Tag Archives: defense policy

Mistake

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (D) is headed to the People’s Republic of China at the end of this month, ostensibly in an effort to stabilize rocky US-PRC relations.

The long-expected visit is aimed at deepening communications with Beijing, the department said.

And

Raimondo will be the latest administration official to visit China since President Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting in Indonesia last year.

This is a serious foreign policy mistake. The PRC is, as some pundits euphemize, an adversary. I’ll be blunt: the PRC is an enemy nation.

In addition to that, we already know where PRC President Xi Jinping stands—he wants to replace us as the world’s leader, with the outcome that he can dominate us. Xi already knows where President Joe Biden (D) and his Executive Branch cronies stand—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for instance, in her remarks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

When necessary, we will take narrowly targeted actions.
…
As we take these actions, let me be clear: these national security actions are not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage, or stifle China’s economic and technological modernization.

This is Yellen telling Xi that we might finger wag, but we don’t really mean it.

Biden, by his actions from as far from the PRC as Ukraine, where he’s slow walking delivery, even approval, of the weapons systems that nation needs for outright victory in the war Putin has inflicted out of fear of upsetting Putin too much, to as near to the PRC as the South China Sea, where he has meekly acquiesced to the continued occupation of other nations’ islands and waters by the PRC out of fear of upsetting Xi too much, has made clear that Yellen’s meekness is his own.

The United States doesn’t want conflict with the PRC, and we’ll go to great lengths to avoid it. This is backwards.

Xi doesn’t care one way or the other about conflict with us; he wants to be the sole hegemon in the world, and he’ll go to great lengths to achieve it.

There’s a parable that’s a propos. The mouse says to the owl that its ways are wrong. The owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

No. On the matter of improving relations (including trade, but mostly politically/diplomatically) let Xi and others of his government come to us. They know where we are, and they have our phone numbers. Let the Facts be submitted to a candid world regarding Xi’s and others of his government’s level of interest in improving relations with us.

A Military Exercise

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The United States, Japan, and Australia are conducting joint naval exercises in the South China Sea this week. The core of the flotilla conducting the exercise is the American aircraft carrier USS America, Japan’s helicopter carrier JS Izumo, and Australia’s helicopter carrier HMAS Canberra.

President Joe Biden (D) had a joint statement released from Camp David, where the leaders of US, Japan, and the Republic of Korea were meeting last week that said, in part,

We strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the waters of the Indo-Pacific. In particular, we steadfastly oppose the militarization of reclaimed features; the dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia vessels; and coercive activities. In addition, we are concerned about illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. We reiterate our firm commitment to international law, including the freedom of navigation and overflight, as reflected in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

It’s about time we’re conducting joint exercises in the South China Sea.

It’s also time to do more: conduct frequent—weekly, perhaps—combat ship sailings, along with civilian commercial sailings, through the Taiwan Strait, and sail combat flotillas as close in as navigably safe and militarily secure as possible to the South China Sea islands that the PRC has seized and militarized. Conduct routine combat aircraft low overflight of those islands. Provide naval escort to the Philippine resupply missions to the Philippines’ establishment at the Second Thomas Shoal.

It would be useful, too, to get the RoK and the Republic of the Philippines involved in such naval exercise, along with Vietnam.

There also needs to be joint air and land exercises on the island of Taiwan and the Japanese chain of small islands stretching away to the east from northeastern Taiwan (and naval anti-landing exercises on those small islands). These exercises should involve American, the Republic of China, Japanese, RoK, and Australian forces.

Do your own Work

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As the US begins, however tentatively, to start severing scientific ties with the People’s Republic of China, some American scientists are manufacturing an alarm and sounding off about it.

China has built itself into a powerful engine of scientific discovery in recent decades, partly with American help, and many in Washington fear that China could gain a security and military advantage unless the US takes decisive steps to cut off cooperation in scientific research.
Many scientists warn, however, that Washington would be severing ties as China is making its greatest contributions to scientific advancements, and cutting it off risks slowing American progress in critical areas such as biotechnology, clean energy, and telecommunications.

Never mind that those scientific achievements have been done with an American help that includes a very large fraction via intellectual property theft, IP gained through economic extortion (give it over, or you can’t do business in the PRC), and outright espionage.

Never mind, either, that other nation’s scientists—those of Canada, Israel, Germany, Great Britain, France, Ukraine(!), and on and on—are every bit as good as the PRC’s, if not better, from the greater freedom of those nations’ economic, political, and research environments. A disruption while the collaborations transition would only be transient.

There’s this aspect of the US-PRC science relationship, too:

The US depends more heavily on China than China does on the US in some strategic areas, according to an analysis by Clarivate [a specialist in science analytics] of studies in respected journals shared exclusively with The Wall Street Journal. Between 2017 and 2021, US-China collaborations accounted for 27% of US-based scientists’ high-quality research in nanoscience, for example, but only 13% of China-based scientists’. The gap in telecommunications was even wider, with collaborations accounting for 10% of China’s output but more than 33% of the US’s.

The science complainers do not see this threat? I’m not sanguine about degree of their…naivete. Regardless, it’s time to end that dependence.

Some of the plaints are just petty, though.

[Tian] Xia, the professor of medicine at UCLA, said he has stopped his research on birth defects because he doesn’t know how to work with embryonic stem cells. That was the expertise of his Chinese collaborators.

A grown man sulking like a toddler. It’s a pity. It’s not that difficult to find experts in embryonic stem cells; that general technology has been around for decades, and there are experts with birth defect-related skills outside of the PRC. Xia just seems upset because he doesn’t get to work with his buds in the PRC as easily as he wants.

Our scientists need to do their own work or collaborate with other scientists in the US and in our friends’ and allies’ nations, and stop sharing our secrets with our enemies.

It’s almost as if these complaining scientists consider their personal careers and researches more important than the security of the nation that encourages and fosters their researches and whose economic, political, and research environment facilitates the flourishing of their research programs, and of their careers.

Go Ahead On

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IBM was interested in buying the Israeli chip maker, Tower Semiconductor, and the acquisition might have raised antitrust concerns in Israel, the US, the EU, and elsewhere around the world. Each of those antitrust concerns, if acted on, would have had effect only inside the nation raising the concern, however, making the matter purely a business decision whether to go through with the merger and simply not do business in the objection nation. Nobody objected, though, except the People’s Republic of China.

The PRC’s State Administration for Market Regulation balked and withheld approval, so IBM meekly quit the deal altogether, apparently in order to appease the PRC and preserve—IBM hoped—its other business concerns there.

Slow walking or outright blocking tech and other mergers with, or acquisitions by, American companies is part of the PRC’s economic aggression against us as that nation objects to our objecting to the PRC’s economic aggressions and to its tech and intellectual property extortion and theft. IBM is working, it seems, at cross-purposes with our struggle against the PRC.

Other moves by the PRC have included blocking

  • Qualcomm‘s acquisition of Netherland’s chip maker NXP Semiconductors
  • DuPont‘s acquisition of electronics-materials specialist Rogers Corp, an Arizona-headquartered company
  • certain PRC domiciled companies from buying memory chips from US chip giant Micron

It would have been better for IBM—and those other companies, too; IBM‘s managers don’t have a lock on timidity—to proceed with the acquisition and to eliminate the PRC’s antitrust concerns by not doing business associated with the acquisition’s chips inside the PRC or with businesses domiciled inside the PRC. Or for IBM, et al., to stop doing business with the PRC altogether.

It would have been a beneficial twofer had IBM gone ahead on with the acquisition: IBM and Tower merge, Israel, the US, the EU, and most of the rest of the world would reap the benefits of the merging, and IBM and Tower would be out from under the PRC’s regulatory thumb.

It would be beneficial for our nation, too, if the managers of our businesses had the courage to stand up to our enemies and walk away from them.

Chip Manufacturing

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The Biden administration is bent on bringing computer chip manufacturing back into the United States. On its face, that would seem beneficial. However, the administration team he’s formed to oversee the matter and its $39 billion of taxpayer dollars allocated to the program is populated with

investment bankers, private-equity investors, and management consultants.

And apparently no chip engineers or anyone familiar with supplying chip factories.

Uh, huh.

The Manhattan Project and the crash program to develop treatments for the Wuhan Virus were populated, strongly preferentially, with experts in the field, and they just as strongly deemphasized the moneybags experts.

That’s not the case with Biden’s nightmare dream team of money allocators. This isn’t a true crash program, certainly, but it’s still an effort to rapidly guts something up. It needs experts in the field to do the gutsing, it does not need politically connected money handlers.