Tag Archives: foreign policy

She’s Right

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But for the wrong reasons.

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says billions of dollars in upgrades are needed to the power grid in the US to prepare for widespread electric vehicle adoption.

If that’s the spur needed to get the upgrades started and seriously underway, then cool. However, our power grid badly needs upgrade and strengthening in its own right. It’s old, near capacity under normal draw, and highly fragile—as the California portion of the grid demonstrates continually, and as the Texas grid demonstrated a couple of winters ago.

Indeed, nothing has been done since the Northeast blackout of 2003—which itself was a geographic repeat of the blackout of 1965. The proximate causes of these actually were quite trivial, but the fragility of the grid was demonstrated by how fast and far the effects spread: throughout the American northeast (and deep into Canada, which illustrates, also, international implications for strengthening, or continuing to ignore, the decrepit state of our grid).

It’s a national security matter, too, beyond the economic aspects of security.

We also need to drop some dimes (though not as many as might seem) on hardening all of our power grids (plural: not only electricity, but grids distributing natural gas and oil from the well through refiners to end users) against EMP attacks—which needn’t be nuclear weapon-originated, or even large, but merely carefully targeted—and against being software-hacked, as the Russians did when they shut down Colonial Pipeline.

Export Controls Regarding the PRC

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It has come to light that we really don’t have any serious export controls covering technology-related exports to the People’s Republic of China.

Of the US’s total $125 billion in exports to China in 2020, officials required a license for less than half a percent, Commerce Department data shows. Of that fraction, the agency approved 94%, or 2,652, applications for technology exports to China. The figures omit applications “returned without action,” meaning their outcomes were uncertain.
The result: the US continues to send to China an array of semiconductors, aerospace components, artificial-intelligence technology, and other items that could be used to advance Beijing’s military interests.

Why is this being allowed to occur?

Some warn tighter restrictions on US tech sales to China will backfire because allies such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea will step in to fill the void. For export restrictions to be effective, “we need our allies to have the same controls,” said Kevin Wolf, a senior Commerce official during the Obama administration, while testifying on Capitol Hill last year. “It is that simple and logical.”

That would be silly if it weren’t, at bottom, rankly defeatist. We shouldn’t be waiting around on putting curbs on technology transfers to an enemy nation. Instead of looking for consensus first, we need to act, to lead, to let the consensus build as we go, and to give our allies something to follow and a consensus to join. After all, if we don’t care enough to do, there’s no reason anyone else should care enough to do.

Beside that, if we stop exporting our technology to the PRC and our putative allies step in to fill the gap, at least we’ll be stopping our own transfers, and our allies’ technologies, for the most part, aren’t as good as ours. The PRC would be getting second best, continuing to trail us, and that would be to the good for our security.

This Says It All

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The Republic of China’s Mainland Affairs Council has issued a statement in response to a People’s Republic of China policy statement that did not include phrasing that ruled out the dispatch of Chinese troops and civilian administrators to Taiwan as had prior editions. In their own statement, the RoC, among other things,

declar[ed] that “the Republic of China is a sovereign country,” referring to the government in Taipei by its formal name.
“The CCP regime has never ruled Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu for a single day,” the statement read….

Hear, hear.

Bragging about Getting al-Zawahiri

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It’s good that we got him. It’s unclear that we can do this sort of thing routinely. General Frank McKenzie, Central Command commander during President Joe Biden’s (D) panicky running away from Afghanistan, had this:

Let’s remember, this is one strike in a year[.]

Indeed. Successfully burning al-Zawahiri in his city apartment makes us one-for-two in over-the-horizon drone strikes into Afghanistan. The other was in the immediate aftermath of that cut-and-run, when we successfully burned a civilian and a bunch of kids with a drone strike on a car.

However, with an n of 2, we can’t tell whether the first, failed, strike is illustrative of the true trend, or the second, successful, strike is illustrative of the true trend—or even whether the true trend is closer to that mediocre 50-ish per cent success rate.

Nor is two strikes a year apart a very useful pace.

“Call Russia’s Bluff”

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Zalmay Khalilzad has a rather fanciful op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Russian President Vladimir Putin is claiming to want a diplomatic solution to his invasion of Ukraine, a claim he’s making with the voice of his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the latter’s tour of Africa. Khalilzad suggested that Putin’s “bluff” should be answered with a number of steps.

First…. One step that may force Moscow to recalculate is for senior US officials to clearly convey that Russian escalation will be met by an accompanying escalation of American support for Ukraine.

Yeah, that really deterred Putin from invading Ukraine in the first place. Neither should we meet escalation with “accompanying escalation.” That just continues surrendering the initiative to the barbarian. We need to escalate faster than the barbarian can respond; we need to be well inside the barbarian’s recognition and decision loops, not the other way around.

Second, improve the chances that Ukraine’s planned offensive operations succeed by ensuring that their plans are realistic and thoroughly evaluating their assets.

Because we Know Better what the folks actually engaged need. That’s why we’re sending them deliberately stunted HIMARS, for instance—we Know Better—instead of sending them fully capable systems, in the numbers they need, and promptly so.

Third, make a better case for other countries to support Ukraine.

Certainly, but we shouldn’t wait to act while we beg for consensus, and shouldn’t act as though we’re unable to act on our own initiative. In the case of Europe, especially, Germany is a lost cause; we should simply write them off and move on. If that means NATO qua NATO doesn’t act, oh well. The member nations don’t need NATO’s permission to act on their own initiatives.

Khalilzad should know better.