Britain, France, and Germany decided Thursday not to present a resolution censuring Iran that they had floated to other International Atomic Energy Agency member states earlier in the week. Iran had warned the move could lead it to further curtail international inspections of the country and dissuade it from engaging in direct talks with the US on its nuclear program.
This meek surrender is being masqueraded as a renewing effort.
On a related note now Congress wants in on the action.
A pair of US senators, a Democrat and a Republican [Tim Kaine, D, VA, and Todd Young, R, IN], have moved to strip President Biden of the power to unilaterally use military force.
The move comes after Biden used decades-old authorizations to “stretch his war powers” when he launched his first airstrike in Syria without congressional approval.
This would be a mistake, and Kaine illustrates a part of its nature.
Congress has a responsibility to not only vote to authorize new military action, but to repeal old authorizations that are no longer necessary.
In a piece about President Joe Biden’s decision to bomb two targets in Syria that was reduced in real-time to one because imagery had identified two civilians in a courtyard of the other, there’s this eye-opener:
Throughout the deliberations, officials said, they sought to strike a bureaucratic balance. The goal was to ensure that all of the interagency machinery was fully engaged while avoiding both the drawn-out deliberations that sometimes occurred during the Obama administration and the quick decisions by the president and smaller groups of aides that often took place during the Trump administration.
The People’s Republic of China is doing that of the Biden administration.
Last week, after the PLA air force flew a fleet of 10+ bombers on a “practice strike” mission over the international waters of the South China Sea, the US sailed the USS Curtis Wilbur through the international Taiwan Strait. The PLA navy proceeded to track our destroyer on its transit.
Nor were the PRC’s government men happy about the transit. The PLA’s Eastern Theater Spokesperson, Air Force Colonel Zhang Chunhui:
The move artificially creates risk factors in the Taiwan Strait, deliberately undermines regional peace and stability, we are firmly opposed to this[.]
He is, indeed, being tested, and the world is, indeed, watching carefully. The editors over at The Wall Street Journal made a point of emphasizing that Tuesday, regarding the rocket attack on a military base the US and our coalition partners use in Erbil, Iraq.
But then the editors said this:
Mr Biden doesn’t need to escalate to Mr Trump’s level….
Yes, he does, and more. Every Iranian attack needs to be answered with a response more severe than the Iranian attack, and more severe than our prior response to a prior Iranian attack.
That’s how President Joe Biden described the People’s Republic of China’s treatment of the people under PRC President Xi Jinping’s control and those Xi wants under his control, compared to how American citizens are treated by ourselves and the government we hire.
Culturally, there are different norms….
The treatment of Hong Kong citizens, who only are struggling for the freedoms they used to be allowed under the PRC’s handover agreement with Great Britain is just the PRC’s different norm. Because jailing some protesters, kidnapping others and sending them to the mainland, seizing escapees on the high seas—isn’t at all rank despotism. It’s just the PRC’s different way of doing things, it’s their different norm.
This one was done by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute a research institute established by the government of Singapore.
Organizers sent the survey late last year to government officials, academics, and other stakeholders from the 10 countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Here are some interesting tidbits from the report. First, the nations’ overall concern about the situation in the South China Sea:
Notice that—even concerns about a US-PRC confrontation are a distant 3rd to concerns about the PRC’s misbehaviors. And of those 12.5% concerned about our own military presence, Singapore (6.3% [of those 12.5%]), Vietnam (4.6%), and the Philippines (4.5%) have little qualms about it. These are the nations most directly threatened by the PRC’s acquisitive adventurism.
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[.]
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.
…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):
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.