Category Archives: foreign policy

Any Excuse to Slow-Walk

Posted on by
1

Now the Biden Defense Department is saying that it won’t be able to deliver the “promised” M1 tanks to Ukraine before the end of this year or potentially the next. According to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, the military does not currently have the available inventory to supply the tanks. “Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh added:

We just don’t have these tanks available in excess in our US stocks, which is why it is going to take months to transfer these M1A2 Abrams to Ukraine[.]

Actually, we do have the tanks to pass along, excess or not. We have lots of them in active units both here and overseas—like in Europe. It seems that President Joe Biden (D), his SecDoD Lloyd Austin, and Wormuth are concerned about drawing down active inventory and, furthermore, do not take seriously the need to get contracts let (and to get Pentagon bureaucrats out of the way so contracts can be let efficiently) in order to ramp up tank (and other weapon systems) production.

Tanks we have in Europe could be at the Ukrainian fronts in a couple of days plus training time. And the Slavs aren’t as dumb as the German government makes them out to be; they’d train up quickly.

Separately, F-16s, European NATO fighter aircraft, and associated logistics chains could be transferred to Ukraine in a few hours plus training time. A-10s, designed from the ground up to destroy armor and other ground formations and which too many in DoD insist are excess to our needs (so no inventory about which to worry drawing down) could be delivered to Ukraine in a matter of days plus training time. It’s time to stop saying “No.”

I have to ask: what’s the value of weapons that are held in reserve and held in reserve and…? Weapons held in reserve in favor of not drawing down inventory, rather than for sound tactical reasons, are weapons that are not available to defeat an enemy’s offensive, or to punch through enemy defense lines, or to exploit breakthroughs otherwise created. (Note, for instance, that the Ukrainian offensives in the east that liberated Kharkiv and much of that oblast, and in the south that liberated Kherson, petered out by the time the one got to Bakhmut in the east, and the other to the river on the southern edge of Kherson, due to lack of armor and other mechanized systems with which to continue exploiting those efforts’ success.)

Aircraft withheld altogether are aircraft not available to shoot down the barbarian’s aircraft and missiles that the barbarian is using to destroy Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods all across Ukraine and to butcher civilian women and children.

The only effect of holding back these tanks—and of NATO nations (like Germany) slow-walking delivery of their “promised” Leopard tanks—and aircraft is to prolong the barbarian’s war against Ukraine. The only purpose for prolonging that war is to increase the bleeding and the weakening of Russia, with the side effect of increasing the odds that Russia will eventually succeed in overrunning and destroying Ukraine.

That the prolongation also increases the bleeding that Ukrainians are doing—civilian women and children as well as Ukrainian soldiers—doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to Biden and his cronies or to those European NATO nations. That increased Ukrainian bloodshed also comes in close parallel with Biden’s avowed policy of creating and then protecting the invader’s status as sanctuary, proof against Ukrainian strikes against the barbarian’s staging areas and supply dumps that are inside Russia.

Should be Good for Us

Posted on by
Reply

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to start another arms race, which of necessity includes a technology race and a matching of economic strengths.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia would suspend its participation in the last remaining nuclear-arms treaty between Moscow and Washington, a vestige of the security architecture that has helped keep the peace for decades.

Despite the outcomes of Progressive-Democrat Party policies, we still have the strongest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even stronger, and we still have the largest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even larger. That feeds into our ability to innovate more rapidly than our competitors or our enemies, and so more rapidly in technology arenas, including weapons and cyber tech. And both our economic and technical capabilities potentiate our ability to produce existing weapons and the ammunition and logistics systems needed for them faster than our competitors or our enemies, and to more quickly develop new weapons and get them deployed in useful numbers.

We dissolved the USSR with that nation’s initiation of its late-stage arms race. Russia’s economic and technological establishment is even more fragile.

The People’s Republic of China? That nation is stronger than Russia, but not as strong—still—as the USSR was.

There’s this, too:

An entente between the two would replicate their Cold War anti-Western partnership with one significant difference, that Beijing rather than Moscow would be the dominant partner.

That prior entente was one in which the two nations routinely exchanged gunfire across their border, especially along the Amur River. One factor leading to those exchanges is the PRC’s—and Kuomintang China, and emperor-ist China and on back—longstanding holding that Siberia belongs to China and that Russia stole it centuries ago. This time around, the PRC is not only the dominant partner, it’s much more dominant than was the USSR in that prior arrangement. And the PRC still insists that Siberia is Chinese. Gunfire exchanges would be much more dangerous for Russia, although it would bleed the PLA, also.

That’s a risk worth taking seriously, but this is the much more likely outcome:

The prospect of the two great autocratic powers that dominate the Eurasian landmass moving closer together carries risks for Beijing. It would probably force European countries that now are hoping to maintain close commercial ties with China to move more decisively toward Washington, on which they depend for security. If that happened, geopolitical competition between the West (along with Asian democracies such as Japan and South Korea) and the Moscow-Beijing axis would solidify.

And that also would redound to the benefit of the US and to the West in general, for all the reasons listed earlier.

Bring it.

It Shouldn’t Matter

Posted on by
Reply

In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the US expanding our military presence in the Republic of China from vanishingly small to miniscule, there’s this meek remark from a “US official” regarding the training of RoC forces that that slightly larger presence would be carrying out:

One of the difficult things to determine is what really is objectionable to China. We don’t think at the levels that we’re engaged in and are likely to remain engaged in the near future that we are anywhere close to a tipping point for China….

Leaving aside the question of to which China this person is referring (the timidity of the Biden and so many predecessor administrations makes that transparent, anyway), it doesn’t matter what is objectionable to the People’s Republic of China regarding our presence in the RoC. The PRC has no legitimate interest in the goings-on with respect to the RoC.

Full stop.

Lobbyists

Posted on by
Reply

In particular, lobbyists representing the interests of the People’s Republic of China and companies domiciled there.

It turns out that the multinational retail and tech conglomerate Alibaba—headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, PRC—has lobbied, and donated lots of money to, American politicians, to the tune of $2.5 million just last year.

And this, via Voice of America:

Public information shows that Mercury, a lobbying firm, lobbied the White House repeatedly on behalf of Alibaba on technology policy issues, access to US capital markets, issues related to e-commerce, and small- and medium-sized enterprise export promotion.

That brings me to my beef about lobbyists and the White House. It’s one thing (however questionable or legitimate) for lobbyists to jawbone White House officials on behalf of companies, whether foreign or domestic. It should be unacceptable for lobbyists to jawbone White House officials on behalf of foreign governments—which in the case of the PRC, includes all businesses domiciled there, since all of those businesses are arms of the PRC’s intelligence community under that nation’s 2017 national intelligence law.

Foreign governments, in particular the PRC government, already have professional, talented, and perfectly suited lobbyists to White House officials: those governments’ Ambassadors and ambassadorial staff personnel. No one else should be lobbying.

Yet Another Reason

Posted on by
Reply

…to stop trading with and to bar exports altogether to (and imports from) the People’s Republic of China.

A US manufacturer of X-ray equipment had a decade-old patent invalidated by a Chinese legal panel. A Spanish mobile-antenna designer lost a similar fight in a Shanghai court. Another Chinese court ruled that a Japanese conglomerate broke antitrust law by refusing to license its technology to a Chinese rival.

This is the PRC weaponizing its legal system as that nation prosecutes the economic axis of its cold war against the US and against the West in general.

This goes further, to include efforts to extend PRC legal jurisdiction into other nations:

In December, the EU sued China in the World Trade Organization on behalf of Swedish telecom-equipment maker Ericsson AB and other companies, complaining that China has barred EU companies from suing to protect their patents in courts outside China. The EU called China’s policy “extremely damaging,” saying Chinese companies requested the intervention “to pressure patent right holders to grant them cheaper access to European technology.”

This is just naked theft by a nation that insists on using its laws and courts as weapons of war rather than as tools for protecting its citizens.

It’s time for us and for the EU to stop technology transfers—under any guise—to the PRC, and that must include what I wrote in my lede: bar all exports to the PRC and stop trading with that enemy nation. The transition will be deucedly expensive, but it’ll only get more so the longer we dither and delay taking that step.