Category Archives: foreign policy

Yes, But It’s Not Enough

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Leon Panetta and Mike Gallagher are on the right track in sounding the alarm regarding our nation’s lagging behind our enemies in military strength and in the pace of scientific and weapon technology development.

They closed their op-ed, though, with this:

To prevent cold-war competition from devolving into a hot war, it’s time to innovate as if the free world depended on it. The path forward must be paved with investments in technology and undergirded by infrastructure built for innovative national-security research and education.

Innovate, certainly. Develop an infrastructure conducive to producing the scientists, engineers, and other researchers necessary for innovation, absolutely. That’s not enough, though. Panetta and Gallagher also emphasized that we are unlikely to adopt industrial policy or match our enemies in sheer production volume.

That’s the Critical Item remaining leg of our rebuilding: we have to produce the things we innovate, and we have to produce them in sufficient numbers that they can overcome the numerical superiority of our enemies’ production. That requires rebuilding the manufacturing facilities and building new such facilities that are necessary for us to produce our innovations. We can no longer expect our automobile manufacturers simply to adjust their assembly lines to produce tanks instead of trucks—both of those today are too complex and too different from each other.

The war(s) we fight against Russia and the People’s Republic of China will be fought with the men and equipment in being and on scene. The pace and weapons effectiveness of modern war will not allow much at all in the way of American reinforcements from overseas, and it will not allow any—zero—combat loss replenishments from our factories, whether extant or starting to be built when the first enemy bullet is fired at us.

Finland Soft-pedals on Ukraine

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President Alexander Stubb is partially correct, as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal:

China holds the key to ending the war in Ukraine, urging Beijing to use its sway over Moscow while also calling on the US to lower growing tensions with China.

Stubb is correct to the extent that the People’s Republic of China is a key player in Russia’s war of destruction against Ukraine, but it’s not the key player. On the other hand, US-PRC tensions are irrelevant to the barbarian’s war except to the extent PRC President Xi Jinping chooses to use the war to poke a PRC stick in our eye.

Stubb’s soft-pedaling also comes from a basic misunderstanding of the situation vis-à-vis the barbarian’s invasion, which is done with a view to erasing Ukraine as a sovereign entity and absorbing it into the fabric of Russia. Here he is, exposing the depth of that misunderstanding:

President Xi Jinping holds the keys to a peaceful solution to this conflict because he’s in such a position of power. We in the West, not even the United States, cannot do that. All we can do is to provide arms to Ukraine to make sure it doesn’t lose its war.

There can be no peaceful solution with a barbarian that deliberately butchers women and children, bombs hospitals and schools, destroys power distribution nodes with a view to freezing Ukrainians in winter, and rapes women and children in barbarian occupied cities.

It’s utterly immoral to the point of outright evil, too, for the US and Europe to limit themselves to provid[ing] arms to Ukraine to make sure it doesn’t lose its war. That just keeps Ukrainian soldiers dying or being maimed while fighting to not lose. That just keeps Ukrainian women and children exposed to and dying from continued Russian atrocities. That just keeps the dwindling populations in barbarian occupied cities exposed to privation and continued atrocities. Fighting to not lose only increases Ukrainian losses.

It’s necessary that Ukraine win its war for survival outright, and that requires—demands—that the US and Europe stop supplying only enough arms for Ukraine to “not lose.” It requires—demands—that the US and Europe supply Ukraine, promptly and in numbers, with the weapons it needs to win its war for survival.

Another Stubb misunderstanding: Ukraine has been crystalline in its terms for ending the war: the barbarian’s withdrawal from all of occupied Ukraine. The PRC’s true key role is this: stop supplying Russia with arms, ammunition, technology, and money. Buy its oil and natural gas from sources other than Russia. Anything less is a dilution of its role to the point of meaningless virtue signaling. And poking with a stick.

Economic Travails

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This time those of the People’s Republic of China’s economy. In a Wall Street Journal editorial in which the editors, correctly, deprecate the idea that the continuing slow devaluing of the yuan is necessarily something about which to worry. Neither the falling yuan relative to the US dollar, nor the parallel weakening vs the dollar of Japan’s yen, the Republic of Korea’s won, Malaysia’s ringgit, and a number of others across Asia reflect anything other than the strength—more accurately, the lesser weakness—of our economy compared to those nations’.

Then the editors dropped this mistake:

No one can say whether an economic crisis is imminent in China, but no one should want one.

The first part is true; the mistake is in the second. Absolutely we, the rest of Asia—particularly the Republic of China and the nations rimming the South China Sea—should want one, as well as Europe and the United States. The PRC’s increasing aggressiveness and threats against those Asian nations, and its support for Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine and the threat that represents for the rest of Europe, and its economic support for a nuclear Iran and the threat that represents to the existence of Israel and the threat of Iran-nuclear armed terrorist attacks on Europe and the US—these are possible only with a strong economy with which to fund the PRC’s militarism, its supplies of military materiel to Russia, and its purchases, even at slight discount, of Russian and Iranian oil, thereby funding those nations’ misbehaviors.

An economic crisis in the PRC or, especially hopefully, a prolonged economic meltdown would be economically disruptive for the world at large in the short run, but it would be a very good event in the medium- and long term for the security, and economies, of non-PRC Asia, Europe, and the US.

Drafting Haredim

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Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled, unanimously, that the nation must begin drafting its ultra-Orthodox Jewish men—haredim—into its military.

A panel of nine judges unanimously ruled that there is no legal basis for exempting ultra-Orthodox religious scholars after a series of laws and government decisions carving out service exemptions were either struck down by the court or expired.

And

The ruling also blocks government funding for religious students without a valid military exemption, a decision that experts say could affect tens of thousands of current religious students and tens of millions of dollars in funding, raising the political stakes for the two ultra-Orthodox political parties upon which Netanyahu’s thin parliamentary coalition rests.

My question here isn’t concerned with the stability of the current Israeli government. I wonder, instead, whether this Court ruling will tip the balance in the Knesset toward passing legislation reforming the Israeli Supreme Court and elevating an Israeli concept of Parliamentary superiority, making the Knesset the final authority on what constitutes legitimate Israeli law.

Opposing that, with this ruling purporting to push for more equal treatment of all Israeli Jews (Israel’s Druze minority apparently remain exempt from the draft in this ruling), I wonder if popular opposition to reforming the Court and elevating the Knesset will grow even stronger.

Limited Options?

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Some of The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities claim that not only are America’s options few, but we are Running Out of Options in the Gaza War. And further, as their subheadline intimates, those options are purely American political re-electability options.

Biden’s stalled cease-fire plan is a political vulnerability ahead of his debate with Trump. Israel and Hamas have a longer timeline.

Of course they do, and of course the news personalities’ bit is nonsense.

While it is true that our—not only Biden’s personal political prospects (and Trump’s, come to that)—are limited, it’s only in the fetid imaginations of pressmen that our options are running out.

Putting any emphasis at all on any sort of ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is dangerously misguided. There can be no hope of a ceasefire with an enemy that will strike at will regardless of the terms of any extant ceasefire agreement, just as Hamas did last October, in violation of the then-existing ceasefire agreement, and just as Hamas has done repeatedly before then in violation of all of those ceasefire agreements.

Our option as a nation—disregard self-serving politicians—is restricted to a single one. Support Israel fully in its war for survival against butchers whose own sole goal is the extermination of Israel. That war, of course, is the source of the longer timeline of Israel and Hamas (notice that: a single timeline, not separate ones for the nation and the terrorists). Hamas mucky-mucks have promised repeated October 7s, no matter the costs the terrorists inflict on Gaza Strip civilians, until the terrorists achieve their goal of extermination. Which makes Israel’s timeline stretch until they’ve succeeded in destroying (not exterminating—an out of line IDF general has badly conflated the two) Hamas.

On reflection, though, there is one more national option, even if Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden lacks both the political courage and the morals to apply it. That is to cut off Hamas’ source of money and arms: going back to enforcing existing sanctions on Iran (which are less effective, now, due to Russia’s and People’s Republic of China’s support, but still damaging), to begin sinking Iranian arms shipping and interdicting overland arms shipments through Iraq before it can deliver arms and ammunition, and severely damaging, if not destroying, Iran’s nuclear weapons development facilities cybernetically and, if necessary, kinetically. Dealing with Iran also would have the happy side effect of weakening Hezbollah’s ability to continue its terrorist attacks against Israel from the north.