Category Archives: foreign policy

Achieving Energy Security

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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm thinks it would be good for our energy security were we to eliminate the 60% of our oil-centered energy that we import and switching over to 100% clean electricity by 2035.

It’s true that wiping out that 60% of our oil imports would help our energy security, but only if it’s done right. We shouldn’t be importing any energy, much less from enemy nations or from nations vulnerable to enemy nations. The right way to eliminate those imports is to release our own oil—and natural gas and coal, come to that—producers to produce from our own, domestic, hydrocarbon-based sources. It’s highly important, too, to get the regulators out of the way of our producers’ ability to produce nuclear power. Sadly, though, Granholm—Energy Secretary Granholm, mind you—seems unable even to say the words “nuclear power,” or at least she never does say them.

The problem with Granholm’s wish to supplant those imports with 100% clean electricity—as even Granholm knows full well—is that the raw materials needed for “renewable,” or “green,” or “clean” energy production come from Peoples Republic of China mines, or PRC-controlled mines in Africa and Siberia (the latter are not yet developed, but they will be). Beyond that, far too many components for “renewable” energy production come from PRC-domiciled factories. Granholm’s move in no way reduces our dependence on enemy nations for our energy.

It is, however, a distinct elimination of our ability to have energy security.

SEIA’s Response to Bidenomic’s Tariffs

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly noted the internal—and intrinsic—contradictions in the Biden administration’s “renewable” energy demands and its trade policy. The administration is pushing ever harder to shift our economy, for good or ill (mostly ill IMNHO), to energy sourced to non-carbon-based, but renewable only—nuclear need not apply—producers. Then comes Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary, and her decision, backed by that same Joe Biden, to apply tariffs as high as 254% to solar power-related products imported from five People’s Republic of China enterprises, never minding that these companies are American domestic solar power producers’ primary sources of the needed articles.

But the Solar Energy Industries Association’s whine about the administration’s tariff policy leaped out at me.

It will take at least three to five years to ramp up domestic solar manufacturing capacity and the global supply chain will be vital in the short-term.

But would SEIA’s members actually ramp up domestic production without the tariffs, or would they simply continue buying from an enemy nation? SEIA is being disingenuous.

I’m not convinced that Commerce’s tariffs are the way to go—in general, they’re being applied as protectionist barriers rather than as foreign policy tools, and Commerce’s tariffs here are no exception—but SEIA’s plaints seem nothing more than excuse-making. After all, those members already have had those three to five years, and more, during which to ramp up domestic solar manufacturing capacity, and they’ve chosen not to do so.

Mistake

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (D) is headed to the People’s Republic of China at the end of this month, ostensibly in an effort to stabilize rocky US-PRC relations.

The long-expected visit is aimed at deepening communications with Beijing, the department said.

And

Raimondo will be the latest administration official to visit China since President Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting in Indonesia last year.

This is a serious foreign policy mistake. The PRC is, as some pundits euphemize, an adversary. I’ll be blunt: the PRC is an enemy nation.

In addition to that, we already know where PRC President Xi Jinping stands—he wants to replace us as the world’s leader, with the outcome that he can dominate us. Xi already knows where President Joe Biden (D) and his Executive Branch cronies stand—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for instance, in her remarks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

When necessary, we will take narrowly targeted actions.
…
As we take these actions, let me be clear: these national security actions are not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage, or stifle China’s economic and technological modernization.

This is Yellen telling Xi that we might finger wag, but we don’t really mean it.

Biden, by his actions from as far from the PRC as Ukraine, where he’s slow walking delivery, even approval, of the weapons systems that nation needs for outright victory in the war Putin has inflicted out of fear of upsetting Putin too much, to as near to the PRC as the South China Sea, where he has meekly acquiesced to the continued occupation of other nations’ islands and waters by the PRC out of fear of upsetting Xi too much, has made clear that Yellen’s meekness is his own.

The United States doesn’t want conflict with the PRC, and we’ll go to great lengths to avoid it. This is backwards.

Xi doesn’t care one way or the other about conflict with us; he wants to be the sole hegemon in the world, and he’ll go to great lengths to achieve it.

There’s a parable that’s a propos. The mouse says to the owl that its ways are wrong. The owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

No. On the matter of improving relations (including trade, but mostly politically/diplomatically) let Xi and others of his government come to us. They know where we are, and they have our phone numbers. Let the Facts be submitted to a candid world regarding Xi’s and others of his government’s level of interest in improving relations with us.

A Military Exercise

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The United States, Japan, and Australia are conducting joint naval exercises in the South China Sea this week. The core of the flotilla conducting the exercise is the American aircraft carrier USS America, Japan’s helicopter carrier JS Izumo, and Australia’s helicopter carrier HMAS Canberra.

President Joe Biden (D) had a joint statement released from Camp David, where the leaders of US, Japan, and the Republic of Korea were meeting last week that said, in part,

We strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the waters of the Indo-Pacific. In particular, we steadfastly oppose the militarization of reclaimed features; the dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia vessels; and coercive activities. In addition, we are concerned about illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. We reiterate our firm commitment to international law, including the freedom of navigation and overflight, as reflected in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

It’s about time we’re conducting joint exercises in the South China Sea.

It’s also time to do more: conduct frequent—weekly, perhaps—combat ship sailings, along with civilian commercial sailings, through the Taiwan Strait, and sail combat flotillas as close in as navigably safe and militarily secure as possible to the South China Sea islands that the PRC has seized and militarized. Conduct routine combat aircraft low overflight of those islands. Provide naval escort to the Philippine resupply missions to the Philippines’ establishment at the Second Thomas Shoal.

It would be useful, too, to get the RoK and the Republic of the Philippines involved in such naval exercise, along with Vietnam.

There also needs to be joint air and land exercises on the island of Taiwan and the Japanese chain of small islands stretching away to the east from northeastern Taiwan (and naval anti-landing exercises on those small islands). These exercises should involve American, the Republic of China, Japanese, RoK, and Australian forces.

Do your own Work

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As the US begins, however tentatively, to start severing scientific ties with the People’s Republic of China, some American scientists are manufacturing an alarm and sounding off about it.

China has built itself into a powerful engine of scientific discovery in recent decades, partly with American help, and many in Washington fear that China could gain a security and military advantage unless the US takes decisive steps to cut off cooperation in scientific research.
Many scientists warn, however, that Washington would be severing ties as China is making its greatest contributions to scientific advancements, and cutting it off risks slowing American progress in critical areas such as biotechnology, clean energy, and telecommunications.

Never mind that those scientific achievements have been done with an American help that includes a very large fraction via intellectual property theft, IP gained through economic extortion (give it over, or you can’t do business in the PRC), and outright espionage.

Never mind, either, that other nation’s scientists—those of Canada, Israel, Germany, Great Britain, France, Ukraine(!), and on and on—are every bit as good as the PRC’s, if not better, from the greater freedom of those nations’ economic, political, and research environments. A disruption while the collaborations transition would only be transient.

There’s this aspect of the US-PRC science relationship, too:

The US depends more heavily on China than China does on the US in some strategic areas, according to an analysis by Clarivate [a specialist in science analytics] of studies in respected journals shared exclusively with The Wall Street Journal. Between 2017 and 2021, US-China collaborations accounted for 27% of US-based scientists’ high-quality research in nanoscience, for example, but only 13% of China-based scientists’. The gap in telecommunications was even wider, with collaborations accounting for 10% of China’s output but more than 33% of the US’s.

The science complainers do not see this threat? I’m not sanguine about degree of their…naivete. Regardless, it’s time to end that dependence.

Some of the plaints are just petty, though.

[Tian] Xia, the professor of medicine at UCLA, said he has stopped his research on birth defects because he doesn’t know how to work with embryonic stem cells. That was the expertise of his Chinese collaborators.

A grown man sulking like a toddler. It’s a pity. It’s not that difficult to find experts in embryonic stem cells; that general technology has been around for decades, and there are experts with birth defect-related skills outside of the PRC. Xia just seems upset because he doesn’t get to work with his buds in the PRC as easily as he wants.

Our scientists need to do their own work or collaborate with other scientists in the US and in our friends’ and allies’ nations, and stop sharing our secrets with our enemies.

It’s almost as if these complaining scientists consider their personal careers and researches more important than the security of the nation that encourages and fosters their researches and whose economic, political, and research environment facilitates the flourishing of their research programs, and of their careers.