The editors of the Washington Post are outraged that France has national interests and that it pursues them:

French President Emmanuel Macron might have thought he could escape turmoil at home and burnish his credentials as a global statesman by making a high-level state visit to China earlier this month. Instead, he exposed disunity in Europe over Beijing, he handed Chinese President Xi Jinping a propaganda coup, and, for good measure, he threw Taiwan under the bus by suggesting Europeans should not follow the United States in defending the island in the event of a Chinese invasion.

That’s a lot of damage from a three-day trip.

Guess what? Germany, the United Kingdom, and every other country we deem an ally has its own national interests and most of those countries pursue those interests quite single-mindedly. I wish we focused as much on our own national interests as France or Germany does.

As I have been saying for some time, I wish our foreign policy idealists understood that it’s a realist world out there. When Germany or France go along with us, it’s because they see it as in their interests to do so. When they don’t think it’s in their interests, they don’t. That’s why, for example, Germany is not doing many of the things the German leadership said it would do a year ago. They got credit for their followership a year ago when they made their pledges but they’re hedging their bets because following through on those pledges would bear costs.

I am seeing a couple of different, contrasting stories about the document leak. In what I consider the more likely of the stories a young man with a security clearance, trying to impress his online buddies, release a significant cache of secret documents online. The release was not discovered by what we like to call our “intelligence community” for months.

In the other story our intelligence community is conducting a psychological operation on the American people to prepare them for what will be a series of foreign policy setbacks. The young airman is a presumably unwitting dupe in the psyop, given unrestricted access to exactly the documents the intelligence community wanted him to leak.

It seems to me that the unstated assumption in that second story is that our intelligence apparatus could not possibly be so feckless as the leak makes it appear to be. Quite to the contrary I think that power, arrogance, and freedom from consequences has a way of encouraging fecklessness.

A connecting thread between these stories is irresponsibility. At twenty-one Jack Teixeira is a man not a kid. Were he a 14 year old trying to impress 12 year olds, leaking secret documents would be completely understandable. As a 21 year old trying to impress 16 year old, it’s irresponsible. Similarly, granting him access to documents for which he had no need to know is irresponsible.

Matt Taibbi concludes his remarks on the leak which are mostly about the media’s indecision over whether Mr. Teixeira was a racist or a gun nut, with something on which I agree with him:

Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post in this:

Justice Thomas should immediately review all his financial disclosure reports, amend them with the newly revealed transactions and add any information he has not reported. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal judiciary, should press him to do so if he fails to complete the reports on his own.

but I am less certain about this:

The conference should then examine Justice Thomas’s conduct and determine whether his repeated nondisclosure merits a referral to the Justice Department.

Justice Thomas’s lapses undermine public trust in the court. They also reflect a disturbing indifference to official rules that is unacceptable for a justice, or any public servant.

Does the Department of Justice actually have that authority?

The precedent that people are thinking of is undoubtedly Abe Fortas. However, Justice Fortas resigned after accepting a payment from a financier who was under investigation. Is the parallel actually that strong? Furthermore, just as in 1969 the political considerations are front and center. Appointing an associate justice to replace Justice Thomas would provide President Biden with the opportunity to move the court from its present trajectory. Inducing Justice Thomas to resign (or impeaching him), appointing someone to replace him, and getting that individual confirmed would be quite a feat.

At the conclusion of his Washington Post column on the leaks of sensitive documents David Ignatius quotes Winston Churchill:

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

It looks like the question is whether the truth has been overwhelmed by her bodyguard.

Here’s his assessment of the trove:

We’re in Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors” here. What matters, as he observed, is that you know what’s accurate and what is a manipulated reflection. Though a few documents appear to have been doctored, an administration official told me Monday: “We’re still examining them, but at first glance, this appears to be real.”

and here’s what he thinks we’ve learned:

• Ukraine’s air defense weapons have dwindled to the point that Russia about to gain air superiority.
• Ukraine is firing faster than the West can replenish.
• The Biden Administration has been less inclined to use our own troops in the conflict more than some of our allies, e.g. the United Kingdom.
• U. S. officials think the conflict is reaching a stalemate.

I found this passage in the column wryly amusing:

This ought to be the trump card for the United States. In World War II, the United States converted manufacturing plants across the country to make tanks, planes and aircraft carriers that simply overwhelmed Japan and Germany. No similar mobilization has taken place this time. Why not? Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has met several times with defense contractors, but why hasn’t President Biden appointed the equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board?

It may have escaped Mr. Ignatius’s attention but this isn’t 80 years ago. The “manufacturing plants across the country” to which he refers were dismantled decades ago and much of that manufacturing is being done in China. Surprise! China isn’t on our side in this conflict.

The reason that President Biden hasn’t appointed a “war production board” is that it would take a lot more than that to restart our manufacturing. Millions of square feet of auto manufacturing, just to cite one example, no longer exist to be converted for use building tanks. The same is true in Europe. They have been offshoring their manufacturing to China for the last 30-50 years.

We’d need to be mining more coal and iron, making more steel, building more plants. We’ve been moving in the opposite direction for 50 years. A war production board can’t change that overnight.

Let me try to summarize David Brooks’s latest New York Times column.

• Lots of people are leaving Blue States for Red States
• Red States have lower taxes, are more pro-business, and have more affordable housing
• People are moving from Blue cities in Blue States to Blue cities in Red States
• Blue cities in Red States are socially more liberal than the rest of the state
• Therefore the “winning formula” is low tax, pro-business, and socially liberal
• Neither political party espouses the “winning formula” and it doesn’t look like they’re likely to in the foreseeable future

I think that’s a superficial analysis and far too “from 50,000 feet”. IMO examining what’s actually happening tells a slightly different story.

For one thing to some extent what he’s observing is nothing new. It’s the same Mad Tea Party that’s been going on since the founding of the Republic. The main difference is now that now the frontier isn’t moving West but moving to the relatively undeveloped parts of the country in the West and the South.

For another are people actually moving from Blue cities in Blue States to Blue cities in Red States? Or are people moving from Purple suburbs in Blue States to Purple suburbs in Red States? I don’t honestly know but I suspect at least some of that is going on.

I note that the words “labor union” do not appear in his column. I suspect that unionization is a factor in the present migration. I don’t know what the situation is in other states but here in Illinois paying public employee pensions and benefits makes up nearly 30% of the state’s spending. The courts have seen to it that the only way for Illinoisans to escape that tithe is to leave the state. Ironically, about 20% of retired Illinois public employees move to other states thereby draining Illinois’s economy in two ways at the same time.

Which provides me a smoother transition to the last point I wanted to make. Ostensibly the United States has a common law system. A common law system has several features that distinguish it from a civil code system. In a common law system the law may or may not apply; if it doesn’t apply, it doesn’t apply. Also in a common law system the written law is only the tip of the legal iceberg. Most of the law has been made by judges and lawyers, precedents, some going back hundreds of years or longer. In that sense our legal system is inherently conservative.

I think there’s a quiet rebellion going on, particularly in Blue States, against our common law system because the common law gets in the way of progressives accomplishing the things they want to do. In Blue States they’re freer to ignore precedent; in Red States even people in Blue cities need to conform to the common law.

And I haven’t even touched on the degree to which the rest of the country has been subsidizing the “Sun Belt” for the last 80 years.

The editors of the Washington Post remark on the security breach:

Keeping secrets is essential to a functioning government. Breaking the laws for a psychic joyride is a despicable betrayal of trust and oaths. In the course of the investigation, it should be determined why such highly-classified materials were available to someone of a junior enlisted rank, and why they were apparently sitting on a gaming server for a month before U.S. officials realized it.

The U.S. classification system for managing secrets is overwhelmed. The Public Interest Declassification Board warned three years ago of an explosion of digital information that will further strain the system, and outlined a vision for modernization. And as the Editorial Board has argued, too much national security information is classified, and too little declassified. The classification process should be simplified into two tiers, “secret” and “top secret,” eliminating the lower “confidential” level and reducing the number of people with access to the highest levels.

If there is anything positive to come out of the Discord leaks, it should be an overhaul to better protect and manage the nation’s most valuable secrets.

That’s fine as far as it goes but IMO it’s insufficiently critical of those who put the present policies in place or those who were supposed to administer them. They didn’t and aren’t doing their jobs.

Update

The editors of the Wall Street Journal pile on:

One obvious question is why Mr. Teixeira had access to such a range of secrets. The leaked documents, assuming they are real, include intelligence on allied foreign governments and assessments of Ukraine’s progress in its war against Russia’s invasion. Did he need to know? Why did he apparently have access to an internal Pentagon computer network for top secret information? A sweeping review of classified access is needed.

It’s also fair to ask how the documents could circulate for weeks on Discord and then other platforms without U.S. counterintelligence agents finding out until the press reported it. Is this another case of misplaced priorities by the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

The Justice Department has mistakenly pursued the innocent before—think the FBI’s obsessive focus on Steven Hatfill for the 2001 anthrax attacks. But if Mr. Teixeira is charged, his motive will be important to know. Did he see himself as another Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, who were celebrated by much of the media for their classified betrayals?

The cavalier handling of classified documents by Presidents Trump and Biden has also set a bad example that could cause less respect for the obligations of secrecy. There’s much more to learn—about Mr. Teixeira, but also about the practices and culture of classification that allowed this to happen.

Again, that’s okay as far as it goes but IMO it’s still very mild.

The story of the security leaks continues to unfold. The latest development is that a 21 year old guardsman has been arrested. Evan Perez, Jeremy Herb, Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen and Kevin Liptak report at CNN:

CNN
—
A member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was arrested by the FBI on Thursday in connection with the leaking of classified documents that have been posted online, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday.

The arrest of Jack Teixeira, 21, comes following a fast-moving search by the US government for the identity of the leaker who posted classified documents to a social media platform popular with video gamers.

Teixeira was arrested in Massachusetts without incident, Garland said, and will be arraigned in federal court there. “This investigation is ongoing. We will share more information at the appropriate time,” the attorney general said, declining to answer questions.

Teixeira will first appear in court on Friday in Boston, according to the US attorney’s office there.

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner posts in reaction to my post yesterday. After citing some of the comments here he remarks:

I’m with Dave on this one: if any idiot private with a security clearance has access to SCI, then we might as well just post it on the open Internet. I honestly don’t know how much value a junior enlisted Guardsman could possibly bring as an intelligence analyst on strategic level matters. But, in this case, he’s not even an intel guy—he’s a low level NerdsToGo tech. Obviously, he would have to be able to access the facilities and equipment but there’s zero need for him to access so much as Controlled Unclassified Information, let alone TS/SCI. The very fact that he downloaded so much as a single document should have sent up a huge red flag.

Is this the end of the story or just its beginning? I sincerely hope it’s the latter. IMO if Mr. Teixeira actually was the culprit it’s a command problem. If he did not follow the procedures that have been put in place, it’s a breach of discipline at the lower level. If the procedures that were put in place were inadequate to prevent the leak, it’s a higher level command problem.

I would add that I disagree with President Biden’s dismissal of the leak as inconsequential. At the very least information released has been embarrassing to the administration. Shrugging and moving on is an inadequate response. Furthermore, if the contents of the documents as described in the media are accurate, the administration’s characterization of the situation in Ukraine has been something between misinformation and disinformation. I don’t see how that can be described as democratic.

I wanted to make one last point. I have read reactions from veteran journalists that I found incredibly naive, effectively deeming the possibility that anything could be given a high security classification simply because it’s embarrassing to the higher ups. Sadly, I think that’s one of the main reasons so much is classified these days. I honestly don’t know how we can assess the conduct of our leaders in an environment in which so much is concealed from us. “Just trust me” is inconsistent with the values on which the United States was founded. If that puts us at a disadvantage by comparison with more authoritarian regimes, that’s the price of democracy.

At the New York Times Aric Toler, Michael Schwirtz, Haley Willis, Riley Mellen, Christiaan Triebert, Malachy Browne, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Julian E. Barnesis report that a young National Guard member is currently a “person of interest” in the leaks of classified documents:

The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said Airman Teixeira might have information relevant to the investigation.

Federal investigators have been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online but have not identified Airman Teixeira or anyone else as a suspect. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

If the individual identified is actually the leaker, it would be beyond incompetent and reckless. Does every member of an intelligence wing of every National Guard unit have materially unrestricted access to such classified materials? What does secrecy mean in that event?

At France 24 Cyrielle Cabot echoes the point I have made:

But in stark contrast to this promising trend in many parts of the world, China moved against the tide, darkening the global picture. “China’s steady new coal plant additions (26.8 GW) offset coal plant retirements in the rest of the world (23.9 GW) in 2022,” said Global Energy Monitor.

China now has 365 GW of generating capacity, compared to an average of 172 GW elsewhere. More alarmingly, China alone now accounts for 68% of coal-related projects under development worldwide, and 72% of those are in the pipeline.

“Because of its size and population, China’s energy consumption is necessarily very high,” explained Thibaud Voïta, a researcher at the Center for Energy and Climate at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI). “One of the major challenges for Beijing is to meet the energy demand that has been constantly increasing for several years.”

Here’s an eye-opening observation:

This saw annual coal capacity additions for many Chinese provinces topping the capacity additions for entire countries. Citing the example of the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, the report noted that, “Inner Mongolia (6 GW) surpassed India (3.5 GW) despite India being the country with the most coal commissioned in 2022 after China. In fact, Inner Mongolia nearly had more new capacity than the next two countries after China combined (India and Japan).”

If the objective is eliminating the use of coal for power generation by a date certain, it can’t be achieved that way. If the objective reducing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, it can’t be achieved that way.

The only objective that might be achieved that way is to reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere relative to what might have been released if no other measures were adopted. That’s pretty weak tea.