I agree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal to the extent that I think we should be able to provide munitions to Israel and Ukraine without degrading our own defense capabilities. Where I think I disagree is over whether we are able to at present:

President Biden hinted Tuesday that he may ask Congress for appropriations for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. That makes military and political sense. The U.S. is confronting an authoritarian axis that is increasingly working together.

Iran, the ventriloquist for Hamas, is helping Vladimir Putin as he tries to subjugate Ukraine. Tehran is pouring drones into Russia’s war, and the Biden Administration has warned of deepening cooperation, including a new weapons plant in Russia. The two are allies in Syria. Mr. Putin is also dining out on his “no limits” partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. The axis wants to set the rules of the world and topple the relative global stability the U.S. has enforced since World War II.

Yet some in Congress want to separate Israel from Ukraine and force a false choice. “Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately,” GOP Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted this week. The Heritage Foundation is encouraging lawmakers to “resist attempts to link emergency military support for Israel with additional funding for Ukraine.”

The implication is that the U.S. can’t supply both at once. But the two conflicts are different enough that the U.S. has weapons that can help Ukraine and Israel. The Ukrainians are trying to break through entrenched defenses of concrete and mines, a different job than destroying Hamas in Gaza.

I sometimes wonder where the editors have been for the last 30 years. The story of the last 30 years of American enterprise is that businesses have wrung all of the excess capacity out of our economy. Now in order to produce significantly more of practically anything it isn’t enough to place an order and turn the spigot a little more. We need to build whole supply chains.

It isn’t 1941 any more. Eighty years ago with a little retrofitting typewriter factories could be changed into machine gun factories in short order. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of munitions manufacturers. Now there are just a handful of primary defense contractors. We don’t have excess production of steel, microchips, and thousands of other things necessary to producing munitions. The “arsenal of democracy” is no more.

Maybe we still have that capacity. I don’t believe we do. If we did we wouldn’t be depending on China (and Russia!) for mission-critical materials and components. Furthermore, I’m skeptical that we can reduce our use of coal and oil, replace them with wind and solar, and produce enough munitions to supply two conflicts using munitions at a pace greater than during World War II concurrently.

“We just have to!” is not a plan. It’s an aspiration.

Update

Here’s a brief history of American steel production:

Present utilization is estimated at between 80% and 90%. In other words we’re not going to produce 30% more steel, for example, in the near term. I suspect we’d be hard put to produce 10% more.

I encourage you to read David French’s account of what he sees as likely to happen in Gaza in the New York Times. In summary he believes that Israel is likely to approach Hamas much the way Iraq and the U. S. approached Daesh in Mosul. Here’s the kernel of it:

We are witnessing nothing like the immediate mass destruction of an indiscriminate attack, but large numbers of precision attacks can still inflict extreme (and deadly) damage.

If civilians aren’t evacuated from the combat zone, the intensity of combat makes significant civilian casualties inevitable, even if Israel fully complies with the law of war: I also spoke this week to James Verini, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine, who wrote “They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate,” perhaps the definitive on-the-ground account of the fight for Mosul, and two things he said stood out in the conversation.

First, because precision weapons sometimes miss and intelligence often fails, airstrikes inevitably inflict serious collateral damage, including civilian casualties. Second, as the fight drags on and ramps up in intensity, concern for civilian lives often diminishes. That was the pattern for the less-disciplined Iraqi security forces, but we can’t for a moment presume that Israeli soldiers are superhuman. Most of them are draftees and reservists. They’re subject to the same fears and temptations under extreme stress and anger as any other soldier in any other army.

Then there’s the factor of time. Spencer observed that Israel always fights against the backdrop of a ticking clock. The United States is an independent economic and military superpower. We possess the world’s most powerful military and the world’s most potent economy. We have the luxury of fighting on timetables we set. If we want to slow down and take nine months to clear a city, we can take nine months to clear a city.

My view, as it has been for some time, is that U. S. interests do not align well either with those of the Israelis or those of the Palestinians but Hamas, by its actions and admission, is hostis humani generis and the Israelis will deal with it as such. I’m concerned that the Israelis will not be as scrupulous as Mr. French insists they will and our government should do what it can to ensure that it is. That does not align well with the position that the Biden Administration has been articulating.

Update

I hope the editors of the Washington Post are right:

At a time when the United States, and the world, desperately need decency and moral clarity, President Biden has provided both. His words regarding the wanton atrocities Hamas has committed against hundreds of Israeli civilians, as well as many Americans and citizens of other countries, in the past week have been unequivocal. In remarks to a gathering of American Jewish leaders Wednesday, he described the mass murder as “sheer evil” and likened it to “the worst atrocities of ISIS.”

In condemning the terrorism, and offering support to Israel’s military response, the president also reminded the new emergency war government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of its responsibilities under “the law of war.” These measured statements put the United States in just the right place: supportive of Israel but positioned, if need be, to influence and temper its response.

That would be a departure from the historic U. S. position. As I say, I hope they’re right.

In an interview at Foreign Policy of Israeli hostage negotiator Boaz Ganor by Tal Alroy, Mr. Ganor selects a variant o my option B from my musings over the likely outcome of the war between Israel and Hamas:

I would expect to see a military operation in large parts of Gaza changing into rescue operations here and there based on new intelligence on the whereabouts of the hostages.

The consideration of the Israeli hostages will become a minor consideration. The success of the military operation and the guarding of the lives of the Israeli soldiers would probably be the first priority.

I suspect it may start out that way but that won’t last long and it will transmogrify into something easier on Israel’s soldiers and harder on the Gazans.

Speaking of predictions William Galston’s prediction that the attacks by Hamas over the weekend are likely the end of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political career—that is confirmed by the opinion polls which are telling us that 4 out of 5 israelis blame him for Israel being caught flat-footed by the attack.

It looks very much as though prospects for preventing Israel’s war with Hamas from widening into a regional conflict have become much more difficult. The BBC is reporting that Syria is claiming that the Israelis have bombed the Damascus and Aleppo airports:

State media said runways had been damaged at both Damascus and Aleppo airports and flights would be diverted to Latakia, a city in north-west Syria.

Israel has not commented on the strike. It has previously attacked targets in war-torn Syria, linked to Iran.

Iran’s foreign minister was planning to fly to Syria on Friday.

Syria’s Damascus and Aleppo airports not only handle civil aviation but also host military bases, which are reportedly transit points for Iranian arms sent to Hezbollah – a militant group which is powerful in both Syria and Lebanon.

An unnamed military source quoted by Syrian state media said “simultaneous” Israeli strikes had “damaged landing strips in the two airports, putting them out of service”. The source called it a “desperate”Israeli attempt to divert attention from the Gaza conflict.

This is breaking news. Whether this is tactical or strategic or true at all is impossible to say.

I think that Zack Beauchamp is trying to thread a very tiny needle in his piece at Vox.com, “How to think morally about the Israel-Hamas war”. I respect his saying this:

Almost immediately after news of the attack broke, celebrations broke out among a group of Western leftists, hailing Hamas’s incursion as an act of “decolonization.” This was not merely a handful of isolated individuals, but included journalists with large followings, professors, and student organizations at elite universities. At a rally supported by the Democratic Socialists in America in New York, the crowd cheered Hamas’s success.

This cheerleading for murderous terrorists is ghoulish and self-discrediting: “a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values,” as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz writes.

It is also, in a way, revealing. The moral failures of the fringe left show us how not to think about the ongoing horrors in Israel and Gaza — and, in doing so, point to a better way.

It needed saying. He continues:

Currently, the Israeli government is preparing a ground invasion of Gaza that threatens to come with unimaginable human costs. The callousness with which they are talking about civilian deaths in Gaza is appalling. An anonymous Israeli official told Israeli reporter Alon Ben David that their response would turn Gaza into “a city of tents.” A parliamentarian from the ruling Likud party said, on national television, that Israel should not concern itself with the safety of any Gazans who “chose” to stay in the Gaza Strip. (With crossings into Egypt and Israel blocked, Gazans could not leave if they wanted.)

This, too, is evil.

I do not pretend to know exactly what the right choice is for Israel going forward. But I know that if the Israeli Defense Forces do slaughter civilians indiscriminately, the Israeli government will be committing abuses on moral par with those of Hamas.

It takes him a while to arrive at his “alternative”:

I agree with Winant, broadly, that American policy prior to this conflict has been far too tolerant of the deepening of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. After the current emergency, the Biden administration ought to reconsider what it can do to put pressure on Israel to cease its cruel and counterproductive policies.

I agree with that. So far, so good. He continues:

This moment, to put it mildly, is not a time when anything like that will happen. But what we can do now is bolster the forces who support peace and equality on the Israeli side in other ways.

Israelis will never feel safe making concessions if they don’t, well, feel safe.

Surprisingly, bombs, rockets, and mortar attacks have a way of making one feel unsafe.

He continues:

More broadly, we need as outside observers to maintain basic human values in ourselves: to see the victims on both sides as humans, to care about suffering, and to attune our statements and activities toward finding ways forward that can improve the situation. If we allow ourselves to slide into moral solipsism, we won’t merely justify atrocities; we will blind ourselves to the steps that can be taken to actually make life better on the ground.

That’s pretty vague. But I agree with this, too:

We can and should extend sympathy to Israeli victims, but we should not let that shade into justification for retaliatory atrocities. We should condemn Hamas terrorism, but we should also condemn Israeli abuses against Gazans.

and here’s his conclusion:

Criticize Israel when it slaughters Palestinians, and criticize Palestinians when they slaughter Israelis. Note the asymmetries — both Israel’s vastly superior power and Hamas’s much greater disregard for rules about targeting civilians — but do not allow those differences to obscure the most basic moral truth: that human suffering is, in and of itself, wrong.

This is not just how we say the right things about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It’s how we, in the end, will figure out how best to contribute to peace down the line. To think otherwise, and find fault only with one side, leads to the moral oblivion of cheering the slaughter of children.

I agree with that, too. Nowhere does he explain how supporting leaders who advocate uncritical support for Israel can be reconciled with the views he’s expressing. In the end he makes common cause with them for electoral reasons which is not a moral judgment.

I found this piece at The Hill Judy Kurtz amusing in a grim sort of way:

Sen. John Fetterman said Wednesday that America “is not sending their best and brightest” to represent them in Congress.

“Sometimes you literally just can’t believe like, these people are making the decisions that are determining the government here. It’s actually scary,” the Pennsylvania Democrat said during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

My former business partner once said something we referred to as the “reverse Voltaire”: “I may agree with what you say but I reject your right to say it”. I believe that Sen. Fetterman is referring to the House but it applies equally if not more so to the Senate. Elections are not assessments of cognitive ability. I find it simultaneously amusing and depressing that people insist that they are.

Over the years I’ve encountered quite a few politicians socially. My experience is that they have typically been pretty ordinary members of the professional class. Not stupid but not brain trusts, either. When you add that our Congress is increasingly ideological and ideology has a way of making people stupid, it explains a lot.

Has the Chinese economy “hit the wall”? That question is raised and partially confirmed by Yiping Huang at East Asia Forum:

Has China’s economic miracle ended? The answer is probably yes, as no miracle lasts forever. Higher incomes and the higher labour costs they create, deteriorating external conditions and an ageing population all present serious long-term headwinds against high growth.

But China is neither the Soviet Union in the 1960s nor Japan in the 1990s. For China, sectors like technology platforms, electric vehicles, green energy and electronics are now vibrant sources of innovation and growth. A major financial crisis, like a blow-up of the property sector, is still unlikely. The economic impact of demographic shifts will be partially countered by artificial intelligence and the digital economy.

This article was written before the announcement that Chinese property developer Evergrande was on the brink of collapse and the subsequent bank runs.

I don’t know what is happening with the Chinese economy but I suspect that the levers that have been pulled over the last several decades by the Chinese authorities to boost the economy no longer have the force they used to.

I think I’ve mentioned this before but there is such a widely held misconception about people having some sort of inherent right to particular areas I felt it was worth repeating. The most immediate example of this is the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. They both use their holy books to prove that God has given them the land.

The reality is messier than that. As well as we can tell there have always been Jews in Israel and there have always been Arabs in Israel. What has happened over time is that one side or another has seized control of the land by force. In 1948 it was the Israelis. In 1967 and 1973 the Arabs retaliated, were defeated, and the Israelis took more territory. Since then the Israelis have negotiated some of the land they seized away.

In the 7th century it was the Arabs. In the 16th century it was the Turks. The Turks held Palestine from the 16th century to the early 20th century. During that period the only people who owned any land in Palestine were the Ottoman, Jews, and Christians. I have written about that extensively. Claims by the Muslim Arabs that their ancestors owned the land for hundreds of years are BS. They didn’t. They were tenants.

If you’re going to argue that might doesn’t make right, the only ones who have any reasonable claim to the land are the Maronites in Lebanon. Before the Israelites the Canaanites held the land (DNA tests have suggested that the Maronites are Phoenicians who were identical to the Canaanites). But reality intrudes once again: I’m quite sure that some time in the mists of history their ancestors seized the land from someone else.

That isn’t just true in ancient Palestine. It’s true practically everywhere. It’s true in the American Southwest where the U. S. government displaced the Navajo who had displaced the people who there before them who had displaced the people who were there before them. It’s true in the Northeast of the United States. It’s true in Egypt, in Britain, in France, in Germany, in India, in China. There may be some vestigial population in East Africa who have actually always been there but, frankly, I doubt it. I think the present inhabitants came from somewhere else.

The siege of Gaza continues. The Israelis are not allowing water, food, or fuel to enter the district until the Israeli hostages are released. The BBC reports:

“No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter,” said energy minister Israel Katz.

Israeli troops are mobilizing at the border.

How will this crisis end?

1. The hostages will be released, the siege lifted, and everything will go back to a dreary normal
2. The Israelis will conduct a house-to-house search of Gaza for the hostages with bitter urban warfare every step of the way. Some hostages will be found, some found dead, some not found at all.
3. The Israelis will stop bombing Gaza when they think they have exacted enough revenge, i.e. stop short of their stated objective.
4. The Israelis will clear a buffer zone between Israel and Gaza which will be surveilled around the clock. That also stops short of their stated objective.
5. The Israelis will assume the hostages are dead and kill every man, woman, and child in Gaza.
6. The present Israel-Hamas war will expand into a regional conflict.

I continue to believe that the situations with the Israelis and Palestinians are not symmetrical. The retort to that has been that events have not proceeded as I suggested they would to which I respond, how do they know? Every year in the last 30 years, indeed, since the founding of Hamas, Israel has experienced some terrorist violence, e.g. attacks, bombings, rockets and mortars, etc. For events to unfold as I have suggested the Palestinians would need to refrain from political violence for some period of time.

The Israelis and Palestinians have irreconcilable objectives. Both think the entirety of the land of Israel belongs to them. If the Israelis stopped ratcheting up their security measures, more Israelis would be killed. If the Palestinians stopped engaging in political violence, the Israelis might be able to relax their security measures. See? Not symmetrical.