Today's Belle

Russia signed on to the Budapest Agreement in the early 90s, promising to assure Ukraine's security.

Russia signed on to Article 147 of the Geneva Conventions - the part that makes it a war crime to attack civilians and civilian infrastructure. 

Told Ya

Is this the waste fraud and abuse

we're so worried about?

Maybe what Republicans are planning on is the removal of millions of people who cost more than they produce. So guys like Elon just want them gone. After all, you're either an asset or a liability. Nothing more. Am I right?

They're working to bring about a final solution to the problems of overpopulation.

There's just too many of "those people".

Musk’s Purges Suddenly Take a Horrific Turn—and Wreck an Ugly MAGA Lie

We can now be depressingly confident that their mass cuts are killing people.

It has a dry, bureaucratic name, but Ready to Use Therapeutic Food has functioned for over a decade as a lifeline for countless starving children around the globe. Manufactured in the United States and distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s a paste made of peanuts, milk, and vitamins that alleviates a form of acute malnutrition known as “severe wasting.”

Now the Trump administration has officially terminated a number of current contracts struck by USAID for this lifesaving nutrition, contracts that had called for the paste to be delivered to hundreds of thousands of children, most in Africa, according to the Georgia-based nonprofit set to deliver them, Mana Nutrition.

Mark Moore, the CEO of Mana, says ready-to-move boxes of the paste are now piled up in a Georgia warehouse and may never be shipped abroad. “If these contracts are not reinstated, there is no doubt children will die,” Moore told me.

This comes mere days after I reported that these shipments had been thrown into doubt because Trump’s mass firings at USAID included employees overseeing the latest round of contracts.

The nixed arrangements are just a handful of hundreds canceled amid the Trump administration’s appalling decision this week to terminate 90 percent of USAID’s foreign aid contracts. As the details of these cancellations have started trickling out, one thing is clear. This latest turn has wrecked the narrative that Trump and his MAGA propagandists have tried to spin about these cuts—they’re targeting “wokeness” inside USAID, they’re about “waste and fraud,” they’re designed to achieve “efficiency.” All of it has been unmasked as absolute nonsense.

The full extent of the damage from these cuts—originally set in motion by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—is not yet known. But Atul Gawande, a surgeon who formerly led USAID’s global health initiatives, has established, via communications with partners that work with USAID, a list of contracts that were terminated. Among them are programs that offer natal care for mothers and children, that provide netting and other equipment to prevent the spread of malaria, that work to thwart the spread of Ebola and bird flu in dozens of countries, and much more. The cancellations will nix programs that helped tens of millions of people, Gawande notes.

“This is going to be a massive loss of life overall,” Gawande told me in an interview. “Children are likely already dying, and will clearly be dying in large numbers.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times has developed a long list of other terminated contracts, which include programs preventing the spread of polio, treating HIV and tuberculosis, ensuring clean drinking water in war-torn regions, and buttressing public health in many other ways. Tens of millions of people benefited; now they will not.

The details of the canceled Mana contracts illustrate the point. RUTF, the sweet nutritional peanut paste that Mana manufactures, is safe for ingestion by children who are suffering acute nutritional deprivation or are on the verge of starving to death. It comes in foil packets that don’t need refrigeration, making it easy to distribute in regions suffering extreme deprivation. RUTF is widely hailed as an extraordinary innovation in feeding children facing starvation and death.

According to Moore, the cancellation of Mana’s latest contracts will mean that around 300,000 kids, mostly in Africa, don’t get aid packets that Congress intended for them. But we, too, are the losers: This paste is manufactured by American workers, and made of peanuts and dairy grown by American farmers, in a spreading of American bounty and goodwill that has long had bipartisan support. Now it’s piled up in a warehouse in Savannah, unshipped and uneaten.

All of this lays waste to the spin that Trumpworld has employed to defend the dismantling of USAID. For instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed all along that “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” will be spared. By any reasonable standard, many of the contracts that have just been canceled qualify as just that.

What’s more, there is no longer any way to pretend any of this is about “efficiency” or “good management.” Aid like this is incredibly cost-effective. Not only does foreign aid constitute a tiny portion of our budget; things like RUTF cost a relative pittance, but they spread a positive image of the U.S. abroad and each treatment can save a child’s life.

Then there’s Rubio’s claim earlier this month that foreign aid is merely being reviewed to ensure that only “dumb” aid gets cut. In reality, this “review” process has been appallingly terrible even from a management perspective. Assuming it’s true that the administration does intend to restore some of these contracts—which is difficult to believe—then why did this review process require them to be suspended in the first place?

Even if some of these suspensions do turn out to be temporary, they will nonetheless have terrible consequences. Programs like these rely on complex supply chains, involving workers in the U.S. and abroad. They require continued delivery of supplies and sustained administering over time. But many people benefiting from ongoing treatments at this moment have now been “completely abandoned,” Gawande said.

“They’re pausing a plane in midflight, and firing the crew, then trying to tell us that it’s not going to be a catastrophe,” Gawande told me. “Terminating the contracts means we’re not investing in a wind-down at all.”

The fact that these cuts were handled this way—wantonly and recklessly—tells us everything we need to know about the administration’s true goal: To broadcast a clear message to the world that we are now shrugging off any sense of obligation to the global poor. As Awande put it: “They’re almost gleefully celebrating the destruction of these programs.”

America's Twilight

The end of the West may be nigh

LONDON, Feb 10 (Reuters Breakingviews) - China’s rise in recent decades had already put the world’s rich democracies on the defensive. Now Donald Trump is swinging a wrecking ball at the alliances, values and institutions that underpin Western power. While it may be possible to salvage something, the omens are not good.

The West is less a geographical definition than a geopolitical force and a set of values. It has brought together not just the rich democracies of North America and Europe but also countries such as Japan in a set of overlapping pacts and treaties. Underpinning these have been mutual interests and ideas such as the rule of law, free trade, democracy, standing up to tyranny and working together to solve global problems such as climate change.

This ethos has dominated the world since World War Two - and, even more so, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though its members have often not lived up to its values, it created the conditions for peace and economic growth in large parts of the world. But its geopolitical pre-eminence started to fray when the United States led an unwise invasion of Iraq in 2003, while its economic supremacy eroded after the global financial crisis in 2008.
Trump was always going to be a disruptive force. But the returning U.S. president has pummelled the international order with an unexpected vigour in the weeks since he moved back into the Oval Office. The former real estate developer had already hinted that he would use military force to annex Greenland, which is a member of the NATO defence alliance, and take over the Panama Canal. He has also threatened tariffs against the European Union and Canada, and pushed for the latter to become part of the United States. Most strikingly, he declared last week that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, after its two million Palestinians inhabitants were permanently resettled elsewhere. Such a project could violate international law.

As if that’s not enough, Trump has ordered the United States to pull out of the World Health Organization, an international tax treaty and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement for a second time. He is imposing sanctions on people who work for the International Criminal Court. His administration plans to slash USAID, the humanitarian aid agency that has been a key component of U.S. attempts to woo developing countries since the 1960s, and has ordered a review, opens new tab of U.S. support for all international organisations.
The rest of the West is too weak to stand up to him. This is especially so in Europe, which desperately needs U.S. military support to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion. It is also true of Japan and South Korea, which cannot defend themselves against China and North Korea respectively without American help.

NOT DEAD YET

The West could yet survive this barrage. Trump’s bark may be worse than his bite. Last week he temporarily pulled back from imposing tariffs on Canada as well as Mexico in return for concessions on border and crime enforcement.

If the U.S. president is using threats to negotiate better deals for America, he may not carry out some of his more extravagant plans. But bullying allies and riding roughshod over international norms still weakens the West.

Trump could also confound doubters and stand by Kyiv. His latest idea is that Ukraine should supply the United States with rare earth minerals as payment for supporting its war effort.
What happens in Ukraine is critical. If Trump abandons it and Russia then bullies it into a miserable peace deal, that could be the final blow for the West. But if the president stands by Kyiv and helps force some reasonable solution, the West could limp on to fight another day.

Another hope is that the United States will go back to its allies and old values after the current president leaves office. But with right-wing nationalism on the rise throughout the West, Trumpism looks more like part of a trend than an aberration.

REST OF THE WEST

If the United States is no longer interested in the West and its values, the remaining countries could try to soldier on alone. The EU could build up its defences, as its leaders promised last week. The United Kingdom could form a stronger security pact with the EU, as it too pledged, opens new tab last week. The European countries could then cut economic and other deals with Japan, Canada, Australia and South Korea.

The rest of the West could reach out to middle powers such as India and Indonesia to negotiate trade and other pacts, as the EU has just done with the Mercosur countries of South America. It could eventually form more friendly relations with China.

Creating such a patchwork quilt would have to surmount a host of hurdles. For a start, Europe cannot do anything Trump would view as hostile, such as cosying up to China. There also should be no question of Europe forming more friendly relations with Beijing while it supports Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Even if the war reaches a reasonable end, it will be hard to stitch together a “mini-West” without the United States, whose economic output of $28 trillion, opens new tab in 2023 was almost as large as the rest of the West put together. The only realistic alternative pole around which countries could rally is the EU.

But the rise of right-wing nationalism in many of its member states may stymie initiatives to do more at an EU level - and a similar phenomenon in the UK may complicate efforts to bring Britain closer to Europe.

The rest of the West should try to protect whatever it can from Trump’s wrecking ball. But the chances of success do not look great.

By Their Own Reckoning

For decades, Republicans have publicly assumed "the left" is (eg) all in favor of bad guys breaking into everybody's houses and molesting their wives and babies, just because we'd like to see a little sanity in the nation's gun laws.

So yeehaw and away we go.

Being adamantly against USAID, Republicans are obviously Pro International Terrorism now.

But here's the difference:

Sensible gun laws save us all time and effort and money, while not hindering my ability to defend my castle.

But killing off USAID does encourage terrorists to blow us up.

Because when we turn our back on hungry dying children, we leave the door wide open for dark-hearted thugs to radicalize those kids' parents and siblings and others - turning at least some of them into suicide bombers.

And those terrorists will be going after American interests, which the corporations will cry about and insist we send in the US military to "protect" those precious capitalist endeavors - which will cost us a helluva lot more than the few billion that USAID is costing us now.

How the fuck does that make "good business sense"?

An Observation

Paraphrasing:

You may have noticed that even back when Republicans were in favor of USAID, they never said we should do it because it's the right thing to do.

Maybe that's what makes it so easy to get them to do the wrong thing now.

Oy

If fentanyl is the big bad bugbear, and we're seizing a thousand times more of the stuff at the southern border than we are at the northern border, has anybody stopped to think that maybe the Canadian border is where we need to send the troops?

BTW - if the poundage is correct, then Canada's number is not 1%. It's 0.1%

But let's stick to the theatrics at hand.

I think Scheinbaum threw Trump a bone. She gave him an off ramp. Sending 10,000 Mexican Guardsmen to the border is a fine and dandy gesture, but what exactly is their mission? She may just be sending them a little camping trip.

• What're they trained to do?
• Do they really have 10,000 weekend warriors who know how to do interdiction work?
• How many guys per border mile is that? *
• 10,000 guys to cover 2,000 miles of border, 24/7?

(* Working round-the-clock shifts, that's 1 guy every ⅔ of a mile - assuming all the cooks and mechanics and truck drivers are on the line too)

And let's not ignore the condescension of it all. Big Daddy Trump and Little Caesar Rubio are going to dictate terms?

I'm all for playing hardball whenever and wherever it's necessary, but this is like - we've been living on this block for a really long time, and we were getting along together pretty well, but now we've got this new temporary manager throwing rocks at the neighbors and trying to push everybody around.

Lastly - we keep seeing every problem from on the supply side. If we could our heads out of our asses for a minute, we might see that the demand for drugs here in USAmerica Inc is what keeps the supply coming in.

Lower demand = lower price

Lower price = lower reward for the same risk

Higher risk aversion = even lower price

Low enough price = very little supply

The same can be applied to our "immigrant problem". We're running around arresting the undocumented workers, but we let their employers slide.

Put a few white-boy business owners in prison for just a few months, and watch this shit practically disappear - as the pay for regular workin' folks goes up.

Trump pauses Mexico tariffs for one month after agreement on border troops

Key Points

• President Donald Trump paused for a month new 25% tariffs on goods entering the United States from Mexico.
• Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to immediately send 10,000 soldiers to her country’s border to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl and other drugs.
• The announcement came two days after Trump slapped 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, as well as a 10% tariff on goods imported from China.
• Trump said there will be Mexican officials, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick will negotiate on tariffs.

President Donald Trump on Monday said he is pausing for one month his new 25% tariffs on goods imported from Mexico after that country’s president agreed to immediately send 10,000 soldiers to the U.S. border to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico.

Trump in a social media post said that during the pause “we will have negotiations” on the tariffs “headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and high-level Representatives of Mexico.”

He also said “I look forward to participating in those negotiations” with Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum “as we attempt to achieve a ‘deal’ between our two Countries.”

The announcement came two days after Trump slapped 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and 10% tariffs on goods imported from China.

Sheinbaum over the weekend threatened retaliatory tariffs on goods imported from the United States, and non-tariff measures, but had not disclosed the rate for the tariffs.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday night that his country would implement a 25% tariff against $155 billion in U.S. goods in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs, which had been announced hours earlier.

China has said it will challenge the tariffs at the World Trade Organization.

U.S. stocks, which had opened trading lower Monday, regained most of those losses on news of the pause of the tariffs on goods from Mexico.

Trump and Sheinbaum spoke Monday morning ahead of the announcement of the pause.

Both he and Sheinbaum said that the Mexican National Guard troops that she is sending to the border with the U.S. will have the mission of halting drug trafficking from Mexico, particularly that of the deadly opioid fentanyl.

Trump also wrote that the Mexican troops will aim to stop the flow “of migrants into our Country.”

Sheinbaum first disclosed the pause on the tariffs on Mexico in a post on the X social media site.

“We had a good conversation with President Trump with great respect for our relationship and sovereignty; we reached a series of agreements,” Sheinbaum wrote in the tweet, according to a translation from Spanish.

She also wrote, “The United States is committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”

Trump had not mentioned a commitment to stem the flow of weapons in his Truth Social post about his conversation with Sheinbaum.

At a news conference Monday morning, Sheinbaum was asked whether the issue of migrants and deportations from the U.S. was addressed during her call with Trump.

“We will always support and defend them. Always,” Sheinbaum answered.

She also said Mexican officials in discussions with the U.S. State Department are “working hard to defend our Mexican brothers and sisters.”

Same As Last Time

In 2017, Trump's first few phone calls to world leaders were borderline disastrous.

He picked a fight with the Australian PM.

And then he tried to play WWE Publicist with Mexico's president.

It was all ridiculous, and he made very few calls to anyone else but his buddies in the Kremlin and Beijing.

And here we go again.

Trump’s calls with British leaders reportedly left staff crying from laughter

Trump has not yet spoken with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer since taking office on Monday

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President Donald Trump’s phone conversations with the two British prime ministers who served during his first term were apparently so madcap that they left staff at Number 10 Downing Street in tears.

According to a report in Politico, any conversation between the then-president and the two occupants of Number 10 from 2017 to 2021 — Theresa May and Boris Johnson — were appointment listening for civil servants and other aides in the PM’s orbit, with staff making a point to gather in a secure room or the prime minister’s private study to hear them speak with the American leader.

One former Downing Street source described the conversations as “extraordinary” and “brilliant” — the latter meant more sarcastically — and said those who were present were “there with tears [of] laughter” because the calls were “hilarious.”

Another former British government official who worked in Number 10 at the time said any planned agenda for the arranged call between the two leaders would “quite quickly fall by the wayside” because Trump would simply change the subject to whatever was on his mind.

Trump would reportedly go off on wide-ranging and long-winded tangents on a variety of subjects close to his heart but not exactly germane to the Anglo-American Special Relationship, including his hatred of wind turbines, his Scottish golf property, or matters that prime ministers simply could not discuss because they were the subject of court proceedings.

“They were never what you wanted them to be about, broadly. If you were calling about trade or Israel or something, it would always go off beam,” said another former government official, who added that the American president would go so far as to ask about the health of Queen Elizabeth II, the reigning monarch at the time.

Boris Johnson shakes hands with Donald Trump
Boris Johnson shakes hands with Donald Trump (PA Archive)
Trump famously got on well with the second of two prime ministers during his term, Boris Johnson, with whom he is understood to have felt a kindred spirit because both men were seen as disrupters and outsiders.

He did not have feelings quite as warm for Johnson’s predecessor May, who was the second woman in history to lead the British government.

According to former Trump administration sources, the rift was due to May’s cautious attitude towards the U.K.’s exit from the European Union, plus Trump’s decidedly retrograde attitude towards women in general.

The newly-minted 47th president has yet to conduct his first leader-to-leader call with the current prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, though he met with Starmer for dinner alongside Foreign Secretary David Lammy last September while he was running his presidential campaign.

They spoke by phone on December 18 after Trump won the election, but the fact that details from that call leaked to the press shortly thereafter has put a chill on the vibes between Number 10 and the White House. A White House official did not respond to a query from The Independent on when the two leaders might speak next.

Today's Beau

This seems vaguely important.

Ukraine

Retired 3-star Ben Hodges seems like such a straight-shooter.

"It (defending Ukraine) matters, not because we love the people, but because of where it sits on the map. If we think strategically about the Black Sea Region, we'll be a lot more clever with our interactions with our Turkish ally..." and we can better understand the importance of other countries like Georgia and Romania, etc.

For myself, I do have an emotional connection with Ukraine because I have a familial connection there. And while I don't know any indigenous Ukrainians, I definitely feel a pretty strong bond, which goes along with, and strengthens my support for the strategic aspects of this big fuckin' mess that Putin's ego has blundered us all into.

Слава Україні

🌎🌏🌍 ❤️ 🇺🇦

Ukraine, Russia, China

Putin fucked up in various ways, aside from some pretty dumbass assumptions that the Ukrainians would just roll over and play dead.

• He didn't bring enough guys

You need a 3:1 advantage in numbers of invaders-to-invadees

You need 1 Russian occupier for every 50 Ukrainian occupy-ees

• He didn't think his own brand of corruption had taken hold in the Russian military almost top to bottom, side to side, and front to back
• He didn't figure on his little excursion becoming a unifying force for NATO
• As rich as he is, he hadn't stolen enough to survive what looks like it could be years of crippling economic sanctions

China is watching this clusterfuck closely, knowing it's practically a lead pipe cinch that Vlad will not survive it.

Xi would need at least 500,000 guys to invade (probably more because it's an amphibious landing), and he'd have to leave all of them on Taiwan for years as an occupying force.

Mike's Guess:

The need to reduce the number of occupation troops is what drives the inevitable slaughter of the occupied country's population, as well as the push to keep throwing more of your own people into the meat grinder. For the guy calling the shots, it becomes a fairly simple matter of "better them than me".

War has always been the stupidest fuckin' thing humans do. And it's even stupider now.

Grey Zone Tactics - Mar 2022

Question 1. How Does China View Competition in the Gray Zone?

Chinese analysts view gray zone actions as measures that powerful countries have employed both historically and in recent decades that are beyond normal diplomacy and other traditional approaches to statecraft but short of direct use of military force for escalation or a conflict. While Chinese scholars do not typically use the term gray zone to describe Chinese gray zone activities, the Chinese conceptualization of military operations other than war (MOOTW) is helpful for understanding how China may use its military for such activities. Chinese analysts characterize coercive or confrontational external-facing MOOTW as stability maintenance, rights protection, or security and guarding operations. China believes that MOOTW should also leverage nonmilitary actors and means.

Question 2. What Drives and Enables Chinese Use of Gray Zone Tactics?

Chinese activities in the gray zone support PRC leadership's overarching domestic, economic, foreign policy, and security objectives in the Indo-Pacific, which Beijing views as China's priority region. Gray zone activities balance China's pursuit of a more favorable external environment by altering the regional status quo in its favor with a desire to act below the threshold of a militarized response from the United States or China's neighbors. Recent developments have provided an increasingly varied toolkit for pressuring other countries across four key domains: geopolitical, economic, military, and cyber/IO. These developments are laws and regulations enabling Beijing to harness nongovernmental personnel and assets growing Chinese geopolitical, economic, and military power and influence vis-à-vis other countries increasing linkages between China's military development and economic growth the integration of military and paramilitary forces.

Question 3. How Does China Employ Gray Zone Tactics?

Overall, China tailors its gray zone activities to the target and has an increasing variety and number of more-coercive tools. Beijing layers the use of multiple gray zone tactics to pressure allies and partners, particularly on issues related to China's core interests. Combining multiple geopolitical, economic, military, and cyber/IO activities means that China no longer has to rely on significant escalation in any single domain and, if needed, can sequence actions to apply pressure in nonmilitary domains before resorting to use of military activity. China also appears to be more cautious and selective in using high-profile gray zone tactics against more-capable countries—for instance, employing a smaller variety of tactics against Japan and India than against Vietnam and the Philippines.

China has increasingly leveraged military tactics, and there is no evidence to suggest that China will use fewer military tactics as its overall military capabilities grow or that improved bilateral relations will discourage China from pressing its territorial claims. Likewise, there is little reason to believe that China will use fewer military gray zone tactics as its geopolitical or economic power increases. China has recently relied heavily on air- and maritime-domain tactics, for example.

China exercises caution in its use of high-profile, bilateral geopolitical and economic tactics and has become more active in wielding its influence in international institutions or via third-party actors. Since at least 2013, China has expanded its involvement on the ground in select regions, recruiting local proxies and engaging in various information efforts. In terms of nonmilitary tactics, China uses geopolitical and bilateral tactics most often.

Question 4. Which PRC Tactics Could the United States Prioritize Countering?

Given the wide range of PRC gray zone tactics and the diverse collection of allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, the United States faces the difficult task of determining how to prioritize which PRC activities to counter. The U.S. government, experts, and academics do not currently agree on how to assess which PRC gray zone tactics are most problematic. Policymakers could consider aggregating across three different criteria: (1) the extent to which PRC tactics undermine U.S. objectives and interests in the Indo-Pacific region, (2) how difficult it is for allies and partners to respond to and counter tactics, and (3) how widely China uses specific tactics (against one or multiple allies and partners).

While there are many ways to combine the three indicators, the most balanced approach might be to weight U.S. objectives and interests equally with allied and partner concerns (40 percent each) and the prevalence of PRC tactics less (20 percent). Based on this aggregate method, ten of the 20 most-problematic PRC tactics are military activities that the People's Liberation Army or Chinese paramilitary actors engage in, with many of the tactics involving operations near or in disputed territories. Other military tactics include China engaging in highly publicized and large-scale, cross-service military exercises; establishing military bases or potential dual-use facilities in neighboring countries to threaten a target; and building up or acquiring PRC military capabilities against targets.

Geopolitical, economic, and cyber/IO tactics also ranked among the top 20. While the most-problematic PRC activities were international geopolitical and grassroots economic tactics, other PRC economic activities and grassroots cyber/IO activities in the targeted region were also problematic. Relative to the other tactics, grassroots geopolitical activities and bilateral cyber/IO activities have been less challenging. These findings suggest that the United States should devote significant effort to helping U.S. allies and partners counter PRC international geopolitical and economic tactics (particularly PRC economic activity in the target region or in disputed regions) and address grassroots cyber/IO activities.

Recommendations

• The U.S. government should hold gray zone scenario discussions with key allies and partners to better understand their concerns, responses, and needs.
• The National Security Council or the U.S. Department of State should identify a set of criteria to determine the most-problematic PRC gray zone tactics to counter via whole-of-government efforts.
• The United States could prioritize countering Chinese activities in disputed territories and responding to PRC geopolitical international and economic tactics.
• The U.S. Department of Defense should develop gray zone plans similar to existing operational plans but focused on responding to a range of more-escalatory PRC gray zone scenarios.
• The U.S. Air Force should continue to build out intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific and improve regional cyberdefense capabilities to increase domain awareness, identify and attribute PRC activities, and counter PRC cyber/IO tactics.

BETTER MEN THAN THESE

HAVE BEEN TRYING

TO CONQUER THE WORLD

FOR 2,000 GENERATIONS.

AND THE WORLD REMAINS UNDEFEATED

A Message

My dear friend, President Xi -

Don't fuck with me.

Best Regards,

Joe

Today's Daddy State Bozo

"We are going to start killing people in Mexico who are killing Americans, because they are terrorists. We do it all over the world every night. We have all of the legal authority we need to go after these drug cartels if we change our laws.” --US Sen Lindsey Graham

A sitting US Senator is suggesting we make deadly incursions inside another country's sovereign borders, issuing death threats against the citizens of a foreign nation - a nation which is an important ally and trading partner.

Note: he makes a very Daddy State move, ie: "Let's change US law in order to make the crime of murdering Mexican citizens acceptable". And he does it after the operative phrase, "... start killing people in Mexico ..." which serves two purposes.

1. It gives him cover - he can rant and rave for the benefit of the MAGA gang, and still be relatively assured that nothing he tells them he wants to do will ever be done
2. It plants the seed - if the rabble raise a big enough stink, he can claim leadership on the issue.

Will there be consequences?

Hint: he has the magic (R) next to his name.

Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game

with more than 200 players.

They're all cheating,

and they all know they're all cheating.

The calculus is never simple.

The Big Stick

Janet Yellen speaks to the issue plainly and clearly.

Yellen Calls for More Ukraine Support and Warns China Against Helping Russia

Ahead of a meeting of G20 finance ministers, the Treasury secretary offered a dark assessment of Russia’s economy and warned China of the consequences of helping Moscow skirt U.S. sanctions.

BENGALURU, India — Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Thursday that the United States would redouble its efforts to marshal global support to help Ukraine and warned that China would face repercussions if it helped Russia evade American sanctions.

She spoke as top policymakers from around the world gathered in southern India for a meeting that is expected to focus largely on accelerating a global economic recovery after three years of international crises. The warning to China underscores how the impact of the war continues to reverberate, straining ties between the world’s two largest economies as they were attempting to stabilize their relationship.

“We have made clear that providing material support to Russia or assistance with any kind of systemic sanctions evasion would be a very serious concern for us,” Ms. Yellen said. “We will certainly continue to make clear to the Chinese government and the companies and banks in their jurisdiction about what the rules are regarding our sanctions and the serious consequences they would face for violating them.”

Ms. Yellen declined to describe specific U.S. intelligence about Russian attempts to avoid sanctions but the Treasury Department has pointed to attempts by Russia to seek assistance from China to supply it with items such as semiconductors which face trade restrictions.

Trade data shows that China, along with countries including Turkey and some former Soviet republics, has stepped in to provide Russia with products that civilians or armed forces could use, including raw materials, smartphones, vehicles and computer chips. Biden administration officials have expressed concern that China could provide Russia with lethal weapons, however China does not appear to have done so yet.

The United States has cracked down on some of the companies and organizations supplying goods and services to Russia. In January, it imposed sanctions on a Chinese company that had provided satellite imagery to the Wagner mercenary group, which has played a large role in the battle for eastern Ukraine. In December, it added two Chinese research institutes to a list of entities that supply the Russian military, which will restrict their access to U.S. technology.

On Thursday, Ms. Yellen made clear that the United States would crack down on sanctions evasion. “We are seeking to strengthen sanctions and to make sure we address violations of sanctions,” she said.

The effectiveness of sanctions on Russia continues to be a subject of intense debate, as recent forecasts from the International Monetary Fund suggested that its economy is performing better than expected.

But Ms. Yellen offered a dark assessment of Russia’s economy, arguing that sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western nations were working to isolate the Kremlin, drain the country of talent and sap its productive capacity. Still, the United States continues to view the conflict as the biggest threat to the global economy, and Ms. Yellen made clear that the Biden administration is prepared to continue punishing Russia for its incursion.

Ms. Yellen said that the United States plans to unveil additional sanctions on Russia and that it is working with its allies to devise ways to tighten restrictions already in place.

“We will stand with Ukraine in its fight — for as long as it takes,” Ms. Yellen said at a news conference as finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations, which include Russia and China, convened for two days of meetings.

The Treasury secretary said that the United States had already provided more than $46 billion in security, economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and that another $10 billion in economic support would be delivered in the coming months. Ms. Yellen also called on the I.M.F. to “move swiftly” with a fully financed loan package for Ukraine. The I.M.F. last year approved more than $1 billion in emergency financing to Ukraine to mitigate the economic impact of the war.

“Continued, robust support for Ukraine will be a major topic of discussion during my time here in India,” Ms. Yellen said.

The United States hopes to include a condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine in the joint statement, or communiqué, that the finance ministers are set to release later this week. However, it is not clear if a decisive statement will be possible because Russia is a member of the G20 and India, which is hosting the event, continues to buy large quantities of Russian oil.

Despite the urgency to address the crisis in Ukraine, Ms. Yellen offered an upbeat assessment of the global economy, which has begun to recover. While she acknowledged that headwinds remained, she said the world was on more stable footing than last fall, when many were forecasting a global recession.

“It’s fair to say that the global economy is in a better place today than many predicted just a few months ago,” Ms. Yellen said, pointing to a recent global growth upgrade from the I.M.F.

She added that the United States economy was proving to be resilient, with inflation moderating while the labor market remains strong.

During their meetings on Friday and Saturday, finance ministers are also expected to discuss ways to alleviate the debt crises facing many developing countries. Officials are also expected to put pressure on China, which has become one of the world’s largest creditors, to demonstrate more willingness to let more countries restructure their debt.

“I will continue to push for all bilateral official creditors, including China, to participate in meaningful debt treatments for developing countries and emerging markets in distress,” Ms. Yellen said.

It was unclear if Ms. Yellen would have any meetings with Chinese officials this week. She said that keeping lines of communication open about macroeconomic issues remained important.

“I certainly expect that we will resume discussions,” Ms. Yellen said, adding, “I don’t have a specific time frame in mind but I think it’s important to do so.”

Today's Reddit

Here at USAmerica, we're never short on ideas - especially when it comes to fucking things up.

Sometimes we fuck something up because we need to unfuck it in order for somebody's brother-in-law to get out from under a debt that he couldn't fucking handle in the first fucking place and everybody fucking knew it, but it didn't fucking matter because he was married to the sister of some random Defense Department Undersecretary, so he was always going to land on his feet, and he always fucking knew that.

Sometimes we fuck something up because "Gee, it seemed like a good idea a the time ..."

Anyway. Poppy Bush and His Merry Adventures in Panama because Monroe Doctrine, bitch.

A Minor Win

A quiet little thing that makes peace in the Middle East a tiny bit more probable.

(pay wall)

Opinion
Biden just pulled off a big diplomatic victory — and almost no one noticed

International diplomacy is inherently difficult, usually unglamorous and often unsuccessful — but nevertheless essential. The Biden administration has seen for itself how hard it can be to achieve results: It has failed to entice Iran back into the nuclear deal or to convince Saudi Arabia to increase oil production. But last week the administration’s diplomacy hit pay dirt — and almost no one noticed.

On Oct. 11, Israel and Lebanon announced an agreement that would demarcate their maritime boundary. This sounds narrow and technical but is a major achievement given that the two countries have been formally at war since 1948. (And that has sometimes led to actual military conflict — most recently in 2006.) The two countries don’t have an internationally recognized land border, and they have not had a maritime border, either. That has been an invitation to conflict and an impediment to the exploitation of the large natural gas fields off their coasts.

Israel has been producing offshore natural gas for years, but its latest field — known as Karish — lies perilously close to the disputed maritime boundary with Lebanon. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to attack Israel’s oil rig in the area. Lebanon, for its part, has not been able to extract any natural gas at all because oil companies don’t want to drill in disputed areas. That natural gas is desperately needed by a country in economic meltdown whose citizens receive only an hour or two of power every day from the electrical grid.

U.S. administrations have been trying for a decade to broker an agreement — with no luck. It was hard to make progress, given that officials of these warring states refuse to be in the same room with each other. Lebanon does not even recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Enter Amos J. Hochstein, a former Senate staffer, energy industry executive and veteran of the Obama State Department who is the presidential coordinator for energy security. He launched a fresh round of shuttle diplomacy at the beginning of the year, commuting from Tel Aviv to Beirut — a trip that usually required stopovers in a third country because there are no direct air or road links between Israel and Lebanon. “I’ve worked a lot of hard problems,” he told me. “This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

He noted that “suspicion is really extreme on both sides” and the timing hardly appeared propitious: Israel is led by a weak caretaker government as one election after another fails to produce a durable majority. Lebanon is perpetually divided among different religious groups and in recent years has been on the brink of economic and political collapse.

Hochstein told me, in a telephone interview, that he changed the dynamics by going from asking who would win and who would lose under any agreement to asking how both countries could safeguard their vital interests. Israel’s government, led by centrist Prime Minister Yair Lapid, made concessions on the boundary line. Lebanon’s government, led by President Michel Aoun, recognized Israel’s control of a three-mile stretch of water close to shore and agreed to pay Israel its share of the proceeds from gas taken from the Israeli side the Qana Field, which lies in both countries’ exclusive economic zones. (The payments will go through an intermediary, the French energy company Total.)

The resulting deal was hailed as “historic” by both sides. Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is trying to return to power in the Nov. 1 election, predictably denounced it as a “disgraceful surrender.” It was also attacked by the former U.S. negotiator who tried and failed to get a deal in the Trump administration.

But this looks very much like a case of “sour grapes,” as my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Martin Indyk noted. Trump and Netanyahu couldn’t get a deal done; Biden and Lapid did. Israel’s security establishment is firmly in favor of the deal not only because it will help safeguard Israel’s natural gas fields but also because it will help bolster the Lebanese government and economy. Israel does not want a failed state next door.

This agreement is not as dramatic as the Abraham Accords struck under the Trump administration in which three Arab states (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco) recognized Israel. But it is, in some ways, even more surprising.

The UAE, Morocco and Bahrain weren’t at war with Israel. Hezbollah, the Iran-allied Lebanese militant group, by contrast, has long been, and remains, one of Israel’s main security threats. It is also the most powerful political entity in Lebanon with a de facto veto over government decisions. So, it’s pretty extraordinary that Hezbollah is allowing the Lebanese government to sign a deal that could turn Israel and Lebanon into business partners. “Lebanon has, for the first time, entered a kind of de facto recognition of Israel and its borders,” writes Daniel B. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.

That’s something for which the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit — just as the Trump administration deserved credit for the Abraham Accords. It just goes to show that diplomacy does pay off sometimes — even if we don’t always give it the attention it deserves.

Classic America

Showing what has to be in the top 5 examples of Americans' strangle-hold on the overly obvious is this headline at Brookings:

The American people’s message to President Biden about Ukraine—get tougher but don’t risk war with Russia

The latest survey of public opinion about the conflict in Ukraine presents a paradox. On the one hand, Americans say that they want President Biden to get tougher with Russia. On the other hand, their views about specific policies precisely track with the administration’s stance. Americans want the administration to do what the administration is already doing, and they do not want the administration to take the additional steps that it has already rejected.

For example, more than six in ten Americans favor imposing sanctions on Russia, providing financial aid to Ukraine, and sending weapons to Ukrainian forces. And by 52 to 19%, they support sending more American troops to bolster the defense of our NATO allies.

But Americans draw a bright line between these measures and policies that risk a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia. Just 33% support sending American troops to “help” the Ukrainians, and only 16% want our troops to be fighting by their side. By a margin of 21 to 52%, they reject shooting down Russia planes, and consistent with this stance, they oppose enforcing a no-fly zone in Ukrainian airspace.

Americans are also leery of non-military measures such as launching cyber attacks against Russia, presumably because they fear Russian retaliation against our information infrastructure, and flatly reject efforts to foment a coup against Vladimir Putin.

Americans are willing to confront the Russians diplomatically, however, and they reject the steps some have urged as ways of mollifying the Russians and ending their invasion of Ukraine. Only one in five Americans think that the US should promise Russia that Ukraine will never join NATO; just 14% say that we should roll back our troop deployments in Eastern Europe. And in a near-unanimous rejection of a Russian “sphere of influence,” only 8% think that Russia should be allowed to exert more power over the now-independent states of the former Soviet Union.

So, yeah Joe - keep doing everything you're doing, and keep on not doing everything you're not doing - and we'll keep believing we know everything there is to know, and that you're not doing what you should be doing, and that you are doing what you shouldn't be doing, because we watch the Press Poodles shit all over you for an hour or so every night.

With A Nod To Jimmy Carter

Carter took all kinds of heat for telling us he was going to line up his foreign policy with the basic tenets of human rights.

I'll admit that it sounded kinda limp at the time.

But the weirdness of "soft" power is that it ends up being the hardest thing - to do, certainly, but also the hardest thing to resist once it's put forward. How do you argue against doing what's right, when you know it's the right thing to do?

Invading a country, without real provocation - no matter how much you hate their government or the way they conduct themselves - is just wrong and unjustifiable. We didn't stick to that one in 2003. We failed miserably, went into Iraq for all the wrong reasons, and we're still paying a steep cost for it.

The same point could be made about Afghanistan in 2001. That one's a little harder, but the principles are the same. The asshole Taliban in charge of that government gave the bad guys a place to hang out, and so they shared in the guilt for 9/11. But a full-on invasion was a bad idea because first, it was disproportional, and second, because of that disproportional response, we stuck ourselves with a busted joint (just like Iraq) that we had to rebuild afterwards while ducking the blowback from people who were thoroughly ungrateful for our noble efforts to liberate them by fucking everything up for them, and now - after 20 years - we're pretty much right back where we started. 20 fucking years.

And we've heard all the same shit coming from Putin that we heard from Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Bush - what a horrible threat "those people" are, and we have to get them before they get us.

It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a war of conquest and nothing more.

So Biden is doing it about right, I think. He's trying to keep the world community focused on a very strong response, but doing it in a more balanced way that puts hard-power war-fighting resources in the hands of the Ukrainians while using the soft-power tools of sanctions and political pressure to degrade Putin's capacity to sustain his armed aggression.

The problem - as usual - is trying to get people to think in wider terms, and to start moving away from the old Henry Kissinger Real Politick I'm-Only-Out-For-Myself crap, which is very much what got us into this fuckin' mess to begin with.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Too many nations still waffle on Ukraine. The U.S. cannot ignore them.

Russian aggression against Ukraine violated both morality and a principle of international law — the sanctity of sovereign borders. So stark was the transgression that neutral or nonaligned nations such as Switzerland and Sweden have strongly condemned President Vladimir Putin’s war and joined international sanctions against his regime. However, many large and influential nations, including some democracies with which the United States has strong relationships, have equivocated. It’s a troubling aspect of the crisis and calls for a deliberate but differentiated U.S. response.

The fence-sitters take a range of positions. In a category by itself is China, which has pursued neutrality while refusing to modify its prewar declaration of friendship with Moscow. Slightly less indefensibly, South Africa and India abstained from a United Nations resolution deploring Russia’s aggression and refused to levy any sanctions. Then come countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Israel and the United Arab Emirates (not a democracy, to be sure), which did vote for the U.N. resolution but still balk at sanctions.

Each country has its rationalization, often related to an entanglement with Russia, either current or — in the case of South Africa, where some still feel a misplaced sense of gratitude for the Soviet Union’s support against apartheid — historical. India still buys most of its weaponry from Russia, despite its recent alignment with the United States, Australia and Japan against China. Brazilian agriculture depends on Russian fertilizer. Israel has a deal with Mr. Putin, whose air force in Syria allows Israeli airstrikes on Iranian convoys that supply Hezbollah guerrillas.

Only for Mexico is the problem pure, misguided ideology rather than conflict of interest. It has only $2.3 billion in two-way trade with Russia, but the United States’ southern neighbor and largest merchandise trading partner — $614.5 billion in 2019 — nevertheless sticks to non-interventionist dogma under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Some members of his left-wing political party — unconscionably — chose this moment to inaugurate a “friendship committee” with Russia.

The lesson, unfortunately, is that much of the world does not share the combination of moral outrage and geopolitical self-interest that has forged democracies in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim into a solid coalition arrayed against Moscow’s war. Mr. Putin has spent years trying to co-opt countries around the world, no doubt in anticipation of a long-planned move against Ukraine. Undeniably, he is reaping some benefits from that now.

Countries supporting sanctions against Russia account for the vast majority of world economic activity, so the refusal of others to cooperate is not decisive. Still, the United States should not underestimate either the need to counter Russian influence among nations that are equivocating or the opportunities to do so.

The Biden administration’s approach should vary, depending on its leverage in each country. There’s not much point using moral suasion on China, for example, though hints to Beijing of the price it would pay for re-arming Mr. Putin appear to be having some impact. For the rest, Washington should aggressively deploy moral suasion, trade and aid — economic as well as military. That’s what Russia has been doing; this country must respond in kind.

On Leaving Afghanistan

Generally, as kind of a default, I'm in favor of going out of our way to help when a fledgling new government is trying to stand up a working democracy.

But no matter who you are, there's always a couple of problems with that, and especially so when you're the dominant power on the planet:

1) We can't be everybody's guardian - everybody's mentoring uncle. We have to choose our projects a lot more wisely, and then do it a lot better.

2) Our good intentions are usually worth exactly diddly-shit when there are assholes like Dick Cheney and Tom Cotton in on the deal - guys who wear The Helper mask so it's hard to recognize them as The Conquerors they truly want to be - so we'll always draw some harsh criticism for throwing our shit around.

 

Anyway, here's a piece from Slate lining it out pretty well.

We Now Know Why Biden Was in a Hurry to Exit Afghanistan

He made several missteps, but on the big picture, he was right.

There was a moment in Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when it became clear why President Joe Biden decided to get the troops out of there as quickly as possible.

It came when Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why he and the other chiefs—the top officers of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—all agreed that we needed to pull out by Aug. 31. The Doha agreement, which President Donald Trump had signed with the Taliban in early 2020 (with no participation by the Afghan government), required a total withdrawal of foreign forces. If U.S. troops had stayed beyond August, Milley said, the Taliban would have resumed the fighting, and, in order to stave off the attacks, “we would have needed 30,000 troops” and would have suffered “many casualties.”

And yet, as Milley also testified on Tuesday, he, the chiefs, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and other military officers advised Biden to keep 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the Aug. 31 deadline. The difference is that those troops wouldn’t be attached to any “military mission.” Instead, they would “transition” to a “diplomatic mission.”

However, it is extremely unlikely that the Taliban would have observed the semantic distinction. In their eyes, 2,500 U.S. troops would be seen as 2,500 U.S. troops, regardless of whether their mission was officially said to be “military” or “diplomatic.” Therefore, the Taliban would resume fighting, as Milley said they would, and Biden would then have been faced with a horrendous choice—to pull out while under attack or send in another 30,000 troops.

Some historical-psychological perspective is worth noting. In the first nine months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the generals were pushing for a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan—an increase of 40,000 troops—and a shift to a counterinsurgency (aka “nation-building”) strategy. Biden, who was then vice president, was alone in suggesting an increase of just 10,000 troops, to be used solely for training the Afghan army and for fighting terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border. As Obama recalls in his memoir, Biden urged the new and relatively inexperienced president not to be “boxed in” by the generals. Give them 40,000 troops now, and in 18 months, they’ll say they need another 40,000 to win the war. As Obama later acknowledged, Biden was right.

And so, as Milley was advising Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, even while acknowledging that another 30,000 might be needed if the Taliban resumed fighting, it’s easy to imagine Biden thinking, “They’re trying to box me in, just like they did before, just like they’ve always done since the Vietnam War,” which was raging when Biden first entered the Senate in 1973 and has shaped his views on war and peace ever since.

Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of Central Command, both acknowledged at the hearing that the U.S. military was flying blind through much of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. The officers of the day tried to mold the Afghan army in their own image, making them too dependent on U.S. technology and support, so that once we withdrew, collapse was inevitable. Milley also noted that he and the other officers paid too little attention to Afghan culture and to the corrosive effects of the Afghan government’s corruption and lack of popular legitimacy. So, Biden might well have been thinking, why should he pay attention to anything these guys had to say on the war in Afghanistan, which they’ve been wrong about from the very beginning?

Biden made several missteps, some of them disastrous, in the pace and sequence of the withdrawal. Most of all, he should have pulled out all the spies, contractors, U.S. citizens, and Afghan helpers before pulling out all the troops. But on the big picture, he was right, and the generals, as they now grudgingly admit, were wrong.

And that last bit is the operative principle - generals make the plans, but the civilian command authority makes the decisions.