The View from Right Field

Jack Ma’s Back. But the CCP Won.

On November 3, 2020, I was thinking that the most significant event that day might be the Chinese government’s decision to cancel the IPO of Jack Ma’s Ant Group Co., and not the U.S. presidential election.  Mr. Ma had given a speech in late October in which he very publicly criticized Chinese government regulators.  The speech did not go over well, and Ant Group’s IPO was cancelled, reportedly by President Xi Jinping himself.  In any case, Donald Trump fairly quickly put my original thought aside.  Still, the cancellation of Ant Group’s IPO was, and still is, a big deal.

The matter came up again last week when Jack Ma went to China to talk to a school in Hangzhou, the hometown of Alibaba (another of his companies), and it was announced that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, the e-commerce empire Mr. Ma built up, was going to split up into six parts.  Articles talked about how Alibaba was getting too big to manage and how investors didn’t know how to value a company with so many unrelated businesses (not unlike the conglomerates of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States).  The articles said the smaller companies would be more nimble, and growth would be easier.  All of which may be true but is irrelevant.

Helping Ukraine. Defending Taiwan. Talk Is Cheap. Actually Doing It Costs Money.

If you support Ukraine in its war with Russia, if you think the United States needs to defend Taiwan’s right to choose if it unites with China, then you need to support more money for defense.  The Russian attack on Ukraine is a new kind of war.  Actually, it’s not a new kind of war, but it is a kind of war that we have not seen for a long time.  It is a war of attrition, which means it is a war of weapons, supplies, and ammunition.

We are rapidly using up our inventories of all kinds of weapons and supplies in supporting Ukraine.  If we are going to continue to support Ukraine, we are going to need more of these things.  Right away.  And if we support the right of Taiwan to decide its own fate, we need to get supplies of these things to them – right away.  Plus, we need to replenish our own supplies because who knows where else trouble might arise.  There are countries and groups that might think now is a good time to take advantage.

Supporting Taiwan With Military Preparedness, Not Just Words and Visits

In The Wall Street Journal’s editorial yesterday about Nancy Pelosi’s speakerships and the lessons the GOP can learn from them, the Journal gave Speaker Pelosi due credit for “believ[ing] in American freedom” and visiting both Ukraine and Taiwan this year.  However, as Walter Russell Mead said at the time of her trip to Taiwan in August:

“Mrs. Pelosi is sincere in her support for Taiwan …. But to make that support effective, she should have beat the drum for the past 15 years for greater military preparedness even if this meant larger defense appropriations.”

Pelosi, Biden, and Taiwan – Part 2

I wrote here about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.  Among other things I asked whether Secretary Pelosi planned her trip without talking to President Biden, or at least to his people, first? Well, apparently she did – or at least that is what one of the panelists in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ “World Review with Ivo Daalder” said last Friday.¹  More specifically, they said that Speaker Pelosi (or her people) told President Biden (or his people) that she would not go to Taiwan if he asked her not to.  But here is the kicker: Speaker Pelosi also told the President that if she did not go to Taiwan at his request, she would have to publicly say why she wasn’t going. 

The panelists all sort of passed over this comment, but I think it is pretty big.  It seems to me that Speaker Pelosi was basically threatening the President: If you tell me not to go, you’re going to get all the blame and you are going to look weak to the American people.²

Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan – and Joe Biden

So, was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan a good idea?  I don’t know,¹ though once the visit was leaked and China objected so vociferously, she had to go.  Still, the visit raises all kinds of questions.  Here is one I had: I find Joe Biden’s comments last month criticizing the trip and saying the Defense Department was worried about the trip, more than a little bizarre.  Speaker Pelosi and President Biden are both Democrats.  I am sure Speaker Pelosi knows how to reach President Biden when she wants to talk to him.  I am sure he picks up the phone when she calls.  Did this mean Secretary Pelosi planned her trip without talking to President Biden, or at least to his people, first?  That would truly be bizarre. 

Let’s Use the Defense Production Act – To Produce Stuff for Defense

The Defense Production Act was passed in September of 1950 to enable the President, by executive order, to order businesses to accept and prioritize contracts deemed necessary for our national defense.  Recently, President Trump used the DPA to, among other things, order General Motors to make ventilators for Covid.  (At the time, the experts said we needed more ventilators.  We wound up needing fewer than the experts thought would be necessary, but that happens sometimes.)

President Biden has used the DPA for numerous things, too, including fire hose and baby formula.

How Worried Should We Be About the China-Russia “Alliance”?

The big news of the opening weekend of the Winter Olympics, other than the Olympics itself, which wasn’t all that big, was the meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia.  The presidents signed an oil-gas deal and issued a joint statement opposing the expansion of NATO (the first time China had ever done that), criticizing the AUKUS security pact signed last year between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and more.₁ 

But how big of a deal is this challenge really?  The answer to that question is probably dependent on how big of a power you think Russia is going to be in ten or twenty years.  Mitt Romney recently quoted John McCain as saying that Russia is a gas station parading as a country.  Unfortunately, a combination of the economic rebound from the pandemic and Joe Biden’s restrictions on fracking and drilling in the U.S., and other things, has pushed up the price of oil and gas, making Vladimir Putin’s gas station more valuable.

China Does Care (A Little) About World Opinion

In a November 2 post on social media, Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli of sexually assaulting her on at least one occasion.  The post was promptly taken down, all mention of Ms. Shuai was taken off Chinese social media, and she went incommunicado.  Pro tennis players around the world started wondering where she was and how she was doing.  And unlike the NBA, which folded like a cheap tent when a Houston Rockets general manager supported Hong Kong in a tweet, they didn’t back down.

China normally doesn’t respond to these kinds of complaints.  Ask the Uighurs.  For that matter, ask the Dali Lama.  But with the Winter Olympics coming up in February and tennis stars continuing to ask where Ms. Shuai was (before China tried to ban tennis players, the Women’s Tennis Association said it would pull out of China), China gave in – at least partially.

Who’s Worse on Foreign Policy: Biden or Trump?

Donald Trump did a bad job on foreign policy.  I talked about that a lot, though, eventually, I got tired of saying it over and over, so I mostly stopped.¹  Even though I felt that way about former President Trump, I did not vote for Joe Biden because, in Illinois, I did not need to.  President Biden was going to win Illinois.  And I was very concerned about President Biden’s domestic policy – or, rather, the domestic policy of his supporters.  Still, when President Biden won, I was hopeful American foreign policy would be better than it had been under former President Trump.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.

On February 19, President Biden told the Munich Security Conference that “America is back.”  That was the hope: President Biden would restore, or at least start to restore, America’s credibility and reliability around the world.  But the way we left Afghanistan was a disaster.  Obviously, President Biden was handed a terrible mess in Afghanistan.  President Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, under which we were to leave on May 1, 2021.² 

After Afghanistan: What Next for American Foreign Policy?

After the collapse in Afghanistan, the questions for many are: Why did it happen so quickly¹ and why we weren’t prepared.  Which are good questions.  But I have a different question: What’s next for American foreign policy?  In that regard, I was surprised by the very negative reaction from Europe to our quick and unilateral pullout from Afghanistan.  One might have expected concern from Asia, but the comments from Europe were very interesting.  Here are excerpts from an article Wednesday’s Financial Times (behind the FT paywall):

“European allies had hoped Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency would bolster Nato’s relevance after Donald Trump’s acrimonious years.  Washington’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan is prompting a rethink.