Category Archives: foreign policy

What We Have on our Northern Border

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This is Canada under its PM Mark Carney.

  • refusing to honor its financial commitment to NATO; subsumed within that refusal is a betrayal of all of its fellow alliance members by rendering it needily dependent on their blood and treasure for defense while shamefully refusing to supply its own blood and treasure for their defense
  • concluding trade deals with the People’s Republic of China, a nation of avowed enmity toward us, that favor the PRC while producing little of material substance for Canadians
  • concluding similarly one-sided trade deals with Qatar, a nation that while nominally aligned with us actively supports and funds terrorists on the southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula
  • leaving wide open to illegal alien flows and drug and human trafficking its border with us

Maybe the risk is greater than that from having Mexico on our southern border. At least, Mexico is taking steps to work with us on curbing illegal immigration and human and drug trafficking across that border, along with curbing imports of the PRC’s fentanyl constituent drugs.

Neville Chamberlain Reborn

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has gone to Beijing to bend the knee and sell his nation to the communist tyrant. Or is it Vidkun Quisling who’s alive and well on Downing Street?

…Britain’s gift to President Xi Jinping arrived early. The UK last week granted approval for China to build its biggest diplomatic outpost in Europe in central London. The question now is what Mr Starmer will get in return.

It’s not just the PRC’s biggest “diplomatic outpost” in Europe. It’s far bigger than it needs to be merely to house the PRC’s embassy to a middle tier nation. It’s the PRC’s biggest headquarters for an espionage operation that’s the most aggressive in the world, and one designed and now equipped courtesy of the estimable Starmer to spy on and steal from the UK, the EU, the EU’s constituent nations (including eastern European nations fronting on the PRC’s BFF Russia), and the United States. This spanking new and oversized embassy also will be the seat of efforts to spy on, harass, and ultimately kidnap Chinese nationals and emigrants living in the UK and throughout Europe.

That’s a huge supplicant’s offering to the Emperor.

What’s in this kowtowing* for the UK? Nothing at all. The PRC has offered nothing, and it has no reason to offer anything. The most the timid Starmer can hope for is to return to the UK with both hands still attached.

Starmer is moving to deliver one more gift to the Emperor: he’s going ahead with the British plan to surrender its Diego Garcia, along with the rest of that Chagos Island group to Mauritius. It doesn’t matter that the US has a joint use agreement with the Brits for the military base on Diego Garcia that nominally long outlives the surrender to Mauritius. With Mauritius in the PRC’s back pocket, the days of that joint use agreement are severely numbered. Just see the PRC’s attitude to other nation’s possessions and agreements in the South China Sea.

Starmer is no Winston Churchill, and the UK, a product of a number of recent governments of both parties, not only Starmer’s, is not the UK that faced down and ultimately contributed heavily to the crushing defeat of a different tyrant.

 

*In traditional China this ritual was performed by commoners making requests to the local magistrate…or by foreign representatives appearing before the emperor to establish trade relations.

Looks Like an Opportunity

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The People’s Republic of China looks like it’s facing a serious economic problem.

[The PRC’s] relentless pursuit of growth through manufacturing has also created a lopsided economy, with much of it stuck in a deflationary spiral. China’s GDP deflator, a broad price gauge, has been negative since 2023, a sign of inadequate demand at home.

And

The risk is that China could get stuck in a prolonged period of stagnation similar to what Japan experienced during the 1990s and early 2000s—a mindset that becomes ingrained over time and even harder to shift.

The subheadline summarized the problem well:

Exports drive growth while race-to-the-bottom competition from overproduction hits prices, profits, wages, and sales

That economic problem looks like an opportunity for us. The Soviet Union, faced with a stagnating economy and a burgeoning technology deficit relative to us that was epitomized by our ballistic defense system under development and then deployment, folded and disappeared.

The PRC has many technology and military advantages over us, but it’s faced with a similarly stagnating economy, even one threatened with sustained deflation, and with an obvious and worsening demographic condition. The PRC’s critical deficit isn’t technological or military; it’s its economic dependency on exports.

If the US and the West generally were to stop importing from the PRC, that would turn the PRC’s economic war against us to our advantage. We should be able to gain quite a number of concessions in return for resuming buying their output, even including the PLA’s withdrawal from the South China Sea, an end to the PRC’s constant, if low key, threats against Japan in the East China Sea, and a cessation of the PRC’s threats against the Republic of China.

Of course, to achieve that—and it would be best done were it done sharply rather than in dribs and drabs, the Trump administration would need to stop trying to work deals with the PRC and to stop coddling American businesses who bleat about the centrality of the PRC to their profits. The administration and American businesses would need to step up the pace of moving supply chains out of the PRC, even in some cases to begin that reorientation.

It would also be necessary to stop our tariff moves against Europe and to stop trying to obtain control of Greenland so we can persuade Europe to join us in no longer importing from the PRC and to move faster at reorienting its supply chains away from the PRC.

Governments around the world are complaining about an influx of cheap Chinese goods that could hurt local industries.

They just need a push and the removal of economic barriers within the West.

The potential gains, though, are enormous, not just economically, but for the order and the safety of all of us, for all the difficulty of taking either of those two steps.

Expanding our Defense Budget

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President Donald Trump (R) says he’ll propose a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, a 50% increase over this year’s proposed (because it’s only passed the House, with no guarantee that an obstructionist Progressive-Democratic Party will allow it to be passed in the Senate) $1 trillion budget. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the larger budget proposal will ever be passed, either, which adds to the premium on Republicans and Conservatives winning the 2026 mid-terms for the reasons below.

The subheadline set the framework.

A $1.5 trillion military will cost much less than a war with China.

This is a war that, presently, we would lose and lose in the most humiliating fashion.

But, but—

[H]asn’t the US military shown, in Iran and Venezuela, that it is unmatched? Yes, and brilliantly so, against small powers when we can dominate space and the skies, and use our experience in combined arms operations. Going up against China, or a multiple front conflict, is far less certain.

Actually, in a fight with the PRC or a multi-front war, the outcome is pretty certain, just not favorably so. The Ukrainian military’s last attempted offensive against our near-peer Russia was an abject failure. That offensive was conducted in accordance with NATO—which is to say American—combined arms doctrine (which worked so brilliantly in Venezuela), but without a Critical Item component of that doctrine: air power and support. Absent that, even with the technologically superior ground weapons Ukraine employed against the Russian forces, Ukraine’s offensive was stopped in its tracks with very heavy loss of those superior armored vehicles.

When the People’s Republic of China invades the Republic of China, American air power will be stripped away from any putative support we might have in mind for the RoC as our Pacific aircraft carriers are sunk and our surviving naval forces are driven all the way back to Hawaii.

Nor would the PRC would have no incentive to stop there, because

new technologies are proliferating in ways that threaten the US homeland. These include hypersonic missiles, space and cyber weapons, drones, and as ever nuclear weapons. All of this is before AI is weaponized in multiple ways.

Unlike 1940s Japan, the PRC has both the stated goal of dominating us in every important way and the wherewithal to follow up its naval victory in the Western Pacific.

The US remains helpless against cyber attacks as demonstrated by the repeated hacks against a variety of data storage sites and infrastructure distribution nodes. The PRC has a first strike capability with its hypersonic, nuclear-capable missiles, which have intercontinental reach. As part of its invasion of the RoC, the PRC has strong incentive to isolate us from the island and wage its cyberwar against us and then to exercise its first strike capability. With the latter, there will be no possibility of a nuclear threat, much less response, from the United States.

We would be left with the PRC dominating our foreign policy and, especially with its control of the Pacific sea lanes of communication and of commerce, dominating our domestic economy. With those controls, the PRC will control us.

That budget must be passed without delay, and DoD’s reform of contract-letting, of weapons development, and of procurement and production must proceed ruthlessly and with similar pace.

Options in Iran

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[A]nalysts, lawmakers, and former administration officials all are busily insisting that President Donald Trump’s (R) options for helping the Iranian people are limited. What’s limited, though, is their thinking on the matter.

A limited strike against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s main security force, is unlikely to decide the outcome of the popular uprising….

And

There are nonmilitary options to put pressure on the theocratic leadership, including cyberattacks on military and civilian institutions….

And

A raid like the one that targeted Maduro in his Caracas residence would be far-fetched in Iran, a much larger country with defenses built to protect Khamenei, including a Revolutionary Guard unit known as Vali-ye Amr, which counts several thousand forces.

These are being posited to occur in isolation from each other, though, and that would be unproductive. All of these and more (see below) would need to be done together and in coordination with each other. Nor is there any need to “raid” Tehran to capture Khamenei and his immediate deputies. American and Israeli intelligence are fully capable of tracking these folks’ whereabouts, and there’s no need to attempt capture. Having located them, it would be necessary only to direct the appropriate ordnance onto them in those locations. This is, after all, what both the Israelis and Americans have done with other terrorist leaders, whether Hamas, Hezbollah, Daesh, or Iranian.

There’s also the matter of sanctions, though these would need to be addressed only after the fact.

The US could also offer to remove sanctions that have crushed the Iranian economy, if moderate military and political leaders remove Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his circle of clerics from the government and promise elections for a secular state.

Sanction removal already is on the table as part of their imposition, on the condition that the Iranian government materially and sustainably alter its behavior. That alteration would require the actual removal of Khamenei, et al. Iranian government promises, in any event, are worthless, and actual, provably fair elections would need to be held before sanctions relief could be contemplated.

Peyman Jafari, a supposed expert on Iranian social movements at William & Mary University cautioned that an attack could rally millions in defense of the Islamic Republic.

The foolishness this sort of thing has been empirically demonstrated within the last few months by the Israeli and American attacks on Iran, which resulted in…no one rallying to the government’s defense.

This is one area where John Bolton is on the right track:

Trump would need to hit the Revolutionary Guard’s bases, its volunteer militia known as the Basij, its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs, and its navy, “and that is just to get started.”

Trump has naval and air forces getting positioned in and around the Arabian Gulf, from which broad, simultaneous, and sustainable actions can be taken—not in constant successive waves, ideally, but on a shoot-look-shoot basis, where the shoot is each wave of attacks. It’s necessary only to act.