Category Archives: foreign policy

“Tit-for-tat”

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Commenting on tit-for-tat, former People’s Republic of China People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang offered this at an economic forum in Tokyo last December:

Tit-for-tat trade retaliation [he said] is “never a good choice” from an economic perspective…. “But there’s not much policymakers can do about that.”

He’s right on the first of that, but tit-for-tat is a terrible tactic in any venue, economic, military, political or other. The far better move, the only serious move, is to retaliate through escalation, escalating far higher and far faster than the enemy can adapt and respond. And keep on with that until the enemy adjusts his ways in manners suitable to us.

Yi is mistaken, though, in his claim that policymakers can’t do much. Of course, they can: they’re the ones who push the tit-for-tat retaliations and who should push escalatory retaliations.

An American general once said about getting into a fight: “Bring a gun, and bring all your friends with guns.” Use overwhelming force—economic, political, military, whathaveyou—to end the conflict the most quickly and the most favorably to you. Not a fair fight? Irrelevant. What’s not fair is losing the fight and having our national, economic, international behaviors dictated to us by the winner of that fight.

It’s time to get off the dime and move, promptly and at pace, to cut all economic ties with the PRC, whose stated goal is to overwhelm, replace, and dominate us. The PRC has already made its opening moves, cutting us off from the rare earths we need to manufacture our national defense systems, from weapons to computers, and flooding Mexican cartels with the precursors of fentanyl for the latter to produce and ship into the US along with mixing into what used to be legitimate medicines produced in Mexico.

It’s time to stop selling rope to the PRC.

Nvidia and Investing in the PRC

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Nvidia‘s honcho, Jensen Huang, says it’s not straightforward for his chipmaker to leave the People’s Republic of China altogether. Many of his arguments, though, are irrelevant.

In the end, the platform that wins the AI developers wins AI. Export controls should strengthen US platforms, not drive half of the world’s AI talent to rivals.

You bet. But our chipmakers don’t need to be in the PRC to win the race—which isn’t a race, anyway, since technology always advances. It’s a never-ending journey. American chipmakers need to be elsewhere, tapping other talent, including American talent that still is second to none.

The US government’s decision in April to stop the company from selling its H20 chips to the Chinese market cost the company about $2.5 billion in lost sales in the April-ended quarter and will cost another $8 billion in the current period ending in July. That is because the H20 chip was designed specifically for the Chinese market to comply with then-current export restrictions, so it isn’t really salable anywhere else.

Avoiding export restrictions is entirely legal, but this is a trade and technology war that the PRC has been inflicting on us for years. Huang had to know that export restrictions would evolve in that war, just as weapons technology and export restrictions evolve in shooting wars. Again: American chipmakers don’t need to be in the PRC. American chips, of any generation, don’t need to be in the PRC.

Also, an irrelevancy from the peanut gallery:

“China is a quarter of the market. It’s a big number,” UBS analyst Tim Arcuri said in an interview. He added that Nvidia would have a “dominant hold” on that market if it were able to compete there.

Here’s a bigger number. Three-quarters of the market is not in the PRC. Nvidia would have a dominant hold on that market if it wanted to.

Dominant hold in the PRC chip market? What about all that PRC techie talent about whom Huang worries so much if left in isolation? Won’t they move even faster with American chips in their suite? Beside that, other companies, American and European, have held a variety of “dominant holds” there: GM, Tesla, Volkswagen, Nokia, Ericsson, and on and on, all had dominant holds, until they didn’t. And the reason they don’t anymore isn’t because they can’t compete on technology and market skill, it’s because they can’t compete with PRC government subsidies of domestic companies and PRC naked theft of intellectual property.

And this, from Huang, again:

China’s AI moves on with or without US chips[.]

Of course; that’s obvious. The PRC, though, does not need easy access to American chips—or those of other Western chipmakers’ chips—in order to do that. The presence of American chips (and others’) inside the PRC only makes it easier for PRC techies to “move on” through their reverse-engineering, theft of techniques, software, intellectual property, and so on.

Certainly, switching out of the PRC would be short-term disruptive to American chipmakers, but it would be mid- and long-term beneficial to them and to our nation. Especially if our chipmakers, and our government, were to arrange coalitions of Western chipmakers to do development and marketing rather than working strictly alone. There would be anti-trust problems here if the coalitions aren’t set up properly, but that’s doable, and has been done in many other venues.

Why So Slow?

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The  International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran hasn’t been cooperating with inspection efforts and that it has continued to greatly enrich uranium, increasing its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February. That’s enough to produce 10 nuclear warheads. That compares with my estimate of the number of nuclear bombs that, if used and they worked, would destroy Israel as a nation and as a people: 4-5.

It would take only two weeks to enrich those ~400kg to the 90% purity needed to make a nuclear warhead.

The slowness problem as I see it:

The IAEA has said it can’t verify that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

And

The report is an important steppingstone in the European powers threat to reimpose the sanctions lifted from Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal.
…
European diplomats have said if Iran failed to cooperate with the agency, they would follow up Saturday’s report with a push to declare Iran in noncompliance with its obligations as a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. …
A noncompliance resolution could be voted on at the coming meeting of the IAEA board of member states, which starts June 9.

And this bit of unconscionable dithering:

European officials have said they will decide by the summer whether to press ahead with the so-called snapback of sanctions on Iran at the UN Security Council, if Tehran doesn’t start to fully cooperate with the nuclear probe. The option of reimposing the sanctions expires in October under the 2015 agreement.

9 June is a week off—half the time Iran would need to produce nuclear warheads. Then the European government men and women will dither and hem and haw through the summer before they think about taking action—and that predicated on whether Iran merely begins to cooperate. Then these Wonders would go argue the matter at the UN, knowing full well that the Security Council doesn’t have the votes among the veto-capable members. And: even were sanctions snapped back via a miraculous Security Council decision, it would take days to weeks to implement them, and it would take months for them to start to interfere with the Iranian economy—while never reaching the impact level necessary actually to stop enrichment and production.

Keep in mind these two things, also: the Iranian government men have sworn to destroy—exterminate—Israel, and those government men care not a single dinar about their own people; sanctions won’t be a practical impediment.

Time is nearly up. Iran needs to receive a kinetic elimination of its nuclear weapons development program, and it needs to receive it promptly.

More Foolishness

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This time, it’s in a letter to the Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section by Isaiah Wilson (USA Col, Ret):

Understanding social dynamics in combat, including race and identity, is necessary for effective leadership and unit cohesion.

The problem with this claim is that in combat, logistics, maintenance, any other support function and in training for these, race is irrelevant, and identity is strictly and solely American. Subdividing our American military members, as it does in civilian life, only divides those members from each other, thereby creating…division, and that works disastrously against preparation and against execution.

Then Isaiah compounded his error.

Perhaps the reason America has struggled in combat is that we have underestimated the role of identity-centered understanding in military operations.

To the extent our military has struggled in combat, there has been too much emphasis on identity-centered understanding and the intrinsically racist and sexist divisions that emphasis creates. For all that, though, our military has not struggled in combat all that much. Our political leadership, though, has struggled mightily with combat, and that has gone to our detriment in nearly every conflict we’ve fought since WWII.

Keep the social justice claptrap out of the foxhole and out of our military in general, and return the training and operational focuses to producing the most lethal soldiers and the most lethal military establishment in the world.

There’s a Hint There

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President Donald Trump’s (R) National Security Council is being reorganized and downsized streamlined in a badly needed revamp. One demonstrated need is this:

The goal, according to one official, is to streamline processes within the NSC, which coordinates national security and foreign policy for the president….

This is a continuation of Fiona Hill’s (remember her?) anger over her ad hoc interagency coordination group foreign policy inputs not being obeyed by Trump I. It’s not the NSC’s job—or it should not be—to coordinate national security and foreign policy for the President. It’s the NSC’s job—or it should be—to coordinate national security and foreign policy inputs to the President’s own national security and foreign policy development and decisions.

The move is intended to increase DoD’s and State’s direct involvement in those inputs, and that’s entirely appropriate. Homeland Security’s inputs should be increased, as well, given that that Department was created long after the NSC. The three departments, too, already form—or should form—the core of all of those policy development inputs.