Category Archives: defense policy

The Peel is Double-Sided

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President Donald Trump (R) seems to be looking to peel the People’s Republic of China away from supporting Russia in the barbarian’s war on Ukraine.

[Trump] has also come to believe that the key to putting more pressure on Russia is to peel China away from its economic and other support for Moscow.
We hear that was part of the message that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brought to Sweden this week. Mr Trump wants the big trade deal with China that eluded him in the first term. But Mr Bessent is pitching a larger detente if President Xi Jinping is willing to stop supporting Mr Putin’s war.

This is against the backdrop of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s and PRC President Xi Xinping’s declaration of their no limits partnership and unbreakable friendship, their trade deal that lets the PRC develop—with PRC laborers and their families—Siberian resources and import into the PRC a significant fraction of those resources, and the PRC’s current large purchases of Russia’s existing oil and natural gas production and the PRC’s shipment to Russia of arms and logistical support for those arms.

Stipulate Trump succeeds in separating, at least somewhat, the PRC from Russia, in getting Xi to walk back, or just to water down, his commitments to Putin. With that demonstration of Xi’s reliability, for how long does Trump, or any of us, think Xi would maintain any commitment to us, or even simply to maintain any damping down of his support for Putin or the barbarian’s war effort? Long enough for Ukraine to succeed in driving Russia back out would be sufficient, but that can’t be relied on.

The effort (and, potentially, the ensuing success) may well be worth the risk, but that risk needs to be well understood before the effort goes too far. That’s especially so regarding these risks:

[Xi’s] abiding goal is to bring Taiwan under Mainland control, and his military is practicing maneuvers that would be part of an attempted blockade of the island. Would Mr Trump be willing to weaken US support for Taiwan?

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors cast Trump’s effort as a potential Nixonian move, a potential (re)opening of the PRC. While Nixon’s move seemed like a good idea at the time, though, in retrospect, it was a huge and expensive (along a number of dimensions) mistake.

Wrong Answer

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William Galston is correct, and he’s dangerously wrong, in his Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

He acknowledges that Hamas will never surrender. This is where he’s correct. He then concluded that Israel should

declare victory and accept a cease-fire that returns all the remaining hostages and withdraws the IDF from Gaza.

He based that on the risible thesis that Israel has ended Hamas’s ability to threaten its security.

Hamas will never release all of its remaining hostages. That would eliminate far too much non-shooting leverage that Hamas has. The IDF is going to have to go get them, and that requires the complete destruction of Hamas.

Regarding Hamas’ threat to Israel’s security, formal cease fire or not, Hamas’ firing at Israel, Hamas’ terroristic assaults on Israel, will never cease until Hamas is utterly destroyed and cannot (not chooses not to) keep up its terrorism. Israel is absolutely correct on this, and its existence as a nation, as a society, depends on it. Leaving Gaza before that’s done would only let Hamas re-expand into the areas currently held by the IDF, refit, regrow, and carry on with its anti-Israeli terrorism.

Galston goes on at length, too, about how long it would take Israel to destroy Hamas. However, he shies away from the other side of this: that the destruction of Israel, were Hamas left extant and so potentially to succeed, would be forever.

That’s the long and the short of it.

There’s a Fix for This

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It’s a straightforward fix, too, even if perhaps politically difficult. “This” is the retention of security clearances by those who leave Federal employ, and the problem that would be fixed by this “this” is this:

The chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board says he believes crimes were committed by intelligence and law enforcement officials who relentlessly pursued President Donald Trump over the last decade, and he also wants to make sure that spies who abused their powers are stripped of their security clearances and their jobs.

Devin Nunes, the PIAB chairman in question, added this:

I just continue to be fascinated by the people who are still carrying a security clearance. It’s amazing who are still in these agencies. And I’m just shaking my head like every time I turn around, like, wait, wait, wait, wasn’t that person in that position a Russia hoax person.

The fix is this: everyone leaving Federal employ should have his security clearance revoked automatically. Having left the government, that person no longer needs a security clearance; he no longer has any need to know, which is a Critical Item for having a clearance. Persons getting (not just seeking) civilian employment that requires a security clearance should be required to go through an entirely new and current—de novo—security background check. Persons changing jobs within the Federal government should have their clearances suspended pending successful completion of an entirely new and current—also de novo—background check, and any renewed clearance adjusted down (or up) commensurate with the new job.

None of this would prevent those who committed crimes from being prosecuted and, if convicted, jailed. They should be. Nor would any of this prevent the President from firing those who’ve failed to carry out their duty fully and enthusiastically, whether or not they’ve done anything illegal. He should fire them.

Their Plan, Our Necessary Response

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The headline and subheadline of the editorial lay it out succinctly:

China’s No-Exit Plan for Foreigners
Beijing is blocking two more Americans from leaving the country which is part of a pattern.

Then the lede:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been eager to lure American companies to invest in China, but you wouldn’t know it from Beijing’s latest actions. China is preventing American citizens, including a Commerce Department employee and a Wells Fargo banker, from leaving the country.

This is naked hostage-taking, and the only way to stop it is to counter it decisively, deeply, and broadly. That doesn’t mean if the PRC takes an American hostage, we take 10, nor does it mean if the PRC brings a knife to the matter, we bring a gun and all our friends with guns. It may come to that—tit-for-tat is far worse and more expensive than drastic and rapid escalation—but it’s not useful in the present context.

What is necessary is for Americans to stop traveling to the PRC under any circumstance—not to visit, not for tourism, not on business. This would be made more effective, and safer for business employees, if American businesses stopped doing business inside the PRC completely. Along those lines, our State Department should issue a Level 4 Travel Advisory—Do Not Travel—on travel to the PRC. The specific risks to travel are included with this level of advisory, and SecState should be explicit: there is an unacceptable risk of the American traveler being kidnapped by the PRC government and barred from leaving. It may be true, and it seems to be so for the two kidnap victims above, that the victims are free to roam about the PRC, but that just means they’re in a shabbily gilded cage.

In addition to those steps, our government needs to make those hostages our hostages against PRC good behavior: do nothing diplomatically or economically with the PRC until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy. Rescind the PRC’s Most Favored Nation status and impose tariffs of at least 500% on all goods and services originating from the PRC, regardless of the path those things take in getting to the US, again until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy.

Accelerate arming the Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. Actively and overtly—with the presence of US Navy and Air Force assets—assist the Philippines in its defense of its island possessions in the South China Sea, including physically blocking PLAN ships from impeding Philippine shipping. Deem PLAN ship refusal to give way, maintaining a collision course as an attack on our ship or the Philippine ship, and fire on and sink the PLAN attacker. Work defense arrangements with Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia.

The more Xi and his minions object, the more rapidly we should push these moves.

Hostage takers deserve no profit; they do deserve to lose drastically.

A Promising Technology

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An alternative to GPS-positioning and navigation—which is increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing—is nearing operational capability, having already begun real world testing. Instead of receiving signals from satellites, this system is as self-contained as inertial navigation systems, but without the dependency on gyroscopes, which drift over relatively short periods of time. Instead, the system uses the varying degrees of magnetization ubiquitous in the earth’s crust. And it doesn’t even send out signals to measure that magnetization—I did say it was self-contained.

Inside SandboxAQ’s device, essentially a small black box, a laser fires a photon at an electron, forcing it to absorb that photon. When the laser turns off, that electron goes back to its ground state, and releases the photon. As the photon is released, it gives off a unique signature based on the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at that particular location.
Every square meter of the world has a unique magnetic signature based on the specific way charged iron particles in the Earth’s molten core magnetize the minerals in its crust. SandboxAQ’s device tracks that signature, feeds it into an AI algorithm that runs on a single GPU, compares the signature to existing magnetic signature maps, and returns an exact location.

Exact location: the system currently is capable of matching, every time, the FAA’s commercial navigation requirement of specifying location to within 2 nautical miles. The system can get within a quarter of a nautical mile about two-thirds of the time.

The system already seems capable, in the defense arena, of sensing submarines and tunnels. For targeting over enemy territory, though, greater precision will be required. The question here, in my peabrain, isn’t whether such pinpoint accuracy can be achieved (there’s no doubt that it can), but how we will get magnetic crust mapping inside, say, Russia or the People’s Republic of China.

I suspect satellites can get those maps.