Category Archives: foreign policy

But They are the Same Theater

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A letter writer in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section expressed his concern for NATO’s increasing emphasis on the People’s Republic of China threat in the Pacific, saying in part,

NATO, however, shouldn’t be pushing into Asia or treating Europe and Asia as the same theater.

And

…founding charter: to maintain the peace in the North Atlantic and defend its member states from a Russian attack.

Asia, the Pacific theater, dominated as it is by the enemy nation, the People’s Republic of China, and the European theater that’s formally the DOC of NATO are, in fact the same theater; the two regions are adjacent Areas of Responsibility.

This isn’t a matter of who’s got the intercontinental reach of missiles. It’s the closely intertwined—and dependency creating—trade regimes and economies, as the PRC exports at artificially lowered price its goods into Europe; the PRC engages in active cyber espionage and cyber sabotage activities; the PRC engages in active dis- and misinformation, pushing as it does its state-owned and -run social media facilities like TikTok and ecommerce facilities like TEMU, one of which actively pushes false claims (not information) and both of which actively hoover up individualized personal and business information for the use of the PRC’s intelligence community; the PRC’s PLA moves into the eastern Pacific and western Atlantic Oceans and into the northeastern Mediterranean Sea with its dual use commercial and military seaports and airports; and on and on.

Maintaining the peace in the North Atlantic, thus, requires the PRC threat to that theater be addressed. Furthermore, the PRC’s nakedly open support of Russia in the latter’s equally naked invasion of a sovereign nation makes it imperative that “defending…from a Russian attack” involve addressing the PRC threat. That’s optimally done at the source; hence the need to emphasize the threat to NATO interests and security by including Asia as one of the AORs in the NATO theater of operations.

Distance in the modern world is nonexistent. It’s entirely appropriate that NATO expand its area of regard and learn to do two things at once.

Rethinking

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Holman Jenkins wrote Tuesday about Rethinking Trump and the Ukraine War. His central thesis is the “confusion” in Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s intelligence community and throughout his administration generally about what to do about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how to respond—if at all—to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprisingly amateurish attempt to sow further confusion in our domestic politics (and the even more amateurish emphasis on those efforts by Biden’s…advisors…throughout his administration).

But my concern arises prior to any of that; it centers on the underlying misconception of the nature of that war.

That rethinking that Jenkins wants to see needs to begin with a correction to that misconception, and I’m almost as concerned that Jenkins and nearly everyone else who should know better…don’t.

Russia invaded with the purpose of erasing Ukraine the sovereign nation and reducing it to a petty satrap in Vladimir Putin’s empire, and Ukraine is fighting for its existence.

It isn’t the Ukraine war; it’s the Russian war, inflicted on Ukraine. Only with an accurate understanding of that situation can any ideas of what to do about it be developed.

All the more Reason

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The People’s Republic of China is continuing to manipulate the price of rare earths and of rare earth production and ore refinement. The nation is exploiting its current overwhelming monopoly of rare earths to hold those prices below the cost of their mining, production, and refinement elsewhere in the world, possibly below their own suite of costs.

That’s a security threat carefully aimed at the US and at Europe, since those rare earths are so critical to military equipment, computing equipment, and a host of other equipment throughout the general economy.

The US, Canada, regions in Europe, and the floor of the South China Sea each have ample supplies of the ores that, when exploited, would eliminate the PRC’s stranglehold on rare earths.

It’s time for the US and Europe, at the least, to suck up and go through the expense of developing our own rare earth resources and wrest that control away from our common enemy nation. It’s long past time to move to take back from the PRC the South China Sea, returning ownership of the islands to the nations with legitimate (if disputed among them) ownership and to return the waters to freely international status with their long-established economic zones which are held by non-PRC nations rimming the Sea. Regaining access to the Sea’s resources on and under the floor is one more critical reason for doing so.

A Campaign Platform

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I’ll be brief. The Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate and current President Joe Biden, has a legislative and administrative history of

  • open to nonexistent borders, epitomized by his failed effort to codify the entry of 1.4 million or more illegal aliens per year (assessed at weekly intervals) before a President would be authorized to do anything toward closing our border
  • enormous inflation that’s only just abating, although the new price levels remain much higher than extant in the prior administration, with no sign those elevated price levels are abating
  • real wages falling relative to those extant in the prior administration as nominal wage increases, with some excursions to the topside, in the main have been smaller than price increase increases due to inflation
  • denigrating Israel as it fights for its survival against the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah—and against their masters, Iran—while moving to protect Hamas by demanding cease fires that only benefit Hamas
  • encouraging continued butchery in Ukraine by slow-walking and blocking weapons Ukraine needs while coddling the invader barbarian as sanctuary against serious counterattack by Ukraine
  • appeasing Iran in its desperation to get Iran to let this administration back into the failed Iran nuclear weapons development deal
  • appeasing the People’s Republic of China regarding that nation’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and its threats against the Republic of China
  • meekly accepting PRC military and spy bases in Cuba, elsewhere in the Caribbean, South American, in even more meek abrogation of our erstwhile long-standing Monroe Doctrine
  • active deprecation of our energy production and energy independence through constant attacks on and blocks of coal, oil, natural gas—even liquid natural gas export—in favor of unreliable wind and solar farms

Those are just the high points; the full list is quite extensive.

This is why Biden and Harris won’t run on policy and how their policies for the next term would benefit Americans. Instead, their campaign platform is personal; it’s focused against a man. They don’t even argue against his policies, past or future—only that the man himself is bad.

This lack of a coherent, reasoned platform is instructive of the capacity of the Progressive-Democratic Party to govern.

This is the Barbarian…

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…that Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden keeps coddling with his slow-walking and blocking the weapons Ukraine needs and with his insistence on protecting Russia as sanctuary against Ukraine attack except under the most narrow and useless circumstance.

The third explosion knocked the 23-year-old to the ground, when a Kh-101 rocket fired from a Russian jet fighter detonated its 900-pound warhead over the hospital.
[Junior doctor Olena] Hovorova survived unscathed and rushed to help some of the 32 people wounded in the attack, including eight children. The strike killed a doctor and a nurse and pulverized a toxicology unit where the walls are decorated with pictures of smiling whales and starfish.

And

Dr Oleh Holubchenko was operating on a 5-month-old child with a cleft palate when he was thrown across the room by an explosion.
When Holubchenko came to some minutes later with shrapnel and shards of glass embedded in his back, he said his first thought was: How is the child?

(As it happened, the child survived the barbarity, was transferred to another hospital, and its operation successfully completed.)

The hospital, set in the heart of Ukraine’s capital, takes in around 18,000 children each year. Many of them live for weeks on the premises with their parents as they await lifesaving treatment ranging from bone-marrow transplants to chemotherapy.

That’s why the barbarian targeted it.

Biden’s response? He announced five additional air-defense systems from Ukraine’s Western allies. Count ’em—five. How many missiles and reloads are accompanying those systems? Why weren’t they in place months—years—ago? Why are the F-16s that may only just be arriving, fighters that could have shot down the Russian aircraft launching rockets along with cruise missiles, air-to-ground missiles, and guided bombs, not in place already, years ago? Why are ex-Warsaw Pact, now NATO members’, MiGs not transferred at all—even if only to serve as parts suppliers for Ukraine’s then-existing fleet of Migs?

Why is Biden still protecting the barbarian from counter attack on his own soil? Releasing the use of our long-range ground-to-ground systems to attack barbarians massing for their own immediate assault just across the border is a nearly useless permission. Ukraine needs to be able to use its systems to attack storage—fuel, ammunition, armor—depots, airbases and the aircraft sitting on them, troop barracks and assembly locations, wherever the barbarian sets them up.

Biden says No, Ukraine must not be allowed to win. Ukraine must only be encouraged to not lose—to keep its soldiers in the field being maimed and killed. To keep its women and children constantly exposed to barbarian atrocities. To keep its hospitals as targets for the barbarian.