Category Archives: defense policy

What’re You Going to Do, Joe?

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Iran has begun accumulating the immediate precursor to weapons grade uranium metal.

…report was given by UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency to its members and states Iran had on Monday produced a small amount of uranium metal, after importing new equipment into a nuclear facility that is under IAEA inspection[.]

To be sure,

The material produced was a small amount of natural uranium metal…meaning it wasn’t enriched. To use uranium metal for a nuclear weapon’s core, Iran would need around half a kilogram, or slightly more than one pound, of highly enriched uranium metal….

However. There’s always a however.

This is the big step, in difficulty right below getting uranium out of the yellow cake in the first place. Now it’s a simple, if tedious, matter of combining the uranium metal with fluorine to get a gaseous salt, and passing the gas through several centrifuge cycles to get to a weapons grade level of enrichment.

It’s your move, President Biden. Israel’s existence is in the balance. As are those of cities across Europe and the US. We’re waiting.

A Clue Bat

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…just struck. Colorado’s Progressive-Democrats want to censure their US Senator John Hickenlooper (D, CO) for the crime of voting to keep illegal aliens from receiving Wuhan Virus situation stimulus checks.

(Apparently, censure is becoming a thing as, just in the last month or so, Republicans moved to censure Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R, WY), Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE), and a brief low key effort was made to substitute censure for impeachment regarding ex-President Donald Trump.)

That’s not the item of interest here, though. The real clue to Progressive-Democrat intentions with their no-border, no-vetting, come-one-come-all immigration policy is this statement regarding censuring Hickenlooper by State Senator Julie Gonzales (D):

Usually politicians don’t slam the door shut on Latino voters so abruptly[.]

And a confirming clue:

Background below. The party platform opposes laws that make immigrants ineligible for assistance. https://t.co/kysMhSRxNi— Justin Wingerter (@JustinWingerter) February 8, 2021

Illegal aliens are immigrants—and these same illegal aliens are voters.

Be very heads up.

Opposition

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Republicans in the Senate put Progressive-Democrats on the record on a number of amendments to Party’s budget reconciliation move—itself a deliberate act to sideline any dissent—which Republicans offered during a Thursday afternoon through Friday morning vote-a-rama. Party’s budget reconciliation then was voted up strictly along party lines.

Here’s some of what the Senate’s Progressive-Democrats oppose. Notice that every one of these would have enhanced Americans’ national security, economy, and individual liberty had they had the support of even a single Progressive-Democrat.

  • 50-50 on a failed amendment to support the border wall
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment supporting the free exercise of religion
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment to oppose packing the Supreme Court
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment opposing stimulus checks for people in prison
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment opposing the Biden administration’s move to restrict oil and gas leasing on federal lands
  • 50-50 on a failed amendment opposing a federal carbon tax

“We Are Deeply Disturbed”

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That’s what President Joe Biden’s (D) State Department claims (through a carefully unnamed “official”) regarding the People’s Republic of China’s systematic rape, other sexual abuse, and torture of Uighur women in the PRC concentration reeducation camps.

And

These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences[.]

Indeed. The Biden administration, like the Obama administration that Biden is reconstructing, surely will shake its collective finger very firmly at the PRC. And if that fails, the Biden administration will engage in stern chit-chat and tongue clucking.

Yeah. That’s the ticket.

Costs

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In Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section, a letter-writer pooh-poohed the idea that the People’s Republic of China might actually invade the Republic of China and reclaim the island of Taiwan.

A decision by Beijing to invade Taiwan would create a major geopolitical crisis for China. Its extensive global trade and investments would be disrupted, creating economic problems. An invasion would result in an occupation. The people of Taiwan have lived in freedom and under the rule of law—they are not about to put on Chinese handcuffs and live in a communist society.

Houlihan made an all-too-common mistake that political and military analysts make in assessing an enemy nation’s motives and goals. Here, he assumed that the PRC cares about costs of regaining and reoccupying the island of Taiwan, just because we would have those concerns. In the end, if the PRC succeeds, it will have destroyed the Republic of China (without the US’ and others’ support, the “people of Taiwan” won’t be capable of resisting PRC handcuffs for any length of time) and regained the island.

And humiliated us, driving us from the western Pacific, opening up the Republic of Korea and Japan—hated enemies—to tacit, if not explicit, control, and putting Southeast Asia, which it has failed repeatedly in invading, under its thumb.

And gained control of the South China Sea shipping lanes, further strangling the RoK and Japan, and inflicting sufficient economic damage on us as to be able to control, in large part, our behavior.

Those may well be goals, in PRC eyes, worth spending a bit of political and economic capital to attain.

The PRC certainly is building, as fast as it can, a military capability designed for the purpose. The PRC also has the stated goal of replacing, in the near-to-medium term, us as the sole world power.