TOC Ready Room 23 March 2023: China, moles, and economic mischief (the non-TikTok kind)

There are always too many interesting new developments to try to cram very many of them into a single Ready Room.  This edition, like all the rest, will leave a number of promising nuggets on the cutting-room floor.

But here are a couple of standouts from this week’s haul so far.

“China mole” info from think-tank officer sheds light on DOJ stance on Bidens in 2019

Miranda Devine has a great piece at New York Post on Wednesday about the explosive information from a Washington, D.C. think-tank principal, Gal Luft, that in a period prior to early 2019, “Hunter Biden had an FBI mole named ‘One-Eye’ who tipped off his Chinese business partners that they were under investigation.”

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Iran’s navy: Stealth-stalking the planet

On 9 March 2023, a webcam caught Iranian frigate IRIS Dena (F-75) underway departing Rio de Janeiro at the end of an extended port visit that began on 26 February 2023.

Forward support base IRINS Makran (441) was presumably in company with Dena.  Although Iran’s leaders have threatened to send the two-ship flotilla through the Panama Canal on this “round the world” deployment, it has been a vexed question from the beginning where the ships are at a given time, and it isn’t clear if they’re headed for the canal now.

There is naturally speculation that the warships will stop in Venezuela next.  If they do, they could already be off the coast from Caracas given their departure from Rio on Thursday.

China goes down to the sea: Putting the “hybrid” in warfare (Bonus update: Biden’s excellent balloon* adventure)

Foreword:  In the interim before sending this to post, the Chinese surveillance balloon* swam into America’s ken.  (Since then, more unidentified airborne objects have been shot down in the last 48-odd hours.)  As an example of the intrusive level at which the Chinese Communist Party is prepared to admit itself to other nations, including the United States, the balloon could hardly have been more timely or useful.  The separate phenomenon recounted in this article has been pooh-poohed by some Western observers as a stretch, too exotic, or – somehow – “evidently” not close enough to implementation to worry about.  But there’s really no closer it has to be.  The capability exists; the opportunity is wide open right now.  Of course China didn’t develop the capability merely for the CCP’s amusement, with no intention of using it.  If Xi Jinping has major geopolitical moves in view, as he manifestly does, now is the time to make preparations for it.  That’s what the surveillance balloon was about:  not just a probe, but a measure to prepare a hybrid battlespace.  We should be paying attention to everything.  I’ll have a few comments on the balloon at the end.

TOC Ready Room 22 July 2022: Biden returns from MidEast, with prejudice; CNN v. Bannon; Bonus tag

We’re on deck with a full-up Ready Room today, after a relatively extended blogging hiatus.  Strap in for some serious (if selective) situational awareness.

Biden’s Middle East adventure

It turns out to be a good thing I didn’t get the segment on President Biden’s Middle East trip posted on Sunday, as originally planned.  Quite a bit has ensued since Sunday, all of it fallout from the essential failure of Biden’s junket, and the fallout is significant.  It’s what needs to be highlighted up front.

Here’s the short list of fallout items.  We’ll look at a few implications with each topic.

On Sunday, a senior Iranian official made a rare statement about nuclear weapons, and baldly averred that Iran is capable of producing them.

TOC Ready Room 24 June 2022: Flawed court ruling overturned; Escalation in Russia-NATO confrontation; Gates ag-buy pushback

Until the Supreme Court ruled Friday morning on Dobbs v. Jackson, this edition of Ready Room was going to lead with the “Russia-NATO escalation” segment.  But such a momentous ruling, which basically overturned Roe v. Wade, obviously merits comment, however brief.

The Dobbs ruling is good law, unlike Roe (and some other landmark rulings including Obergefell, the same-sex marriage case).  It’s good law because it recognizes that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t confer a “right” to abortion on which states cannot impose limits.

It’s good law because it doesn’t overturn any state laws, like those of New York and California, that are as consistent with the Constitution as any state law that puts limits on the conditions in which abortion is permissible.