And contradictory. The Trump administration wants Europe to go back to buying Russian natural gas, only do it through the pipelines running through Ukraine (and relying on Russia to deposit the proceeds in an escrow account run by a third party pending the end of it war on Ukraine). The thinking, such is it might be, is that by doing so, Ukraine and Russia can be persuaded to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure, which would, supposedly, also lead to a reduction in global energy prices.

There are at least two things wrong with this foolishness.

One is that the move would put more money into Russian coffers with which to pursue its barbaric invasion and potential conquering of Ukraine.

Another is that Ukraine needs to heavily damage, if not destroy, Russia’s ability to produce the fuels its invading hordes need to move weapons, ammunition, fuel, food, soldiers, etc. from their origins through staging points to the front so that the barbarians don’t have the wherewithal with which to continue their assault, or even to hold on to what they’ve occupied.

Astute readers likely can come up with more avenues of the foolishness of this ploy.

This is an idea (I use that term loosely) that needs to die promptly.

In their article centered on the domestic woes of the People’s Republic of China’s automobile industry, the news writers had this claim:

Beijing shows little sign of doing anything about its car mess, partly because it doesn’t enjoy full control. Local government officials who promoted car manufacturing are reluctant to pull the plug, said Tu Le, managing director of consultant Sino Auto Insights.

That’s partly true, but it’s erroneous to assume it’s the only factor. PRC Electric Vehicle exports are hammering the European auto industry, and it’s getting into Canadian auto industry. The US auto industry is getting hammered, albeit not as extremely, by the tariffs imposed in an effort to protect it from PRC auto imports.

This hammering is part of a sub rosa two-pronged assault on the West. One prong is holding Western industry hostage to PRC control over rare earths—both of the ores and of the capacity to process them into finished items. The other prong is to deindustrialize the West by pushing hard goods—not just battery cars—into Western markets at prices and in volumes that Western nations cannot match, inducing those populations to buy PRC goods in preference. The domestic auto industry kerfuffle is a price the PRC is willing to pay in order to achieve its aim of dominance over the US and over the West in general.

This is a long-term threat to Western security, but there’s a near-term security threat, also. As WWII demonstrated, a viable automobile manufacturing facility is at the core of the ability of a nation to produce its military establishment’s combat vehicles and related weapons systems.

There is a solution to this, which itself involves addressing both prongs. One facet is to take advantage of the PRC’s domestic industrial strait and either impose very high tariffs on all imports originating from the PRC, regardless of the path those imports take between the PRC and the final destination, or outright boycott all PRC products. Either would limit PRC sales to its already paltry and declining domestic market.

The other prong is to get off the dime and move to develop Western rare earth mining—there are a plethora of rare earth ore regions throughout North America, for instance, and on the accessible sea bottoms of the eastern Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea—and processing facilities, thereby eliminating the PRC-controlled bottleneck and associated fist on the throat of Western industry. In parallel, or at least in tight sequence, that rare earth supply chain adjustment should be extended to supply chains for all Western manufacturing and assembly facilities, removing all dependence on PRC supply.

Of course, this solution will be extremely expensive to bring about, especially were the PRC to cut off access to its rare earth output—as seems likely, along with restrictions on other supply chain materials—in response to moves to develop non-PRC accesses. That effects of that cutoff would last, though, only until Western accesses come on line. The relatively shorter-term cost, too, must be compared with the longer-term cost of PRC dominance over the US and the West and our remnant industrial output.

This one from NATO’s military boss, General Alexus Grynkewich. In responding to the Russian threat to Europe, he made this remark:

NATO could “match any enemy move up the escalation ladder….”

What about, instead, getting out in front (get higher, to stick to the metaphor) in the escalation sequence and by being in front—escalating farther and faster than Russia can respond—block any further escalatory efforts by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin? Surely American military leadership learned the blood-soaked folly of tit-for-tat reactive moves, which only extend the conflict and greatly increase the friendly casualty butcher’s bill.

He had this, too:

Grynkewich laid out a “block, blunt, and break” strategy for defeating an invading force. The alliance’s superior data and sensing ability means Mr Putin wouldn’t have the luxury of surprising the West.

This is incredibly naïve for so senior a military officer. I was stationed in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, and one of things that we worried about and tried to train against was the ability of Spetznatz to infiltrate and lie low until the USSR decided to come over the fence. At that point, those infiltrated and secreted agents and small teams—4-5 agents—would act to sabotage key communications and radar nodes, interfere with Army crashout ops, blow or at least damage key bridges, and so on.

Today, the ability of Russia’s modern-day and evolved Special Operations units to infiltrate and secrete extends much farther than human agents. It includes smuggled-in and hidden until The Day drones (of which Ukraine has already demonstrated the catastrophic consequences) and malware inserted into key communications nodes and fuel, water, and electricity distribution infrastructure chokepoints not doing anything until activated on The Day.

Russia already is collecting a plethora of intelligence with its campaign of drone incursions and cyberattacks, which, far from being intimidation or warning moves, are in their essence reconnaissance probes.