Our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has publicly defended having the largest military in the world focus on studying and understanding “white rage.”
Then our commander-of-chief handed over 20 years of American efforts in Afghanistan to a group of eighth-century warlords. Our defense secretary conceded at the time that the leader of the free world lacked the “capability” to rescue hundreds of Americans and allies from the Taliban.
Now, the Justice Department has shuttered a successful anti-espionage program focused on China’s cyber theft, economic espionage, and institutional infiltration. Why? Because — wait for it — racism.
“By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric, we helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen. Instead, Olsen explained, the DOJ would replace the plan founded under former AG Jeff Sessions with a more “comprehensive” approach, arguing that “there is no one threat that is unique to a single adversary.”
Even in his prime, Joe Biden was a subpar legal scholar, short-tempered gaffe machine, and foreign policy pinhead. He was so famously wrong in his estimations that Robert Gates famously declared he had been wrong on every major foreign policy conflict for 40 years.
So, is it any wonder that Vladimir Putin thinks we’re wimps?
The Russian dictator’s performative machismo belies a certain Freudian insecurity over his actual agency. His revolting display of revanchism, currently devastating the sovereign nation of Ukraine, does absolutely nothing to challenge the conclusion that Putin is anything more than a thug regarded as a beast rather than an expert in realpolitik. But as he rightly deduced in 2014, Putin has again wagered that the entire West would choose impotence when faced with Russia flexing first its financial and diplomatic and then its military might over the rest of the free world.
Thanks to technological advances and the Western obsession with climate change, the time was perfect for mass proliferation of clean nuclear power in the West. This could have helped diminish dependency on Russia. Instead, Germany opted to abandon nuclear after the Fukushima disaster. Also, a Swedish teenager, mostly famous for melodrama and cutting class, conned all of Europe into embracing nonsensical fears about nuclear power.
Biden foolishly reversed Trump-era sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and let Russia have free access to the continent’s markets even in the event of a conflict with Ukraine.
Putin bet for years that the Western calculus to choose foreign oil imports over domestic drilling would allow him to hide human rights abuses behind climate activism. And even now, as Russia invades, Biden’s global envoy for climate change, John Kerry, has agreed with them.
The Chinese Communist Party unleashed a virus that shut down the entire planet for two years, lied about it, and then called anyone “racist” when they questioned whether it originated from a lab we already knew was conducting risky experiments on bat-borne coronaviruses. And the entire West agreed with them.
The Chinese communists spent decades erasing the autonomy and cultural identity of Tibet and have now graduated to the full-scale genocide of predominately Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Still, Xi Jinping’s bootlickers charge that criticism of this ethnic cleansing is the real racism. And now, the United States Department of Justice has agreed with them.
Putin is a dictator and a murderer. He never deserved the deference and respect shown to him by the West and its leaders. But he gambled that we were pusillanimous wimps, and that bet just endlessly keeps paying off.
