Tag Archives: freedom

What He Said

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Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR), wrote of the need for modernizing and expanding our nuclear weapons capability across three dimensions: numbers of warheads and systems to deliver them, the quality of those warheads and systems, and the range of threat—tactical, theater, and strategic—against which those warheads and systems are optimized.

He closed his piece, though, with the most important Statement of Need of his piece:

[T]o those who fear an arms race: The race has already begun. Russia and China have been running it for more than a decade while we sat on the sidelines. The question isn’t whether there will be competition in nuclear forces, but whether America will show up to compete.

To which I add: if we don’t compete, we cannot compete successfully. If we cannot compete successfully, we will find ourselves very quickly faced with nuclear blackmail or a nuclear war that we will certainly lose. In either of those cases, we will see ourselves completely subjugated to our enemies.

Neville Chamberlain Reborn

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has gone to Beijing to bend the knee and sell his nation to the communist tyrant. Or is it Vidkun Quisling who’s alive and well on Downing Street?

…Britain’s gift to President Xi Jinping arrived early. The UK last week granted approval for China to build its biggest diplomatic outpost in Europe in central London. The question now is what Mr Starmer will get in return.

It’s not just the PRC’s biggest “diplomatic outpost” in Europe. It’s far bigger than it needs to be merely to house the PRC’s embassy to a middle tier nation. It’s the PRC’s biggest headquarters for an espionage operation that’s the most aggressive in the world, and one designed and now equipped courtesy of the estimable Starmer to spy on and steal from the UK, the EU, the EU’s constituent nations (including eastern European nations fronting on the PRC’s BFF Russia), and the United States. This spanking new and oversized embassy also will be the seat of efforts to spy on, harass, and ultimately kidnap Chinese nationals and emigrants living in the UK and throughout Europe.

That’s a huge supplicant’s offering to the Emperor.

What’s in this kowtowing* for the UK? Nothing at all. The PRC has offered nothing, and it has no reason to offer anything. The most the timid Starmer can hope for is to return to the UK with both hands still attached.

Starmer is moving to deliver one more gift to the Emperor: he’s going ahead with the British plan to surrender its Diego Garcia, along with the rest of that Chagos Island group to Mauritius. It doesn’t matter that the US has a joint use agreement with the Brits for the military base on Diego Garcia that nominally long outlives the surrender to Mauritius. With Mauritius in the PRC’s back pocket, the days of that joint use agreement are severely numbered. Just see the PRC’s attitude to other nation’s possessions and agreements in the South China Sea.

Starmer is no Winston Churchill, and the UK, a product of a number of recent governments of both parties, not only Starmer’s, is not the UK that faced down and ultimately contributed heavily to the crushing defeat of a different tyrant.

 

*In traditional China this ritual was performed by commoners making requests to the local magistrate…or by foreign representatives appearing before the emperor to establish trade relations.

Watching in Unanimity

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European leaders are unanimous in their position regarding Iran and that nation’s government abuse of the people over which the mullahs reign.

From Rome to Brussels and from Paris to London, leaders have criticized what the European Union’s foreign policy chief called a “heavy-handed” and “disproportionate” response from Iranian security forces toward protesters.

But….

…European leaders are clearly gauging how much regional uncertainty they can tolerate.

Translation: European managers [sic] are unanimous in their decision to watch the hell out of the mullah’s abuses of the Iranian people. Unfortunately, those same European managers are just as unanimous their being too timid to do anything concrete in opposition to those abuses. As we might say in Texas, those worthies are all hat and no cattle. Unfortunately, though, those worthies don’t even have the hat. Stetsons are made in Texas, not in the haberdasheries of Paris or Milan.

Maybe this will Prod

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Maybe it’ll prod us both. The People’s Republic of China has cut off export of rare earths and the magnets made from them to Japan over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s recent commentary about Japan’s strengthening resolve to assist the Republic of China in the event of a PRC invasion.

China has begun choking off exports of rare earths and rare-earth magnets to Japan, a potential blow to Japanese companies that use them to produce components for global chip makers, car companies and defense firms.

It really is getting time, and urgently so, for Japan to pull all of its supply chains out of the PRC. Doing so would eliminate nearly all of the PRC’s economic leverage over Japan short of going to war over the sea lines of communication on which Japan depends.

The PRC’s move also should be a serious prod for us to get off the dime and move all of our supply chains out of the PRC. It’s time we proofed ourselves against PRC economic pressure, along with Japan. Nearly half of our economy’s imports flow through portions of those same SLOCs to our west coast.

Time to Respond…

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…more forcefully and farther than what the People’s Republic of China has done.

China said it banned the export to Japan of goods with potential military uses, intensifying Beijing’s retaliation against Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi over remarks she made about Taiwan.
The export ban takes effect immediately, China’s Ministry of Commerce said Tuesday.

It’s time for Japan, and the US in support of Japan, to answer the PRC’s escalation with a much sharper escalation of their, and our, own.

Japan—Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and the Diet—must state unequivocally that it will support the Republic of China in the event of a PRC invasion attempt. Japan also must make concrete moves toward developing its own nuclear weapons. The nation, given its geographic location, doesn’t need anything more esoteric than intermediate range missiles along with a small constellation of surveillance satellites. Japan also must begin taking overt defensive measures regarding its islands in the East China Sea.

Economically, Japan must begin serious and rapid disengagement of its business activities with and within the PRC.

The US must announce that we will support the RoC in the event of a PRC invasion attempt, and we must step up arms deliveries to both the RoC and to Japan. We need also to be much more forceful in defending the international waters and sea lanes of commerce in the South China Sea as well as moving to restrict the PLAN’s and PLAAF’s movements in that region.

The US must also get serious about severing our economic ties with the PRC.

There must be no petty tit-for-tat responses, and there must be no non-response. The question is whether Japan’s government men and women, and ours, have the stomach for facing down the men and women of the PRC government.

Cutting off doing business with and within the PRC will be expensive and disruptive, but it won’t be nearly as much so as acceding to PRC demands—which will only increase were Japan or us to back down repeatedly and further.