Tag Archives: defense policy

Clarity

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Walter Russell Meade, with whom I agree far more often than not, had a piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. He titled his piece Can Biden Find Clarity on China and Russia? and he closed it with this:

The global governance issues that many on Team Biden care most about cannot be addressed without the hard-nosed geopolitics that many Democrats reject. The president-elect’s foreign policy will stand or fall on his ability to manage that paradox.

I think the answers to the question, and the fixing of the paradox, stem from Biden’s own words:

The PRC isn’t “a patch on our jeans.”
“[T]hey’re not bad folks, folks.”

Biden’s position on the PRC seems pretty clear to me.

The widow of a Moscow mayor sent Hunter Biden $3.5 million.
On Russia generally, Biden has this: “He [Romney] acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on [and] Russia is still our major adversary. I don’t know where he has been.”

Biden’s Russia position, which remains unchanged in deed, his current words notwithstanding—and the Russian hooks in his family—are equally clear.

A Training Opportunity

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Ramstein AB, Germany, location of USAFE headquarters, got an emergency alarm over the weekend of an in-progress missile attack on the base. The alarm turned out to be false.

There are a couple of ways such a false alarm might be triggered. One is that the alarm was part of an exercise and the exercise label simply dropped or missed. Another is that, as part of a Russian exercise, by happenstance in also progress, missiles were launched at exercise targets inside Russia during that exercise’s final phase, and detection systems acted on the fact and a short time later (but after the alarm had been sent) recognized the launches for what they were and canceled the alarm.

In any event, as “a Pentagon official” said,

It’s important that we find out what happened, for a lot of reasons. We don’t want people getting needlessly alarmed, and we don’t want them to be complacent in the face of a genuine alert.

“Ramstein officials” also noted

Today, the Ramstein Air Base Command Post was notified via an alert notification system of a real-world missile launch in the European theater.  The Command Post followed proper procedure and provided timely and accurate notifications to personnel in the Kaiserslautern Military Community.

And in response to the alarm, those officials said,

Those who heard the warning took it seriously.

Which raises another important aspect of the false alarm: the real-world operational training opportunity the alarm presented to the base and the surrounding Kaiserslautern Military Community. Finding out what happened regarding the transmittal of a false alarm should include a detailed, critical post mortem on the base and community response to the fact of the alarm. That post mortem also should include an assessment of why less than everyone heard the alarm.

Joe Biden’s Defense Policy

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In the context of commenting on Biden’s selection of retired Army General Lloyd Austin to be his Secretary of Defense should he become President, James Carafano wondered what Biden’s defense policy actually would be.

We know very little about what kind of defense policy a Biden presidency will deliver. The issue hardly came up on the presidential campaign trail. … The nomination of Austin doesn’t give us much of an answer.

I disagree. I think we’re pretty clear on what Biden’s defense policy will be.

This is the man who opposed the killing of bin Laden.

This is the man who decried the killing of Soleimani.

This is the man who wants to rejoin the Iranian nuclear weapons development deal.

This is the man who wants to rejoin the Paris Climate business, a business that will do grave damage to our economy while explicitly favoring the People’s Republic of China economy.

This is the man who insists the PRC is no competition, is “not a patch on our jeans,” whose Government and Party personnel “are not bad folks, folks.”

The Biden defense policy will be one of abject appeasement and a continuation of Obama’s retreat.

The People’s Republic of China and Private Economies

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The government of the People’s Republic of China does not trust the people over whom it reigns. This is illustrated by its broad distrust of those folks’ private enterprise.

Xi Jinping, long distrustful of the private sector, is moving assertively to bring it to heel.

And

The government is installing more Communist Party officials inside private firms, starving some of credit and demanding executives tailor their businesses to achieve state goals.

And

The push is driven by a deepening conviction within the country’s leadership that markets and private entrepreneurs, while important to China’s rise, are unpredictable and not to be fully trusted.

Bringing the PRC into the World Trade Organization, engaging with the nation economically—even helping the nation economically—in order to enhance freedom and prosperity for the ordinary folks of the PRC was worth the try those 50 years, more or less, ago.

It’s clear now, though, and it’s been clear for some decades, that the government men of the PRC have no intention of enhancing that freedom of prosperity. Those men intend only to enhance their power domestically, to dominate neighboring nations, and to set the global world order, replacing not just us, but the West altogether.

Yet this is the PRC that Joe Biden wants us to cozy up to.

Pocket Veto

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This week, the House passed the National Defense Appropriation Act with enough votes that, if repeated, would override a Presidential veto.

President Donald Trump has said he’ll veto the bill because it doesn’t include repeal of Section 230, which confers immunity from publication-related liability on Facebook, Twitter, Alphabet, and a few others.

Now the bill goes to the Senate for passage, and then to the President.

Here’s the thing, folks. As I write this post, it’s 9 December. Congress recesses at COB 18 December.

If Congress doesn’t extend its session and not go on recess as currently scheduled, the President can simply not sign the bill into law, and it’ll be pocket vetoed with no opportunity for an override vote in each house.

Here’s what Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution has to say on Presidential vetoes [emphasis added]:

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

We’re already inside those 10 days.