Category Archives: defense policy

On Whose Side Are They?

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Via Deputy SecState Christopher Landau:The data are for the Biden administration years of 2022-2024. As Landau pointed out, the money sent to Russia is in blue; the money sent to Ukraine is in orange. This is how much the nations of Europe really care about Ukraine and their own security. The money transfers to the barbarian invader pales the paltry financial and equipment support those nations have been offering Ukraine. Only the UK was sending more aid to Ukraine than to Russia; that has been colored by the UK’s access to North Sea oil and natural gas.

This, despite the hooraw over the US’ apparently fading support for Ukraine.

As usual, right click on the image and select Open Link in New Tab to enlarge the image.

H/t @ralflongwalker

Actually, Some of Us Do

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Greg Ip, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has an extensive article delineating how the People’s Republic of China is growing economically at the direct expense of the rest of the world.

Far from missing the opportunities of an international free market process whereby everyone gains, the PRC is doing this deliberately. Its overtly stated goal is to economically dominate (not effectively compete with) us. Its unstated but longer term goal is to economically dominate the rest of the world.

And with economic domination comes political domination.

Ip’s subheadline, though, isn’t entirely accurate:

No one knows how to cope with Beijing’s “beggar thy neighbor” economic model

Some of us do know how. The PRC is an enemy nation. This is amply demonstrated by the PRC’s control and use as national security-threatening weapons of such Critical Items as rare earths, both ore and processed, and of the basic components of medicines. The PRC’s enmity toward us is corroborated by their “graduate students'” efforts to smuggle into our nation, via university labs, fungi that if loosed would severely damage if not wipe out, much of our food plant agriculture.

We should be doing no economic business with the at all; the cease and desist will eliminate the PRC’s economic weapons. It will be extremely expensive and disruptive for us to pull our supply chains entirely out of the PRC and to stop selling anything at all to the PRC or its companies and buying anything from them, but it will only grow more expensive as we delay moving. But those expenses will pale compared to the cost of having our economy and our politics controlled by the PRC.

A Thought on the National Security Strategy Doc

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The Wall Street Journal‘s news writers had some, and so I have one.

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

Who has kept the peace? Only one member of the alliance.

It’s possible this doc is of a piece with Trump I’s statements that European NATO nations have been welching on their own commitments to NATO for too long, and maybe the alliance isn’t worth our trouble, blood, or treasure anymore, especially since it’s been us who’ve kept the peace all these years. It was us who flew the Berlin Airlift, it was us all along who was ready to risk nuclear war’s destruction across our homeland to defend Europe against potential Russia-led attacks.

Trump I’s threats were followed, if fitfully, by many of those nations finally stepping up and honoring their fiscal and equipage commitments. Still, though, one-third of those nations continue to welch on their commitments.

There’s this, too:

The strategy says the EU—an institution that the US helped establish decades ago—and other transnational organizations “undermine political liberty and sovereignty.”

What the WSJ is ignoring here is that we helped establish the EU as an economic union, which was the EU founders’ goal, also. Since then, the operators of the EU have been trying to transmogrify the economic union into its own national entity—and that attacks the member nations’ individual sovereignty. This is the mother of all mission creeps.

Maybe the NSS document is another prod, after too many decades of pretty please.

Or maybe not. But it’s interesting that the WSJ chooses to ignore any interpretation that differs from its own.

Japan is Learning the Reasons

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Reasons for ceasing doing business with and within the People’s Republic of China, that is. In response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks that a PRC attack on the Republic of China (Takaichi referred to “Taiwan”) would trigger a Japanese defensive response,

China has unearthed its old playbook of informal coercive moves. Unlike clear-cut export controls, these disguised measures are harder to manage and pose escalatory risks. Governments and companies must grapple with how to respond.
Since Nov. 14, China has issued a series of escalating restrictions: cautioning tourists and students against travel to Japan; postponing the release of at least two Japanese films; and reinstating a blanket ban on Japanese seafood imports.

The WSJ‘s op-ed authors, Victor Ferguson and Audrye Wong, Hitotsubashi University Assistant Professor of International Relations and USC Assistant Professor of Political Science, respectively, claimed

It is hard for governments and companies to respond to such disguised measures effectively and cohesively.

It’s only hard politically. It’s completely straightforward as a practical and economic matter. It’s time for the Japanese to suck up and grunt through the unavoidably disruptive period of disruption and discontinue doing business with PRC-domiciled companies, with the PRC government, and business of any sort inside the PRC.

Cards on the Table?

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That’s the breakthrough being touted by Just the News regarding “peace” talks between Ukraine and Russia.

This week for the first time, Kiev and Moscow articulated specific visions for a peace deal. And while they remain apart on big issues like land borders and NATO membership, the two sides have a meaningful framework that eluded past negotiations and presidents.

This is inaccurate. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been clear on Ukraine’s vision for peace, and equally specific the requirements for achieving one from the outset following the barbarian’s renewed invasion of his nation four years ago. He has demanded Russia’s departure from Ukraine and specific, material mechanisms for guaranteeing his nation’s sovereignty against renewed barbarian invasion.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been equally clear on his requirements for peace. He has demanded recognition of his occupation of Crimea as a Russian oblast, the ceding of all of the Donbas to Russia as additional Russian oblasts, disarmament of Ukraine, and guarantees that NATO will never accept Ukraine.

It’s hard to get any more specific than these; the two sides’ cards have been on the table all along.

There’s this bit of foolishness, also, from Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ):

If you’ve ever negotiated anything, and virtually everybody has, if you don’t understand what you want and what the other side wants, you can never get to yes.

This operates from the false premise that “yes” by Ukraine is in any way useful or would be at all reliable given to whom and to what Ukraine would be saying “yes.” It’s not possible to say “yes” to a barbarian that routinely welches on each of its commitments, including, during its present invasion, its universal violation of every cease fire to which it has pretended to agree. That’s local. More universal is the barbarian’s routine violation of international law, particularly including the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of civilians in occupied territories and the targeting of civilians in the course of a campaign. Russia’s atrocities—rape and butchery of women and children in occupied Ukrainian cities and its targeting hospitals, churches, residential neighborhoods, and children’s schools during repeated attacks are well documented.

The real breakthrough, the only breakthrough with any security or moral validity, is to transfer to Ukraine the weapons, ammunition, and logistics it says it needs; in the numbers it says it needs them; and on the schedule it says it needs them. The UA has shown its superiority these last four years over the barbarian hordes, despite the barbarian’s superiority in numbers. The only advantage the barbarian has is that it’s far better supported by its allies, Iran and the People’s Republic of China. Ukraine could win the barbarian’s war decisively were the West, led badly by the US, to find some spine and set about supplying Ukraine at least as effectively as are the barbarians’ benefactors supplying the barbarian.