You might find this piece by Norbert Neumann at Army Technology on securing the U. S. rare earths supply chain interesting. Here’s a snippet:

The US began funding the construction of rare earths processing facilities a few years ago, but after the minerals are processed, they must be turned into magnets to be used in military hardware. None of that happens in the US today, while China and Japan are the largest specialised magnet producers.

and here’s the conclusion:

However, many REE are found within radioactive materials that can leach into water supplies. Extracting, processing and disposal of material can also cause environmental disruptions, and regulations in China are often much more lenient than in the US.

Unless the US can find ways to navigate regulatory and infrastructure challenges to its domestic REE extraction efforts, breaking its reliance on China for these critical materials – in defence as well as other sectors – will prove difficult.

All I have to add to it is that deindustrializing was a easier politically and more than than reindustrializing will be. But we really have no choice and we must make whatever decisions and take whatever actions are necessary to reshore of our far-flung supply chains. None is more urgent than rare earth elements.

Here’s another question. Is the Supreme Court too political and or ideological? I am coming to conclude that it is.

The judiciary is the branch of the federal government that is most technocratic and, consequently, least democratic. We will never have an apolitical judiciary; all human activities are political as was pointed out more than two millennia ago. I do think it is possible for it to be less political and less ideological than at present. I just have no idea of how to accomplish that. Expanding, i.e. “padding” the Supreme Court won’t accomplish that nor will shortening their terms. As usual I blame the Congress.

The political activism and IMO foolish actions of Justice Thomas’s wife have not pushed me over the edge. She is not the first judicial spouse to be a political activist and won’t be the last. But they are certainly additional data points.

Why not abolish the Supreme Court? Or replace it with jurimetrics? And why has the Congress never limited the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court?

I’m just full of questions today and I didn’t want to let this one get away without remarking on it. In preface I want to mention that I think that the Senate should confirm President Biden’s appointment of Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court. At this point I think it will, probably with the unanimous support of Senate Democrats and possibly with some Republican support as well which is for the good.

My question has to do with the conduct of the hearings. I don’t think that anyone—Republicans, Democrats, or Judge Jackson herself—is covering themselves in glory. What are the Republicans doing? It eludes me. Battlespace preparation for the midterms? They aren’t doing a very good job of it.

I recognize that many won’t agree with me in this but I don’t think that Judge Jackson is covering herself in glory, either. The Judiciary Committee Republicans have laid multiple traps for her and she has happily stepped into each of them. That the traps have largely fizzled to my eyes is more a sign of ineptitude of the Judiciary Committee Republicans than of any cleverness on the part of Judge Jackson. Does she think that the Republicans believe her answers? I can’t imagine that.

If you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s a Chicagoism. Just substitute “Cubs” for “confirmation hearings”. That’s pretty much what they’ve sounded like to me.

Lord Ismay, the first Secretary-General of NATO, famously characterized the organization’s mission as to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. Here’s my question: is that obsolete? The Soviet Union is no more. Is Russia actually as much a threat to our European allies as the Soviet Union was? Despite their present nervousness, our European allies have not seemed to think so right up to the point at which Russia attacked Ukraine.

In what sense are we keeping the Germans down? Had that remained part of NATO’s raison dêtreL we would have prevented German reunification and the euro.

Do our European allies actually want to keep the Americans in? Or do they just want us to serve as their janissaries?

My view is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given the first clause of Lord Ismay’s characterization new currency and that the other two clauses remain in our national interest as well. What do you think?

James Joyner has a good round-up of reaction to President Biden’s apparent Kinsleyite gaffe at Outside the Beltway. It is being interpreted by many, particularly the president’s supporters, as a call for regime change in Russia.

Will the statement make it harder or easier to arrive at a negotiated settlement of the Russian-Ukrainian War? Or is it irrelevant?

It reminds me of what is called “Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics”.

Again at Bloomberg Bobby Ghosh takes pains to remind us that the most damaging war going on now isn’t between Russian and Ukraine but the Ethiopian civil war:

Though the war’s true toll is impossible to know, researchers from Belgium’s Ghent University estimate as many as half a million people have died so far: between 50,000 and 100,000 from the fighting, 150,000 to 200,000 from starvation and more than 100,000 from the lack of medical attention. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has expressed concern about possible ethnic cleansing in Tigray, but the government in Addis Ababa has dismissed this as “spurious.”

The Tigrayan rebels have been accused of crimes, including murder and rape, against other ethnic groups. But Abiy’s soldiers are blamed for most of the civilian casualties, especially those from starvation and neglect. Government forces are preventing food aid and medicine from reaching Tigray, humanitarian groups say.

And they are no slouches at other kinds of atrocity, including the recent immolation of a Tigrayan man, which even the government-affiliated human rights commission has blamed on Abiy’s forces.

Such outrages are likely to multiply and escalate as the war remains stalemated. Late last year, government troops were able to beat back a rebel advance toward the capital and retake towns on the border with Tigray. The use of military drones, apparently supplied by Turkey, helped turn the tide. (Turkish drones have also helped Ukrainian forces slow the Russian advance.)

While his ground forces seem to have stopped short of an assault on Tigray, where the mountainous terrain has previously proved to be a distinct rebel advantage, Abiy has no qualms about ordering airstrikes that have inflicted heavy civilian casualties. Michelle Bachelet, head of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, says her staff have recorded hundreds of deaths from aerial attacks “apparently carried out by the Ethiopian Air Force.” The government has denied this.

There are many reasons that the U. S. is reacting so differently to the two conflicts. No great power is involved in the Ethiopian civil war. It doesn’t alarm our European allies or pose any threat to them whatever its outcome. Ethiopia doesn’t have nuclear weapons or AFAIK biological or chemical weapons. I also suspect there is a tinge of racism in our reaction as in all conflicts in Africa, a sort of “what else can you expect from the wogs” sort of attitude.

In his piece at Bloomberg, after expressing a fond hope that the Ukrainians will prevail in their war against the Russian invasion of their country which I share, Niall Ferguson makes what I think is a very good point. Presidents Biden, Zelenskyy, Putin, and Xi are all turning to historic parallels to form their understanding of what’s going on now but they’re each turning to different history and interpreting it differently. As Dr. Ferguson sees it, the Biden administration is seeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the prism of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan:

According to Sanger, who cannot have written his piece without high-level sources, the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units, according to American officials. But as of now, Mr. Biden and his staff do not see the utility of an expansive covert effort to use the spy agency to ferry in arms as the United States did in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s.”

He remarks:

It would indeed be wonderful if the combination of attrition in Ukraine and a sanctions-induced financial crisis at home led to Putin’s downfall. Take that, China! Just you try the same trick with Taiwan — which, by the way, we care about a lot more than Ukraine because of all those amazing semiconductors they make at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

The fascinating thing about this strategy is the way it combines cynicism and optimism. It is, when you come to think of it, archetypal Realpolitik to allow the carnage in Ukraine to continue; to sit back and watch the heroic Ukrainians “bleed Russia dry”; to think of the conflict as a mere sub-plot in Cold War II, a struggle in which China is our real opponent.

Meanwhile President Zelenskyy harnesses whichever historic parallel is most telling to the audience to which he is appealing:

Remember, both sides get to apply history. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is a master of the art, carefully tailoring his speeches to each national parliament he addresses, effectively telling one country after another: “Our history is your history. We are you.” He gave the Brits Churchill, the Germans the Berlin Wall, the Yanks Martin Luther King Jr., and the Israelis the Holocaust.

The history on which President Putin is relying is considerably older:

Yet such recent history is less significant to Putin than the much older history of Russia’s imperial past. I have made this argument here before. Fresh evidence that Putin’s project is not the resurrection of the Soviet Union, but looks back to tsarist imperialism and Orthodoxy, was provided by his speech at the fascistic rally held on Friday at Moscow’s main football stadium. Its concluding allusion to the tsarist admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who made his reputation by winning victories in the Black Sea, struck me as ominous for Odesa.

and the history to which President Xi is different yet again:

The Chinese also know how to apply history to contemporary problems, but they do it in a different way again. While Putin wants to transport post-Soviet Russia back into a mythologized tsarist past, Xi remains the heir to Mao Zedong, and one who aspires to a place alongside him in the Chinese Communist Party’s pantheon. In their two-hour call on Friday, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry read-out, Biden told Xi:

50 years ago, the US and China made the important choice of issuing the Shanghai Communique. Fifty years on, the US-China relationship has once again come to a critical time. How this relationship develops will shape the world in the 21st century. Biden reiterated that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; it does not aim to change China’s system; the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; the US does not support “Taiwan independence”; and it has no intention to seek a conflict with China.

To judge by Xi’s response, he believes not one word of Biden’s assurances. As he replied:

The China-US relationship, instead of getting out of the predicament created by the previous US administration, has encountered a growing number of challenges. …

In particular … some people in the US have sent a wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” forces. This is very dangerous. Mishandling of the Taiwan question will have a disruptive impact on the bilateral ties … The direct cause for the current situation in the China-US relationship is that some people on the US side have not followed through on the important common understanding reached by the two Presidents …

Xi concluded with a Chinese saying: “He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off.” Make of that what you will, but it didn’t strike me as very encouraging to those in Team Biden who have been pushing a hawkish line toward China.

I don’t have a great deal to add to that. There will be no perfect historic parallel. As a remark frequently incorrectly attributed to Sam Clemens puts it history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. Those rhymes are composed of permanent national interests and human nature.

It might be worthwhile to pass along the way in which Russians see World War II, dramatically different from ours, which they call “the Great Patriotic War”. As the Russians tell it the Soviets won the war; the Americans were just standing around holding their coats while the Soviets worked.

I don’t think that either the Russian or American interpretation is quite right or complete. I think that during World War II the Soviets put up with hardships and setbacks we can barely imagine. They lost and lost and lost and lost and then they won. That victory was made possible because the Germans didn’t have the ability to fight on four fronts at once. Largely the Brits were doing massive damage to German industrial capability in the north, the Americans and Brits were advancing from the south, the Soviets from the east, and, nearly simultaneous with the Soviets’ westward advance into Poland, American and British forces began advancing from the west. The Germans were actually afraid of the Soviets; they knew how much damage they had absorbed since 1941 and recognized they were out for revenge. Besides, the German forces used to make war against the Soviet Union were needed elsewhere. It was the American and British advances form the north, south, and west that made the Soviet advances possible. It would actually be against the law to say that in Russia.

I honestly don’t know how the Chinese Communist Party views World War II. I wouldn’t be surprised if their view were similar to that of the Russians—that they won the war without a great deal of help.

At Financial Times Edward Luce makes a point I’ve been making around here—the statement that “the world is on our side about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” is factually untrue:

One red flag is the west’s habitual tendency to claim moral leadership. This creates three problems. First, it is hypocritical. US public opinion paid little attention to the horrific carnage in Syria, for which Assad is primarily culpable. Though Germany took in 1mn refugees in 2015, most of the rest of the west did not follow suit. Britain and the US admitted fewer than 50,000 Syrians between them. What Russia is doing to Ukraine is barbaric. But there is plenty to go round. Many in the Muslim world, in particular, think America practises double standards. Thousands of civilians died in Iraq and Afghanistan from US munitions, though they were not deliberately targeted (unlike in Ukraine).

A second point is that the west is rash to assume its values are universal. The US this week designated what Myanmar did to its Rohingya minority as genocide. Though Myanmar, unlike Ukraine, is in India’s neighbourhood, Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, made only token protests. The fact that the Rohingya are Muslim undoubtedly influenced him. India took only a tiny fraction of the refugees. This is in spite of the fact that India, unlike China, is a democracy.

A third is that much of the world resents western sanctions. With the exception of fuel exports to Europe, the west has largely decoupled from Russia in a month. The execution has been astonishing. But it has also reminded others of the west’s capacity to punish those with whom it disagrees. In this instance, it is very hard to argue the west is wrong. Putin not only poses a mortal threat to democratic values; he is also extolling the law of the jungle. No wonder so many small countries condemned Russia at the UN.

There’s a line in the musical, Gypsy. In response to one character declaiming “New York is the center of the world!”, Mama Rose respondes “New York is the center of New York”. Just because we’re convinced we’re doing the right thing and our closest allies, coincidentally mostly the countries with which we have the most in common, agree with us and are taking steps themselves, doesn’t mean that the whole world agrees with us. Don’t assume.

I wish Mr. Luce had gone into how making such assumptions impedes our ability to engage in diplomacy in greater detail but I agree that it does. In the here and now if we understood better why India isn’t going alone with us on sanctions against Russia we could be better able to convince them to go along. Right now India is taking up the slack on Russian oil exports. Why? Because it’s in their national interest.

Here’s the money quote in Robert Henneke’s op-ed at Washington Examiner:

When the liberal environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, a coalition of U.S. senators led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and a conservative Texas institute like mine come together to question an ocean-based wind farm project, something must be fishy.

The issue on which those two unlikely parties agree is the construction of a 1,400-square miles wind farm, Vineyard Wind I. Here’s where it’s under construction:

The objections being raised are both procedural:

As we point out, in its urgency to get offshore wind projects approved, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management failed to conduct the proper environmental impact studies, he states jumping on board with this project failed to get input from the fishing industry regarding environmental and economic impacts, and reasonable alternatives to the sites chosen for the turbines were not considered.

and material:

Critically endangered North Atlantic right whales (fewer than 350 remain) live and travel through the areas where Vineyard I and other projects are planned. In fact, NOAA has listed the waters off New England as critical habitat.

But at every stage of wind farm development, as NRDC points out, these majestic creatures are threatened. It starts with the sonar surveys used to map the seabed.

“Some of the soundwaves used in geophysical surveys overlap with frequencies for marine mammal hearing, meaning they can be detected by these animals,” the NRDC points out.

This can damage their hearing — their main sensory mechanism. The noise can drive them from their feeding grounds, their breeding areas, and their familiar migration routes. And the fast-moving research vessels also pose a risk of collisions, which are often fatal to the whales.

That’s why Sens. Angus King and Susan Collins of Maine and Warren have asked that more research be done before offshore wind turbines start going up. They’re also asking about economic impacts — particularly to the fisheries that sustain their state economies and literally put food on their tables.

Fishermen say trawling near and around those turbines would be dangerous, if not impossible. It’s not just the turbine towers and the massive concrete bases they require — it’s also the miles and miles of transmission lines, which have to be buried and covered over. The federal government itself admits that “due to the placement of the turbines, it is likely that the entire 75,614-acre area will be abandoned by commercial fisheries due to difficulties with navigation.”

The Biden Administration fast-tracked the approval.

It does make one wonder the reason for the rush. There’s an old proverb, “more haste, less speed” which seems to cover the situation. Did the incoming Biden Administration want to be able to show progress? Or is there something more going on?