Rogue uranium, China’s infrastructure burrowing – Things predicted: The “Told ya so” edition

In the past decade and a half, I’ve had occasion to perceive some significant trends and express concern about what they would predictably lead to.  These have been specific sets of developments involving both politics and technology.  They go beyond predicting human moral and societal train wrecks, although I’ve done my share of predicting those too.  In some ways, the latter are easier to see.  We are all expert in them at some level.

But the more specific and contingent trends, like the ones linked to the emergence of technology and its ability to fulfill motive (but not limited to that category), take more work to perceive.  For some time, perhaps the chief example I had to offer was the roiling of the Middle East set in motion by Obama in 2009, which led pretty much exactly as I envisioned to what Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev called the “tectonic” perturbations of the Arab Spring.

TOC Ready Room 9 February 2024: Strikes and rumors of strikes; Bonus: the missing TACAIR?

With a second round of strikes completed, the original assessment for the 2 February strikes stands.  We’re not executing deterrence-quality strike events.  This can be readily discerned from the information we’re given about the targets, which reveals a major deficiency in what we’re hitting.

There’s some value to attacking “command and control” assets (though not inherently that much, as one-offs); there’s less to attacking Houthi missiles on launchers.  In both cases, we’re just taking out easily regenerated operational equipment.  Neither the Iraqi militias nor the Houthis have anything approaching the elaborate, expensive, hard-to-replace infrastructure the U.S. uses for these tasks.

Knocking off six launchers at a time is a waste of AVGAS.  It may be cheap in comparison to intercepting Chinese-Iranian former-Soviet knock-off cruise missiles with modern, U.S. Navy Standard Missiles, but that’s an ironic, situational first-world problem that doesn’t get at the real point.  The real point is,

Here’s motive: Hindsight 20/20 on Trump’s disruption of Obama-Biden enterprises

[Note:  Because of its length, I considered breaking this article into sequential parts posted separately.  But it’s essential to take it in as a single, coherent story.  Think of it as a single-themed chapter in an extensively researched book.  The article stops a few times to marshal the facts and implication so far, a necessary technique, I believe, to keep it flowing as a single story.  By the end of it, readers will see how Trump’s tenure affected a campaign launched in the Obama administration and pursued from its earliest days.  In particular, Trump basically sent now-revealed Biden interests in that Obama campaign down the drain.  Because of the length, and because the facts not included here are laid out elsewhere, I have left much that readers will be aware of on the cutting-room floor.  This is not because I’m not aware of those facts.  It’s because including everything would make this impossibly long, and is not essential to making the main point: Trump policy killed the Obama-Biden show.  – J.E.]

On Saturday 18 November 2017, Chinese official Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, then director of the China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC), was arrested by federal authorities of the U.S. Southern District of New York on bribery charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).  Ho and a Senegalese national, Cheikh Gadio, were charged with a bribery scheme entailing money-laundering (through the U.S. affiliate of an international bank) and involving officials of Chad and Uganda.

I’ve got a secret: Biden administration and Xi regime give pattern

There’s an interesting tale of two official “disappearings” out there, one involving the U.S. and the other in China. I don’t intend to go in-depth on either one here, partly because doing so would cause us to obsess over the trees and miss the forest.  Better to zoom out and perceive the basic similarities.

The U.S. “disappearance” has occurred American style, with the individual in question – former Iran envoy Rob Malley – continuing in enough of the routine paths of his life to raise no alarms about where he is or what’s happened to him.  No one seems to think he’s other than alive and well, unlike the recent (until Tuesday) Chinese foreign minister, Qin Gang, who has gone missing as far as anyone can discern from outside Xi Jinping’s closest circle.

But the supposed reasons posited for the two “disappearances” – one (in China) in the more literal sense of the common idiom – are similarly superficial and even kind of fatuous.

China: Go fish

A recent social media post served as a reminder of how the maritime environment is changing, in ways that will have an impact on the big nations’ strategic maritime postures, and will shape tactics and opportunities in coming conflicts.

This article deals with only one aspect of that, and I am laboring to keep it short and to the point.  So I’m linking considerable background material and asking readers to consult it, rather than using a lot of verbiage in this article to lay out facts.  What I want to do here is advance a little analysis, based on the topic of China’s global fishing fleet.

The social media post is from 17 July 2023, and was copied to a tweet sent the following day.