Category Archives: foreign policy

Only a Partial Solution

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The editors of The Wall Street Journal correctly recognize the dangerous (and fatal to our nation if it’s not corrected) weaponization of commercial hardware and software. The solution they propose, though, is badly incomplete.

…we should first recognize that the Chinese Communist Party isn’t interested in cooperating on AI risks and safety.

Absolutely, and in so many other areas, as well. But….

Second, we need to wield the free-world technology stack more effectively. … America has the tools to build a software-defined manufacturing ecosystem, where we can find and fix bottlenecks. A digital twin of the entire defense supply chain would allow us to analyze, allocate, and accelerate production from the factory floor to the front line.

And

Third, a revitalized American technological industrial base should catalyze an interoperable free-world technological industrial base. To outcompete China, we must make it easy for allies and geopolitical swing states to adopt, contribute to, and innovate on top of our software.

I’ll leave aside, here, the risks to our own national security of exposing our technology and software even to friends and allies, much less to those uncertain swing states, only to have secrets and advantages further exposed to our enemies by leaks. Instead, I’ll emphasize that the finest software in the world is useless without the hardware to run it, and the farthest advanced technology does no good for us at all if it sits exclusively in one or two prototype models or in the horribly expensive few production models.

First after recognizing the inimical nature of the PRC, and Russia, and Iran, and northern Korea must be revitalizing our industrial base—that factory floor—so we can build the hardware—the weapons and weapons systems—which will house that wondrous technology and on which will run the bleeding edge (and proven, mind you) software in the vast numbers we’ll need, and our friends and allies will need, when our enemies attack.

After all, that next war will be fought with the forces in place. The speed of war has reached the point that there will be scant time, if any, for reinforcements to reach the theater (if they can survive the trip at all), and no time at all to produce, even from a thoroughly revived industrial base, combat loss replacements.

Rebuilding our industrial base will itself be terribly expensive, but what would be the cost of having our foreign, even domestic, policies controlled by our enemies after we lose the next war they start?

This is Backwards

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And it’s disappointingly so, although not that surprising in the increasingly Leftist bias of The Wall Street Journal‘s news page writers.

Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks in southern Israel, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage.

No. Hamas launched the war with that attack and butchery; Israel has been responding and defending itself against that terrorist instigated and continuing war, a war that Hamas leadership has repeatedly said is intended to destroy Israel utterly.

The WSJ management team needs to clarify this with the writers in the news outlet’s news room. The error is blatant enough to be closely approaching being anti-Israel and, more broadly, antisemitic.

On Whose Side…

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…is the Biden/Blinken State Department?

Mistakes happen, even egregious ones, even with matters of security. This one, though, should get some folks fired, for cause, and charges brought for the breach [emphasis added].

The independent watchdog for the State Department says the agency deviated from standard policy in the security clearance suspension of Biden Iran envoy Robert Malley, permitted the advisor access to classified meetings, and allowed him to continue work on sensitive issues while he was under investigation.

How does that work, exactly? This is, however it works, sadly typical of the lackadaisical attitude toward national security across a broad range of security milieus held by this Biden-Harris administration and Antony Blinken’s Department of State.

The…screwup…in more detail, from House Foreign Affairs committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R, TX) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch (R, ID) [emphasis added]:

The State Department IG’s report is disturbing and sheds light on the multiple ways the State Department grossly mismanaged Mr Malley’s case and intentionally misled Congress. Mr Malley, a political appointee and close associate of the secretary, was treated very differently than a civil servant or foreign service officer.
Among the new revelations in this report, Mr Malley conducted sensitive government business and was allowed to utilize his official email account after his clearance was suspended. As the report noted, this was done out of fear that Mr Malley might “conduct government business on a personal email account.” This concern was valid because it is one of the primary things Mr Malley did to get his clearance suspended in the first place.

The illogic of that last—that it was necessary to let Malley have the access because without it he might have conducted his business through his personal communications (and which he already was doing, but let’s not talk about that)—is so ludicrous that it had to be deliberately done from malice toward our nation’s security.

Hence my opening question: on whose side are Malley’s supervisor, that supervisor’s supervisor, and the official who restored Malley’s accesses and clearance in mid-investigation? They’re plainly not on the side of the United States of America.

Malley’s supervisor and that supervisor’s supervisor should be fired, those who misled Congress on the matter belong in jail for their perjury in their testimony, and individual who reinstated his clearance in mid-investigation needs to be arrested and put on trial for his espionage-related behavior.

Sadly, no State Department personnel will be harmed in the making of this breach.

Disingenuous TikTok Arguments

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The law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok entirely or have TikTok banned from the US is in front of the DC Circuit Court, and there are at least two arguments that TikTok is making that are…misleading.

The first is this one:

Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.

No speech is being silenced. Only a particular outlet—TikTok—used by the People’s Republic of China intelligence community is being acted against. That outlet would remain available were ByteDance to wholly divest TikTok, which ByteDance and the PRC, on their own initiative, refuse to do. There also are a plethora of speech pathways for precisely the same speech desires besides TikTok. ByteDance’s/PRC’s decision to let TikTok be closed will have no impact on speech.

The second is this one:

Our constitutional tradition leaves no room for the government to stop Petitioners from expressing their ideas through the editor and publisher they have chosen. The government could no more prohibit a freelance journalist from publishing in a magazine of her choice; forbid an actor from working with a particular director; or tell a musician what studio he can record in.

Of course, no one is making any prohibition of this. The decision to leave TikTok available to the freelancer (or any other journalist), the actor, or the musician is entirely in the hands of ByteDance and the PRC government. It’s their decision to refuse to let TikTok be divested that would deny access to TikTok.

The Addiction of Government Handouts

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It’s not the handout recipients who are addicted that are the problem, although their addiction is tragic in its own right. It’s the government men and women who are addicted to giving handouts who are the problem. The former are individual problems, even though those problems aggregate. Government men and women, though, are inflicting their nation-level addiction on the nations over which they reign, and their addiction is a national security threat approaching existential as they render their nations helpless against aggressor nations. That is immoral enough, as those government betray the same people they’re charged with protecting.

The immorality extends, though, when it comes to Europe’s NATO member nations. European NATO governments provide canonical examples of both immoralities.

When the Cold War ended, European governments slashed their military budgets and spent a windfall of several trillion dollars on social programs—a popular policy with voters when Europe faced few external threats and enjoyed the security protection of the US.
Now, European nations are finding it difficult to give up those peacetime benefits, even as the war in Ukraine has revived Cold War-era tensions and the US tries to shift its focus to China. Most are failing to get their armies in fighting shape.

The German army, in particular has been shrunk to a paltry 180,000 men and women, a large fraction of whom are in non-combat jobs, and not even combat-supporting jobs at that. The German army has only a couple hundred tanks, a large fraction of which are not operational. The army, by Government politician conscious decision, is not capable of defending itself, even as it trickles out arms to Ukraine. The decision to not defend gets worse [emphasis added].

During negotiations for Germany’s 2025 budget earlier this year, Finance Minister Christian Lindner wanted to free up money for defense by freezing social spending for three years—letting it lag inflation. The move was rebuffed by other parties in the governing coalition…. Spending on military aid for Ukraine was cut to €4 billion, about half this year’s level.
What the coalition parties did agree on was a €108-a-year increase over two years in Kindergeld—an annual €3,000 payment per child to all families, regardless of income. Today, that benefit alone, payable for offspring up to age 25, costs more than €50 billion a year, as much as Berlin’s annual Defense Ministry budget.

Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck articulated very clearly the addiction and its immorality, although he didn’t recognize it.

The idea—we are dismantling the welfare state because we need more money for the military—I would find fatal.
Social spending is necessary to keep the country together.

Leave aside the foolishness of that claimed threat of dissolution from any lack of socialism. Even such a one as Habeck can recognize that an intact nation that has been conquered and occupied through its government’s refusal to defend that nation has been functionally dissolved.

The lesson: it was easy to swap guns for butter; reversing the trend is far more challenging.

Any rational person—even a government politician—knows it’s far easier to get addicted than it is to break the addiction.

Nor is Germany alone in these immoralities. Here are just a few of the one-third of NATO members whose government men have chosen not to enable their nations to defend themselves or to come to the aid of their fellow members.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has refused to put a date on [any increase in defense spending relative to GDP]. Military spending in Italy and Spain, meanwhile, sits under 1.5%.

The immoralities and the betrayals are done deliberately, as these men and women refuse even to try to curb, much less to control, their addiction.

The immorality extends one more time: those government men still refuse to prepare their governments and to enable their defense establishments to defend the nations over which they rule, and with that failure, they betray their fellow NATO members by rendering themselves incapable of aiding their fellows against an invasion. Instead, they create their nations as dependent on the treasure, and especially the blood, of their fellows should they be the target of attack.

These conscious and continuing moral betrayals by NATO member nations render NATO a waste of American money, and blood.

That’s the price of addiction—it even prevents those responsible for it from resisting it.