RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20845/us-china-world-war-iii

“The Commission finds that DoD’s business practices, byzantine research and development and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance reflect an era of uncontested military dominance… Such methods are not suited to today’s strategic environment…. The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare,” — Commission on the National Defense Strategy, July 29, 2024.

“The Department’s usual laser focus on mission has been supplanted by Marxist-inspired instruction, an eradication of meritocracy in favor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion promotion programs, with an extra emphasis placed on administration fetishes like climate change… The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian militaries are not burdened by such nonsense.” — Blaine Holt, former US Air Force brigadier general, to Gatestone Institute, August 5, 2024.

Unfortunately, Biden has not addressed the American people in a comprehensive and meaningful way about the greatest threat they face.

The Commission on the National Defense Strategy is clear on what must be done: “A bipartisan ‘call to arms’ is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11.”

It is unlikely, however, that bad actors will give America a decade more to prepare.

General Mike Minihan, the chief of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, predicted in a memorandum to his command leaked in January of last year that America would be in a war with China “in 2025.”

Xi Jinping can see the United States is starting to stir; why would he wait for his foe to get ready?

“We are closer today to World War III than we’ve been since the Second World War,” said former President Donald Trump at the Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach on July 26.

Trump hyperbole? No.

The former president is not alone in thinking this way. “China and Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, each of which presents its own significant threat to U.S. interests,” states the Commission on the National Defense Strategy in its 114-page report released three days after Trump spoke. “This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/04/americas-eroding-deterrent-in-the-face-of-prc-aggression/

Time is running out, as the PRC’s aggression against the Philippines is certainly calculated with one eye on the U.S. election calendar and the realization of what the CCP fears—Donald Trump’s return.

n March 2015, the former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Harry Harris, while giving a speech in Australia, dismissed the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) building of seven artificial islands in the South China Sea (SCS) as nothing more than a “Great Wall of Sand” that would not alter the U.S. Navy’s freedom of navigation operations or American deterrence capabilities in the region. Harris’s remark was a classic case of what we term “threat deflation.” Year after year, U.S. officials have dismissed the growth of the PRC capabilities that were right in front of their noses. Now, almost a decade later, the reality of that arrogance has come home to roost. The PRC’s seven islands are now fully operational military bases and are being used by the PLA to dominate the SCS and bully and intimidate treaty allies like the Republic of the Philippines.

In sum, the PRC’s “Great Wall of Sand” has not eroded. Rather, it has hardened to the detriment of U.S. national security and the peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific region. Given the PRC’s most recent pressure campaign against the Philippines over the past four months at Second Thomas Shoal (Ayungin Shoal), it would be more accurate to say that U.S. national security credibility in the South China Sea is “eroding like a Great Wall of Sand.”

The PRC has publicized an agreement reached with the Philippine government on July 22. This asserts that the Philippine government must notify the PRC before conducting a resupply of the sailors aboard the grounded ship, Sierra Madre. Providing prior notification to the PRC and even inspection by the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) would in effect demonstrate that the Republic of the Philippines no longer maintains “sovereign control” over their maritime territory at Second Thomas Shoal. And while the Philippine government has denied the specific terms of the agreement with the PRC, the international perception is that Manila has again been forced to cede its territory to Beijing. This would now be the second major successful seizure of Philippine territory by the PRC in just over a decade, the first being at Scarborough Shoal in 2012.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20788/china-xi-ready-to-strike

Why is Chinese President Xi Jinping moving so fast at this time to exert control over peripheral waters? Prominent China analyst Willy Lam wrote last October that China’s leader perhaps sees a closing window of opportunity and therefore is in a hurry to annex territory.

Whether he goes to war or not, he is getting ready to do so. Both the Financial Times and CNN have reported that businesses have been establishing military units inside their organizations. “Chinese Companies Are Raising Militias Like It’s the 1970s,” the cable network reported.

Xi is engaged in the fastest military buildup since the Second World War. In addition, he is purging military officers opposed to war, trying to sanction-proof his regime, stockpiling grain and other commodities, surveying the U.S. for nuclear weapons strikes, and mobilizing civilians for war.

His economic policies emphasize war preparation, and he looks determined to take China into battle, regardless of prospects. “Even if we cannot win, we must fight,” Xi is reported to have said to military officers in 2017, in connection with Taiwan.

I believe that Xi wants war — or at least a ramping up of tensions — to prevent senior Chinese leaders from moving against him. He is not looking to rally the Chinese people with provocative actions or even an attack; he wants to defang political opponents in the Communist Party.

Xi may not yet have made the decision to go to war, but he has clearly made the decision to risk war. That means he can strike when we least expect it.

In recent weeks, China has surged its naval fleet into both surrounding and far away waters.

Most significantly, the People’s Liberation Army Navy sent two strike groups into the South China Sea. The larger, centered on the Shandong aircraft carrier, operated off the main Philippine island of Luzon before transiting into the Western Pacific for blue water flight operations. The other is an Expeditionary Strike Group led by a Type 075 Yushen-class amphibious assault ship, one of China’s largest and most advanced. Four of China’s Type 055 Renhai-class cruisers, described as “the most lethal surface combatant in the world,” escorted the two strike groups.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/in-the-pacific-china-isnt-just-threatening-taiwan/

Crisis in East Asia may hit the Philippines first. America must deter it.

Repeated hostile Chinese military incursions into another country’s sovereign territory. CCP claims over this same territory and attempts to exclude the rightful owner. Use of civilian cover to bolster Beijing’s military capacity. Deliberate pushing of international legal boundaries to the limit of outright conflict. Bogus narratives denying this truth and blaming the victim.

This malign cycle repeats over and over, always rising in intensity and slowly but surely bringing China’s favored policy outcomes closer to realization.

You would be forgiven if you think this story is about Taiwan, but it isn’t. It’s actually about another island archipelago just to its south: the Philippines. And the ever-increasing danger to this Asian nation from Beijing is perhaps even more concerning for the United States than the threats to Taiwan.

This trend menacingly accelerated just last week, when eight Chinese Coast Guard vessels attacked a two-boat Philippine naval-resupply mission to the Second Thomas Shoal, a disputed atoll firmly within Manila’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). In that brazen assault, Chinese military personnel were armed with various weapons, including axes and knives, while their counterparts were unarmed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20711/the-russians-are-coming\

The Russians are coming. Again.

In a dramatic reminder that the Russians are seeking to intimidate the White House and launch a second chapter of the Cold War, a Russian nuclear-powered submarine, along with an accompanying flotilla of warships, recently spent five days visiting Cuba. In the event, the Oval Office missed the point; several of these vessels can deploy nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

Published reports suggest the Biden Administration’s response is studied indifference, telling reporters that missile test firings off the Florida coast by the Russian vessels were routine.

Hardly.

Putin’s navy is reminding the United States that it has recaptured the Soviet Union’s ability to project naval power where and when it wants. And by extension, that if it wishes to send a potent reminder that it has the coordinates of America’s cities if it ever came to unleashing the unimaginable, it doesn’t need to base ballistic missiles in Cuba.

This display of military power by an adversary on the march is not something that has gone unnoticed by the American public. In a recent poll conducted by McLaughlin Associates, it becomes clear that our citizens are seeking strong, resolute, and unequivocal national leadership at a time of historic international tensions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/07/the-world-needs-the-west/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Reestablishing deterrence in a dangerous world

The world keeps getting more dangerous. It is now grappling with war in Ukraine; China’s increasingly bellicose actions in the South China Sea and its little-talked-about nuclear proliferation; and Iranian aggression that threatens the existence of Israel, the lives of U.S. forces and their allies in the Middle East, and the security of global shipping lanes. All of this is happening against the background of a project long held by authoritarian regimes, including Russia and China, to undermine the liberal order that has guaranteed peace in most of the West since World War II. The West needs to take seriously the threat. In response, it should double down on its investments in alliances, national-defense bases, and military institutions. Otherwise, it will learn the hard way how a steady erosion of military funding can break down deterrence and cause problems that ramify throughout the world, undermining security.

The liberal peace project was conceived after the horrors of the First World War but didn’t reach maturity until a quarter of a century later, in post–World War II Europe and North America. This resulting geopolitical order has largely held intact for the last 80 years, but now these revisionist powers are attempting to supplant it and develop an international regime more beneficial to their own interests. As they attempt to navigate these challenges, liberal democracies are struggling to reinforce military deterrence where prudent.

One large reason for that struggle is the prolonged “peace dividend” after the Cold War, which led many European nations to reduce national-defense spending by inordinate amounts. No longer did the specter of the Soviet Union threaten transatlantic security, and welfare states were established almost overnight, their budgets outstripping defense spending many times over. This led over the last 20 to 30 years to a military-capability erosion among many Western democracies, and thereby to the lack of a credible deterrent. Authoritarian states have sensed this decline and adjusted their force postures to exploit it. Russia’s invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022 are examples, as is China’s increasingly aggressive behavior throughout the Indo-Pacific and its illegitimate territorial expansionism in the South China Sea.

There are strong historical parallels in the last century to modern-day Ukraine and the South China Sea. A rejuvenated and expansionist Germany sought to sweep across much of central and western Europe in the 1930s. It was allowed to do so in part because leaders in London and Washington were at first naïve about its intentions. Today’s authoritarian dictatorships are similarly taking advantage of what is at best a perceived Western indifference to global affairs and turn toward isolationist foreign policy, and at worst a perceived Western military and diplomatic weakness. Whatever their exact assessment of the West at present, Moscow and Beijing are trying to rewrite historical borders much as last century’s fascist dictators did.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/23/loose-talk-about-the-end-of-everything/

After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.”

No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks.

But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement—and why now?

Rarely has the global rhetoric of mass annihilation reached such a crescendo as the present, as existential wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza.

In particular, Putin at least believes that he is finally winning the Ukraine conflict. Xi seems to assume that conventional ascendant Chinese military power in the South China Sea has finally made the absorption of Taiwan practicable.

They both believe that the only impediment to their victories would be an intervention from the U.S. and the NATO alliance, a conflict that could descend into mutual threats to resort to nuclear weapons.

Thus the recent warnings of Xi and Putin.

Almost monthly, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un continues his weary threats to use his nuclear arsenal to destroy South Korea or Japan.

A similarly monotonous, pro-Hamas Turkish president, Recep Erdogan, regularly threatens Armenians with crazy talk of repeating the “mission of our grandfathers.” And he occasionally warns Israelis and Greeks that they may one day wake up to Turkish missiles raining down upon their cities.