Tag Archives: foreign policy

Dangerous Naivete

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken has it. During a 60 Minutes interview, the man actually said that our nation does not have the luxury of not dealing with China.

That’s a blatantly raised straw man. No one is arguing that we should have no dealings with the People’s Republic of China. The debates are centered on how we should deal with it. Leave aside the fact that a total boycott of trade with the PRC is dealing with it, rather than not dealing with it, a means that no one is touting.

Instead, the debates involve moving our supply chain away from the threat the PRC poses, as illustrated by that nation’s attempt to cut off supplies of rare earth metals to other nations. They involve jawboning businesses to stop doing business with PRC suppliers operating with Uyghur slave labor. They involve how to pressure the PRC to desist from its Uyghur genocide in progress. They involve how to respond to the PRC’s occupation of the South China Sea and the islands within it that are owned by other nations (even if ownership is often disputed among those other nations.

Blinken said this, too, in that interview.

I want to be very clear about something. Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.

This, especially, is an example of Blinken’s naivete. Our purpose most assuredly must include containing the PRC, holding it back. At least until it’s ready to stop being our enemy, to stop its genocide, to stop its slavery, to leave the South China Sea and respect the ownership of sovereign nations’ territory.

In fine, until the PRC is ready to join the community of civilized nations.

The full interview can be seen here.

Other Implications

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Automakers are starting to adjust their level of dependence on Just in Time manufacturing, a technique whereby manufacturers vastly reduce inventory holding costs by having the relevant inputs—car parts, for instance—arrive at the factory just before they’re needed. In some of the more extreme cases, that includes arriving on the moving assembly line just before it’s needed for addition to the growing product.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather, and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.
“The just-in-time model is designed for supply chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

That’s true, and it’s also good that that fragility finally is being taken seriously.

There are two other factors in JIT supply chain fragility beside those largely innocent ones. One is the fact that an enormous amount of trade goods, including raw materials and components for assembly into larger components or finished products, passes through the South China Sea. A large majority of Japan’s inputs and trillions of dollars of value for the US pass through the that Sea. Those shipping lanes are at increasing risk from an increasingly aggressive and acquisitive People’s Republic of China.

The other source is supply chain disruption by union strikes. Strikes generally and supply disruption by strikes are ways in which unions extort concessions out of manufacturers.

Inventory on hand, rather than on trucks or rail cars, helps manufacturers get through those deliberate disruptions.

Walls

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Who’s building them? President Joe Biden (D), within days of being inaugurated, ordered construction of physical walls along our southern border halted.

We have an exploding—and still expanding—crisis on that southern border, one that centers on illegal aliens inundating our facilities (and Mexico’s) and that has a second center involving accompanied children (children; let’s not hide behind the soft-pedaling euphemism “minors;” these unfortunates are as young as eight or nine), many of whom have been abused, repeatedly to the point of being a routine matter, on their way to that border.

Nevertheless:

Biden has refused to visit our southern border, and he won’t even discuss any plan to visit it in his term, much less at any time soon.

Vice President Kamala Harris (D) laughs at the idea of visiting our southern border, even though she’s been charged with responsibility for dealing with that crisis. She’s also more widely traveled domestically than her partner in this administration. She’s been to California to discuss Governor Newsom’s (D) plans for handling the State’s Wuhan Virus situation. She’s been to Chicago for a Chicago-style piece of German chocolate cake. She’s been to Connecticut to push her partner’s spending plan. She’s been to North Carolina to push her partner’s “infrastructure” plan. She’s been to New Hampshire on a 2024 campaign preparatory trip. Now she’s going to Milwaukee on a Progressive-Democrat agenda touting trip.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (D) actually has been to our southern border, but only to visit within the safety of the interior of a CBP/ICE facility; he’s never actually been to the border itself, away from those facilities.

It’s almost as though the Harris/Biden (Biden/Harris?) administration has erected its own wall—the purpose of which is to keep administration officials, including the two top dogs, away from the border.

Progressive-Democrats’ Immigration Newspeak

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has announced that the Federal government will no longer

fine illegal aliens who fail to depart from the US and it plans to pursue the cancellation of any currently outstanding debts for people who previously incurred such financial penalties.

After all, he says,

We can enforce our immigration laws without resorting to ineffective and unnecessary punitive measures.

We can enforce our laws by not enforcing our laws….

John Kerry, Secret Agent?

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Perhaps for the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?

If what Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif said, in what he thought was a secret interview intended for posterity’s sake and to be held by an Iranian Presidency think tank, is true, maybe.

Buried in a leak of three hours’ worth of a seven hour interview was this bit:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry informed him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times, to his astonishment, Mr Zarif said.

I sure hope Zarif is dissembling again. But he’s talking, he thinks, in secret, and none of what he said in the leak is particularly self-aggrandizing, so his motive for lying is unclear at best.

Of course, it also could be the case that Kerry isn’t a foreign agent. It’s at least as likely that it was Kerry’s self-absorbed superiority complex that led him to betray Israel and our nation. Zarif’s astonishment would certainly be a nearly addictive ego stroke for a man like Kerry.