The View from Right Field

Visiting the Baltics After “Voting for Estonia” in 2016

Just before the 2016 election, I wrote a post entitled “On Election Day, I’ll Be Voting for Estonia”.  The post continued – and explained: “and Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and many more.”¹  At the time, I was worried about then-candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy: “He has threatened to abandon most of our NATO allies.  He has implied to Japan and South Korea that they are on their own.”  While I disagreed with some parts of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, and even more of her domestic policy, I voted for her because I felt she would maintain our NATO commitments and would continue to support our other allies and friends.  I felt such a foreign policy was the best way to protect the security and well-being of the United States. 

In saying I was “voting for Estonia”, I was really saying I was voting against what I feared would be President Trump’s foreign policy.  And I still think that was the right vote.  If President Trump’s foreign policy in his first term wasn’t as bad as I feared, that may have been because, for the first couple of years, he didn’t know how to do what he wanted (and, at times, didn’t even know what he wanted).  Inexperience slowed him down – and made his first term foreign policy not as bad as it might otherwise have been. 

Something Is Going On in China –

And I don’t know what it is.  For that matter, I don’t think anybody knows what it is for sure.  But unusual things are happening in China.  The foreign minister, a close associate of Xi Jinping, all of a sudden disappeared and after almost a month was replaced by the man he replaced, all with no explanation.

The head of the PLA Army’s rocket force, a separate branch of the Chinese military, was replaced by a person from outside the rocket force, the first time this has happened.

And more: The economy has not taken off after the strict Covid restrictions were lifted late last year.  The prices for housing, a key way of saving for Chinese, are down.  Jobs for graduates are harder to come by (and the government has stopped reporting youth unemployment statistics).  And the economy is suffering from a bout of retail price deflation, even though the government is saying deflation isn’t happening.

Where Are All the Military Correspondents - Just When We Need Them?

Back in the day (not that long ago), major newspapers had military correspondents.  Not just reporters who covered the Pentagon, but reporters who really understood how militaries worked, how battles were fought, and how wars were won and lost.

At the turn of the century, i.e., the nineteenth to twentieth century, Winston Churchill was a military correspondent for newspapers in London, covering the Second Boer War in South Africa, among others.  Between the World Wars, there were people like B.H. Liddell Hart, who wrote for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times, as well as writing books on strategy and on military history.  More recently, a military correspondent I particularly remember was Drew Middleton of The New York Times, who, in addition to writing for them, wrote books such as Can America Win the Next War? and Submarine.

“Oppenheimer”, the Bomb, and Should It Have Been Used

With the new movie “Oppenheimer” out, we are once again debating whether it was right to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.  I have talked about this question many times before, so I will not go into it again,¹ except for one thought that I have had for a while but not written about before.  Actually, it’s more of a possibility or a question than a certainty.  In any case, I thought of it again because of a couple of things in a review of Road to Surrender, a new book by Evan Thomas focusing on three men involved in the decision to drop the bomb and end the war:

“After receiving a full description of the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including an account of the civilian death toll, President Truman ordered that further atomic bombs would be used only on his explicit order – first time in American history that a president had taken direct control of a military weapon. …

Trump Being Bad Doesn’t Make Biden Good

As with my last post, this is something I have said before that needs to be said again: Just because Donald Trump was not a good president (how’s that for understatement) and would be even worse in a second term (see, inter alia, here and here), that does not mean Joe Biden is doing a good job.  He’s not.  In President Biden’s case, I am not talking about his character (though some have done so).  I am talking about his policies.  Here is a short list of some of them (there are more):

• While supply chain disruptions from Vladimir Putin’s renewed invasion of Ukraine may have added to inflation, our inflation started long before Putin’s invasion.  It was a result of the huge Covid stimulus package in 2021 that we did not need.  The stimulus package in 2020 was necessary.  The one in 2021 was not.  All that money had a big role in the inflation that followed.  Some may say that people needed the money, but people always want free money from the government.

More Weapons; More Ammunition; More Defense. Now.

I have written about this before, but it needs to be said again: We need to spend more money on weapons; we need to spend more money on ammunition; we need to spend more money on defense.  Some of those weapons, a lot of that ammunition, need to go to Ukraine in the short run, but in the longer term, we need more supplies of weapons and ammunition for ourselves.  Plus, in any case, most of the increased spending is for us.  Actually, all of the spending is, in the end, for us because Ukraine beating Russia is for us.^1,2  Ukraine beating Russia makes the world a safer place.  Plus, Ukraine beating Russia may give China, and Xi Jinping, some pause with respect to how they pursue reunification with Taiwan, which is also good for the world, including us.³

The problem is how do we get agreement to increase spending for weapons, ammunition, and defense generally.  In an editorial last Tuesday, “America is Running Out of Ammo,” The Wall Street Journal suggested that President Joe Biden

Consequences of Prigozhin’s Mutiny Against Putin

Two and a half weeks ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner group led a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov.  Within a day or so, the mutiny ended, but it almost seemed to end more because Prigozhin chose to stop than because he was being stopped.  In any case, all kinds of questions arose.

Those questions have not been answered, and won’t be for quite a while, but a few indications may be starting to come in.  Yesterday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan released several high-level Ukrainian prisoners of war, leaders of the Ukrainian defense of Mariupol last year, that Russia had previously transferred to Turkey on the understanding that they would not be released until the war was over. The Russians objected the release, but apparently President Erdogan didn’t care.

“A Foreign Policy for the Middle Class”

Martin Wolf wrote a column in yesterday’s Financial Times about President Biden’s new foreign policy.  Mr. Wolf’s general view can probably be summed up in the headline on his article: “US has buyer’s remorse for the world it built”.  However, in describing the economic world the United States helped create after World War II, including Bretton Woods, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, etc. Mr. Wolf, however, fails to mention the reasoning and motivation behind the policy: By protecting peace and promoting growth in other countries, we would be helping and protecting the United States.  And it worked. 

While Mr. Wolf may say the United States is having buyer’s remorse, if we are, it is because people aren’t remembering where the world was in 1945 and how far we have come in the last almost eighty years and because our leaders see more political gain in complaining about problems than explaining about progress.

Drone Attack on Moscow; "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"

Several more drones attacked Moscow on Tuesday.¹  Ukraine has denied that the drones are theirs, though I would certainly have no problem if Ukraine was sending drones to attack Moscow.  Russia is attacking Kiev and so many other cities in Ukraine with rockets, etc.  Why shouldn’t Ukraine do the same?

But regardless of the actual physical effects of the drone attack, one wonders about any psychological effects of the attacks.  Which, of course, brings to mind the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April, 1942.  The story of the raid was told in the book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and the film of the same name that came out in 1944.  (Back in the late 1950s or early 1960s, I read a version of the book that was aimed at young adults.)

Ukraine and the Failure of Sanctions – One More Time

I’m sorry to keep harping on the failure of sanctions, but it’s important because they are not working, or at least not doing enough, in Russia’s war against Ukraine.  As I mentioned here, there were two articles in the Financial Times last week about how sanctions against Russia are being violated and how they are aren’t getting the job done. 

There was another article in yesterday’s FT¹, this one about the “ghost trade” in dual-use goods.  Dual-use goods are products that can be used for civilian purposes and for military or intelligence purposes.  The ghost trade is when goods are ordered by a company in one country and never show up there.  What is happening, among other things, is that the dual-use goods are ordered by companies in places such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia and are shipped, from EU countries, through Russia to get to their destination,  But the goods are never arriving.  They are disappearing.