In an essay at the U. S. Naval Institute Lieutenant Commander Stuart J. Ambrose urges the use of the U. S. Coast Guard in guarding the coasts of African countries:

Perhaps more than any other region, African nations eagerly await partners with whom they can begin to realize their vast potential. The United States should not miss this opportunity to shape this incredible continent for generations to come, and the Coast Guard can play an outsized role in engagement efforts with countries hungry to grow their littoral maritime forces. Africa’s 54 countries will engage with someone—and the United States should work hard to be the partner of choice in the region.

The essay is far too dewy-eyed and general for me. For example:

The United States shines at engagement. Its melting pot values of inclusion and acceptance often make it the partner of choice against the frequently heavy-handed Chinese or even Europeans, who—deservedly or not—still carry today the baggage of past colonialism. But this is true only so long as the United States chooses to show up.

Is that true? Or is the U. S. tarred as a racist, overbearing colonial power, lumped with the British and French?

I have no problem with the U. S. Coast Guard or, better yet, the Navy taking part in joint activities with European, South American, or Asian countries in anti-piracy activities around the Horn of Africa. Such activities might even be managed as a method of encouraging countries who are otherwise spending too little on defense (Netherlands—1.1% of GDP, Germany—1.2% of GDP, Italy—1.3% of GDP, Brazil—1.5% of GDP). But I’m concerned about “mission creep” for the Coast Guard.

Has it really been so successful in eliminating smuggling (its original purpose) that it must look abroad for new objectives?

I have no objection to the measures proposed by the editors of the Washington Post for reducing the number of mass shootings:

Background checks and so-called red-flag laws, the subject of another bill backed by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), represent only the bare minimum of reform. To tackle the specific, acute problem of mass public shootings, Congress must address the actual hardware: assault-style firearms, along with large-capacity magazines. Both should be banned, as assault weapons were at the federal level between 1994 and 2004, and as the law in several states already provides.

If anything, the large-capacity magazine ban may be the highest priority: Such devices, which augment the lethality of semiautomatic weapons, were involved in half of the 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012, according to a 2013 report for Mother Jones. A 100-round drum of bullets enabled the Dayton shooter to fire 41 shots in less than 30 seconds. “It is fundamentally problematic,” the city’s police chief observed, “to have that level of weaponry in a civilian environment, unregulated.” Could the president or Mr. McConnell look him in the eye and deny it?

I have no objection to any measure within the bounds set by the Constitution. However, as suggested above, I believe the editors will be disappointed with the results. As they note only half of mass shootings involved high-capacity magazines. Is it credible that they wouldn’t have taken place without them? I doubt it.

IMO measures far beyond bans on firearms or equipment will be necessary including changes in the practices of the media. More than anything else we need a general decrease in the temperature of discourse.

While I agree with the sentiments Joel Kotkin expresses in his piece at City Journal:

Our present trajectory is ruinous; it will exacerbate political antagonism and likely produce even more politicized violence. The only solution to greater polarization lies in reestablishing the norms of a civic nationalism that transcends identity politics of all kinds.

Developing a renewed sense of American identity won’t be easy. As a lifelong Democrat, I saw nothing remotely unpatriotic in the rhetoric of George McGovern—a World War II hero—and certainly not from Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Yet today, according to Gallup, only 22 percent of Democrats today say that they are “proud to be Americans,” down from 65 percent in 2003, when the widely disliked George W. Bush was in the White House. Modern progressives generally reject any thought of American exceptionalism, maintaining, in the words of Pete Buttigieg, that America was “never as great as advertised.”

It’s hard to build a positive agenda without some sense of national pride and shared culture. Fortunately, America’s founding principles—rule of law, protection of minority rights, market-based capitalism—are not dependent on race and heritage. Unlike Europe, we don’t have one great historic tradition that we must embrace or lose. By contrast, America, based on ideas that transcend race, boasts a remarkable record of incorporating newcomers, first from Ireland and Germany, then Italy and Eastern Europe, and more recently from Latin America and Asia. These generations of new Americans constitute the secret sauce that makes this country work and could sustain it in the future.

This expansive civic nationalism also represents an economic imperative. Due to sharply lower birthrates, most of our prime competitors—the EU, Japan, and even China—are on the verge of demographic collapse. Europeans may need immigrants, but their welfare states, slow growth, and lack of cultural cohesion will make absorbing these newcomers problematic at best. Most Asian countries have little interest in large-scale immigration.

America’s future will depend on believing in a shared mission. Calling progressives “Communists” or conservatives “fascists” gets us nowhere. Convincing young people, particularly young men, that they have no future won’t dissuade them from authoritarian views—or even violence. The road to sanity starts with a renewed embrace of a shared American identity that transcends all others.

I can’t for the life of me see how we might cultivate a “sense of national pride and shared culture”. The national myths require, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s memorable phrase, a willing suspension of disbelief. The Founding Fathers were not without fault but, unless they are remembered as such, our civic religion cannot be maintained. Parson Weems, who spread the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, must be believed uncritically. Being an American must transcend, as Mr. Kotkin puts it, being an Irish-American or black or Hispanic or any of the other hyphenations. As long as there’s good money to be made in dividing us, it’s hard to see what can put us back together again.

Back when I was in grad school I encountered a friend of mine, a doctoral student in a particularly abstruse area of mathematics, looking very crestfallen. “Pete”, I said, “what’s wrong?” He responded “Somebody found a practical use for my research.”

At Bloomberg Noah Smith is concerned that the pace of innovation is declining:

Unfortunately, innovation might be slowing down. Except for a brief resurgence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, developed-country productivity — of which innovation a major long-term driver — has been growing more slowly since 1973. Meanwhile, some studies suggest that research productivity is slowing down, so that it takes more scientists to glean each new insight across a variety of fields…

His proposals for changing the trend include:

• Give more money to younger researchers
• Give more money to less prestigious institutions (ROI is better)
• Devote more money to “novel research fields”
• Change patent laws to increase the rate at which private research spreads
• Zoning reform (I don’t follow his reasoning here)
• Improve our higher educational system

Probably the best way to improve our system of higher education would be to improve our system of K-12 education—colleges and universities devote too much effort to remedial education as it is.

Some of the decline in innovation is inevitable. We’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit. I’ve seen and written about the claim that there haven’t been any basic breakthroughs in 80 years. I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

I’ll repeat my proposal for increasing innovation: let the federal government fund a mass engineering program. The last federally-funded mass engineering program, the “space race”, produced an enormous amount of innovation. It revolutionize4 our society. Most present federally-funded R&D is medical research and the ROI on that is terrible.

As it turns out just about everything you may have been told about mass homicides in the United States is wrong. This article at The Conversation from researcher Christopher J. Ferguson may cast a little light on the subject. The perpetrators of mass homicides are distributed by race at roughly their proportions in the population and most are not male white supremacists:

Hateful people tend to be attracted to hateful ideologies. Some shootings, such as the 2016 shooting of police officers in Dallas, were reportedly motivated by anti-white hatred. Other shooters, such as the 2015 San Bernardino husband and wife perpetrator team, have espoused other hateful ideas such as radical Islam.

Most mass homicide perpetrators don’t proclaim any allegiance to a particular ideology at all.

Importantly, the prevalence of mass homicides is not increasing in the United States:

To be sure, the U.S. has experienced many mass homicides. Even stability might be depressing given that rates of other violent crimes have declined precipitously in the U.S. over the past 25 years. Why mass homicides have stayed stagnant while other homicides have plummeted in frequency is a question worth asking.

Nonetheless, it does not appear that the U.S. is awash in an epidemic of such crimes, at least comparing to previous decades going back to the 1970s.

Additionally, the United States does not have more mass homicides relative to the size of its population than quite a number of reasonably peaceful countries including Norway, Switzerland, and France.

In my view the causes of mass homicide are multifactorial including the frequent depiction of violence in the society tending to inure people to violence, the reporting of violence inuring people to violence, mental illness, the availability of high-powered firearms, other societal stresses, boredom, and any number of other factors.

The horrific nature of mass homicides makes it a fruitful vehicle for opportunistic political attacks but, as the author of the article notes, let’s not confuse the myths with the reality. Attacking the myths will do little or nothing to curb the reality.

Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han’s op-ed at Spectator has about the harshest view of China of any I’ve encountered:

This is the intellectual framework that China is creating under the guise of ‘a community with a shared future for mankind,’ most recently expressed in the July 2019 defense white paper. Precisely what the Chinese Communist party (CCP) means by this concept is deliberately vague and nebulous. But it is clear enough from the more tangible comments defining peace, stability, and prosperity in China with the collective good of the world, as is the equation of a strong Chinese military as a force for world peace, stability and the building of a shared future for mankind.

This shared future is certain to be dystopian. Any community that the CCP creates will be totalitarian and oppressive by its nature. Any shared future that it seeks to create will be one in which the rest of the world adapts to serve the interests of Beijing. The future will be shared only because China’s power is great enough to trap states into it either by seduction or coercion. It will be like Foxconn on a global scale. Beijing’s conception of global governance is a firm hierarchy with it on top. This shared future will be less free, less diverse, and far more oppressive than the present one.

I don’t know how that view can be reconciled with our present policy. I don’t even see how any trade with a country pursuing such an agenda can be justified.

I’ve been highly critical of the Chinese regime but my view isn’t quite as extreme as that. I guess my view would be more along the lines of “he who sups with the devil must have a long spooon”. Our commerce with China should be more cautious than at present and contingent on China’s adhering to the international commitments it has undertaken. Trade with China should benefit more than the Walton family. Cost-benefit should be considered.

Here’s Gen. Daniel Woodward’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, as articulated in a piece at RealClearWorld:

The need to safeguard our interests in the region is without dispute, and Central Command undoubtedly has stacks of studies that outline the special operations, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and training assets required to do just that.

This American military footprint will remain in Afghanistan for years, but the present force of 14,000 conventional soldiers, trainers, and advisers should be reduced now. It should be pared to a level consistent with America’s core counterterrorism objective in Afghanistan: ensuring transnational terrorist groups are unable to use the country to launch an attack on the American people. This will allow the country to reach equilibrium, even as we focus on our most fundamental national interest — protection of the homeland.

The key phrase in that passage is “America’s core counterterrorism objective in Afghanistan”. Since 2003 we’ve been pursuing a strategy of counterinsurgency there. We should have been pursuing counterterrorism. Whether any president will have the courage to pursue the right course and whether it can be preserved without mission creep remains to be seen.

I think that Dibyesh Anand, in his piece at Foreign Policy, has the situation in Kashmir about right, as expressed by a “vegetable vendor”:

This is about empowering activists who now exclaim proudly, “Aab Hindu Rashtra banega” (“We will now build a Hindu nation”), or the ordinary vegetable vendor in Ranchi saying to me with sadistic glee: “Now the Muslims will become Hindu out of fear or they will go to Pakistan or they will face…” He let the sentence trail off, an unspoken threat.

The BJP, under strongman leader Narendra Modi, is driven by a far-right Hindu chauvinist ideology. Its solid reelection victory this spring gave it the power to bring about controversial and fundamental changes in Indian politics and justify them as a matter of national security and as a rectification of the “past mistakes” of the secularist Indian National Congress. The BJP has justified abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which guaranteed autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, and of Article 35A, which protected indigenous society from possible demographic transformation in the name of development, equality, and national unity.

While analysts may try to connect Modi’s decision to geopolitical imbroglios, it is most appropriate to see it as a dress rehearsal for the BJP’s main agenda—the conversion of India from a secular pluralist democracy to a Hindu Rashtra. From political sloganeering “Hindustan mein rehna hai to hindu ban kar rehna hoga” (If you want to live in India, you have to be a Hindu) to the crackdown on religious conversions into Islam and Christianity to inclusion of various anti-Muslim agendas in party manifesto to celebrating anti-secular supremacists as national heroes, the BJP is remaining true to the explicit agenda of Sangh Parivar, a family of organizations linked to the far-right paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

I have long been skeptical about the U. S.’s cultivating too close a relationship with Israel on the grounds that I do not believe that an explicitly sectarian country aligns well with our values. I have similar feelings about the direction in which India is moving.

The editors of the Economist present their reasons why the Chinese military should not intervene to quell the disturbances in Hong Kong:

If China were to send in the army, once an unthinkable idea, the risks would be not only to the demonstrators.

Such an intervention would enrage Hong Kongers as much as the declaration of martial law in 1989 aroused the fury of Beijing’s residents. But the story would play out differently. The regime had more control over Beijing then than it does over Hong Kong now. In Beijing the party had cells in every workplace, with the power to terrorise those who had not been scared enough by the tanks. Its control over Hong Kong, where people have access to uncensored news, is much shakier. Some of the territory’s citizens would resist, directly or in a campaign of civil disobedience. The army could even end up using lethal force, even if that was not the original plan.

With or without bloodshed, an intervention would undermine business confidence in Hong Kong and with it the fortunes of the many Chinese companies that rely on its stockmarket to raise capital. Hong Kong’s robust legal system, based on British common law, still makes it immensely valuable to a country that lacks credible courts of its own. The territory may account for a much smaller share of China’s gdp than when Britain handed it back to China in 1997, but it is still hugely important to the mainland. Cross-border bank lending booked in Hong Kong, much of it to Chinese companies, has more than doubled over the past two decades, and the number of multinational firms whose regional headquarters are in Hong Kong has risen by two-thirds. The sight of the army on the city’s streets would threaten to put an end to all that, as companies up sticks to calmer Asian bases.

The intervention of the People’s Liberation Army would also change how the world sees Hong Kong. It would drive out many of the foreigners who have made Hong Kong their home, as well as Hong Kongers who, anticipating such an eventuality, have acquired emergency passports and boltholes elsewhere. And it would have a corrosive effect on China’s relations with the world.

Hong Kong has already become a factor in the cold war that is developing between China and America. China is enraged by the high-level reception given in recent weeks to leading members of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp during visits to Washington. Their meetings with senior officials and members of Congress have been cited by China as evidence that America is a “black hand” behind the unrest, using it to pile pressure on the party as it battles with America over trade (a conflict that escalated this week, when China let its currency weaken—see article).

Were the Chinese army to go so far as to shed protesters’ blood, relations would deteriorate further. American politicians would clamour for more sanctions, including suspension of the act that says Hong Kong should be treated as separate from the mainland, upon which its prosperity depends. China would hit back. Sino-American relations could go back to the dark days after Tiananmen, when the two countries struggled to remain on speaking terms and business ties slumped. Only this time, China is a great deal more powerful, and the tensions would be commensurately more alarming.

None of this is inevitable. China has matured since 1989. It is more powerful, more confident and has an understanding of the role that prosperity plays in its stability—and of the role that Hong Kong plays in its prosperity. Certainly, the party remains as determined to retain power as it was 30 years ago. But Hong Kong is not Tiananmen Square, and 2019 is not 1989. Putting these protests down with the army would not reinforce China’s stability and prosperity. It would jeopardise them.

I think that all of these are from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in rather than as a Chinese insider looking at Hong Kong. If Xi shows anything resembling weakness, it will be interpreted as an opportunity by his competitors within the CCP. If the disturbances in Hong Kong are allowed to continue, it will be interpreted as an opening for gaining greater freedom and autonomy.

As I see it Mr. Xi’s priorities are:

1. His own power.
2. Keeping the CCP in power.
3. Chinese prosperity.

Foreign goodwill, except to the extent that it promotes on those major objectives, is far down on the list. In other words the editors are explaining why they don’t want the PLA to intervene but not why Mr. Xi should not.