RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19439/realism-on-china

What is clear is that, intentionally or not, China has shown America’s need to get serious about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its expansionist global aims.

As the latest provocation by the CCP plays out, it gets more disturbing. The media, and even US President Joe Biden, describe the CCP as a “competitor” and downplay any possible conflict. When the CCP flies spy balloons across the continent, opens police stations in our cities, infiltrates our universities, poisons more than 100,000 Americans with hard drugs each year, and announces its plans to replace the United States, it is hard to argue we are in anything but a “Cold War” with the CCP.

It is time for the U.S. government and our allies to definitively outline the clear challenge and danger the CCP poses to the West. The behavior demonstrated by the CCP spy balloon is not an aberration; it is part of a dangerous pattern. This includes the CCP’s longtime intellectual property theft; breaches of cybersecurity; its increasing global military presence; expanding and modernizing its military, and its purchases of farmland near US military sites. Given that this is the reality, the Biden Administration must act more forcefully in response to the CCP’s aggressive behavior or, through passivity, it will invite an even greater challenge from China.

Given the CCP’s clear efforts against America, why does there continue to be such a muted response from the Biden Administration? While they haven’t explicitly said it, one reason might be climate change.

Other reports, however, strongly contradict the Annual Threat Assessment. These assert 1) that “apocalyptic claims about climate change are wrong” and that climate change is “a fraud”; 2) that China has less than no interest in cutting emissions; 3) that green energy actually consists of a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich to “destroy capitalism” and punish the West for having “pulled millions out of poverty and shaped the modern world”; 4) that cutting back on fossil fuels hurts the poor , it hits them worst ; and 5) that climate change is basically caused by sun flares and there is not a blessed thing you can do about them. Vested interests can offer grants for “scientific papers” to promote their businesses; sun-flares cannot offer grants.

No matter where one falls on climate change, the CCP’s brazen spy balloon flight has left little doubt about the threat the Chinese Communist regime poses. It is past time for all Americans to recognize and respond to this threat.

It was impossible to miss — a giant white balloon with a massive solar array and a yet-to-be-publicly-disclosed sensor package flying over some of America’s most sensitive military sites. In the time since China’s spy balloon traversed Alaska, Canada and the continental United States, details surrounding the surveillance overflight are murky at best as the Biden Administration has provided confused, conflicted and muddled statements to Americans and even Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ukraine-and-our-confused-foreign-policy/

“It’s time to accept that our vacation from history was over 20 years ago, and we need to get back to work strengthening our country’s security.”

The first anniversary of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine has come and gone, and the uncertainty about how that conflict will be resolved remains, despite the West’s cheerleading and photo-ops with Zelensky, and billions in cash and materiel sent to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China is  “strongly considering” supporting Russia with arms and ammo, Iran keeps sending Russia drones, and American support for aid to Ukraine is starting to dwindle.

The way out of this stalemate, moreover, requires choices none of which are politically palatable or possible. So here we are again, with our idealistic foreign policy reach exceeding our political will and materiel grasp.

The origins of this predicament in part lie in the still uncertain justifications for spending billions of dollars and depleting our own stockpiles of materiel. The Asia Times’s David Goldman recently posed the still unanswered questions about our reasons and intentions:

“In furtherance of what strategic interests has the United States acted in Ukraine? Is Ukraine’s NATO membership an American raison d’état? Did American strategists really believe that sanctions would shut down Russia’s economy? Did they imagine that the trading patterns of the Asian continent would shift to flow around the sanctions? Did they consider the materiel requirements of a long war that is exhausting American stockpiles? Did they consider what tripwires might elicit the use of nuclear weapons? Or did they sleepwalk into the conflict, as the European powers did in 1914?”

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3870017-biden-needs-to-answer-these-3-questions-about-ukraine/

In his recent surprise trip to Kyiv, President Biden took pains to note that assistance to Ukraine has been “bipartisan.” That is true, but it is also true that some Republicans are beginning to question what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called the “blank check” that Biden seems to be offering the war-torn nation.

Republicans and others debating the open spigot of U.S. aid are not pro-Russia or anti-Ukraine, they simply want some answers as the U.S. ships an unprecedented amount of money and arms to the beleaguered country. Last year Congress approved $113 billion in munitions and aid for Ukraine, an amount greater than budgeted for the U.S. Department of Education or the Department of Homeland Security. Imagine that.

Polls show U.S. enthusiasm for helping Ukraine is waning. In a recent survey, 48 percent of U.S. adults approved sending weapons to Ukraine; a year ago, 60 percent were in favor.  

Biden is to blame for this sliding support. On his trip the president spoke about the war to the people of Poland and to those in Kyiv. But when was the last time he spoke to Americans? When did he last hold a press conference about our strategy in Ukraine, perhaps joining with our military leaders? True, he touched on the war in his State of the Union speech but expended a mere 224 words on the conflict in a 9,000-word address. He spent more time denouncing baggage fees than explaining what U.S. ambitions were in Ukraine.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stand-up-to-bullies-and-defend-taiwan-select-committee-ip-theft-human-rights-uyghurs-hard-power-jinping-aa34bd85?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“Mr. Gallagher, a Republican, represents Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District and is chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.”

I’ve just returned from Taiwan, where I had the privilege to meet with President Tsai Ing-wen. Her message: “Today, saying ‘I am Taiwanese’ is an expression of honor.” The Taiwanese have thrived and built a democracy in defiance of the dark shadow of Chinese Communist Party aggression.

My grandmother told me that “every bully is deep down a coward.” When President Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Taipei in 1960, the Chinese Communist Party, in a fit of rage, spent a week pounding the Taiwanese island of Kinmen with more than 85,000 rounds of artillery. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi touched down in Taipei last August, the party threw another tantrum. For days after her visit, sortie after sortie of fighter jets violated Taiwan’s airspace, warships cruised into Taiwan’s territorial waters, and bombs exploded around the island.

Every day we read about the party harassing dissidents in the U.S., disappearing tech executives such as Jack Ma, coercing American companies into ideological complicity. The party locks ethnic minority populations in concentration camps for possessing religious books or the wrong smartphone app. It welds its own citizens into their apartments for “public health.” Confident nations don’t act like this. The party’s rulers are defined by a fear of their own people and operate from a place of almost crippling paranoia.

I’m chairing the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party this Congress, and when we think about how to deter the Chinese Communist Party, it’s useful to think about how you deal with a bully—by getting your friends together and standing up.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19401/made-in-usa-policy

The threat to our nation’s defense from Chinese spy balloons may be the least of it.

In the 19th Century, the British military confronted and defeated Chinese forces, allowing British drug dealers to reap fortunes selling addictive opium to the Chinese population. So powerful was the poppy that Chinese society, for all intents and purposes, collapsed. The destructive force of opium would ensure that the Chinese would suffer centuries of occupation, civil war, economic collapse, and the loss of empire.

The Chinese have never forgotten their humiliation by Western forces. Nor have they forgotten the role of illicit drugs in destroying a once might kingdom.

So while we are not surprised that the Biden Administration can’t seem to get its story straight regarding Chinese spy satellites, we are beyond outraged that the White House has failed to respond to China’s role of manufacturing in huge amounts the drug fentanyl, which kills at least 70,000 Americans every year. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, it is “the leading cause of death for ages 25-44… far exceeding homicide, suicide, and traffic accidents.”

Perhaps better than any other nation on the planet, the Chinese know how illicit drugs can destroy a nation’s next generation of leaders, dismantle an economy, impair the strategic defense of a sovereign country, and topple a global power. It happened to them with British sales of opium to their citizens. Now the Chinese are doing the same to the United States with fentanyl.

This Administration has failed to recognize the Chinese threat from above and below. They have either refused to confront the wholesale manufacturing of Chinese fentanyl or cannot devise a strategy to block its import, given the fact that our economy depends on a broad range of Chinese imports. Because President Joe Biden has no answers, even threatening an embargo of Chinese goods would be a self-inflicted wound on our national economy. That has to change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-biden-wont-stand-for-freedom-congress-can-russia-ukraine-china-iran-democracy-lockdowns-aggression-attack-7233aa2a?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

This month marks the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.S., Europe and much of the rest of the world—with the significant exceptions of China and Iran—have rallied to support the Ukrainian people and condemn this unprovoked attack. This war isn’t one more clash of competing nations; it’s about a nation defending its freedom against autocratic aggression. While it is important to support the Ukrainian people with the arms and resources they need to resist Russia, the most vital asset the U.S. can offer is the idea of freedom itself.

During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan understood the symbolic value of freedom. He founded his strategy for prevailing against the Soviet Union on his belief that the human yearning for freedom is universal and that America’s leadership in the world depended not only on military or economic power but also on its ability to demonstrate how freedom creates prosperity and happiness.

This past year we’ve learned how universal that yearning is, even in Russia. Tens of thousands of young Russian men refused to participate in Mr. Putin’s illegal war of aggression, and thousands more risked arrest and bodily harm protesting that war.

In China we’ve seen massive protests against Beijing’s brutal Covid lockdowns—protests that have directly challenged President Xi Jinping’s autocratic rule.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19402/genocide-in-nigeria

[T]he Biden administration’s decision to delist Nigeria from the list of Countries of Particular Concern was “inexplicable,” according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom

Christians are being butchered — “purged” — in Nigeria at an alarming rate.

In 2022 alone, 90% of all Christians around the world who were killed for their faith… were slaughtered in Nigeria. On average, that is 14 Christians killed for their faith every day in Nigeria — at least one Christian every two hours.

In just the first month of 2023, in January alone, Muslims slaughtered approximately 60 Christians in Nigeria, raided churches, and kidnapped women and children.

[O]n January 31, 2023, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), introduced a bipartisan resolution calling for not only the return of Nigeria to the State Department’s CPC list, but for the appointment of a special ambassador to monitor the situation.

“[The Fulani] demonstrated a clear intent to target Christians and symbols of Christian identity such as churches, and, during attacks, shouted ‘Allah u Akbar,’ ‘destroy the infidels,’ and ‘wipe out the infidels.’… [Despite this] the Department of State mischaracterizes or incompletely characterizes the increasing incidents of large scale violence … [as] solely attributable to competition for scarce natural resources resulting from climate change.” — U.S. House Resolution “Expressing the sense of Congress regarding the need to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern.”

The new resolution also, rather refreshingly, calls out Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari—himself a Fulani, who “has favored and promoted fellow Fulani and other northern Muslim ethnic groups,” while others, chief among them Christians, “are denied equal rights.”

“It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.'” — Sister Monica Chikwe, Nigerian nun, cruxnow.com, August 4, 2019.

[B]y removing Nigeria from the CPC list in November, 2021, the Biden administration was simply returning to the status quo. Although jihadists had slaughtered and terrorized Nigeria’s Christians all during President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure, when Biden was his Vice President (2009-2017), and although the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom had, beginning in 2009 and every year afterwards, repeatedly urged that Nigeria be designated as a Country of Particular Concern, the Obama administration had obstinately refused to comply.

It was only in 2020, under the Trump administration, that Nigeria was first designated as a CPC — only to be removed the following year under Biden.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19399/china-balloon-us-weakness

If China perceives that the America’s leaders lack resolve or that its national security decision-makers are divided, these failures can only tempt Chinese aggression against Siberia or Taiwan. After watching America’s debacles in Afghanistan and a week of hosting the balloon, China must be asking: If not now, when?

These reconnaissance flights seem but one dimension of a vast, multidimensional intelligence-collection effort by China.

The most important lesson China might have learned, unfortunately, is that Washington’s bungled balloon performance could well be replicated if Communist China’s President Xi Jinping invaded Taiwan or other targets.

The second-most damaging impact to US security regarding spy balloon that the Chinese Communist Party floated over the entire US continent may have been the assessment that China’s decision-makers gleaned from the perceived clumsy and indecisive manner in which America’s political and military leaders responded to the incident.

China, flaunting a lack of respect for the US, publicly ridiculed the balloon’s shoot-down and did not answer the phone when US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called. If China perceives that the America’s leaders lack resolve or that its national security decision-makers are divided, these failures can only tempt Chinese aggression against Siberia or Taiwan. After watching America’s debacles in Afghanistan and a week of hosting the balloon, China must be asking: If not now, when?

The saga of China’s balloon, as well as other unidentified objects in the skies over the US and Canada, only adds to the confused and feckless decision-making process of America’s political military leadership. Why, as reported, did the Pentagon brass really not follow Biden’s order to shoot down the balloon immediately after the White House was notified?

https://www.hoover.org/publications/strategika

As the Ukraine war enters its twelfth month, the military situation remains a stalemate, but a stalemate that gives the political advantage to Russia. If Russia can hold most of the territory in the oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson that it annexed on Sept. 30, 2022, it will claim success for its “special military operation.”

In furtherance of what strategic interests has the United States acted in Ukraine? Is Ukraine’s NATO membership an American raison d’état? Did American strategists really believe that sanctions would shut down Russia’s economy? Did they imagine that the trading patterns of the Asian continent would shift to flow around the sanctions? Did they consider the materiel requirements of a long war that is exhausting American stockpiles? Did they consider what tripwires might elicit the use of nuclear weapons? Or did they sleepwalk into the conflict, as the European powers did in 1914?

Why did Russia invade? Would Russia have invaded Ukraine if the West and the Zelensky government had put Minsk II into effect, with autonomous Russophone regions within a sovereign and neutral Ukraine? Contrafactual history is inherently unprovable, but there are good reasons to believe that this is true. Protecting the rights of Russians separated from the motherland by the breakup of the Soviet Union is a Russian raison d’état. After more than 14,000 casualties in fighting between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Russian separatists in Donbas before the February 24th invasion, it is hard to argue that Russia’s concerns were groundless.