Tag Archives: defense policy

Naïve

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Holman Jenkins wrote this, regarding a peace deal for the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine, in his Tuesday op-ed:

Even with Russian troops still on Ukrainian territory, NATO would be stronger, Russia would be thwarted, and the lesson would percolate globally.

Jenkins is naïve to the point of idiotic.

The only part of Jenkins’ remark that’s accurate is the first. NATO most assuredly would not be stronger in any material way, even with the accession of Finland and Sweden to the alliance. The European member nations have been so woefully and for so long neglecting their national defense establishments in parallel with their NATO solemn commitments that neither the alliance nor the member nations in their aggregate can mount a large enough force supplied for long enough to resist the continued Russian advance into the prior fallen Soviet empire that Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised he would be going after.

Fully a third of the member nations, now including Canada, continue overtly to refuse to honor their 2% of GDP financial and equipment commitments to NATO—an amount far short of the now-recognized need of 5% of GDP just to catch up. Germany, the economic powerhouse of the EU until very recently, does not even have enough soldiers on active duty to train replacements, much less expansion, and the nation does not have more than a regiment of combat ready armor.

Russia will not at all be thwarted. Putin wants to reconstitute the erstwhile Russian empire, and that includes recontrolling, if not outright reconquering, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, Moldova, and more. Even the heavily depleted Russian military can overmatch the NATO nations, especially with the ample and upgraded resupply from Iran, the People’s Republic of China, and northern Korea, along with soldier reinforcements from the latter two.

The lesson that will—and is already, to an extent—percolate globally is that the West, now including the US—does not have the stomach for fighting, if the sort of deal described by Jenkins goes through. That lesson puts eastern and central Europe at severe risk, and it puts the Republic of China at immediate risk, along with longer term risks to the Republic of Korea, Japan, Australia…and the US.

A Mistake

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The Trump administration may be getting soft on Iran, at least relative to past positions by then- and now-President Donald Trump (R).

US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that the Trump administration is prepared to allow Iran to enrich uranium at a low level if it is subject to stringent verification, a significant shift from the White House’s initial demand that Tehran’s nuclear program be dismantled.

Witkoff said

They do not need to enrich past 3.67%. This is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program and then ultimately verification on weaponization.

This is the mistake. Iranian insistence on enriching past 3.67%–to 60% and above, with that 60% level just a kitten’s whisker way from bomb-grade purity—and its history of requiring weeks to months of advance notice on inspections, interfering with inspections, outright barring inspectors’ access, and its development and maintenance of secret sites outside the reach of inspectors demonstrate that the Iranian government cannot be trusted with uranium at any level.

The only appropriate level for Iran’s uranium enrichment program is 0.00%, with no notice inspections at any location the inspectors choose. Otherwise, the only legitimate solution is kinetic obstruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons—and its nuclear, generally—programs.

Bargaining Chips

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The People’s Republic of China is avidly intent on keeping its bargaining chips, of which two truly important ones are its TikTok app and its port businesses at each end of the Panama Canal.

What gets lost, even ignored, in this, though, is that bargaining chips have only the value the bargainee assigns to them, not what the holder of the chips claims to be their value. Not a red sou more than that.

TikTok, for instance, can be viewed as utterly without value as a chip to be played: current US law requires it to be shut down entirely and banned from the US unless and until it is sold in toto to an entity not under the control of the PRC. The only thing standing in the way of that way is the law’s provision that the deadline for sale can be moved back if our Federal government deems negotiations for the sale to be making sufficient progress. That’s where things stand under President Donald Trump, and that confers exactly zero value to the app as a PRC chip.

So it is, nearly, with those PRC businesses that are Panama Canal bookends. A BlackRock-led group has concluded a deal to purchase those two port businesses along with a number of others around the world from CK Hutchison Holdings, a PRC-domiciled (Hong Kong) company. The PRC is actively interfering to delay and potentially prevent that deal from coming to fruition. The appropriate response here is for the US to restrict, even block as far as may be, the ability of those two ports to get any business from the US or any other nations. That would deny those ports any value as PRC chips.

A Thought on Trade Deficits

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Set off by a post on Shrewd’m, which contains a plethora of useful discussion boards, including mechanical investing conversations.

Americans benefit from importing cheaper and/or better goods, which enhance our quality of life in myriad ways. Moreover, trade is part of a circular movement not only of goods but also of money. The US trade deficit of $918.4 billion last year was the mirror image of a $918.4 billion capital surplus, or infusion from overseas.
Sooner or later, all of the net $918.4 billion that Americans spent on foreign goods was invested in American capital assets such as stocks, real estate, bonds, or short-term assets such as Treasury bills.

That’s one of the problems with running a trade deficit, or “investment surplus,” which the poster suggested as an alternative term. It’s certainly true that in Ricardian fashion, truly free trade makes everyone financially more prosperous by letting those nations that do a few things better than others get the production trade and sell their goods to other nations in return for money or products that those other nations do better than anyone else. Financial prosperity is very good for all of us.

However, that sword has another edge, too. [A]ll of the net $918.4 billion that Americans spent…was invested in American capital assets such as stocks, real estate, bonds, or short-term assets such as Treasury bills. Not on manufacturing or on producing and processing the raw materials necessary for manufacturing in general. Especially not on manufacturing or on producing and processing the raw materials each category of which is a Critical Item for our defense establishment, our national security—our ability to secure ourselves from being dictated to by militarily superior enemies.

There were massive job losses in those manufacturing and raw materials production and processing industries, too, and those people are worse off for it, regardless of the injunction from some that these folks should learn to code.

Worse, those hard goods/raw materials producing companies have been closed long enough that we’ve lost the factories, mining, and personnel expertise central to those Items. Now, we’re dependent on other nations—including enemy nations—for raw materials like the rare earths that are specific Critical Items for our computers, communications, and weapons systems we need to maintain our freedom of action. We’re dependent on other nations—including enemy nations—for processing those rare earths and other materials (like graphite, another Critical Item) that we already produce some of for ourselves.

Our dependency on enemy nations is demonstrated by the People’s Republic of China’s restricting shipping to us rare earths and processed rare earths, both of which the PRC produces in ample quantities in response to the tariffs President Donald Trump (R) has applied to the PRC. Had we been producing and processing our own—and which we have ample quantities domestically but have chosen to leave them unmined and so have no processing capability, also—the PRC’s move would have been toothless. I’ve written about a similar situation a while ago.

Now a regionally militarily superior PRC is pressing its threats against the Republic of China and is in a position to cut the sea lines of commerce on which the Republic of Korea and Japan are utterly dependent and through which trillions of dollars of trade pass enroute to our own west coast. And we’ll soon—that cutoff of militarily critical rare earths—be helpless to stop them.

Fiscal prosperity is a Critical Item for our nation, and Ricardo was right on how to achieve that. Trade deficits, per se, are nothing about which to worry. But more so is military capability, without which we have no freedom of action and so no prosperity or even freedom. We need to redevelop our own manufacturing and raw material production and processing capability, even if we continue to source much of those outputs from overseas, and even if it’s more expensive to do so than getting them all from overseas.

The higher cost for such a domestic core production capability is part of the cost of our national freedom, and it’s far less than the cost of having our activities dictated to us by militarily superior enemies.

Golden Dome

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William Forstchen, historian, author, and reputed EMP expert, wants us to build President Donald Trump’s (R) golden dome, an evolution of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative which was designed to destroy incoming ICBMs before they could reach their detonation locations in an attack on the United States. He’s right, but his emphasis is too narrow. His concern:

We have to defend the United States against an EMP attack, which could destroy us in a matter of minutes.

He cited studies, as summarized by Fox News, some statistics:

Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80%-90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike happened.

That would result from energy and water distribution network failure, power failure, financial system failure, transportation failure, and the resulting lack of food in the cities and the lack of water in urban areas from small to large.

The problem that’s not being addressed, though, is that an EMP does not need a nuclear detonation to generate it. Small EMP devices can be built relatively easily, and our destruction can be achieved with a collection of these small devices being used to destroy our financial and communications data centers, nodes in our energy distribution networks, nodes in our water distribution networks, nodes in our mass transportation and shipping centers.

All of these would aggregate to a nuclear EMP in their end result, and these smaller devices are much harder to detect. The several Departments in our Federal government and the several private companies in our tech industry need to get seriously involved, both in partnership with each other and separately, in figuring out how to detect and neutralize these devices, also.