With the newly installed Biden administration, the People’s Republic of China are enthusiastically touting the status quo ante. Here’s the PRC’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying:
I hope they can meet the Chinese side halfway, uphold the spirit of mutual respect….
Meet us halfway: agree that the South China Sea with its islands and resources are our sovereign territory, and we’ll stop going after the East China Sea. For now.
Oh, and yes, we’ll respect you in the morning.
The People’s Republic of China has once again reached into American businesses to control what they do.
This time, it was the proposed acquisition by Cisco Systems of Acacia Communications, both of which are American companies. The PRC condescended to approve this acquisition—subject to certain conditions the PRC dictated.
The PRC also is actively interfering with the American company Applied Materials’ proposed acquisition of Kokusai Electric Corporation, a Japanese company.
Earlier, the PRC interfered with, to the point of blocking, a merger between Qualcomm, an American company, and NXP Semiconductors NV, a Dutch company.
A question that the Biden administration must answer: why do we allow an enemy nation—the PRC—to have veto authority over American business’ decisions such as mergers and acquisitions? I’m not sanguine that the administration will even take on the question, much less answer it in any way favorable to our businesses.
Related to this is why Europe’s nations, the European Union, or Asian nations cede similar authority over their businesses to the PRC.
None of us need the PRC market that badly, especially since the non-PRC Asian markets are readily available, as are those of South America and Africa—the latter two which could easily lose much of their own government graft with the greater economic prosperity that would result from greatly increased trade and business penetration.
These are private companies making these decisions, to be sure. The PRC, though, isn’t only dictating how those companies must operate within its border–a right of any nation–the PRC is dictating how those companies must operate anywhere in the world. The PRC’s vetoes of mergers and acquisitions are global.
In aggregate, such companies’ desperation to do business in or with the PRC at the expense of acceding to the global diktats of our common enemy threatens the security of each of our nations.
Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Senate Appropriations committees, has reported that his laptop was stolen from his office, ostensibly by the rioters who assaulted the Capital Building last Wednesday afternoon. (Ostensibly: frankly, I have no reason to doubt the fact of the theft or which member(s) of which crowd did the theft. However, the deed as theft and who did it remain unproven at this early stage of the investigation.)
Merkley also said he’d left his office unlocked while he went to the Senate floor for the Electoral College vote counting and debates. The importance of that will become clear below.
He apparently isn’t alone in this:
The Justice Department (DOJ) said Thursday during a briefing that “national security equities” may have been among the records stolen during the looting and destruction that stalled the congressional proceedings….
What’s not being reported in the NLMSM is the utter contempt these folks—possibly from both parties—have for our nation’s secrets, our classified information: they won’t even take the slightest pains to protect them.
A laptop unsecured in an unlocked office? Not even in locked away in a safe when the Senator isn’t around? An open office is all the security a Senator—a Senator experienced in handling classified materials, if only by his membership on a foreign relations committee—deems necessary?
Classified “equities” left unsecured in other offices?
How does that work, exactly?
Where are DoJ’s and DIA’s investigations into this manifest mishandling of classified material?
…independence today. Tomorrow, American energy dependence.
Bloomberg is reporting that the US didn’t import any oil at all from Saudi Arabia last week, the first time in 35 years. That’s part of a longer term trend in declining Saudi oil imports over the last six years, especially. See the graph just below.
This trend is a result of the US technology advance of fracking which both drove down the cost of getting the oil (and natural gas) out of the ground and drastically increasing our own oil and gas production—virtually eliminating our dependence on foreign oil and gas and making us net exporters of both.
However.
Watch for American energy independence to (re)degrade into energy dependence on foreign nations under the Biden administration.
Watch that dependence made doubly vulnerable as the Biden administration reduces funding for our national defense, including particularly our Navy, so that we will be less able to defend the shipping lanes carrying that foreign energy to us.
The People’s Republic of China, beginning under the Obama régime, already is in a position to shut off the shipping lanes carrying trillions of dollars of goods, including crude, to us through the South China Sea, and they’re building/acquiring naval bases for the PLA on the west coast of Africa and creating “economic” ties with island nations on the eastern boundary of the Caribbean Sea, and on the north coast of South America. And Biden’s softness toward the PLC is well-known.
Now it appears that DoJ also was compromised—at least a little bit—by the SolarWinds hack. DoJ says its classified systems weren’t affected, but some unclassified email systems were.
There’s this bit, though, that doesn’t appear to be getting sufficient attention.
Even unclassified email accounts, though, can contain sensitive information about investigations and potentially national security related issues, said Chris Painter, a former senior official at the Justice and State departments who worked on cybersecurity issues. “A lot of DOJ work happens on unclassified systems.”
That sort of thing is largely unavoidable. Hence the perhaps too little attended-to need: vastly improved training in and execution of COMSEC principles, for everyone from the Attorney General through the lowest-ranking unpaid intern. That training and required performance must extend, also, to every enterprise and individual doing business with DoJ or wanting to.