Following Up: Welcome Shrinkage of China’s Ties with U.S. News Organizations

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Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, China, China Daily, ChinaWatch, Following Up, Houston Chronicle, journalism, Mainstream Media, news media, propaganda, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Free Beacon, The Washington Post, transparency

Since Memorial Day is – or at least should be – a remembance and tribute to what’s best about America, it seems appropriate to report some good news: Some of the nation’s leading news organizations have cut some not-at-all-trivial ties with China.

These ties concern their decision to stop distributing with their print editions and posting on their websites a Chinese government propaganda vehicle called ChinaWatch. As I wrote more than two years ago, their decision to present ChinaWatch and the form of this presentation created two problems. First, although the Constitution’s First Amendment should authorize giving even possibly genocidal, increasingly hostile dictatorships the right to present their material in the United States, journalistic ethics and (I believe) the law should require the clear labeling of any such material as foreign government products.

I argued that neither the Chinese government nor the news organization’s carrying their material met these obligations.

Second, since ChinaWatch was paid advertising, it became a source of revenue for the news organizations that featured it, and because these news organizations covered the Chinese government, its appearance raised conflict of interest questions that at least should have – but weren’t – have been forthrightly acknowledged. Importantly, some news organizations have received millions of dollars from Beijing – not decisive sums in terms of the overall finances of some of them, but not trivial, either.

Happily, these problems have now been reduced, although not eliminated. The New York Times said about a year after my post that it had stopped accepting such material from all state-run media. According to this Tibetan dissident publication, the same goes for The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post says it has not run or distributed ChinaWatch specifically since 2019.

Official U.S. government lobbying records show, however, that multi-million dollar relationships still exist between several major U.S. news organizations and Beijing’s propaganda machine. As reported last week by the Washington Free Beacon, over the last six months,

“China Daily [the parent organization of ChinaWatch] paid more than $1.6 million for advertising in Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and Foreign Policy magazine, according to disclosures filed with the Justice Department. The Beijing-controlled news agency paid another $1 million to American newspapers, including the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Houston Chronicle, to print copies of its own publications.”

And unlike the The New York Times, the Post, and the Journal, the Free Beacon observes,

“Many of the newspapers [still] working with China Daily face severe financial problems. The Los Angeles Times furloughed workers last year as advertising revenue cratered during the coronavirus pandemic. Papers like the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe have failed to turn a profit for years.”

The nation’s news organizations have more than enough credibility problems these days (see, e.g., here and here). Severing all official ties with Chinese and other foreign government media, or at least making every effort to publicize them to their readers, could only help them regain some of that trust.

Following Up: The Democrats’ Trump/Ukraine/Impeachment Hypocrisy is Now Complete

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Adam Schiff, Alexander Vindman, Biden, Bill Taylor, Bob Mendendez, Democrats, Donald Trump, Eric Swalwell, Fiona Hill, Following Up, foreign policy, globalists, impeachment, Jeanne Shaheen, Mainstream Media, Marie Yovanovitch, Nancy Pelosi, national security, natural gas, Nordstream 2, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

As known by RealityChek regulars, I’ve devoted two posts lately (here and here, and here) to the puzzling matter of President Biden’s policies toward the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline. The reason: For months during the last half of the Trump administration, any number of leading Democrats and globalist U.S. diplomats and other officials had justified the first effort to impeach the former President largely because he allegedly threatened key U.S. national security interests by hinging American military aid to Ukraine to its government’s cooperation in investigating charges against Mr. Biden (then a likely Democratic presidential candidate and therefore political rival) and his family.

Indeed, the first Article of Impeachment expressly stated that Trump “compromised” and “injured” national security for precisely this reason.

Mr. Biden never explicitly accused Trump of comprising American security by weakening ties to a supposedly crucial ally. But he certainly insinuated comission of this “high crime or misdemeanor” by charging that Trump “betrayed this nation.”

So I believed it was worth spotlighting that the Biden administration had for months been moving toward a decision that would both unquestionably endanger Ukraine and enrich Vladimir Putin’s Russia – whose apparent designs on Ukraine have prompted the United States (including the Trump administration) to provide it with various kinds of weapons and other military supplies to begin with. That decision: nixing significant sanctions on companies building the pipeline, which would transport Russian natural gas directly to Europe, in the process bypassing the previous transit route through Ukraine and enabling Russia to avoid the need to pay literally billions of dollars’ worth of tolls to its neighbor. And yesterday, the Biden administration made the move official.

For the record, I don’t consider Ukraine a vital or even important ally of the United States (for reasons explained, e.g., here). But Americans were told consistently during the first Trump impeachment hearings and actual proceedings that it was, making at least ironic a Democratic administration’s pursuit of a policy bound to enrich the country threatening Ukraine – and at Ukraine’s expense.

And at least as interesting, during the period that Mr. Biden has made his Nordstream intention clear, and since the final decision was announced, it’s become clear that most of the Democratic and diplomatic voices that touted Ukraine’s centraility to America’s own safety didn’t believe their own claims either. And ditto for the Mainstream Media news organizations that breathlessly reported and even endorsed them.

How do I know this? Because none of Trump’s main accusers along these lines seems to have had anything to day about Mr. Biden’s unmistakably anti-Ukraine decision. And my charge is easily verifiable. Just Google “Nordstream” and any of the following names: Alexander Vindman, Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, Bill Taylor, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell. In various roles, these folks were leading the charge to dump Trump because of his Ukraine record and the related claim that he was a ” Manchurian” candidate and then President who won the presidency by accepting Putin’s help during the campaign in return for doing the Russian dictator’s bidding.

And do you know what these Google searches come up with? Not a peep of protest about Mr. Biden’s Nordstream decision. Incidentally, some of these figures have been commenting some on Ukraine-related issues. Vindman, for example, co-authored a Washington Post op-ed piece in March urging the West as a whole to toughen its stance against Russia’s “blatant violations of human rights and unrestrained repression of opponents both at home and abroad.” He urged Germany “in particular [to] reconsider its business ties to Moscow — specifically the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline which is nearing completion” and the United States and the United Kingdom to strengthen existing Nordstream sanctions. But nothing about Biden indifference to the matter even though it was already becoming apparent – and certainly nothing since.

Three weeks later, after the President imposed sanctions on Russia for cyberattacks and election meddling, Schiff – the lead House impeachment manager in 2019 – noted that “While appropriate, sanctions alone will not be enough to deter Russia’s misbehavior. We must strengthen our own cyber defenses, take further action to condemn Russia’s human rights abuses, and, working in concert with our Allies and partners in Europe, deter further Russian military aggression.” But he said nothing about Nordstream at all.

At least as important, I can’t find a single instance of a Mainstream Media journalist even seeking the Nordstream views of either figure, or of their other impeachment-period Ukraine-philes.  

Some Democrats have condemned the Mr. Biden’s Nordstream decision – notably, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. But although both voted to remove Trump from office in part because his Ukraine actions jeopardized national security (see here and here), neither mentioned taking any punitive measures against Mr. Biden even though in the long run his Nordstream decision could undermine Ukraine’s independence far more than Trump’s brief suspension of the arms aid.     

It’s true that the Ukraine national security charge wasn’t the only accusation leveled against Trump in 2019. He was also impeached for violating the law in holding up the military assistance Congress approved for the country.  But as pointed out in this post, nothing in the statute in question regards such presidential actions as impeachable. Certainly they’re far from the first course of action. Instead, the law specifically instructs Congressional plaintiffs to bring a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court.

As for the claim that Trump abused the power of the Presidency by launching an official investigation of a political opponent for purely political reasons, the revelations since of Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine during his father’s vice presidency show how premature – to put it kindly – that conclusion was.   

Aa a result, given the outsized role played by the Ukraine charge’s substance, the indifference shown this year to that country’s fate by Trump’s 2019 prosecutors strengthens the case that the first impeachment pretty thoroughly abused power itself.  The one silver lining (and it’s not negligible):  At least the Democrats and other Never Trumper globalists aren’t beating the Ukraine war drums for now.

Following Up: Gun Sense Still Lacking in the Crime/Violence/African Americans Debate

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African Americans, Arionne Nettles, Barack Obama, Chicago, crime, Following Up, gun violence, guns, homicides, law enforcement, police reform, policing, poverty, racism, The New York Times

Everyone (like me) worried about the metastasizing influence of race-panderers can give thanks that so many are so completely, and indeed stupefyingly, incompetent. Otherwise, merchants of division like Northwestern University journalism faculty member Arionne Nettles and her enablers at The New York Times might be overwhelming favorites to tear the country apart for good. All the same, the more they push claims (I’m getting fed up with the pseudo-sophisticated term “narrative”) that are not only flagrantly phony but transparently contradictory, the more they obscure genuine and important failures and inequities that need fixing.

Nettles and The Times editors who considered her piece on African American victims of “gun violence” worthy of publication in this form took only a paragraph and a half to blow up their own case that big cities across the United States have seen a recent “rise in gun violence – perpetrated both by civilians and police officers” that’s taken an especially heavy toll on black children and teenagers.

They’re of course right about these tragedies and their scale. But the obvious insinuation that “civilians and police officers” share even remotely comparable blame is demolished by the observation that

“In one especially alarming spree last summer, Chicago police officers shot five people in just two months. And shootings and murders in the city were up more than 50 percent overall in 2020 compared with 2019; 875 people died from gun violence – a record high. A majority of the city’s victims (78 percent) were Black.”

Let’s assume that every one of the five Chicago police shootings mentioned here was totally unjustified. Let’s also state categorically that unjustified shootings by police are way more disturbing than other types of shootings because law enforcement must be held to a much higher standard. Are Nettles and The Times still seriously contending that the two categories of violence are on anything like a par, even as threats to African American lives?

More important, these and similar passages – along with Nettles’ interviews with African American mothers who have lost children to such violence – add powerfully to the evidence that, as I’ve argued before, the overwhelming problem here isn’t “gun violence” at all. Instead, it’s a culture of violence and broader irresponsibility that’s gained a strong foothold in too many Black neighborhoods, and whose importance keeps being ignored by supposed champions of American minorities.

A handful of data points from recent (2018) national (FBI) law enforcement statistics clinch this case. First, of the 328.24 million total U.S. population estimated by the Census Bureau that year, 76.3 percent were white and 13.4 percent African American. That’s a ratio of nearly six-to-one. Yet that year, reported Black homicide offenders in one-on-one incidents actually slightly outnumbered their white counterparts in absolute terms (3,177 to 3,011).

Almost as stunning: Of the 2,925 Black homicide victims that year, nearly 89 percent were killed by other Blacks. Nearly 81 percent of the 3,315 white homicide victims in 2018 were killed by whites, so it’s clear that American killers principally go after members of their own race. But relatively speaking these figures – combined with Nettles’ accurate observation that Blacks are much likelier to die in firearms incidents than Whites – reveal not a gun violence crisis afflicting so many African American communities. They reveal an African American violence problem.

No one can reasonably doubt that racism’s legacy and the resulting lack of economic opportunity and poverty play a big underlying role. As I (and many others) have written, the racial wealth gap alone is yawning, owes much to discrimination, and generates affects that have lasted generations. It should be just as hard reasonably to doubt, however, that something other than poverty is responsible.

Look at Chicago. In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, its Black poverty rate was 26.3 percent – that’s much higher than the overall poverty rate for the city (16.4 percent), or the national African American poverty rate (18.8 percent). So even though there seems to be a Chicago-specific problem on top of a poverty problem, even in Chicago nearly three fourths of the Black population lives above the poverty line. That hardly means affluence, but it’s hardly destitution, either.

Moreover, the Chicago Black poverty rate is down considerably from 2010’s 33.6 percent (although the city’s overall poverty rate fell faster during this period). Yet the city’s numbers of homicides and its homicide rate have roughly doubled during the subsequent nine data years, and in Chicago, the vast majority of the killers (as with the victims) are African American.

As suggested above, moreover, Nettles’ ham-handed treatment of the “gun violence” and homicide issue is all the more inexcusable because the author’s interview subjects do a decent job of reinforcing the case that there does exist a serious race-based policing problem in this country. Not that the African American women with which the author spoke are entirely free of denialism about what’s plaguing their neighborhoods. There’s Shanice Steenholdt, who seems to believe that Australia-like gun control laws would turn her city of Houston into a replica of the small Australian town in which she lived for a time where she “didn’t feel like [she] had to worry about gun violence.” There’s Chicago’s Diane Lasiker, w appears to think that the big problem in her city is that it seems “to want to keep the Police Department separate from the community.” Her fellow Chicagoan Chez Smith and Flint, Michigan’s Marcia McQueen put much stock in “offering conflict resolution techniques” to their communities’ youth.

But the story told by Atlanta’s Cora Miller of her husband’s arrest (in Minnesota) reinforces the case that it’s much too common for completely innocent African Americans to be mistreated by police. As I’d written last August, I’ve heard first-hand accounts of such episodes from Black friends who have experienced it first hand – on top of South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott’s experiences with Capitol police. If these individuals – who are all highly successful by any reasonable definition – can be harassed for no good reason, imagine how often everyday folks just trying to get by face these indignities and indeed dangers.

So let’s by all means get policing up to snuff. Let’s by all means identify the most effective ways in which government and business can help foster opportunity in needy Black (and other) communities. But let’s also never forget a voice who has passionately argued that

“no matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose or how many government programs we launch — none of it will make a difference, at least not enough of a difference, if we don’t seize more responsibility in our own lives.”

In case you’re wondering, his name is Barack Obama.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Unanswerable Question Driving Biden’s China Policy

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Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, China, foreign policy, globalism, Indo-Pacific, liberal global order, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, rules-based global order, strategy, Taiwan, Xi JInPing

Two of the first maxims of strategy in world affairs (and probably in some other realms, too) are that (a) intentions and capabilities are fundamentally different and that (b) the former are much harder to gauge than the latter. These rules of the road in turn lead promptly to a key lesson: The greater the extent to which plans are based on intentions, the likelier they are to produce failure.  

The difference between measuring intentions and capabilities and the resulting policy implications matters crucially these days. For the evidence keeps mounting that the Biden administration is relying more on gauging China’s intentions in formulating its approach to the People’s Republic (PRC) and less on the much sounder foundations of assessing Beijing’s wherewithal and, most important, how this capacity’s dangers to specific U.S. interests are evolving – including over Taiwan, the newest and scariest bilateral flashpoint.  . 

The reason for focusing on capabilities is no great mystery. Figuring out how strong or weak a country’s military and economy are entails dealing with matters that are readily measurable to begin with. Although dictatorships like China’s in particular often go to great lengths to present misleading economic data, and misinformation about the state of their armed forces, the PRC’s competitiveness can be judged pretty dependably by tracking its interactions with other economies – e.g., its export performance, its attractiveness as a magnet for foreign investment. And U.S. intelligence is good enough to determine roughly how many soldiers and weapons, and the quality of the latter, that China could bring to bear in various contingencies.

Even more obvious – and important – is the case for deciding on U.S. interests. For whatever a potential adversary’s overall capabilities, why should Americans care about those that can’t plausibly affect whatever goals and missions that the United States decides it values?

Identifying what China’s leaders want is a qualitatively different and more formidable challenge. Good intelligence can provide some valuable information, as can face-to-face dealings with Beijing’s representatives. But ultimately, measuring intentions is an exercise in mind-reading, and it’s rendered all the tougher because of the secretiveness of China’s political system and the cultural gaps dividing East Asian countries like China’s and their western counterparts like the United States.

Which is exactly why the Biden administration’s strategy toward the PRC is so troubling. A heavy emphasis on intentions is clear from at least two of its features.

The first is its obsession with playing word games to define how it wants the relationship with China to develop, which in turn faithfully reflects the globalist position that achieving various types of relationships with allies, adversaries, and countries in between should be a high foreign policy priority. As I’ve written previously, that’s a great way to substitute form for substance, and to rationalize failure to achieve or preserve particular valued objectives in the here and now for the sake of payoffs stemming from a sense of mutual obligation that could be entirely unilateral and imaginary, over a time frame that tends to keep lengthening. Think of it this way – it’s easy to avoid rocking the boat if you don’t care who owns or controls the vessel.

The Biden administration, however, has taken relationship fetishizing to a whole new level. How else could one reasonably characterize all the time and effort it’s devoted to terming U.S. dealings with Beijing as a “competition,” or an “extreme competition,” or “a steep competition,” or a “stiff competition” (see here for the last two) or a relationship that will be, in Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s words, “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, adversarial when it must be.”

Why do the Biden-ites think anyone cares or should care? In particular, why do they think China cares or should care? Do they have any evidence of much thinking in Beijing along these lines? Or that any Chinese definition of a desirable relationship relationship would be remotely acceptable to the United States?

If anything, the President’s declaration that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping “is deadly earnest on [China] becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others, autocrats, think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century” can only mean he thinks that win-win ties are the last things on Beijing’s mind. Unless Mr. Biden believes that Xi is just interested in purely verbal bragging rights?

The second feature of Biden foreign policy that reveals a potentially dangerous emphasis on intentions is the refusal of the President and his top aides to define U.S. interests with any specificity – or even to speak concretely about the very idea of purely U.S. interests.

Their rhetoric is peppered with phrases like Mr. Biden’s claim that during his first phone call with Xi, “I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board.” But you’ll search in vain for meaningful elaborations beyond “I also told President Xi that we’ll maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific, just as we do with NATO in Europe — not to start a conflict, but to prevent one” – which of course refers to American commitments that have been in place for decades, not to anything new, much less that reflects concerns heightened for any reason.

What you will find – ad nauseam – are statements like Blinken’s declaration that the United States is “committed to leading with diplomacy to advance the interests of the United States and to strengthen the rules-based international order. “That system is not an abstraction. It helps countries resolve differences peacefully, coordinate multilateral efforts effectively, and participate in global commerce with the assurance that everyone is following the same rules. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.”

Blinken of course might be entirely right on the merits. But it was more than a little interesting that the Chinese response to his remarks – which took place at that confrontational bilateral March meeting in Anchorage, Alaska – emphasized that the rules-based order is nothing more than a system selfishly “advocated by a small number of countries”; that “The United States itself does not represent international public opinion, and neither does the Western world;” and no doubt most important, “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

In other words, as the Chinese see it, whatever Washington’s view of “right,” what matters is that it lacks the might to create or maintain it over China’s objections – which evidently are legion.

None of this is to say that specifying concrete interests is a guarantee of foreign policy success. But how else can that goal be achieved without setting out objectives considered vital to the nation’s security and prosperity, communicating them abroad in no uncertain terms, and ensuring that enough power is available to prevail when they’re threatened whether Americans guess correctly about potential adversaries’ intentions or not?

And these questions have moved to the forefront lately because Sino-American tensions are rising steadily over Taiwan – the world’s new leader in semiconductor manufacturing technology, which near neighbor China views as a renegade province. Worries are understandably rising that Washington and Beijing might stumble into a conflict that neither truly seeks. If the Biden administration could straighten out its own thinking about Taiwan and other U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific region, the odds of such an unnecessary catastrophe could at least be considerably reduced.    

 

Following Up: A Lippmann Gap Still Could be a Big Threat to Biden’s Foreign Policy

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allies, America First, Biden, China, defense budget, Donald Trump, Following Up, Lippmann Gap, Russia, Theodore Roosevelt

Late last month, I worried here that President Biden could open up a dangerous “Lippmann Gap” in U.S. foreign and national security policy by proposing a defense budget incapable of supporting his expansive ambitions. Yesterday, the administration came out with its first official budget request, and although it lacks the detail to justify firm conclusions, I’m still worried.

The nub of the problem is this: The President has repeatedly announced his intention to reverse course from his predecessor’s America First strategy and return U.S. foreign policy to its decades-long pre-Trump sweeping global activism and engagement. And since Mr. Biden’s “America is back” declarations clearly entail at the least a determination to fill an allegedly vital gap left by Donald Trump, and probably to pursue an even more expansive agenda, logic and common sense alone dictate that he request much more defense spending than at present.

It’s true that Pentagon budget and the military forces it supports are by no means the only tools available to the nation to carry out its international aims. It’s also true that defense spending can be made more effective without boosting overall spending levels by spending existing funds more efficiently and wisely. The latter’s potential won’t start to be revealed until the more detailed budget request is made later this year.

But for now, what is known is that Mr. Biden will ask for some 1.6 percent more for the Defense Department proper for the coming budget year (fiscal 2022) than the resources allotted to the Pentagon during the Trump administration’s final year (fiscal 2021). When adding in national security funds not provided to the Department itself (mainly for maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile – which is handled by the Energy Department), the Biden increase is also about two percent over the funding appropriated during the final Trump year.  (This figure is calculated from here and here.)

Knowledgeable observers of defense spending may note that these Biden fiscal 2022 requests are considerably bigger than the Trump fiscal 2021 requests. These sought just 0.1 percent more for the Pentagon itself than was spent in 2020, and 0.34 percent more for that larger national security budget including the non-Pentagon money. (These figures are found here and calculated from here and here.) 

But Mr. Biden charged that the Trump national security agenda was sorely inadequate. So it’s natural that he’d want more military spending than his predecessor. What’s noteworthy, however, is that the Biden request isn’t that much more. In fact, if inflation takes its expected course this year, this latest military spending proposal will leave the Defense Department and the other agencies responsible for national security with less money when adjusting for rising prices than they spent last year.

Moreover, even in terms of “top-line” spending figures, this Biden request is hardly the last word. The Democratic Congress is practically certain to make further cuts.

Again, wiser spending could fill some of this gap. But what the Biden administration has said about its priorities isn’t all that encouraging, either. Just one example (but a big one): The administration stated yesterday that its military spending request “prioritizes the need to counter the threat from China as the [Defense] Department’s top challenge. The Department would also seek to deter destabilizing behavior by Russia.”

It’s still possible, as suggested above, that moving funds into U.S. China- and Russia-related accounts from lower priority accounts could accomplish these aims even though overall outlays decline in real terms. But in the very next sentence, we learn that the administration isn’t confident that these moves would be the answer (assuming they’re even being contemplated). For it claims that

“Leveraging the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and working together with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, DOD [the Defense Department] would ensure that the United States builds the concepts, capabilities, and posture necessary to meet these challenges.”

That is, help from allied countries supposedly will be crucial to countering the Chinese and Russian threats. But not only have these countries skimped on their own defense for decades. For the time being, the President has decided not to press them overly hard to share more of the defense burden (as documented in my original “Lippmann Gap” post).

To repeat: I’m not calling for more U.S. military spending. In fact, I’d like to see Pentagon budgets shrink. But this position reflects my judgment that the nation can be adequately safe and sound by doing less in the international sphere. As long as President Biden wants to do more – not only than me, but also than Donald Trump – the only responsible policy would be to boost military spending. Anything else amounts to inverting former President Theodore Roosevelt’s approach of speaking softly and carrying a big stick – which history teaches never, ever ends well.

Following Up: Biden’s Cave-In on Ukraine, Russia, and Germany and Why It Matters

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Adam Schiff, alliances, allies, America First, Angela Merkel, Democrats, Donald Trump, energy, Eric Swalwell, Following Up, Germany, impeachment, NATO, natural gas, Nord Stream 2, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Earlier this month, I wrote about the weirdness of the Biden administration’s seemingly blasé attitude toward Ukraine’s security, given the President’s long record of support (including military aid) for its independence from an expansionist Russia, and especially given the determination of the entire Democratic party to impeach Donald Trump largely because his allegedly blasé attitude toward Ukraine security treasonously endangered America’s own security.

Today I can report that the situation has grown even weirder – and in the process, raised major questions about the administration’s view of smooth alliance relations as a top foreign policy priority, and about its adults-in-the-room reputation itself for foreign policy competence itself.

As explained in my March 17 post, the issue at hand is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, That’s a natural gas transport project that the Trump administration opposed because it threatened to, among other problems, increase Europe’s energy dependence on Vladimir Putin’s Russia, provide this aggressive autocrat with a big new source of revenue and therefore of funds for his military, and ace Ukraine itself out of natural gas earnings, thereby weakening its economy and ultimately its ability to defend itself.

So why is Nord Stream 2 being built? Two main reasons. First, lots of big German (and other European) companies have been involved in its financing and nearly finished construction, and will profit from its operation. (See here and here for good summaries.) Further, the German government is obliged to cover the multi-billion dollar losses that would result from cancellation. Second, Chancellor Angela Merkel;s government views the project as a means of keeping Germany, and Europe in general, economically engaged, influential, and therefore at peace with Russia.

The Germans also say they need the new gas because of its plans to de-nuclearize and de-carbonize its economy. Berlin also has the option of filling the looming energy supply gap by purchasing more gas from the United States than at present.  But Germany seems more impressed by the fact that higher transport costs make the U.S. product more expensive than Moscow’s.

You’d think, therefore, that Germany would be facing heavy pressure to cancel the pipeline from the Biden administration and especially from the impeachment enthusiasts in the Democrats’ Congressional ranks – like California’s Adam Schiff, the lead House manager for the first Trump impeachment trial, who described Ukraine’s sovereignty and safety as nothing less than a vital interest of the United States.

Not a peep about Nord Stream has been heard from Schiff or from other Trump impeachment hard-liners, like California Democratic Congress Member Eric Swalwell – confirming suspicions that their main concerns all along during both the Trump-Russia collusion and impeachment dramas were somehow ousting Trump for purely partisan or possibly simply deranged reasons, not safeguarding America’s security or democracy.

But Mr. Biden’s stance is more puzzling and disturbing – the latter since Presidents matter so much more than individual legislators. As my earlier post noted, his administration has seemed more relaxed about Nord Stream even though it, too, has claimed to harbor major concerns about Ukraine’s fate.

In fact, as recently as a few days ago, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declared that “President (Joe) Biden has been very clear, he believes the pipeline is a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States, ultimately it is in contradiction to the EU’s own security goals, It has the potential to undermine the interests of Ukraine, Poland and a number of close partners and allies.”

Yet just this morning, when asked whether Washington could (and by extension, actually would) do anything to stop Nord Stream 2, Blinken “Well, ultimately that is up to those who are trying to build the pipeline and complete it. We just wanted to make sure that our … opposition to the pipeline was well understood.”

In other words, “La de dah.”

Such quick and complete turnabouts by America’s top diplomat are disturbing in and of themselves, but the real problems with the Biden Nord Stream stance go far beyond the impotence claimed (and therefore advertised) by Blinken.

After all, avoiding a showdown with Germany on the pipeline would be understandable and even smart if Mr. Biden really didn’t view Ukraine’s security, and/or Russia’s aims and power, as terribly important in the first place, or if (as I offered as a possibility in my previous post), this decision reflected some broader administration conclusion that relations with Russia should be improved in order to outflank the stronger and more dangerous Chinese.

But not only is the President a strong believer in deterring Russian designs on Europe. He recently seemed to go out of his way to antagonize Putin by calling him a “killer.”

So the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that, at least for now, Mr. Biden is so determined to keep America’s wealthiest European ally happy that he’s given it a veto on a matter he himself has deemed a major U.S. interest. Worse, he seems indifferent to Trump’s (correct) complaint that Germany evidently has no problem with enriching Moscow while continuing to rely on the U.S. military to defend it from Russia. This doesn’t necessarily leave the President guilty of carrying out an “America Last” foreign policy. But it makes you wonder how far he’ll drift from from putting America First.

Following Up: Two Hopeful Signs from Trump’s CPAC Speech

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Capitol riots, Conservative Political Action Conference, Conservative Populism, CPAC, Donald Trump, election 2020, election integrity, Following Up, Jeff Sessions, Kevin McCarthy, Populism, voter ID

He came, he spoke, and he left the audience happy. Not that I view Donald Trump as a Caesar-esque figure, but a paraphrase of that Caesar-esque remark seems to describe well the former President’s speech and its reception yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Two aspects of the speech – the former President’s longest public utterance since his pre-Capitol riot rally speech – made yours truly especially happy. First, he spent a fair amount of time defining what he (and many others, including me) called “Trumpism.” And second, his inevitable treatment of the election 2020 integrity issue was nearly as forward looking, and therefore constructively focused on how last fall’s unmistakable voting and vote-counting irregularities can be minimized from now on, as it was backward looking, and therefore divisively focused on claims of an outright political steal (which, as I’ve previously said, haven’t struck me as results-altering).

Trump’s attention to a Trumpist perspective counts mainly because at least in principle it conveys the idea that he’s interested in consolidating and strengthening his legacy by promoting a set of programs and policies, and not simply by mounting a comeback of his own and emphasizing personal loyalty. In other words, possibly along with not explicitly declaring even an interest in running for reelection in 2024, the former President has opened the door to the possibility of Trumpism without Trump – that is, the party’s nomination of a presidential candidate who’s with him on the issues but lacks his troubling personality traits.

Of course, talking this talk doesn’t mean that Trump will walk this walk. In this respect, I can’t help but recall the way he excommunicated from Trumpworld his first Attorney General and the former Senator from Alabama Jeff Sessions, who was a Trumpy (and in my view admirably serious) conservative populist way before Trumpy was cool, and in fact became the first sitting Senator to endorse his 2016 White House bid.

It’s true that Sessions was villified – and essentially denied a return to the Senate last year when Trump endorsed his much less ideologically Trumpian opponent in the state’s Republican primary – because he recused himself from overseeing the Justice Department’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.

But it’s also possible that the so-called “Russia-Gate” drama was (understandably, given its disgracefully partisan roots and its damage to his early presidency) a one-off event in Trump’s mind. In this vein, perhaps Trump’s continued cordial relations with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who blamed him in part for the Capitol Riot, points to a more tolerant Trump going forward.

As for election integrity, don’t overlook the fact that Trump led off by demanding voter identification requirements. First, polls show it’s incredibly popular among the public, enjoying, for example, 76 percent approval in this 2018 Pew Research Center survey. In addition, however, there’s reason to think that Democrats might find it in their interests, too.

How come? Because of evidence that stronger ID requirements have actually spurred Democratic and non-white voter turnout – two paramount and related objectives of the party. Apparently, these rules so incense Democrats that they react both by voting in greater numbers, and by doubling down on efforts to register non-whites.

But regardless of motives, the outcomes should be applauded across the political spectrum. For they mean not simply that more votes are cast, and that voting becomes easier. After all, those shouldn’t goals for democracies that want to remain or become healthy. Instead, the combination of voter ID requirements and more registered voters would mean that voting by those who are eligible is maximized. Who could legitimately object?

So in theory, the election integrity portion of the Trump CPAC speech could help inspire at least a first needed election reform step that even the most extreme partisans would favor. For in states that tighten ID requirements, these new standards would logically set off a heated voter registration competition that would both increase turnout and greatly boost the odds of all ballots cast being valid ballots. That sounds like a win both for election integrity and for a more inclusive political system. And the faster the progress made by this reform campaign in state legislators, the likelier that America’s next presidential election will help bring the nation together rather than drive it further apart.

Following Up: A New Warning on U.S. Allies’ Reliability

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alliances, allies, Asia, Asia-Pacific, Biden, China, deterrence, Following Up, Indo-Pacific, infotech, multilateralism, national security, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, semiconductors, Sheena Greitens, Taiwan, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, tech, TSMC, Xi JInPing, Zack Cooper

Well isn’t this a kick in the pants for the Biden administration – and by extension for all Americans?. No sooner did the President give a major speech to U.S. allies on his plans to return them to the center of American foreign policy-making because they’ll be such crucial assets in vital efforts to achieve essential goals like coping with China’s rise, than a new study comes out reporting that these hopes could be in vain. 

Specifically, the United States’ allies in Asia could well stay on the sidelines in what’s arguably become the most important potential showdown with China of all: ensuring Taiwan’s independence.

As known by RealityChek regulars, keeping Taiwan free of Beijing’s control has become so pressing for two reasons. First, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is sounding and acting more determined than ever to “reunify” what he and his predecessors have regarded as a breakaway province by whatever means necessary – including using force. And second, a Taiwanese firm, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), has recently grabbed the global lead in actually producing (as opposed to designing) the world’s most advanced semiconductors. If China manages to control TSMC’s capabilities, it could use them to build the electronic devices and defense systems that would secure substantial technological and military superiority over the United States.

President Biden is of course correct in arguing that the more allies the United States can mobilize, the easier it will be to handle China’s increased aggression and economic predation. But that claim inevitably assumes that these allies will actually join with America to push back against China, and especially that Washington can count on their assistance if heaven forbid the missiles and bullets start flying.

And this assumption is exactly what’s questioned in a paper recently published by the Washington, D.C.-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. According to authors Zack Cooper and Sheena Greitens, there’s not a single country in the Asia-Pacific (or, as it’s now officially called by the U.S. government, the Indo-Pacific) region that’s sure to stand shoulder to shoulder with American forces as they seek to actually repel either a Chinese attack on Taiwan, or an effort by Beijing to turn the island into a satellite through coercive means short of full invasion, like limited military strikes, cyber-attacks, or an embargo.

In fact, write Cooper and Greitens, these allies not only would likely balk at sending their own ships, plans, and troops to buttress American forces. To varying degrees, they’d be reluctant to allow the United States the kind of access to their military bases needed to prevail over China in any of the above contingencies.

The authors believe that sufficient allied cooperation can be generated if the United States begins (ASAP!) “a series of detailed discussions with key allies about their roles in different contingency scenarios involving China and Taiwan (and for some, the South China Sea).” That advice sounds fine as far as it goes.

But the need in the first place for “detailed discussions” on such dangerous and perhaps rapidly growing threats – which would leave all countries in the region far less prosperous and prosperous if not deterred or beaten back – makes appallingly clear just how dysfunctional these alliance relationships have become. Moreover, you can be sure that the longer and more detailed these discussions become, the more allied doubts they’ll reflect, and the less likely they’ll be to produce the kind of certainty when push comes to shove that the United States or Taiwan will need.

I don’t view Cooper and Greitens analysis as gospel. But in my experience, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center has done serious work on Asian security issues in the past, and the larger project of which this essay is a part has had support from sponsors across the political spectrum. So its warning is worth taking seriously, and if its arguments are on target, the problem they describe will resist easy solution – and not just because truly worthwhile agreements with the allies could take years to negotiate, but because the U.S.-based semiconductor production capacity needed to reduce Taiwan’s importance will take just as long to create.

Luckily, as indicated in the piece linked just above, both Congress and the new administration claim to recognize the need – at least rhetorically – to restore cutting-edge U.S. competitiveness in this and other information technology manufacturing. In the meantime, the Biden administration should of course try maintaining enough of a semblance of allied unity vis-a-vis China to give Beijing pause over Taiwan. Hopefully, Washington  can even inspire some genuine support for preserving the island’s independence.

But as I’ve written previously (in the afore-linked National Interest piece), the greater the emphasis placed on resolving the semiconductor challenge via the homegrown solution of reviving the domestic industry, instead of relying mainly on protecting Taiwan’s security militarily, the better the odds of maintaining American security and prosperity. And in any necessary negotiations with the allies, the sooner President Biden abandons his globalist faith in apologetics and gauzy preaching, and acknowledges the need for at least some of the hard-bargaining Trump-ian “transactionalism” he’s decried, the better.  

Following Up: Still No Biden Learning Curve in Sight on the Middle East or China

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America First, China, energy revolution, Following Up, fossil fuels, globalism, Iran, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Joe Biden, Middle East, oil, Phase One, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, tariffs, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trade, trade war, Trump

Talk about great timing! Just two days ago, I analyzed New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s new offering warning Joe Biden not to rush back into the Iran nuclear deal because this step could undo lots of the progress made by President Trump’s America First foreign policy approach in greatly improving the prospects for advancing and protecting U.S. interests in the region.

And just this morning, Friedman has published a piece based on lengthy interview with the apparent President-elect making clear that he has no interest in learning these valuable lessons of the recent past. In addition, Biden confirmed that his China policy plans are just as dominated by cynical doubletalk these days as during the 2020 election campaign.

As Friedman argued on November 29, Mr. Trump’s message that Israel and the Arab world’s Sunni Muslim monarchies (mainly Saudi Arabia) should no longer count on the United States to fight their battles accomplished this critical objective: It

“forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.”

But as Biden made clear in his conversation with Friedman, he either can’t or refuses to understand the key development that validates the Trump approach – the U.S. fossil fuel production revolution that has eliminated America’s overriding reason for treating the Middle East as a vital national security interest, and enabled Washington to adopt a Trump-ian take-it-or-leave-it approach safely.

Not that domestic energy independence means that completely ignoring Middle East affairs is always the best response. But it certainly does mean much greater scope for Washington to advance objectives with varying degrees of importance (notably, preventing a nuclear-armed Iran from dominating the region) in ways far less risky and costly than the lengthy wars and immense military commitments that have dominated globalist strategy.

And as Friedman has indicated, the President has started lifting the United States off its dangerous hook by leaving its Middle East allies no choice but to stop quarreling over trifles (like the fate of the Palestinians) and work together to take responsibility for their own genuinely critical and shared interests.

Biden, however, still believes that America remains so dependent on “getting some stability” in this long-unstable region that deep entanglement in Middle East affairs is unavoidable. Just as worrisome: He’s laid out a genuinely Rube Goldberg-esque rationale for treating the Iran nuclear deal as his strategy’s linchpin. As Friedman describes his blueprint (based on this interview and other conversations with top Biden aides):

“[O]nce the [nuclear] deal is restored by both sides, there will have to be, in very short order, a round of negotiations to seek to lengthen the duration of the restrictions on Iran’s production of fissile material that could be used to make a bomb — originally 15 years — as well as to address Iran’s malign regional activities, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

“Ideally, the Biden team would like to see that follow-on negotiation include not only the original signatories to the deal — Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — but also Iran’s Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”

To which the only reasonable response is “Good luck with that” – especially given the lack of consensus on Middle East goals among this highly diverse group of countries, and, equally important, the wildly varying stakes in success between governments inside and outside of the Middle East,

On China, the big and encouraging news is that Biden has decided not to remove the steep, sweeping Trump tariffs “immediately.” That position of course makes at best little sense given how disastrous he called these levies’ impact.

Otherwise, the former Vice President showed that his China policy statements could be even more thoroughly dominated by doubletalk and cluelessness than they were during the campaign.

Most troubling was how Biden contended (correctly) that “leverage” is the make-or-break factor in negotiating with China, and then quickly added “in my view, we don’t have it yet.” Even leaving aside Beijing’s at-least-suggestive decision to sign a Phase One trade deal whoppingly one-sided in favor of a country whose markets it needs desperately to secure adequate levels of prosperity, why did the apparent President-elect go out of his way to advertise supposed American weakness? Indeed, this perverse practice looks like an emerging habit of the Biden foreign policy camp.

As Biden told Friedman, he continues insisting that this leverage can be created in large measure by creating a “coherent strategy” behind which the United States and its European and Asian allies can unite. But as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, many of these countries (notably, Germany, Japan, and South Korea) have made too much money trading with China at the U.S.’ expense to support any position but a complete return to the pre-Trump era of actively coddling and enabling the People’s Republic.  (See, e.g., this analysis.)

At the same time, the apparent President-elect deserves credit for recognizing that gaining sufficient leverage to deal with China successfully requires (in Friedman’s words) “developing a bipartisan consensus at home for some good old American industrial policy — massive, government-led investments in American research and development, infrastructure and education to better compete with China.”

Finally, however, Biden still accepts the completely unjustified pre-Trump view that, without the kind of one-sided, pro-U.S. enforcement mechanism at the heart of the Phase One agreement, Washington can negotiate away most of China’s wide-ranging trade predation with precisely enough worded paper agreements. As I’ve explained, the only genuine hope for progress along these lines is the kind of dispute-resolution system set up in Phase One – in which Washington serves as judge, jury, and court of appeals. 

A few days before he spoke with Friedman, Biden told another journalist that he knows the nation and world are “totally different” from his Vice Presidential days and that therefore his administration would not be “a third Obama term.”  His conversation with Friedman, though, strongly indicated that he meant “except for the Middle East and China.”  

Following Up: Podcasts On-Line of Yesterday’s National Radio Appearances on Biden and China/Asia Trade

Tags

allies, Asia-Pacific, China, globalization, Making News, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, RCEP, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, The John Batchelor Show, Trade

I’m pleased to announce that the podcasts are now on-line of my two national radio interviews yesterday on U.S. trade policy under a Biden administration.  The special focus:  whether the United States should be worried that 14 Asia-Pacific countries – including all of America’s main regional allies – have just signed a Chinese-organized agreement to set up a free trade zone called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

My appearance on Moe Ansari’s “Market Wrap with Moe” can be found at this site, and clicking on the play button of the “Current Market Wrap” (“Cold War with China”) episode.  The interview begins just before the 23-minute mark.

Meanwhile, the “John Batchelor Show” segment episode covering these subjects is located here.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.