The pack has a new member. Above he’s poking his head out of the sherpa bag, preparing to board the plane for Chicago. As you can see he’s a merry little soul.

And here he is take his first steps in our backyard. He was very interested in all of the smells.

It will be an adventure. He’s going to have a very good life. That’s our job.

Needless to say none of us got much sleep last night.

I didn’t want to let Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column pass without comment. Here’s the concluding snippet:

Following the Cold War, the American foreign-policy establishment embraced the tragically misguided belief that we could set aside traditional forms of great-power competition and balance-of-power diplomacy while focusing our efforts on “global issues” like human rights, climate change and the construction of an ever-stronger set of international institutions operating under an ever-more-pervasive system of international law.

That destructive consensus rested on two mistaken perceptions. The first was that America’s victory in the Cold War was final and America’s economic and military power plus our diplomatic prestige ensured our unchallengeable supremacy for decades.

The second was that the so-called rules-based world order we were using our power to build would be popular abroad and uncontroversial at home. The economic benefits of the free-market, free-trading world system were so great that no serious country abroad or political movement at home would be insane enough to challenge it. And the elegant international system was going to be so ethically beautiful and politically inspiring that countries all over the world would be irresistibly drawn into it.

The war in Afghanistan illustrates the feckless nature of two decades of American foreign policy. In Afghanistan, we expanded our objectives, and our war aims shifted from removing and punishing a government that sheltered the terrorists who engineered 9/11 to changing the culture and political system of a society very different from our own.

Unfortunately, in the midst of our inspiring campaigns of institution-building and civil-society promotion, we neglected one tiny detail: We never developed and implemented a military strategy capable of winning the war.

The same disastrous mix of mission creep and strategic incompetence that wrecked our Afghan policy threatens our global strategy today. Our plans for world order grow increasingly ambitious and elaborate even as the security underpinnings of that system become dangerously weak. Global issues are real, and hard power on its own is never enough. But if you don’t get the hard-power issues right, nothing else matters much.

My concern about repivoting towards the Middle East is a little more prosaic than that. Let me put it into the form of a question. Can Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey ever be our ally in fact rather than just in theory? I don’t believe that an Israel committed to being a Jewish state, Islamist Saudi Arabia, or Turkey under Erdogan can be our allies let alone our friends. I think that Israel is our client, and Saudi Arabia something between a client and a hostile non-belligerent. Kemalist Turkey was our ally; Turkey under Erdogan is something between a client and a hostile non-belligerent. Iran, of course, is something between a hostile non-belligerent and an enemy.

What is there to pivot to?

Update

Pat Lang on Saudi Arabia:

I have had a great deal to do with that country including a three-year tour as Defense and Army attaché in the US Embassy. This gave me the status of Counselor of Embassy. And I have been there many, many times in various capacities. I can’t say that I ever liked the place and I share that sentiment with many Muslims who are not subjects of the Saudi state. I was lucky when I lived there that even though a Christian I was protected by my diplomatic status.

In spite of all the fancy hotels and foreign flunky-built infrastructure Saudi Arabia remains a frightening, medieval mind set place where an ability to speak Arabic well merely guarantees that a foreigner will be thought a dangerous spy. That I was an AMERICAN diplomat meant absolutely nothing to them. To the Saudis the necessity of supposedly cordial mutual relations with ANY country in the non-Muslim world is an unfortunate necessity. Iran and other Shia dominated places? Well. they are thought to be deluded and murtad (apostate) in their beliefs.

For the Saudi state and much of the “citizen” population all relations with non-Muslim states and companies must be TRANSACTIONAL. All. If you want to do business with the Saudis, you must have something of value to trade. Sentiment does not enter into this. Example – In the past in return for our willingness to protect them from people with actual strength and to sell them our military toys they were willing to surreptitiously give some of us money with which to corrupt our own political system.

At Atlantic Alec MacGillis makes a point I’ve made here from time to time. The failure of our legal system to identify, arrest, prosecute, try, and convict criminals in a timely manner is undermining the rule of law:

Criminologists have offered several explanations for the increase, including the rise in gun sales early in the pandemic, changes in police behavior following the protests over the murder of George Floyd, and the social disruptions caused by closures of schools and interruptions in social services. But many people who work in criminal justice are zeroing in on another possible factor—the extended shutdown of so much of the court system, the institution at the heart of public order.

This could have led to more violence in a number of ways. Prosecutors confronted with a growing volume of cases decided not to take action against certain suspects, who went on to commit other crimes. Victims or witnesses became less willing to testify as time passed and their memories of events grew foggy, weakening cases against perpetrators. Suspects were denied substance-abuse treatment or other services that they would normally have accessed through the criminal-justice system, with dangerous consequences.

Above all, experts say, the shutdowns undermined the promise that crimes would be promptly punished. The theory that “swift, certain, and fair” consequences deter crimes is credited to the late criminologist Mark Kleiman. The idea is that it’s the speed of repercussions, rather than their severity, that matters most. By putting the justice system on hold for so long, many jurisdictions weakened that effect. In some cases, people were left to seek street justice in the absence of institutional justice. As Reygan Cunningham, a senior partner at the California Partnership for Safe Communities, put it, closing courts sent “a message that there are no consequences, and there is no help.”

Where I differ from Mr. MacGillis is that I think that COVID-19 has practically nothing to do with the problem since the problem existed long before January 2020. I think our laws, law enforcement officers, judges, and states attorneys offices all need fundamental reform, starting with having laws that can be enforced and a commitment to enforcing the law.

Just to cite one example Kim Foxx assumed the office of Cook County States Attorney in December 2016, one of a group of states attorneys who are not committed to prosecuting crimes. Chesa Boudin, just removed as San Francisco District Attorney, assumed office in January 2020. He ran on a platform of decarceration and reduced prosecution so blaming the reduction in prosecutions during his tenure on COVID-19 is a stretch. He was doing what he promised to do.

At RealClearPolitics Steve Milloy argues that President Biden’s climate agenda is melting and, worse, meaningless:

President Biden is being urged to declare a climate emergency, which may happen as early as this week. If he does, the irony will be rich, as the 911 call should really be for the climate agenda.

The president apparently hopes to take advantage of the ongoing record-setting European heat wave and string of wildfires, and an ongoing heat wave in the U.S. Midwest.

While it certainly is very hot in Europe and the Midwest, it is relatively cool elsewhere. The unfortunate reality for Biden’s planned exploitation is that today’s average global temperature per the University of Maine is a mere 0.2C warmer than the average from 1979-2000. It’s called “global warming,” and yet there’s really not much of that occurring.

We also know that heat waves are not associated with carbon dioxide emissions. The frequency and intensity of heat waves has dramatically declined in the U.S. over the past 100 years despite ever-rising emissions, per the National Climate Assessment conducted by the Obama-Biden administration.

Carrying on with my question of yesterday, IMO claiming that the record high temperature being experienced across Europe is “natural variability” is weak in any but the most general sense. The temperatures they’re seeing are from 2-3°C above previously recorded highs.

I’m a bit disappointed that nobody is mentioning other possibilities like

1. The unusual La Niña pattern
2. The extraordinary sunspot activity

It could be global climate change but there are other possibilities, too, and I’m not sure how you’d go about determining the cause definitively. There’s a lot we don’t know about the weather.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is being mentioned by some as a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2024. The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of Mr. Pritzker’s lackluster performance as governor:

Research outfit Wirepoints notes in a new report that Illinois’s real GDP grew a mere 0.5% between the first quarters of 2019 and 2022, the first three years of Mr. Pritzker’s governorship. That’s by far the slowest growth in the region. Indiana’s GDP increased by 6.1%, Iowa’s by 5.2%, and Michigan (3.7%), Kentucky (3.3%) and Missouri (3.1%) lapped it too. Even slow-growing Wisconsin (1.6%) recorded triple the growth of Illinois.

Mr. Pritzker can’t blame climate change. Illinois’s lagging GDP is especially remarkable given it benefited mightily from rising farm commodity prices. Agricultural GDP in Illinois rose 25.4% during the three-year period, which was more than in Iowa (21.2%), Missouri (15%), Michigan (11.4%) and Kentucky (0.4%).

Yet high taxes, crime and lousy schools are driving residents and businesses to other states. Ken Griffin recently said he’s moving his Citadel hedge fund and securities trading firm to Miami from Chicago. Caterpillar is replanting its corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas, and Boeing is relocating its head office to Arlington, Virginia.

Illinois lost $8.5 billion in adjusted gross income from out-migration in 2020, or about 1.9% of AGI, ranking 49th in the country. The only state that lost a larger share was New York. Florida gained $23.7 billion and New Hampshire $960 million. Maybe Mr. Pritzker has sojourned to these low-tax states to hit up Democratic donors who have decamped from Illinois.

Mr. Pritzker and Democrats were worried enough about his re-election that they spent more than $30 million during the GOP primary to boost Republican State Sen. Darren Bailey who was considered the weakest candidate in the field. But we wonder if Mr. Pritzker really wants to stick around for a full second term when the state and Chicago pension liabilities may again become a crisis.

Running for President might be a nice diversion that spares him from dealing with the mess Democrats have made of Illinois.

I didn’t want JB Pritzker as Illinois’s governor for a number of reasons:

• I don’t think much of billionaires being elected to executive office.
• To add insult to injury Mr. Pritker is a trust fund baby.
• He was basically elected as a figurehead so that Mike Madigan could continue to run the state unimpeded.
• His misprision of Rod Blagojevich’s felonies should, at the very least, have caused him to be disbarred and rendered unqualified for office.

As governor he has lived down to my expectations. The sole good thing about JB Pritzker’s being elected president would be that it would get him out of Illinois.

There’s quite a bit of bickering going on right now about the bill making its way through the Congress, the presumed intention of which is to increase the proportion of semiconductors manufactured in the United States. I’m not entirely in agreement with the editors of the Wall Street Journal whose inclination is to oppose the bill, making a more or less laissez-faire argument:

Global semiconductor capacity increased 6.7% in 2020 and 8.6% in 2021 and is expected to grow another 8.7% this year. The risk of over-capacity is growing as China heaps subsidies on its semiconductor industry as part of its Made in China 2025 initiative, and the U.S. and Europe race to compete.

Some 15,000 new semiconductor firms registered in China in 2020. Some have drawn investment from U.S. venture-capital firms. Intel has backed Chinese startups even as CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbies Congress for subsidies to counter Beijing. Intel has threatened to delay a planned Ohio factory unless Congress passes the subsidy bill.

The other claim for the bill is that the U.S. must subsidize domestic chip-making to compete with China, but this also isn’t persuasive. The companies like to point out that the U.S. share of the world’s chips has fallen to 12% from 37% in 1990. They don’t mention that the U.S. leads in chip design (52%) and chip-making equipment (50%). Seven of the world’s 10 largest semiconductor companies are based in the U.S. China trails American companies by years in semiconductor technology.

Chip fabrication has moved to South Korea and Taiwan because many chips are commodities with low margins. But chip makers are working to diversify their manufacturing bases to avoid future supply disruptions and have announced $80 billion in new U.S. investments through 2025. Samsung plans to build a $17 billion factory in Texas. TSMC has a $12 billion plant under construction in Arizona.

Uh, no. Most businesses in the United States have very small margins. If what the editors are saying were true most retail establishments, particularly grocery stores, would close. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China dominate chip fabrication because their governments subsidize them and they subsidize them for strategic reasons. The editors continue:

History shows that easy government money can undermine competitiveness. It often leads to inefficient spending and investment. The politicians will also attach their own strings, perhaps with limits on stock buybacks and dividends. Wait until Bernie Sanders is heard from on the Senate floor.

The chip bill isn’t needed to compete with China, and it will set a precedent that other industries will follow. Anybody who can throw up a China competition angle will ask for money. Why Republicans want to sign up for this is a mystery, especially when they might control both houses of Congress in six months.

I also don’t think that the editors understand engineering. Production engineering inevitably follows production and design engineering inevitably follows production engineering. We have seen that in any number of industries.

We need to ensure that more chips are fabricated in the United States for security reasons if for no other. My preference would be to start with strategies other than subsidies although we may end up with subsidies. A good start would be to require that companies bidding on defense contracts have supply chains 100% within the United States, a tall order that goes well beyond chip fabrication. The notion that we can be prepared to go to war with China when we are dependent on China for everything we use to make war is absurd on its face. Today if you walk into any federal government office including DoD offices you will be confronted with masses of things, all made in Taiwan and China or with components or materials made in Taiwan, China, or Russia. That needs to change and in my view the most organic, market-oriented way to accomplish that is by hitting companies on their bottom lines. Start with doing business with the federal government. However, we may ultimately end up with subsidies which is what Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and China have been doing.

The big news in Europe is the heat. They’re experiencing record-breaking heat all across Europe with many areas seeing temperatures over 100°F (38°C). Here in Chicago we’ve already had a protracted period with temperatures that high—a bit unseasonable for us but not a disaster.

In Europe it’s a disaster. They’re accustomed to much milder temperatures than we are. Air conditioning is rare; many homes don’t have central heating. That means when it gets very hot in the summer or very cold in the winter they suffer more than we probably would.

Why is Europe experiencing a heatwave? The explanations I’ve read aren’t particularly satisfying, things like “the jetstream has split in two”. Okay, why has the jetstream split in two?

Quite a few people are attributing the heat to global warming. Maybe. Unlike several regular readers here I actually think that anthropogenic global warming is a thing. Unlike others I think that localized climate change is a much more pressing problem. Plus I would not be a bit surprised if localized climate change didn’t have effects that spread far beyond those local areas. For example, what effect does dumping millions of gallons of hot water into the Western Pacific have? Can that affect the La Niña/El Niño cycle?

So here’s an opportunity to give your explanation for Europe’s extremely hot weather.

Rather than analyzing or remarking on Perry Bacon’s Washington Post column attributing President Biden’s low approval rating to adverse press coverage in the mainstream media, I will, as they say on Jeopardy, put it in the form of a question. Has President Biden’s press coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, and Politico been too negative?

Frankly, I’m skeptical. I’m reminded of Mme. de Cornuel’s wisecrack: “No man is a hero to his valet”. It’s less that Biden’s media coverage is excessively negative than that the coverage is excessive. IMO the days of presidential approval ratings in the 60s or higher like Eisenhower or Kennedy are long gone. 24/7 news coverage practically ensures that we know too much about presidents to think well of them.

I materially agree with Bryan Stryker’s observations in his New York Times op-ed. After characterizing the present situation as an existential crisis for Democrats he makes the following recommendations:

Democrats can focus on three things. First, we need to talk about the work we’ve done to rebuild America — for example, through the infrastructure bill, which has engaged construction in places all over the country. Making things in America is not just a so-called Rust Belt issue, it’s an American-voter issue. People are getting hammered by inflation, and when they can afford something, it’s often back-ordered or plain out of stock. There are no easy answers to inflation, but voters want to hear that Democrats see it as the big problem that it is. And voters everywhere want to bring supply chains home, if possible, so Americans can build things in states all over the country.

Democrats have too often shied away from talking about outsourcing — possibly because Mr. Trump’s anti-outsourcing talk has made us wary of remotely sounding like him. We need to get over that and start owning this issue again.

Second, Democrats should continue to push legislation that helps the working class, particularly in building things — and point out how it will make a difference in people’s lives. The White House’s Buy American executive order and the American Rescue Plan help make sure that American companies get first crack at any contract funded by American taxpayers. That means jobs and income. We should immediately pass some version of the China competitiveness bill that brings critical supply lines like semiconductor production back to America, invests in American manufacturing, takes on China’s intellectual-property theft and illegal subsidies and expands worker training.

Democrats can also improve trade deals so they deliver tangible benefits for American workers. Hundreds of Democrats voted with Mr. Trump to make NAFTA better for workers, and they should continue to do that for other trade pacts. It wasn’t so long ago (2005) that Mr. Obama explained his vote against George W. Bush’s Central American Free Trade Agreement by pointing out that trade agreements too often have been “about making life easier for the winners of globalization, while we do nothing as life gets harder for American workers.”

In addition, the tax code should be reformed to incentivize companies to pay American workers an honest day’s pay here, not hire cheaper foreign labor.

Third, Democrats need to draw a contrast between themselves and Republicans, who have been all too glad to see corporations ship jobs overseas. For example, Republicans overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump’s tax cuts for outsourcers. Democrats took Mitt Romney down for his outsourcing at Bain Capital and held John McCain to account in Michigan for his cheerleading of job-killing trade deals. We should bring this tactic back to the forefront of Democratic campaigns.

And fourth, Democrats should draw inspiration from our roots and union friends. We should remind voters over and over again about who saved the American auto industry: Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden.

I’m concerned that he underestimates the problems facing Democrats. I think it’s far from certain that they want to be the party of making and building. Talking a good show is not enough. They’ve got to follow their supportive words up with actions.