RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/07/nancy-pelosis-childlike-diplomacy-mirrors-americas-childlike-posture-toward-china/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sin was not in going to Taiwan per se. Rather, after announcing her destination, the California Democrat then sorta kinda hesitated in deer-in-the-headlights fashion under threat from the Chinese.  

So, by her back-and-forth media announcements, she added to the endemic strategic confusion at the White House and Pentagon that opposed her visit. Pelosi never gave a reason why she was going to Taiwan, except to note after the fact that as a child, she used to like China and at the beach would dig in the sand to reach Beijing.

In other words, in her eight decades since infancy, Pelosi has not yet learned the difference between Chinese Taiwan and the Chinese Communist mainland and has come up with no greater affinity with the Chinese than remembering as a child vainly digging in the sand to reach them.

The internal administration discord reminded the Chinese that the Biden Administration can still become even more inept than it has been since its inaugural humiliation in Anchorage, Alaska. 

And lastly, Pelosi showboated with loud freedom rhetoric while carrying a mere twig.

So, yes, ostensibly, it was silly for Nancy Pelosi to freelance in foreign policy by going to Taiwan. She has no record of any foreign policy accomplishment.

Ever since her first speakership 15 years ago, Pelosi has always seen foreign policy as an arena to embarrass her political opponents. We remember her dishonest post-9/11 public reversals about enhanced interrogations, and her all-but-rooting-for the surge in Iraq to fail.

https://compactmag.com/article/sleepwalking-into-war-with-china

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan marks the beginning of a new and dire strategic crisis with China. Whether by accident or design, the Biden Administration is sleepwalking into war with China—quickly, but not quickly enough for most Republican leaders. While the United States wasted $6 trillion or more in failed nation-building campaigns during the past 20 years, China focused its military resources on surface-to-ship missiles, modern aircraft, submarines, and electronic warfare measures on its coast. If we fight China on its home seas, we probably will lose.

“There is a fundamental asymmetry of strategic interest in Taiwan.”

There is a fundamental asymmetry of strategic interest in Taiwan between China and the United States. China is not a nation-state but a polyglot empire. Only 1 in 10 Chinese converses in Mandarin, the state dialect, according to a 2014 government study. Most speak one of 200 dialects. China is held together as it has been for thousands of years by a common tax collector in Beijing and the Mandarin bureaucracy, recast as the Chinese Communist Party. One rebel province—as Beijing views Taiwan—sets a precedent for many. Countless times in its long history, China has fragmented into warring provinces, encouraged during the 19th and 20th centuries by foreign powers.

Opposition to Taiwanese sovereignty is a raison d’etre of the Chinese state, and Beijing will go to war to prevent it. Beijing will tolerate the status quo, but not if it believes the United States is promoting Taiwanese sovereignty.

What makes Pelosi’s visit so provocative is her constitutional status as second in the line of presidential succession. A visit by an American vice president would, in diplomatic protocol, verge upon diplomatic recognition and crosses a red line; a visit by the next-in-line to the vice president touches that red line.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/only-dangerous-thing-about-pelosis-taiwan-visit-daniel-greenfield/

If you believe the Biden administration and its media allies, members of congress visiting Taiwan is a shocking and unprecedented event. Except that Senator Tammy Duckworth visited Taiwan in May. Senator Richard Burr,  Robert Menendez, Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse and Robert Portman came in April. Along with Rep. Ronny Jackson 

Senator Dan Sullivan and Chris Coons flew over last summer. In the fall, Rep. Nancy Mace, Sarah Jacobs, Mark Takano, Elissa Slotkin and Colin Allred saw the sights.

Thanks in part to the Taiwan Travel Act, which passed with no opposition and was signed by President Trump in 2018, Taiwan is Grand Central Station for congressional delegations.

Pelosi is higher-ranking only in that she’s the outgoing lame duck leader of a vanishing majority.

China was not threatened by Pelosi’s visit. It chose to exploit it as an opportunity to intimidate the Biden administration and blackmail its weak enemies. And whatever else happens, it succeeded in exposing once again how worthless Biden’s tough talk about Taiwan is.

“Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan?” Biden had been asked at a press conference with the Japanese prime minister.

“Yes,” he assured. “That’s the commitment we made.”

“We made a sacred commitment to Article 5 that if, in fact, anyone were to invade or take action against our Nato allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan,” Biden had promised.

https://asiatimes.com/

The Biden Administration’s policy signaling on China has been confused and contradictory from the inception of the Administration, and the confusion around House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rumored visit to Taiwan suggests that Biden’s foreign policy team blundered its way into a prospective crisis. At China Center’s deadline, Pelosi was en route to Asia, without confirmation or denial of a stop in Taiwan.

The seriousness of the present situation cannot be emphasized enough. Remnin University Professor Jin Canrong, one of the Chinese analysts most closely followed by Biden’s national security team, said Aug. 1 in an interview with the “Observer” (guancha.cn) website: “It can be said that in our offshore waters, whether in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, our military has advantages. Our ballistic missiles can cover the entire South China Sea, the air force can basically cover the entire South China Sea, and the navy has certain advantages over several US fleets. In addition, we have obvious advantages given our geographic position in electronic countermeasures and reconnaissance systems. If the US really wants to create friction here, it won’t be cheap.”

In off-record discussions in Washington, several US former top foreign policy officials expressed doubt that Pelosi planned a trip to Taiwan without consulting the White House. How the visit was first mooted suggests an amateurish attempt at plausible deniability. Pelosi did not announce a visit to Taiwan, and no American media outlet has confirmed such plans. Instead, the first mention of a possible visit came from the London Financial Times July 18, citing six separate sources. That is not eavesdropping at a hotel lobby bar, but a deliberate leak. The newspaper also said that the Administration was divided over whether Pelosi should visit Taiwan.

https://www.newsweek.com/reviving-dead-corpse-opinion-1728909

Robert Malley, the man who led the American delegation sitting outside the “Iran talks” in Vienna while American interests were represented inside those talks by the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese, has now thrown in the towel. “You can’t revive a dead corpse,” he has said.

Question: Can you revive a live corpse?

It isn’t a fully sarcastic question. American bribes thrown at Tehran—both for the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal (JCPOA) and the hoped-for-2021 reprisal—were intended to invigorate what was seen by two Democratic administrations as a live, but perhaps comatose, body. It was actually dead then, although the bribes were numerous.

Before the JCPOA, the U.S. had issued warrants for, arrested, tried, and/or convicted a number of Iranians for violations of American export laws regarding high technology or equipment that could have military application. The 2015 deal unfortunately reversed most of that.

Three Iranians were pardoned before trial, and a fourth in the same case had his charges dropped. Three men were released from prison for providing or planning to provide technology: fiber-optic gyroscopes and electron tubes, satellite service, and high-tech industrial parts. Charges were dropped against another man in the case, as well as the company he worked for. Charges against an Iranian accused of shipping lift truck parts, one accused of shipping antennae, and one accused of sending aircraft parts to Iran were also dropped—as were charges against three fugitive defendants wanted in federal court for cases involving alleged export controls or sanctions violations regarding goods headed for Iran.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/our-other-foreign-policy-stale-orthodoxy-iran-bruce-thornton/

Next to the conflict between Israelis and Arabs, the war between the U.S. and Iran is the most significant illustration of our failed foreign policy idealism. The fact that we don’t consider it “war” –– despite the fact that the prime mover of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, formally declared war on us –– is itself evidence of our myopic idealism. Calling the conflict what it is would force us to admit that 43 years of “diplomatic engagement” have failed at stopping wars.

Now, however, the wages of that delusional policy are more dangerous than ever. Iran has just announced that it has enriched enough uranium to quickly produce a nuclear weapon, the Gatestone Institution reports, and has over 3000 missiles, many capable of delivering nuclear bombs. Also worrisome is Russia’s recent visit to Iran to strengthen their geopolitical marriage of convenience. Both nations are facilitating each other’s evasion of Western sanctions, and Iran is slated to sell several hundred advanced drones to Russia and providing training in their use, while Russia may reciprocate by providing the mullahs with its advanced S-400 and S-500 air defense systems.

So, all that our decades of reliance on the “democratic, rules-based international order” has got us is a fanatic, illiberal, revanchist, oil-rich regime on the brink of possessing weapons of mass destruction.

https://bit.ly/3zER3Ez

Conventional wisdom vs. evidenced-reality

According to the late Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith, “the notion of conventional wisdom… is commonly understood as knowledge that is accepted within a certain community or among the general public…. [They] tend to hold on to opinions and ideas that fit with their established worldviews. Accordingly, conventional wisdom provides an obstacle for the acceptance of new knowledge or novel and original thinking….

“To its adherents, conventional wisdom provides comfortable padding against inconvenient truths and the complexities of reality…. This is a prime manifestation of vested interest. For a vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure…. Acceptable ideas are disinclined to change….

“In the struggle between what is correct and what is agreeable, conventional wisdom had a tactical advantage…. There are many reasons why people like to hear articulated that which they approve…. It serves the ego: the individual has the satisfaction of knowing that other and more famous people share his conclusions….

“The enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events [evidence].… The fatal blow to conventional wisdom comes when conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable.… The concept of conventional wisdom accentuated the difference between established truths – fundamentally out-of-touch with contemporary challenges – and new knowledge….”

Yale University’s Prof. Harlan Krumholz adds: “In science, what seems obvious may not be true, and what is accepted as conventional wisdom, may sometimes be based on flawed assumptions.” 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18761/china-taiwan-us

One hopes that [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is also intended to reassure free Asia that America will militarily defend Pacific democracies, despite the failure of the US either to deter Russia from invading Ukraine or adequately to defend it after it was invaded.

Above all, the US, must not submit to the Chinese Communist Party’s threats. Pelosi should proceed to Taiwan with as large a bipartisan Congressional delegation as possible. If she bows to demands to stay away, China will be incentivized to attack Taiwan effectively the next day. Backing down at this point would only establish a pattern that all Beijing has to do to intimidate America is bark.

After America’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the “far too little, too late ” response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, any cancellation of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan would be seen the world over as yet another spineless US surrender.

The only question is if this administration finally has the political will to stop appearing weak, scared and permitting China to dictate US policy. The administration’s record so far: it has sold oil from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, meant for hurricane damage and other emergencies, not only to China, but to the offshoot of a firm there in which President Biden’s son, Hunter, had “invested heavily”; it has cancelled the China Initiative, thereby allowing China to continue stealing intellectual property with impunity; it has ignored China’s purchase of massive amounts of American farmland and land near US military bases; it appears about to lift tariffs for China that will permit China to dictate US trade policy but only negligibly curb inflation; it is permitting China to collect genetic data from Americans citizens for potential biological warfare against the US.

China this weekend, according to reports, privately delivered a message to US national security officials reinforcing an earlier Chinese Foreign Ministry statement: if US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi goes ahead with her planned August visit to Taiwan, it would be met with a “resolute and strong measures.”

China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian stated on July 19 that the visit “would seriously undermine Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/27/the-ukrainian-verdun/

Five months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war is now reduced to one of attrition. The current dirty, grinding slog is fought mostly with artillery and rockets. Everything from Ukraine’s shopping centers to apartment buildings—and the civilians in them—are Russian targets. 

Most outsiders have already forgotten the heroic Ukrainian winter repulse of the botched Russian shock-and-awe effort to sweep into Kyiv, decapitate the government, and declare the eastern half of the country a Russian protectorate within mere days.

Months later, the long war devolves further into a contest of mass and weight—tons of explosives blowing up pathways for massed troops grabbing a few more charred miles of ruined landscape.

Vladimir Putin bets he can throw in more men and more shells than Ukraine and its Western suppliers can match. He is quite willing to “win” by laying waste to eastern Ukraine even if it means losing three Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian. 

When war becomes such gridlocked carnage, each side looks to new game-changing diplomacy, strategies, allies, or weapons to break the deadlock.

For Putin, such escalation means more flesh, steel, and explosives. His country is 28 times bigger than Ukraine, and over three times more populous, with an economy 15 times larger. 

As for Putin’s financial reserves, the Western oil boycott means increasingly little to him when 40 percent of the planet’s population in India and China are eager to secure near-limitless Russian energy. 

Another 750 million people in Europe once talked tough. But as a second winter nears, their gas and oil imports from Russia will further wither. Then their Churchillian rhetoric may chill. 

So, the Ukrainian war increasingly will depend on endless U.S. aid and escalation.

To stop the Russian steamroller, Ukraine demands sophisticated American missiles to sink Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Kyiv requests shipments of U.S. jet fighters to knock down Putin’s missiles and planes.

It asks for more rockets and artillery to ensure tit-for-tat retaliation for every incoming Russian shell and bomb. Kyiv negotiates for more Western intelligence to take out more Russian generals and more lift capacity to stage airborne raids into Mother Russia itself.