RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/arming-china-its-bill-clintons-fault-michael-ledeen/

Conversations on social media are beginning to stress the urgency of reconsidering our relationship with the People’s Republic of China. It was only recently that most Americans discovered that most of our pharmaceuticals are manufactured in China, and that the Chinese are in a position to withhold them during an emergency of the sort we now face.

Recent stories have documented Chinese espionage, including the bribery of top American biochemists at places like Harvard, that entailed the constant travel of U.S. experts between China and the United States. Given the short memories of American political leaders, these stories have made it appear as though espionage is of very recent vintage. 

But it is not so. The United States has been arming China for more than 20 years.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-panic-an-opportunity-to-hit-reset-with-china/

“In short, that America is going to stop lying down with depraved, despotic dogs and waking up fleeced — in every sense.”

It’s an old and familiar saying: “If you lie down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas.”

Not to mention:

Poisoned, fake-brand THC vapes killing our kids via the vaping lung illness outbreak of last summer. (Oh. You missed that foreign-sourced public health crisis?) Plus floods of counterfeit nicotine e-cigarette brands habitualizing high-schoolers and undermining heavy-handed efforts at home to keep the products away from kids.
Thousands of dangerous, fraudulent, mis- and wrongly-labeled, and even banned products swamping the world’s largest retail platform – and driven to the top of listings, claiming a coveted but misleading “Amazon Choice,” through lies, bogus sales and bribes.
Decades of systematic cheating on trade agreements hollowing out America’s industrial base.
Blatant and ubiquitous identity theft, cyberfraud and cyberattacks – including, ironically, unrelenting unleashing of computer “viruses.”
Sponsorship of rogue nations rushing headlong to develop nukes that can take out Los Angeles.
Of course, pandemics that, in flea-like fashion, rapidly infest the entire globe.
And resulting record stock-market crashes, free falls in energy and other commodity markets, plummeting bond yields, and maybe, a recession that could undo the unparalleled job gains of the last few years.

Hey, Wall Street! Ya maybe paying attention yet?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/10/wuhan-virus-exposes-the-danger-of-reliance-upon-china/

What we know at this point is that the virus is more infectious than the flu. Some studies suggest it is roughly two to three times as contagious. There is also good reason to believe that this virus and the COVID-19 respiratory syndrome that it causes are particularly dangerous to older people and those with underlying health problems. This, of course, is also true of the seasonal flu, but it appears to be much more pronounced with this virus.

What’s more, the range of preexisting or chronic health issues that materially raise susceptibility to serious illness as a result of this virus keeps expanding. At first, doctors thought it was limited to people with respiratory conditions, but they since added high blood pressure, which affects 77.9 million Americans, and diabetes, which affects 30 million Americans. Add in asthma and some other chronic conditions and something like one-in-three Americans may be in the high-risk category.

There is some good news: the vast majority of people who contract the Wuhan Virus will experience only mild symptoms, many will remain completely asymptomatic, and then they will recover.

In other words, this isn’t the plague that killed 30 percent of Europe’s population. But it is a very serious public health threat for a significant portion of our population and that needs to be handled effectively lest the death toll spiral.

The time for handling Wuhan Virus as a threat that we could avoid has passed. It’s here. Now we need to focus on mitigating it’s spread and treating those who develop life-threatening pneumonia and long-term fibrosis of the lungs “as seen in SARS and MERS.” Both are potentially deadly. Worse, the fibrosis doesn’t heal. Its spread can be arrested with treatment so that it doesn’t consume the entire lung, but those who develop it are stuck with it—and all of the accompanying limitations—for life.

The ongoing experience of treating Wuhan Virus has exposed dangerous inadequacies in our healthcare system, in our government’s ability to handle foreseeable public health threats, and even in the way we have ordered our economy. They are all interrelated and they all need fixing.

One thing that became clear very quickly in China is that the Chinese lacked hospital capacity. According to viral videos, they constructed that capacity very quickly. Feel free to take that with a grain of salt if you like. The Chinese were also able to direct production of drugs, N95 masks, and biohazard suits, so that healthcare workers and first responders could do their jobs.

Of course, that’s because China manufactures all of those things in their own country. We do not.

An anonymous Department of Homeland Security official told Reuters of the protective equipment needed by healthcare providers that “very little of this stuff is apparently made in the [United] States, so if we’re down to domestic capability to produce, it could get tough.”

And that’s a major health and national security risk that must be remedied.

The Italian experience, an open society much more like our own, is perhaps more instructive. In mid-February, Italy had very few known cases of coronavirus and none of them were from community infection. That’s when one of the first Americans to contract the virus, Marc Thibault, a vice principal from Rhode Island guiding a school trip, picked it up. He was an otherwise healthy 48-year-old father of two who spent two weeks in the hospital, most of it in intensive care connected to a ventilator, where he was given last rites by a priest. Thibault recovered due to the timely application of expert healthcare and a lot of resources. Again, thank God.

But his experience exposes the weakness in our system. Treating the people with the worst cases of Wuhan Virus is possible—but it takes a lot of resources. When there are one or two or 10 cases, that works. But when we are talking about thousands flooding hospitals, as in Northern Italy, the system breaks down.

There are only so many ICU beds and even when the hospitals convert whole floors from standard care to intensive care, there are only so many respirators, so many doctors and nurses—some percentage of whom will get sick even with extreme preventive measures—and even in the absence of sickness are limited as they become exhausted. What happens next is that healthcare workers must triage the patients and they are left with hard, heartbreaking decisions.

The question isn’t who could we treat and probably save under normal circumstances but rather who has the best chance of survival when there are limited resources and the rest get a palliative and a prayer.

What has been the most galling and dangerous weakness to be exposed—but also the most correctable one—is the realization of how dependent the United States is upon China for lifesaving drugs, for hazmat suits, and for N95 masks.

For all sorts of critical products, we don’t and currently can’t make them ourselves. Ninety-seven percent of antibiotics used in the United States are made in China, 80 percent of the chemical components necessary for the drugs that we do make here come from China. Within one year, nearly the entire production of N95 masks went from “Made in USA” to “Made in China.” The U.S. Strategic Stockpile currently holds just 12 million N95 masks, a small fraction of the 3.5 billion the DHS estimates we would need in the event of a pandemic. This is insane and it must change.

Outsourcing manufacturing to China has done incalculable damage to the United States. It’s impoverished countless towns and many millions of people. It’s shrunk the American middle class and made it more precarious. And that’s led to all kinds of social and political distress from skyrocketing opiate addiction and deaths to an embrace of radical politics.

For some people the connections between these things are too abstract or they just shrug and say, “Well, that’s the market” as if Americans—real people—exist to serve “the market” rather than markets existing to serve Americans by making their lives better. But the simple fact that we can’t make the very products necessary to provide lifesaving healthcare for Americans in a time of crisis isn’t an abstraction. It’s real, it’s dangerous, and it’s time to change.

The Chinese know our lives are dependent upon their good will. The state press agency, Xinhua, published a not so thinly veiled threat targeting the United States on March 4:

If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products and ban exports to the United States. Then the United States will be caught in the ocean of new coronaviruses.

According to the US CDC officials, most masks in the United States are made in China and imported from China. If China bans the export of masks to the United States, the United States will fall into a mask shortage, and the most basic measures to prevent the novel coronavirus can’t do it.

Also according to the US CDC officials, most of the drugs in the United States are imported, and some drugs are imported from Europe. However, Europe also places the production base of these drugs in China, so more than 90% of the US imported drugs are related to China. The implication is that at this time, as long as China announces that its drugs are for domestic use and banned exports, the United States will fall into the hell of the novel coronavirus epidemic.

They’re right and they know it. So let’s take the hint and take responsibility for our own security.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been a leader on this. In February 2019, he published a report warning, “the U.S. runs the risk of losing important components of its medical supply chain to China’s government-backed industry.” He was prescient.

Late last month, he revisited the subject. “At the time, those seemed like abstract concerns, but we now know they are real,” Rubio wrote. “Americans unable to buy medical masks and who see headlines about potential shortages of critical, irreplaceable drugs will be familiar.” Rubio is working on vital legislation that would address these issues. We could go even further.

Here are a few simple ideas policymakers should act on now. As a national security priority, we must mandate by law that the following items and the materials necessary to make them are manufactured in the United States:

Critical drugs, including antibiotics, antivirals, steroids, and vaccines.
Protective gear and medical equipment such as masks, hazmat suits, respirators, and ventilators.
Vaccination for highly infectious new viruses should be mandatory and free where necessary.

On Tuesday, the Chinese government announced it would send an aid package to Italy, where the hospitals have been overrun and where respirators and ventilators—often the difference between life and death—are being rationed. That aid package includes 1,000 ventilators, 2 million masks, 100,000 respirators, 20,000 protective suits, and 50,000 test kits. And it’s all a free gift.

The United States didn’t do that because we can’t do that. We don’t have the capacity to supply our own needs let alone provide lifesaving help to an ally like Italy. That’s shameful and we must do better.

China is not just a strategic competitor, it is a hostile foreign power. And by controlling the manufacture of critical healthcare supplies—not just iPhones and toasters—they hold significant power over this country and the rest of the world. And they know how to use it—especially in a time of crisis.
Chris is publisher and editor of American Greatness and the host of The Chris Buskirk Show. He was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute and received a fellowship from the Earhart Foundation. Chris is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold businesses in financial services and digital marketing. He is a frequent guest on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Hill, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter at @TheChrisBuskirk

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/iran-theocracy-usual-tactics-arent-working-against-arab-enemies-and-west/

The theocracy grows more desperate by the day and can no longer rely on its usual tactics to thwart its Arab enemies and the West.

Iran has misjudged not only the toxic effects of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions on the regime but also the entire psychology of U.S. policy toward Iran. The result is that Iranian unemployment is soaring, its gross domestic product is tanking, inflation is raging, oil prices are crashing, and its friends are fewer than ever — and for the first time in 40 years, the regime believes that it must do something quite radical before it implodes.

2020 is not 1979, not 1983, not 1986, not 2004–2007, and not 2011 — all years when Iran variously pressured the U.S. by taking hostages, killing American personnel in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, threatening oil disruptions, and planning to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. Now things are redefined for a variety of reasons, most of them apparently still underappreciated by the theocratic Iranian elite.

1) As the world’s largest oil and natural-gas producer, the U.S. is not vulnerable to cutoffs of oil from the Middle East. It, of course, cares about global free passage through the Straits of Hormuz, but not as much as do major importers such as Europe and exporters such as China.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/the-trump-doctrine-and-the-return-of-pax-americana/

Any serious reckoning of the Trump Doctrine will see the experts recoiling in horror or simply snickering at the very thought of attaching “doctrine” to the foreign policy initiatives of President Trump. What informs Donald Trump’s decision-making, according to most narratives, is nothing more than an incongruous compendium of braggadocio, narcissism, opportunism and impulsiveness. His America First worldview, in the opinion of the naysayers, cannot be configured as a coherent set of principles. The Obama Doctrine was ascribed to Barack Obama and the Bush Doctrine to George W. Bush, but to talk earnestly of a Trump Doctrine is to suggest a degree of lucidity in Donald Trump’s actions where none exists. As a consequence, the targeted killing on January 3 of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Forces, foreign legion division of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, can make no strategic sense in the eyes of the experts, though it could—and still might—trigger general war in the region. Maybe it is the anti-Trump narrative that lacks credibility.

Scepticism about President Trump’s judgment in foreign affairs runs very deep. We now know, thanks to revelations by the former US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, in her book With All Due Respect (2019), that Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State in the period 2017-18, questioned his judgment. In conjunction with John Kelly, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff for a time, Tillerson considered it his duty to impede President Trump’s inexpert ideas to save America and the world from calamity. Secretary Tillerson, astonishingly, attempted to enrol Ambassador Haley in an anti-Trump cabal operating at the very heart of the Trump administration: “Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country.” If even those close to him—or, at least, those who were close to him—have no confidence in President Trump, then why should anybody else make the case for a cogent Trump Doctrine? Haley’s disclosure gives credence to this sentiment, expressed in the aftermath of the Qasem Soleimani killing by the reliably anti-Trump journalist Joel McNally: “The most dangerous day of his presidency is always tomorrow.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/secstate-pompeo-confronts-un-secretary-general-joseph-klein/

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo met on March 6th with United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres at UN headquarters in New York. Secretary Pompeo took the opportunity to condemn the UN’s highly biased pro-Palestinian decision to release its blacklist of companies doing business with Israeli firms operating in disputed areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which includes several U.S. companies.

According to the State Department’s readout of the meeting, Secretary Pompeo “reiterated his outrage at the decision by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to publish a database of companies operating in Israeli-controlled territories.” The U.S. statement added that Secretary Pompeo “made clear that the United States will continue to engage UN officials and member states on this matter, will not tolerate the reckless mistreatment of U.S. companies, and will respond to actions harmful to our business community.”

As usual, the UN Secretary General tried to paper over significant objections to the UN’s moral failures with diplomatic niceties. His office’s readout of the same meeting made no mention of the blacklist controversy. “The Secretary-General expressed appreciation for the continued engagement of the United States in the United Nation,” the UN statement said. It ticked off as topics of discussion “a range of situations around the world, including Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Sahel and the questions related to the implementation of the host country agreement.” The reference to the host country agreement implementation may have alluded to a dispute over the denial or delay of visas issued by the U.S. to UN diplomats from certain countries, principally Russia and Iran, seeking to attend UN meetings in New York. However, the statement completely sidestepped the substance of the issue. Nothing was even hinted regarding any other differences between the United States and the United Nations.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/02/get-out-of-afghanistan/

Over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tweeted out her condolences for the first known American to die from coronavirus. Recycling her two favorite yet still unconvincing words from impeachment—”sadly and prayerfully”—Pelosi mourned the loss of the still-unknown victim.

The Democratic leader has offered no such sympathy for Javier Gutierrez, Antonio Rodriguez, lan McLaughlin, or Miguel Villalon: All four are U.S. soldiers who were killed in fighting in Afghanistan this year. (Two additional service members died in a January plane crash.)

With few exceptions, America’s longest war is largely ignored by our political class while the costs and casualties mount. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held a hearing last month on the Washington Post’s explosive and infuriating series on the war in Afghanistan: Only three of his colleagues bothered to attend. The sole Democrat in attendance was the committee’s ranking member, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).

“Doing nothing is no longer an option for any senator or member of Congress with a conscience,” Paul said, perhaps during a moment of wishful thinking. 

The long-time proponent of ending the Afghanistan war ticked off the stats: Nearly 2,400 dead U.S. servicemen and women with more than 20,000 wounded. Soldiers who have faced numerous deployments since the war began in 2001. And nearly $1 trillion in U.S. tax dollars—an average of $50 billion per year for almost 20 years, as Paul pointed out—spent in a backward nation that still ranks near the bottom of the list of the world’s most economically and politically free countries.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/could-end-afghanistan-misadventure-finally-be-hand-robert-spencer/

Afghanistan “is not going to become Switzerland overnight,” an American official said as the U.S. and the Taliban signed a peace accord on Saturday morning, and you have to admire his understatement. The United States has sacrificed the lives of numerous heroic service members and squandered trillions for nearly two decades now in the fond hope that it could remake Afghanistan into Switzerland, and the one good thing about this “peace accord” with the Taliban is that it heralds the long-overdue end of this fool’s errand.

The old assumptions, although they have led to policies that have multiply failed, are still prevalent. The usual objections are being made. In its story on the peace accord, the Washington Free Beacon reported that “a group of Republican members of Congress” had petitioned the Trump administration, asking the President not to go through with the agreement. “They and other critics say the Taliban cannot be trusted to implement peace and that the moment U.S. forces vacate the country, terror forces will again rise to power.”

This echoed a statement from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said: “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”

The unnamed American official said: “Everybody has the same goals. No one wants to see the return of the Islamic Emirate.” Well, sure. Everybody, that is, except the Taliban, who are still determined to reestablish their Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan. Once the American troops finally leave, “terror forces” will indeed make every effort to “again rise to power.” There will not be “stability” in Afghanistan. Does that mean that we have to keep troops there forever? Or should the United States focus on what is best for America in Afghanistan, working to ensure that the Taliban cannot engage in international jihad terror activity, and otherwise leaving the Afghans to their own devices?

https://www.foxnews.com/media/gen-jack-keane-taliban-deal-afghanistan-us-troops

Gen. Jack Keane, a Fox News senior strategic analyst, reacted Sunday to a new U.S. deal with the Taliban that could see a reduction in violence and lead to the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

“We gotta have a healthy dose of skepticism,” Keane told “America’s News HQ.” “Our government officials know the Taliban can’t be trusted… everybody’s clear right there.”

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the deal “looks very promising” but it was not without risk. Esper also told reporters that U.S. troop levels could be reduced to about 8,600 — from 12,000 currently in the country — if the 7-day truce is successful. However, Defense Department officials said counterterrorism operations will continue in the country.

Esper stressed that the possibility of a more permanent peace deal could be discussed.only after assessing the outcomes of this new agreement.

“This the beginning of a very long and challenging process,” Keane explained. “A reduction in violence is not a ceasefire. The Taliban can’t hold their hardcore organization from fighting… they’re not a monolithic organization,” he added.