I didn’t want this post at The Hill by Jennifer Hillman and David Sacks on the G-7’s announced “Build Back a Better World” pass without comment. Here’s a snippet:

The Biden administration should be applauded for prioritizing a response to Belt and Road and partnering with the G7 nations to offer a transparent, sustainable, responsible alternative. But it is unlikely that this new initiative, termed “Build Back Better World,” will be enough to compete with Belt and Road.

Belt and Road is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy endeavor and the largest-ever global infrastructure undertaking — funding and building roads, power plants, ports, railways, 5G networks and fiber-optic cables around the world. In many ways, Belt and Road filled a void left by the United States, its allies and the multilateral development banks.

In too many instances, China is the only country offering to fund critical infrastructure projects in low- and middle-income countries, while in other cases China is more competitive than the United States because it can move quickly from planning to construction and offers the ability to work with a single group of builders, financiers and government officials.

I don’t think that the U. S. needs to respond to “Belt and Road” and moreover our putative allies in the G-7 aren’t reliable partners for such a venture. There are any number of reasons for my views. First, I think China’s policy of non-intervention is a better one for building China’s repute in the non-aligned world. Lending money may make you a few temporary friends but it can also produce, shall we say, unforeseen secondary effects like this. Here’s another example of that. China is heavily involved in Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam—one of the developments most likely to provoke a major war in Africa. Sometimes one country’s development program is another country’s destruction of essential ressources.

Second, what’s the objective? If it’s to line the pockets of a few local politicians, an infrastructure lending program is a darned good way to do it. If it’s to build infrastructure maybe not so much.

Third, our putative allies, France and Germany in particular write a heckuva good press release but are perhaps not as good at follow-through as might be needed. And keep in mind that more involvement from their former colonial overlords might not a all that bright a prospect for many countries in the world.

Finally, IMO there is no better way for the U. S. to boost its soft power than to rebuild its own society and economy and by that I mean more primary production, more research and development, more national infrastructure (things like a resilient power grid, a sound currency, dependable and just enforcement of laws, and so on). Increasing primary production would put the administration at odds with some of the people on whom it depends for political support, flying in the face of the “green reform” they prefer.

So what about not invading other countries? That would be a darned good way of building up U. S. soft power, too.

I had to giggle when I saw the headline for this op-ed by Adam Schiff in the Washington Post: “The Justice Department must be depoliticized”. The slug attributes the politicization of the JD to Nixon:

Nixon started it. Trump perfected it. Now it’s time to clean it up.

Rep. Schiff has apparently never heard of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Maybe he’s too young.

The first Attorney General of the United States was Edmond Randolph who had been George Washington’s aide-de-camp during the War of the American Revolution. He received the appointment for his support of Washington. It was a notably political appointment. As far as I can tell the Justice Department which the Attorney General directs at the president’s behest, has been politicized ever since.

If I recall correctly, John Kennedy’s Attorney General was his brother, Robert who had graduated from law school in 1951 and received a series of jobs that were clearly political in nature. His resume as a lawyer was quite thin. His appointment was political not to mention nepotism. The more notable of Johnson’s Attorneys General was Ramsey Clark. Must I document the political nature of that appointment or the various political activties in which Mr. Clark participated?

For my entire life I cannot remember a time in which the AG was not in essence the administration’s hatchet man. Maybe it hasn’t always been that way but I can’t recall anything else.

I actually found Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column, an attempted explication of the situation with respect to Iran, pretty interesting. He has a succinct assessment of the problem:

Iran is too big to invade; the regime is too ensconced to be toppled from the outside; its darkest impulses, to dominate its Sunni Arab neighbors and destroy the Jewish state, are too dangerous to ignore; and its people are too talented to be forever denied a nuclear capability.

with which I materially agree except in one particular but it’s an important one. I think that Mr. Friedman is doing something I’ve complained about frequently. I don’t think he’s taking the religion of the Iranian mullahs seriously.

All of the following is just how I understand things. In Islam the entire body of those who profess Islam is the Ummah, analogous to what is called in Catholicism the “community of the faithful”. After Mohammed’s death the Ummah was governed by a caliph and it is soon after that the great division in Islam began. Sunni Muslims believe that any Muslim may be made caliph. Shi’ite Muslims believe that only a descendant of Mohammed may legitimately be caliph. In other words they believe that all caliphs after the death of Ali and, indeed, all other rulers of Muslims countries are, in effect usurpers. The mullahs of Iran hold to a specific version of Shi’a Islam dubbed “Khomeinism” (and considered a heresy by some other Shi’ite Muslims) under which government of the Ummah by Muslim clergy has a sort of legitimacy.

That’s where I think that Mr. Friedman doesn’t appreciate the problem. Iran’s mullahs aren’t just interest in dominating “its Sunni Arab neighbors”. They believe they have a religious obligation to spread their version of Islam not just to Sunni Muslims but to everyone. That they would happen to rule that world-spanning doamin is just a coincidence. What must be kept in mind is that they can’t be dissuaded from it and they won’t negotiate it away. I suspect that the mullahocracy’s antipathy towards Israel is a device to rally other Muslims, particularly Sunni Muslims, to their side.

Mr. Friedman goes on to provide what I think is a pretty fair assessment of the status quo:

None of this will change as long as these ayatollahs are in power. And, if we are being honest, not only have they been consistent for 42 years, but so, too, have U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers. Their strategies can be summed up as this: Always try to get the best deal with Iran that money can buy.

also with one proviso. Since the mullahs won’t negotiate their core beliefs away and those beliefs are diametrically opposed to what we and Israel might want to accomplish in the Middle East, the expectations from negotiations with them should be pretty darned limited. In fact I don’t honestly think they’re worth negotiating with at all.

Also, keep in mind that should the Israelis genuinely feel threatened by Iran they won’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons against them. They don’t believe in showing mercy to their enemies and they have their own religious motivations. Not to mention survival. It wouldn’t take much to render Israel uninhabitable.

Here’s his description of the Biden Administration’s position:

It’s not only that Biden won’t grant Israel’s new prime minister his every whim the way Trump did Bibi. It is that Biden is tightly focused on securing what he thinks is America’s primary strategic interest in the Middle East — preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon that would force Turkey and all the Arab states to get nukes, thereby blowing up the global nuclear nonproliferation order and making the region a giant threat to global stability.

The Biden team believes that Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign did not diminish Iran’s malign behavior in the region one iota (it will show you the data to prove it). So, Biden wants to at least lock up Iran’s nuclear program for a while and then try blunting its regional troublemaking in other ways. At the same time, Biden wants to put more focus on nation-building at home and on countering China.

while here’s his proposal for moving foreward:

I have an idea: One way to defuse the tension between the U.S. and Israel would be for Biden to attempt a radical new diplomatic initiative — a leveraged buyout of the Iranian presence in Syria.

Syria today is effectively controlled in different sectors by three non-Arab powers — Russia, Turkey and Iran. Russia is not enamored with having Iranian forces in Syria alongside its own, but it needed them to help crush the democratic and Sunni Islamist enemies of its proxy, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Biden and the gulf Arab states could go to the Russians and Assad with this offer: Kick out the Iranian forces from Syria and we will triple whatever financial aid Iran was giving Syria, and we’ll tacitly agree that Assad (though a war criminal) can stay in power for the near term.

I agree with him that negotiating with Russians and Syrians is more likely to be productive than negotiating with the Iranian mullahs.

The news isn’t entirely bad, however. The history of radical revolutions like the Iranian Revolution is that they don’t tend to outlive the revolutionaries by much. The “students” who overthrew the Shah are now old men. In twenty years or so they’ll be dead and their successors will be bureaucrats without a great deal of revolutionary fervor sp things are quite likely to change.

I encountered a statistic that’s pretty startling is true in a post on “decarbonization” of all things at RealClearEnergy by Rupert Darwall:

In his epochal book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,” Joseph Schumpeter described publicly traded corporations as capitalism’s vulnerable fortresses. This is truer now than when Schumpeter was writing in the 1940s, with huge, politically controlled state and municipal pension funds. The Big Three index funds of Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street now hold 43% of the fund industry’s U.S. equity assets, which own individual stocks and vote their proxies not out of choice or conviction but because they’re in the index.

The emphasis is mine. Is that right? That sounds like too much consolidation to me.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead has some interesting definitions of winning and losing directed at the G-7 representatives who seem to confuse pontificating with achievement:

Winning means getting Russia to withdraw from Syria, the Donbas and Crimea. A diplomatic victory is when China agrees to dismantle military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea. Success involves getting Iran to stop arming and funding armed militias and terrorist groups in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

Losing, on the other hand, is something the West has become quite good at. Losing is watching construction continue on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as Russia declares the country’s largest opposition party an illegal conspiracy. Losing is moaning about Chinese behavior in the South China Sea as the military balance tilts toward Beijing. Losing is crafting intricate webs of ineffectual sanctions as Russia’s reach and control inexorably expand. Losing is wringing one’s hands and issuing eloquent critiques as China intensifies its crackdowns in Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

Perhaps it’s just me but I see something of a mismatch in those success criteria. A year-round port has been part of Russia’s definition of winning for more than 200 years. IMO the notion that Russia will cede that goal to an anti-Russian regime of dubious legitimacy in Ukraine is pretty far-fetched.

I can’t speak authoritatively to China’s objectives in trying to consolidate its control of the South China Sea or Iran’s support for Islamist terrorist groups. Perhaps someone can explain it to me. I could speculate that in China’s case it’s about natural resources and trying to obstruct U. S. “freedom of navigation” exercises and in Iran’s that it’s part of Iran’s asserting its role in the Islamic world but those would just be speculations.

As far as the losing side of the equation goes, I think I can explain that in one word: Germany. As long as Germany sees its relationships with Russia, China, and Iran as economically advantageous, the G-7 will keep losing as Dr. Mead defines it.

You might want to look at this argument against teaching critical race theory by Rick Esenberg and Daniel Lennington at RealClearEducation. After identifying the legal problems with federal programs to teach CRT in the schools the authors arrive at the meat of their argument:

Critical race theory literally teaches children racism. They are placed in groups, labeled oppressors and victims, and taught that America’s system is rigged against persons of color. These are destructive lies that have no place in American schools.

concluding

Our schools are places of reason, facts, discovery, and the scientific method. Critical race theory is a Marxist experiment to remake society based on class struggle. It is not an educational tool and certainly should not be funded with taxpayer dollars. The Education Department should abandon this abominable social experiment and remove any reference to critical race theory from these grant programs. America must reject the false promises of “equity” and rededicate itself to equality for all.

I have no objection to teaching the painful, unpleasant facts of American history in the schools. I have no problem with teaching young people, once they have reached an age at which they might understand it, what critical race theory teaches. I do have an objection to teaching that it is true. For example, consider this famous quote from Ibram X. Kendi:

The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination.

That is a textbook example of arguing that two wrongs make a right. It is fallacious since it is a relevance error. Furthermore, it benefits people who have not personally experienced the “past discrimination” by punishing people who did not commit that discrimination.

I also object to consciousness-racing exercises in schools. Such exercises serve no healthy function.

While I am in material agreement with the core point of Stephen Wertheim’s New York Times op-ed—that President Biden is putting too much unconditional support behind NATO:

Even before today’s NATO summit, President Biden settled the most important question: He affirmed America’s commitment to defend the alliance’s 30 members by force. And despite divisions on many other foreign policy issues, his party stands in lock step behind him. To most Democrats, alliances symbolize international cooperation. Proof positive is that Donald Trump supposedly sought to tear them down.

Yet current progressive enthusiasm for NATO is anomalous. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, depriving NATO of its original reason for being, skeptics of the alliance included liberals as much as conservatives. In 1998, 10 Democratic Senators joined nine Republicans in opposing the first, fateful round of NATO enlargement, which would soon extend the alliance to Russia’s border.

Among the dissenters was Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. In between voting against the first Iraq war in 1991 and the second after Sept. 11, Mr. Wellstone warned that expanding NATO would jeopardize Europe’s hard-won gains. “There is peace between states in Europe, between nations in Europe, for the first time in centuries,” he said. “We do not have a divided Europe, and I worry about a NATO expansion which could redivide Europe and again poison relations with Russia.”

Events have proved him wiser than his party seems to think. The left has ceded criticism of NATO to the right, mistaking armed alliances for friendly partnerships and fixating on Mr. Trump’s rhetoric instead of his actions.

I don’t think he goes quite far enough. A good place to start would be with Lord Ismay’s famous wisecrack about NATO’s purpose: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. I would have little problem with that mission statement but it has largely been abandoned or, at least, there is no consensus about it among present NATO members. Germany, in particular, seems to want the Russians in and the Americans out. It’s not entirely clear to me why the Biden Administration’s support for NATO is as full-throated as it is other than

1. It’s the opposite of Trump’s rhetoric (although consistent with his actions)
2. NATO makes a handy body to approve intervention the United Nations Security Council won’t approve and
3. Support for multi-lateralism for it own sake.

If I recall correctly then-Sen. Biden was a strong, vocal supporter of the second round of NATO expansion which, as far as I can tell, served no purpose other than to “poison relations with Russia”. It certainly didn’t strengthen the alliance.

But this statement by Mr. Wertheim took me aback a little:

For progressives who seek to end endless wars and prevent new ones, the matter of Europe can no longer be skirted. The United States can trust Europeans to defend Europe.

Other than a few backbenchers, who are these progressives “who seek to end endless wars”? President Biden? I remain unconvinced that he’s a progressive. And I’ll believe we’ve left Afghanistan after it happens and not before. As far as I can tell both political parties are dominated by interventionists.

In a piece at The Atlantic Richard Alba (sociologist), Morris Levy (political scientist), and Dowell Myers (policy, planning, and demographics) underscore a point I have been making over the last twenty years, after Ruy Texeira and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority—that the notion of a “majority minority” America would run into a few potholes:

In recent years, demographers and pundits have latched on to the idea that, within a generation, the United States will inevitably become a majority-minority nation, with nonwhite people outnumbering white people. In the minds of many Americans, this ethno-racial transition betokens political, cultural, and social upheaval, because a white majority has dominated the nation since its founding. But our research on immigration, public opinion, and racial demography reveals something quite different: By softening and blurring racial and ethnic lines, diversity is bringing Americans together more than it is tearing the country apart.

The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarization. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers. It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment. At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.”

The narrative is also false. By rigidly splitting Americans into two groups, white versus nonwhite, it reinvents the discredited 19th-century “one-drop rule” and applies it to a 21st-century society in which the color line is more fluid than it has ever been.

The irony is, of course, that today it is the “anti-racists” who are promoting the “one-drop rule”. The reality of the situation can be illustrated from my own family’s history.

Back at the turn of the 20th century my father’s paternal grandmother objected to one of son’s French-Irish girlfriend on the grounds that she wasn’t German. She refused to allow their marriage. They married after she died. My paternal grandfather didn’t encounter the problem his younger brother did—my paternal grandmother was German. More German than he, in fact. On the other side of my family my mother’s uncle married a Mexican girl. Their children, my mother’s cousins, are an interesting mix—my maternal grandmother’s family was Irish and French. Those cousins are my contemporaries and I have never thought of them as anything but white.

The reality of today is that many if not most Hispanics consider themselves to be white and that intermarriage among people of different races and ethnicities will continue. Most of us in the U. S. are mutts. My ancestry is Swiss, Irish, French, and German; my wife’s is English, Scottish, Irish, and Albanese (it’s a long story). Increasingly, there will be Americans who add Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, etc., Chinese, Japanese, and Indian into the mix. Most blacks in the U. S. except in certain isolated pockets, e.g. the Gullahs in the Southeastern United States, are already mixed race. Will they continue to identify and be identified as black? My guess is both. I think that many of the people who proudly claim Native American ancestry would be surprised to learn that’s not actually true but they do have sub-Saharan black ancestry.

I think that the present claims of “systemic racism” are counter-productive. I’m not denying that racism exists and creates problems. But everybody has grievances, some grievances are more serious than others, and bundling them all up into one unactionable grievance is not particularly productive.

I hesitated about posting on this subject since it’s a bit out of my comfort zone. You are presumably aware that a recent “bug-finding” event found 238 security vulnerabilities in the Army’s systems. Brad D. Williams reports at Breaking Defense:

WASHINGTON: The third annual Hack the Army event uncovered 238 security vulnerabilities — 102 rated “high” or “critical” — in Army tech.

The bug bounty event, which began in January and ran for six weeks, invited military and civilian security researchers to find vulnerabilities within a limited time frame. This allows the Army to proactively fix the prospective cyber targets, ideally before a bad guy can exploit them.

For perspective, Hack the Pentagon found 138 unique, validated vulnerabilities in 2017, Hack The Army found 118 late fall, and Hack the Air Force found 207, according to a story Sydney did on the program.

“We cannot afford a ‘next time we will do better’ mentality. I strongly believe a proactive approach is critical, which means finding potential problems and addressing them before they are realized,” said the Defense Digital Service’s Maya Kuang, who participated.

This year’s event included 40 military and civilian participants. Eligible civilian security researchers received more than $150,000 in total bounty payouts.

The reason I was moved to remark on this is the several recent, highly-publicized ransomware incidents. There have been a number of suggestions of using Cyber Com to oppose these exploits.

Now, you might think that for legal and cultural reasons our military was well-positioned to protect itself against cyber-security threats. The discovery of so many vulnerabilities suggests that just isn’t the case.

What’s the issue? Lax discipline? Cyber-security just not a priority? They don’t have the capacity to deal with the situation? If any of those is the case it doesn’t exactly bode well for our military’s ability to protect the civilian sector against attack if they can’t even protect themselves. Consider physical analogies and you’ll see what I mean.