Category Archives: defense policy

Pressure

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Here’s an excerpt from the Trump-Zelenskiy telecon transcript [the odd characters at the beginning of each President’s remarks are lined out classification markings: (S/NF)]:

t:;’HP) The· President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your weal thy people… The server, they say Ukraine has.it There- are a lot. of things that went on, the whole situation… I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.
(l!l-,’HP) President Zelenskyy: Yes it is. very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer.

Yeah, that’s pressure, all right.

And here’s the “pressure” of a request—one request, mind you, not eight times repeated:

There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.

The entire transcript can be read here.

Political Tactics

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The Wall Street Journal says the “Ukraine call” will

leak eventually, so Trump might as well get it out.

No.  Telecons between American and foreign heads of state must, necessarily, remain strictly between heads of state, else it’ll be impossible for an American President to engage in “frank and open” dialog and polylog with foreign leaders or to conduct serious foreign policy in general.  No transcript should be released.

Alternatively, and in second place in the order of priorities for such things, let the leak(s) occur.  Then release the transcript and let the truth burn the leaker(s) and those who jumped onto the leak-related opprobrium bandwagon knowing they didn’t have the facts.

In the realization, something close to that second place has already happened.  In their hysteria to get President Donald Trump and to undo the outcome of an election the Progressive-Democrats consider to be their personal property stolen, the House Progressive-Democratic caucus has forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) to authorize an “impeachment investigation.”  In the immediate wake of that stampede, Trump has decided, with the permission and agreement of Ukraine’s President Volodomy Zelenskiy, to release the unredacted transcript of the call, with the so-called whistleblower’s “complaint” to be released by week’s end.

And that will be irrelevant, at least in the eyes of Progressive-Democrats: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) is saying it doesn’t matter what the transcript says; Party wants to “see what happened.”  Because the transcript isn’t actually what happened.

Intransigence

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that if he’s reelected later this month, he’ll begin annexing territories in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea.  Naturally, the Palestine Liberation Organization and its European Union apologists are in a snoot over it. An anonymously presented EU spokesperson says

The policy of settlement construction and expansion…is illegal under international law and its continuation, and actions taken in this context, undermine the viability of the two-state solution and the prospects for a lasting peace[.]

The PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi says that

Netanyahu exposed his “real political agenda of superimposing ‘greater Israel’ on all of historical Palestine [and] carrying out an ethnic cleansing agenda.”

And so on.

Yet, this is what Palestinian intransigence, along with the steady drumbeat of the PLO’s Hamas terrorism, lately enhanced by Iran’s Hezbollah attacks from within Syria, have pushed Israel into.  The Israelis have nothing to lose with this move, and there is nothing possible to gain from continuing the past policies of failure.

A Different Sort of National Security Threat

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This one demographic; it’s the potential for population collapse in the People’s Republic of China.  Most of the nations of the world outside Africa face population declines, but none seem as severe as the PRC’s is looking to be.

In 2016, after the one-child policy was abandoned, there were 17.86 million births. This dropped to 17.2 million in 2017 and 15.2 million in 2018—the third-lowest rate since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

That might be an accelerating drop, although three data points don’t make for a strongly measured trend.

There’s this datum, too, from Yi Fuxian, Senior Scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Medical School Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology:

In China in 2017, the ratio was six workers in the 20-64 age bracket supporting one senior citizen at least 65 years old. This will decline to 2.0 workers in 2039 and 1.6 in 2050.
“No social security net, no family security, and a pension crisis—this will evolve into a humanitarian catastrophe. As women live six to seven years longer than men on average [and are usually a few years younger than their husbands], they will be the main victims of population control,” said Yi.

And this from George Magnus, an Oxford University China Centre Research Associate:

Measured by the proportion of 65+ and the old age dependency ratio, China will age as much in the next 22 years as most Western economies have done in the last 60-70 years—and at far lower levels of income per head, and with a much less developed social security system[.]

It’s unlikely to get better in time to do anything meaningful: the PRC’s fertility rate, the number of children born per woman, as of 2018 is 1.6—far below the 2.1 rate required just to maintain the population at its current level.

But it’s more than just aging women or aging generally.  This is the size of its labor force in absolute terms, too, with its production capacity. The number of Chinese in the labor force is the economic underpinning of the nation and its ability to keep itself armed—to the degree the Communist Party of China and its People’s Liberation Army deem sufficient—and able to face the enemies perceived by the CPC and the PLA.

That economic underpinning also is critical to the nation’s ability to keep its people, including those actively working, fed and housed.

What will a desperate Xi Jinping or Xi-successor do in the face of this crisis?  We need to be prepared diplomatically, economically, and humanitarianly.  And militarily, since neither Xi nor his successor are likely to accept this crisis without resorting to force and invasions to “capture” workers and baby-makers.

Surrender, Or Else

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That’s Teheran’s latest demand regarding the nuclear weapons deal that the European signatories have shown themselves so desperate to preserve.

Iran will “take a strong step” away from its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers if Europe cannot offer the country new terms by a deadline at the end of this week, a government spokesman said Monday as top Iranian diplomats traveled to France and Russia for last-minute talks.

Never mind that those European nations hold all the cards that we don’t hold, and that Iran is in no position to make demands on anyone.  Iran has Europe thoroughly cowed.

It’s a shameful abdication.

Some few pundits, like Amy Kellogg on Fox News last Monday, claim that talks with Europe are Iran’s preparation of themselves for talks with the US.  This is a misreading of the situation.  Iran has already said it will not talk to the US.  Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani:

Maybe there has been a misunderstanding. We’ve said it several times and we repeat it there has been no decision to hold bilateral talks with the US[.] In principle, we don’t want bilateral talks with the United States[.]

The larger misread, though, is this: Iran has no need to talk to us; it’s not laying groundwork for talking to us, because they’re on the verge of getting Europe to surrender outright. That surrender will bypass our sanctions.