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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In a new geo-military landscape, Belarus’s Lukashenko goes to China

Just over six years ago, in January 2017, I noted in an article at Liberty Unyielding that China had recently closed a logistics gap eyed for some 200 years by military planners.  The gap had been felt as a hindrance for much longer than that, but it became especially significant to warfare and geopolitics in the age of rail.

China’s feat was completing a capable, reliable rail network all the way from China’s eastern coast to the UK, on the western edge of Europe.  On 1 January 2017, Beijing inaugurated the first freight train service from China to London.

Rail service all the way across Asia and Europe, and not operated by Russia to at least Eastern Europe, had never existed before.  The lack of such service was a key factor in every kind of geopolitical calculation about Asia:  economic and military as well as political.  The Soviet “iron curtain” had laid a long stasis

TOC Ready Room 22 November 2022: Drive-by edition; Poland missile impact, Biden FBI/Israel, Special Counsel and other Trump

Increasingly, I agree with those who say we need an “audit” of U.S. support to Ukraine.  I put “audit” in quotation marks because a mere audit of the tens of billions flowing to Ukraine – and to military contractors – won’t get the job done.  What’s needed is a wholesale policy scrub of the Biden administration’s handling of the problem.

As always, I begin by affirming that the U.S. needs to support a fight to reverse and end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The U.S. shouldn’t have direct military engagement in the fight, nor should NATO.

But it matters what strategy we’re supporting and how military assistance to Ukraine is executed.

It matters at least as much how the fight in Ukraine is affecting NATO’s security conditions, posture, and unity.

TOC Ready Room 26 October 2022: 101st Airborne in Romania; Kanye, China, and other wonders

This will be a rough-and-ready Ready Room, intended to spray a few current topics out there without going in-depth on any of them.  I really mean it this time, so throw rotten fruit if you catch a glimpse of over-analysis out here in the heathery rough.

The first topic is the headline teaser:  deployment of the U.S. 101st Airborne to Europe.  CBS did a segment this past week in which its crew accompanied soldiers of the 101st on field activities in Romania, just “a few miles” from the border of Ukraine.

CBS gets an exclusive sneak peak: "The US Army's 101st Airborne is practicing for war with Russia just miles from Ukraine's border"

"It's not just about defending NATO territory," correspondent @charliecbs reports. "They're fully prepared to cross over into Ukrainian territory" pic.twitter.com/XE2OfHZV4o

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 22, 2022

A great deal was made of the point that the 101st hasn’t deployed to Europe since World War II.

TOC Ready Room 6 October 2022: Ukraine; or, the world in a pickle

This won’t be a thematically unified post, which is why it’s being put up as a Ready Room.

In some ways, public dialogue on weighty matters is getting sillier and sillier, to the point that one can’t even join the discussion because the premises are so off that there’s no discussing it sensibly.  (I’ve written about this Babel-ization of public communication before, going back to Trump’s first year in office and even prior to that.  Rounds of ritual chanting have largely taken the place of thoughtful speech in the mainstream media and much of standard politics.  The Left is about nothing but this now – people who stray from the model are actively punished –  and although there are still parsable sentences and paragraph-length thought-packages coming from the Right, the pattern is present there as well.