I’m trying to figure out how to reconcile the view expressed by Charles Lane in his latest Washington Post column:

There is fury on the right over President Biden’s new commission to study reform of the federal judiciary, including expansion of the nine-member Supreme Court, a.k.a. “court-packing.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called it “a direct assault on our nation’s independent judiciary and yet another sign of the Far Left’s influence over the Biden Administration.”

Still stewing about McConnell’s refusal to abet his challenge to the 2020 election results, and about the senator’s denunciation of the Jan. 6 mob attack on Congress, former president Donald Trump said the real court-packing problem is that McConnell is “helpless” to stop it.

What an overreaction. Yes, some on the Democratic left would love to add new justices, negating the current 6-to-3 conservative majority.

with this report from NBC News:

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats will introduce legislation Thursday to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, joining progressive activists pushing to transform the court.

Is he accusing House Democrats of pure and futile partisanship?

An op-ed by Jonathan Horn in the Wall Street Journal provides a little historical background:

In the spring of 1861, Union officers in Washington looked with fear at the Arlington Heights rising from the Virginia banks across the Potomac. With Virginia seceding from the Union, Confederate forces could fortify the position and inflict serious damage on the capital. “The president’s house and department buildings in its vicinity are but two and a half miles across the river from Arlington high ground, where a battery of bombs and heavy guns, if established, could destroy the city,” warned the officer in command of Washington’s defenses.

It did not have to be this way. Arlington had sat comfortably inside the District of Columbia’s borders, which Congress in 1790 had charged then-President George Washington with drawing along the Potomac. Washington had plotted a 10-by-10-mile square, oriented like a diamond, straddling the river and encompassing land ceded by both Maryland and Virginia. But in 1846, with Congress’s permission, residents on the Virginia side held a referendum on their future and voted overwhelmingly to leave the federal district and rejoin their native state.

Even President Washington’s adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, who owned the pillared mansion crowning the Arlington Heights and had long opposed breaking up the diamond-shaped federal district, had come around on the idea and cheered the outcome. The government buildings were on the Maryland side of the river, and residents of the Virginia side had tired of having no representation in Congress, which had legislative power over the federal district and could one day have restricted the region’s profitable slave trade or even freed its slaves altogether.

Then as now, views on the constitutionality of shrinking the federal district varied. Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina insisted that nothing in the Constitution prohibited the federal government from returning land it no longer needed. Rep. John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts thought otherwise. He declared the act “unconstitutional and void.”

and in doing so suggests a better solution than statehood for Washington, DC. The borders of the nation’s capitol should be reduced to the area immediately surrounding the White House, National Mall and Capitol and the remaining land ceded back to Maryland. That satisfies the goal of providing representation to the residents of that space, should not provoke a political battle, and would not require a constitutional amendment or approval by the states.

Charlie Bilello provides a litany of the assets and goods that have increased in price over the last year including:

• Stocks
• Junk bonds
• Crypto-currencies
• Housing
• Lumber
• Copper
• Agricultural commodities
• Used cars
• Collectibles

Some of these are at 7 year or 10 year highs. I would add gold.

Maybe it’s transitory and maybe it’s not. When gold and collectibles prices rise, it’s a pretty good indication that there are people who are expecting inflation.

There’s enough of interest in Judge Glock’s rather sprawling post at City Journal, “Can American Cities Manufacture Again?”, that I recommend you read the whole thing. It touches on industrial policy, subsidies, taxes, educational policy and other subjects. I’ll just quote some snippets and then add my own commentary afterwards.

The confluence of the Great Lakes and their tributaries helps explain why the large area that comprises St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Milwaukee has dominated U.S. manufacturing for more than a century. While manufacturing employs only about 7 percent of the workforce in most states, these numbers remain at about 14 percent in much of the Rust Belt, and at over 16 percent in Wisconsin and Indiana. One finds a similar zone—called an industrial “banana,” ranging from Essen in Germany down to Milan in Italy—that has dominated European industry for generations. Its location in Western Europe’s center, which includes the intersection of the Rhine and the Danube, helped establish its preeminence.

Even when the importance of geography wanes, these industrial heartlands remain powerful. One reason is that existing industries inspire the creation of new infrastructure. New canals, railroads, highways, and airports attract more industry and then more infrastructure in a virtuous cycle. And the output of one industry, such as steel, is often the input of another, such as cars, so that the industries benefit from proximity and from being near to that burgeoning infrastructure, too.

and

Despite a national obsession with high-tech clusters like Silicon Valley, manufacturing industries and their workers are much more concentrated than service industries. The most concentrated industries in America are sectors such as carpet-weaving (still based in Dalton), paper products, and steel-rolling. Though proportionally a small part of our economy, these clusters are a matter of life and death for their home cities.

and

America’s deindustrialization is not only a story of failure. One reason U.S. manufacturing has declined is that we have been more successful in other spheres, partly because of our light-touch employment regulations. Economists Stian Westlake and Jonathan Haskel have shown that a positive relationship exists between the relative laxness of job regulations—that is, how easy it is to hire and fire people—and the amount of investment in “intangibles,” or nonmanufactured things like brands, software, and job training. Europe’s strict labor regulations encourage tangible investments and large-scale factories, for instance, since these can succeed even with stilted, immobile labor forces. But such regulations discourage the more ethereal investments and mobile workers who power the freer American economy.

Deindustrialization in the U.S. owes perhaps less to factors driving factories away than to the pull of productive and tradable service industries, such as software and movies. A Brookings Institution study ranked the U.S. as having one of the globe’s best manufacturing environments, a reality reflected in how, despite our proportionally smaller workforce, we still produce more real goods than any other country, though we’re now neck-and-neck with China in that regard. But America has an even more dynamic service industry. We wouldn’t want to follow the European path and revive manufacturing at the cost of discouraging mobility and eroding the nation’s dominance in service industries, which make up more than 80 percent of our economy.

The key problem with American deindustrialization is that those who have benefited have been a very different cohort from those who lost out. Those who lost out have never really recovered. And those who have benefited represent a much smaller slice of the American population. What of the other 75% of the population?

I think that in the final analysis Mr. Glock fails to apprehend the enormity of what has happened in the U. S. over the last 40 years. 40 years ago you could drive throughout the Midwest or the Northeast, off the main roads and in town after town after town there would be a court hour or seat of government, churches, stores, and a small number of light manufacturing facilities. Now much of that is gone and those towns are either ghost towns, greatly diminished, impoverished or all of the above.

As I have said before I think that we need a re-commitment to primary production (mining, agriculture, lumbering, etc.), secondary production (steel, refining, etc.), and tertiary production. We need to be a lot less reliant on finance and consumption in its various forms than we are today.

And as I have also said before the U. S. is actually better at mass engineering projects than it is at subsidized industrial planning and research. With new mass engineering projects the research and industry will happen.

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston remarks on the “Global Trends” report I’ve posted on twice:

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Biden proposed convening a “Summit for Democracy” to reinvigorate the global democracy movement. Some have criticized this step as premature at best, saying America should get its own democratic house in order before trying to rally others to the cause. The new report takes the opposite tack: By focusing on democracy in the world, the U.S. will have fresh incentives to improve democracy at home.

The summit must be designed for long-term results, the report says. Among other things, that means it must include a price of admission for attending countries, plans of action with timetables, and mutual commitment to put supporting democracy and countering authoritarianism at the center of diplomacy. Countries would coordinate efforts to resist backsliding within existing democracies, as well as denouncing authoritarian violations of human rights and democratic norms.

More controversially, the report calls on America and its allies to make democracy a prerequisite of security assistance such as advanced weaponry and defense technology. U.S. law prohibits assistance to countries committing “gross violations of human rights,” but such help should come with more explicit rules around human rights and democratic governance. Doing this wouldn’t be easy. Elevating democracy and human rights may create friction with longstanding partners such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Other sections of the report call for boosting investment in the pillars of democracy—free and fair elections, the rule of law, a diverse and independent media and a vibrant civil society, among others. It proposes making the fight against corruption and kleptocracy a national-security priority—a stance Mr. Biden has endorsed. And it lays out a plan to harness American economic power in support of a more democratic world. This would require the strategic use of treaties and development finance, as well as corporate respect for democracy and human rights throughout global supply chains.

While some of the report’s specific recommendations are open to challenge, it is certainly comprehensive. By laying out the full range of actions that a serious effort to advance democracy would require, the report gives policy makers a template for progress.

But all this will take leadership from the top. Mr. Biden’s national security adviser should appoint a team to review this report and make recommendations about how it can be adapted to promote the president’s vision of revitalized U.S. democracy, leading a coalition of like-minded countries to promote democracy around the world.

I disagree rather fundamentally with this. I think that while the U. S. should be the “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” it should be the champion and vindicator only of our own. The two ways we can promote liberal democracy most effectively are by

• Ensuring that our elections are free, fair, and honest. Everyone who is legally entitled to vote should be able to vote and
• Bolstering our own prosperity and egalitarianism

We need to show that liberal democracy can be successful and effective. In doing those things we will have done what we can and doing anything else is waste motion, wishful thinking.

Media outlets and pundits are reacting to President Joe Biden’s announcement of a September 11, 2021 date for the complete withdrawal of U. S. forces from Afghanistan.

U.S. officials offer various rationalizations for abandoning the elected government of Ashraf Ghani to what will be, at best, a bloody fight for survival. Mr. Ghani also has resisted U.S. peace proposals, and his rule has been feckless. A strategy of leaving troops in the country in an effort to force the Taliban to compromise could extend the U.S. commitment for years without achieving a durable peace. Perhaps, too, some officials say hopefully, the Taliban will moderate its denial of women’s rights and other repressive policies to preserve international aid, without which Afghanistan’s economy would implode.

If that assessment proves wrong, Mr. Biden’s decision to remove U.S. forces by the symbolic date of Sept. 11, 2021, may simply result in the restoration of the 2001 status quo, including terrorist bases that could force a renewed U.S. intervention. At a minimum, it will mean an abandonment of those Afghans who believed in building a democracy that guaranteed basic human rights — and the nullification of the sacrifices of the American servicemen who were killed or wounded in that mission. Mr. Biden has chosen the easy way out of Afghanistan, but the consequences are likely to be ugly.

The tragedy is that there is a reasonable alternative to withdrawal. The bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group said this year that 4,500 American troops would be enough “for training, advising, and assisting Afghan defense forces; supporting allied forces; conducting counterterrorism operations; and securing our embassy.” That’s not a commitment that prevents the U.S. from dealing with other adversaries.

In the short term, many Americans will welcome Mr. Biden’s retreat as the end of a “forever war.” But the President’s exit means he will have to take responsibility for what happens next. We hope it doesn’t betray the great sacrifices so many have made.

The military, for all its worries about withdrawal, has hated the meat grinder of Afghanistan. Most of today’s Army and Marine commanders have fought there, and many of their sons and daughters have, too. They share Biden’s desire to get the hell out. But that’s checked by a feeling that the only thing that’s worse than remaining in what seems an unwinnable stalemate is pulling out troops — and then having to go back in.

That’s what happened in Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2011. They were back five years later, dealing with the slaughterhouse that was the Islamic State. And if Biden was right about Afghanistan 10 years ago, he was dead wrong about getting out of Iraq, which he also strongly advocated.

That’s the awful danger of this decision. Sometimes cutting the knot and removing U.S. troops opens the way for peace; more often, in recent years, it has been a prelude to greater bloodshed.

The downside is easy to imagine: a spiral of violence in which provincial capitals fall, one by one, leading to a deadly battle for Kabul — a fight in which the people who believed most in the United States’ intervention will be at greatest risk, and pleading for help. Closing our eyes and ears to that catastrophic situation — turning away from the desperate appeals, especially from the women of Afghanistan, who fear new oppression — will require cold hearts and strong stomachs.

So, essentially, we made the rubble bounce for two decades and ended up right where the Russians, the British, the Persians, the Mongols, and Alexander the Great ended up. Brave men and women were tossed into a country that has resisted the brave men and women who came to fight there for millennia, and we’re leaving having killed the mastermind of the attacks that sent us there. The truth of the matter is that nobody really wants Afghanistan except the people who live there, and they want to run the place their own way. They keep trying to demonstrate this to the wider world, and the wider world never gets the message.

In addition to major domestic challenges, “the reality is that the United States has big strategic interests in the world,” the person familiar with the deliberations said, “like nonproliferation, like an increasingly aggressive and assertive Russia, like North Korea and Iran, whose nuclear programs pose a threat to the United States,” as well as China. “The main threats to the American homeland are actually from other places: from Africa, from parts of the Middle East — Syria and Yemen.”

“Afghanistan just does not rise to the level of those other threats at this point,” the person said. “That does not mean we’re turning away from Afghanistan. We are going to remain committed to the government, remain committed diplomatically. But in terms of where we will be investing force posture, our blood and treasure, we believe that other priorities merit that investment.”

And that, I guess, will be that.

There’s little doubt in my mind that those who worked for the Americans, especially our military, will be targeted once we’re gone. The moral equation is rather a difficult one. We owe it to these people to allow them to start over in the States if they choose, bringing their immediate family with them. But pulling out schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and those we’ve given technical training makes it even less likely that Afghanistan transitions to anything like a modern society.

When I first began this round-up I saw a NYT editorial reacting favorably to the announcement but it seems to have vanished. I will add additional reactions as I encounter them. Note that the WaPo view and, particularly that of David Ignatius, undoubtedly represents the prevailing wisdom in Washington, DC.

I guess there’s more than one way to view this announcement. Once is that, since President Trump announced a May 2020 withdrawal date, Mr. Biden is kicking the can down the road once again. I’ll take him at his word.

My view of our involvement in Afghanistan remains what it was 20 years ago. I opposed our invasion. Although from a political and maybe even from a strategic standpoint some forceful response in Afghanistan was required, there were many alternatives other than invading and occupying the country. Once we had “boots on the ground” and ousting Afghanistan’s previous Taliban government, we became the “occupying power” with certain obligations under treaties to which we are party. There were many unworkable strategies but just two workable ones:

• We could colonize Afghanistan and settle a population there as Alexander did which was politically impossible.
• We could maintain a small, lethal force in Afghanistan with a mission of counter-terrorism, expressly committed to maintaining it in the country until there was no longer a terrorist threat which was politically unpleasant.

We, of course, chose one of the unworkable strategies which brought us to where we are today. We might have withdrawn in 2005, 2009, 2013, 2017 or any date in between those and saved the lives of a couple of thousand Americans. Now maybe we’ll actually leave.

The prosecution has rested in the trial of Derek Chauvin for causing the death of George Floyd. The defense will begin its case tomorrow and it is expected to conclude by the end of the week.

Here are the standard jury instructions for murder in the third degree in the State of Minnesota (hat tip: Legal Insurrection).

With juries anything can happen and I think it’s quite likely that Officer Chauvin will be cleared of the more serious charges (I don’t think they fit) but be convicted of murder in the third degree. I also don’t believe that will satisfy a lot of people.

He could also be cleared of all charges or convicted on all charges. As I say pretty much anything can happen.

You have presumably heard about the recent cyber-exploit which shut down Irani’s Natanz refinement facility and caused damage to some of its centrifuges. It is widely believed that the Israelis were the source of the attack.

The situation is extremely volatile. Among the factors are that the Israelis are well aware that detonating a single nuclear device within its borders could well destroy the entire country. That provides the Israelis the motivation to engage, not just in cyberattacks, but even in pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Iran and it is believed they have that ability.

I don’t think the Iranian leadership has a similar consciousness. I think they see antipathy towards Israel as their ticket towards increased influence in the Muslim world and, potentially, as a religious obligation. I also think that they believe that God will protect them. Some might deem that irrational but I believe that from the point-of-view of the Iranian leadership it’s completely rational.

The JCPOA did not defuse this situation and if anything the Biden Administration’s determination to restart the JCPOA has aggravated it. In other words all parties are acting completely rationally within their own cloistered points-of-view.

Then there are the Russians. On the one hand the Russians presently have a pretty fair relationship with the Iranians but on the other they’ve actually occupied parts of Iran within living (or nearly within living) memory and I doubt the Iranians have forgotten that. And there are the Chinese who also have a pretty fair relationship with the Iranians. I don’t quite understand how the Chinese can persecute Muslims and retain the support of the mullahs but the mullahs’ lack of alternatives provides them with a certain amount of cover.

Those are among the reasons I consider the situation extremely volatile.

In a remarkably warlike Wall Street Journal column, Walter Russell Mead outlines what he sees as the threats posed by China and Russia:

The global storm clouds are darkening. Last week a Chinese aircraft carrier strike group patrolled the waters east of Taiwan as U.S., Taiwanese and Chinese warplanes flew sorties. En route to Israel, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin conferred with his Filipino counterpart over the refusal of Chinese vessels to leave waters claimed by Manila. In a televised interview Secretary of State Antony Blinken again characterized China’s policy toward the Uighurs as genocide, blamed Chinese errors for making the pandemic worse, and warned Beijing against attempts to invade Taiwan.

Meanwhile, as Alexei Navalny’s health continued its mysterious and dramatic decline, Russian forces ostentatiously maneuvered near the contested Donbass region of eastern Ukraine and in the Russian-garrisoned Transnistrian enclave on Ukraine’s western frontier. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned of the possibility of “full-scale hostilities” as Vladimir Putin informed an alarmed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about what the Russian president called Ukraine’s “dangerous provocative actions” in the Donbass. Two American destroyers have been dispatched to the Black Sea; retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former U.S. Army Europe commander, warned that Mr. Putin’s goal may be control of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.

His list of “provocations” is substantial:

China

• Tightening its hold on Tibet
• Genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang
• Crushing Hong Kong’s autonomy
• Attacks on Indian troops
• Massive naval buildup presumably aimed at Taiwan
• Intimidation of Philippines

Russia

• Annexation of Crimea
• Increasing Russian influence in Syria
• Cyber hacks
• Crushing “democracy movement in Belarus”

Let me bundle these together. Like it or not Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong are Chinese internal matters. However heinous the Chinese authorities are and I do believe they are heinous, in a Westphalian world our interests in them are quite limited. I do find the skirmishes between China and India in the Himalayas troubling. Unless we’re very, very stupid I think the most likely source of great power war is between India and China.

I know what Russia’s interests are in Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus. What are our interests in those countries? I mean other than poking Russia in the eye? For it to be fostering liberal democracy in those places there would need to be some prospect for liberal democracy in those places and there is not. To some degree we were complicit in Russia’s annexation of Crimea. If we hadn’t supported the putsch that overthrew the elected (and pro-Russian) government of Ukraine and if the government that replaced it hadn’t threatened to reneg on its agreement with Russia to maintain its port in Crimea, Russia wouldn’t have acted. Our actions WRT Ukraine have been short-sighted and, frankly, stupid. IMO the Chinese have more interest than we do in preventing such an eventuality.

If we’re going to complain about Russia (or China) meddling in our elections, we would have better standing if we hadn’t meddled in Russian elections which raises an additional point. We’ve been throwing away both our moral standing and our soft power over the period of the last 20 years. It would be nice if we hadn’t but we have.

While I fully agree that Assad is a shmuck, he’s no bigger shmuck that anyone else in the Alawite regime who might replace him and the Alawite regime is the best alternative among bad alternatives. The Russians are pragmatists and realize all of that.

We do have interests in Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, and South Korea. How we manage and secure those interests over the coming years will determine the course of the 21st century.

I have studied the language, literature, history, culture, and politics of both Russia and China. I’m not particularly concerned about an entente between the two countries. It’s our fecklessness that is pushing them together. Worry about the U. S. first.