THE BIDEN INVASION - Health inspections for foreign nationals entering our country illegally have gone out the window. That's enabled the importation of many diseases which affect livestock and other agricultural output, and already these things are happening. Legal immigrants and even returning U.S. citizens must pass these inspections to protect the U.S. food supply. But under Joe Biden's catch-and-release, illegals are exempt from such cumbersome requirements. MONICA SHOWALTER
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
STEVE McCANN - CHINA AND THE 2020 ELECTION - WHO WILL SUCK IN THE MOST BRIBES? JOE "RED CHINA" BIDEN OR SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND HER CHINESE DRIVER?
On April 25, 2019, Joe Biden declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Seven days later, on May 3, 2019, the Chinese sent a diplomatic cable to the Trump Administration blowing up a 150-page draft agreement that had taken many months to negotiate. The cable was riddled with reversals by China that undermined core U.S. demands. In each of the seven chapters of the trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: theft of intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition policy; access to financial services; and currency manipulation.
A coincidence or a premeditated scenario?
Joe Biden, in his days in the Senate, was very partial to China, as he voted against revoking China’s most-favored nation status and in 2007 opposed the idea of applying any tariffs on China despite their obvious unfair trade practices. However, it was as Vice President that he became wholly enamored with the country and its leadership.
For example, while in China, Biden, in August of 2011, defended and approvedof China’s one-child policy which brutally used forced abortions to implement the law. In the same year Biden was given the assignment, by Barack Obama, to be the point man on China due his close personal relationship with Xi Jinping, then Vice-President and heir apparent to the Presidency. (Xi Jinping is currently President and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the most powerful figure in China’s political system).
Due solely to Joe Biden’s influence, in 2011, less than a year after starting Rosemont Seneca Partners, essentially a three-man investment firm with Chris Heinz (stepson of John Kerry), Biden’s son Hunter, who had no previous experience in private equity, was in China to explore business opportunities with Chinese state-owned enterprises. These meetings occurred just hours before Joe Biden met with the Chinese president in Washington. Later in the same year, Hunter had a second meeting with many of the same Chinese financial powerhouses -- just two weeks after his father, the Vice President, conducted U.S.-China strategic talks in Washington with Chinese officials.
Joe Biden and Xi Jinping dine at the State Department, Valentine's Day, 2012
Meanwhile Joe Biden never missed an opportunity to downplay China’s threat to the United States. In May of 2013, during a commencement speech he assured those concerned the Chinese were “going to eat our lunch” that they had nothing to be alarmed about as China had immense problems and an inability to think differently. In May of 2014 Biden described China as a nation incapable of producing innovative products and ideas. (Two weeks after declaring his 2020 candidacy Biden, in Iowa, said, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man…they can’t even figure out how to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.” After a massive backlash, he walked back some of those comments a few days later by saying “I don’t suggest China is not a problem.”
In December 2013, Biden flew to Beijing on Air Force Two with his son Hunter on an official trip ostensibly to discuss tensions over disputed territories in the East China Sea. Joe and Hunter were ushered into a red-carpet meeting with a delegation of various Chinese officials. Hunter remained with the delegation while his father met with President Xi Jinping. During these meetings Joe Biden struck an extremely conciliatory and friendly tone with the Chinese leadership -- much to the dismay of America’s allies in the region.
Ten day later, Hunter’s company, Rosemont Seneca, signed an exclusive $1 Billion (later expanded to $1.5 Billion) deal with the state-owned Bank of China, creating an investment fund called Bohai Harvest, with money guaranteed by the Chinese Government. As Peter Schweizer, who was the first to unveil these conflicts of interest, wrote in his book Secret Empires “the Chinese Government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers” Rarely has there been a more stark illustration of being “compromised by a foreign power.”
And in 2014, another arm of Hunter’s budding business empire, Rosemont Realty, began negotiating multi-billion dollar deals with Gemini Investments, a Chinese firm with ties to the China Ocean Shipping Company Ltd. which reportedly operates as an extension of the Chinese military and who eventually acquired 75% of Rosemont Realty in order to purchase commercial real estate in the United States.
Anyone who has dealt with the Chinese Government or the myriad of entities controlled by the government can attest: any foreign business transaction with China always has a requisite or implied quid pro quo that oftentimes does not involve monetary considerations. Once entangled in this web it is nearly impossible to escape. It would be naïve to believe that the Biden family, particularly Joe, are not embroiled in this labyrinth of expectations and demands.
In the years and months before he decided to throw his hat in the ring, it had to be obvious to Joe Biden and in particular those close to him that his mental acuity is rapidly failing, not to mention that his and Hunter’s questionable business activities in China and the Ukraine would be exposed on a grand scale. Why then would he willingly take on a grueling 18-month marathon of running for president? As the timing of Biden’s announcement and Chinese abrupt volte face on the trade agreement implies, one must, therefore, assume he was coerced into declaring his candidacy as a pawn in the chess game the Chinese are playing in order to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
If Xi Jinping coerced his old friend Joe Biden into running, then he placed his prestige and fate on the line that China would be able to hold out in the ongoing trade war and achieve a favorable outcome in any negotiations with Biden at the helm. While Xi Jinping is powerful, he still is one of seven members of a standing committee of the Politburo (25 members) that can oust him. At this point Xi Jinping cannot be perceived as losing face by caving to Donald Trump and reinstituting the agreement made in the spring of 2019.
Therefore, while the threat of further escalation in the trade war will recede there is little chance of anything substantive happening as intransigence will be the rule the day between now and November 2020. However, China’s growing internal problems and failing economy will dramatically escalate, which could force the Politburo to either remove Xi Jinping, or accept, with clinched teeth and a renewed determination to defeat Donald Trump, the basic terms of the May 2019 trade agreement.
Joe Biden’s everyday performance on the campaign trail reinforces the reality that he will not be the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Thus, whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party will, by default, be backed by the Chinese -- who will do whatever is legal, illegal or unethical to defeat Donald Trump. The actions the Russians were falsely accused of in the 2016 election will be child’s play by comparison.
It appears that the Chinese may have made a major blunder in April and May of 2019. A blunder with potential major ramifications for China and, if Donald Trump is defeated in 2020, the United States.
Senate
Finance Committee Probes Biden-Linked, Chinese Military-Boosting Tech Sale
The Senate Finance Committee is probing the Obama administration’s 2015
decision to approve the sale of a U.S. company with insight into “military
applications” to the Chinese government and an investment firm run by former
Vice President Joe Biden’s youngest son, Hunter Biden.
Sen.
Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee’s chairman, sent a
letter to the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Thursday requesting
documents relating to the sale of Henniges, a Michigan-based automotive
company, to Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and Bohai Harvest RST
(BHR). The latter was formed in
2013 by a merger between a subsidiary of the Bank of China and Rosemont Seneca,
a firm started by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary
of State John Kerry.
Since
AVIC was a subsidiary of the Chinese government and Henniges, the producer of
“dual-use” anti-vibration technology with military application, the deal
required approval from the Obama administration’s Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The panel — made up of representatives
from 16 different federal bodies, including the departments of State, Treasury,
and Defense — is required to
review any transaction that could lead to a foreign person gaining control of
an American business.
In
question is whether CIFUS was influenced by Obama administration officials,
most notedly Joe Biden and John Kerry, who had an interest in seeing the deal
move forward.
“The
direct involvement of Mr. Hunter Biden and Mr. Heinz in the acquisition of
Henniges by the Chinese government creates a potential conflict of interest,”
Grassley wrote.
The
senator noted in his letter that AVIC’s bid for Henniges should have
immediately set off alarm bells in the Obama White House. In 2007, AVIC
“reportedly involved in stealing sensitive data regarding the Joint Strike
Fighter program,” which it later “reportedly incorporated … into China’s J-20
and J‑31 aircraft.”
Even
more troubling, however, is that bid was facilitated at the same
time China was staking out a
more adversarial role in global affairs. At the time, Beijing was suspected of
undermining U.S. cybersecurity by underwriting hackers stealing governmental
data. There was also simmering tension over disputes in the South China
Sea.
Despite
the threat to national security, the $600 million deal was approved by CIFUS,
with AVIC purchasing 51 percent of the company and BHR taking ownership of the
other 49 percent. Upon purchase, an industry newsletter stated the
deal was the “biggest Chinese investment into US automotive manufacturing
assets to date.”
In
his letter to Mnuchin, Grassley compared the deal to the Uranium One scandal,
which arose when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved the sale of
a Canadian mining company to Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear energy
conglomerate. It later emerged that
both investors in the company and Russian energy officials had donated heavily
to the Clinton Foundation.
“As
with the Uranium One transaction, there is cause for concern that potential
conflicts of interest could have influenced CFIUS’ approval of the Henniges
transaction,” Grassley wrote. “Accordingly, Congress and the public
must fully understand the decision-making process that led to the Henniges
approval and the extent to which CFIUS fully considered the transaction’s
national security risks.”
This
is not the first time that Hunter Biden’s ties to China have caused grief for
his father’s political career. As Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at
Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret
Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family
and Friends, Hunter Biden signed the $1.5 billion deal
creating BHR in 2013 only ten days after visiting China aboard Air Force Two
with his father.
Eight
Things to Know About the Biden Family’s Culture of Corruption
The family
of former Vice President Joe Biden has earned millions of dollars since the
start of his political career, often from dealings with heavy political
overtones.
Biden, the frontrunner among 2020 Democrats,
often touts his middle-class bonafides on the campaign trail. Although Biden
did not become a multi-millionaire until he left the White House in 2017, the same cannot be
said of his family. In fact, several members of the Biden clan became immensely
wealthy over the span of the former vice president’s 40-year political career.
Breitbart News is providing an in-depth breakdown of a few
instances in which Joe Biden’s political career and his family’s financial
interests seemed to intersect.
1. Joe Biden’s younger brother,
James Biden, secured generous bank loans.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s upset election to the U.S. Senate in
1972, his younger brother James was able to secure a series of generous bank
loans to start a Delaware night club.
Although James Biden had no business experience and a net worth
of less than $10,000 at the time, he was able to arrange more than $160,000 in
start-up capital for the venture. When the nightclub proved to be unsuccessful,
generating more than $500,000 of debt by 1975, James Biden and his business
partners were thrown a life-line by a Pennsylvania bank that loaned him a
further $300,000.
During the same time period James Biden was receiving the
extensive lines of credit, Joe Biden was sitting on the Senate Banking
Committee, which had purview over the financial sector. A specific jurisdiction
of the committee was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which
provides bailouts to banks if they should become over-leveraged.
2. Joe Biden’s top campaign
contributor hired his youngest son Hunter right out of law school.
Shortly after Joe Biden was
reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, his largest campaign contributor, the
credit card issuer MBNA Corp., hired his son for an undisclosed role. The job
raised eyebrows from good government groups because MBNA employees had just
donated $63,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in what appeared to be
a coordinatedmanner to sidestep federal campaign finance regulations.
Clouding the picture even further was that, at the
time, Hunter Biden was a 26-year-old recent graduate of Yale Law
School with no prior banking or business experience. Both father and son
defended the job offer, claiming nothing improper had or would result because
of the arrangement.
“Unfortunately, no matter where I
went to work, some people would make an issue of it,” the younger Biden told the
Delaware News Journal in November 1996 when the job was
announced.
Despite his role being unknown at the time of his hiring, when
Hunter Biden left the company in 1998 to join the Clinton-era Commerce
Department it was as a senior vice president.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Joe Biden was championing
bankruptcy reform legislation endorsed by financial interests and credit card
companies like MBNA.
3. An MBNA executive purchased
Biden’s house for the full asking price in a deal that appeared facilitated by
the company.
A senior MBNA executive purchased
Biden’s 10,000 square foot colonial mansion in the Wilmington, Delaware,
suburbs for the asking price of $1.2 million in February 1996. The sale garnered
notice because larger and newer homes in the vicinity sold for less. The issue
became a minor campaign problem for Biden’s reelection but was quickly
dismissed when the senator provided local media appraisal forms showing his
home was worth the value for what it was sold.
Byron York, however, investigated the matter in an exposé for the American Spectator and
found that properties appraised around the same value in the vicinity had “sold
for a good deal less” than at what they were valued on paper.
“In comparison, it appears [the MBNA executive] simply paid
Biden’s full asking price,” York wrote. “And, according to people familiar with
the situation, the house needed quite a bit of work; contractors and their
trucks descended on the house for months after the purchase.”
As York also noted, it appeared that MBNA may have played a role
in facilitating the purchase. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange
Commission show that “in 1996 MBNA reimbursed [the executive] $330,115 for
expenses arising from the move.” Of that total, $210,000 “was to make up for a
loss [the executive] suffered on the sale of his Maryland home.”
4. Hunter Biden remained on
MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation.
Throughout the early 2000s, Hunter
Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll as a consultant while his father was writing
and pushing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of
2005. The arrangement, which did not become public until
after the law was passed, started in 2001 after Hunter Biden had left his
position in the Commerce Dept. MBNA was paid monthly consulting fees, with some
claiming they ranged upwards of $100,000, to advise the company on online
banking issues.
The 2005 bankruptcy
tightened regulations to make it extremely more difficult to declare
bankruptcy. It was heavily favored by MBNA and other giants in the banking and
finance sectors. Many consumer protection advocates, including Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-MA), have claimed the bill benefited special interests at the
expense of consumers. Some have even suggested the law only served to
hasten and aggravate the recession of the late 2000s.
As previously reported by the New
York Times, Biden worked against many of his own fellow Democrats
in Congress to ensure the final version of the bill was free of provisions
opposed by companies like MBNA.
Biden “was one of five Democrats in
March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to
provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying
only the minimum amount due each month,” the Times noted.
5. Joe Biden paid his family
members with campaign cash.
During his failed 2008 presidential
campaign, Joe Biden paid more than $2 million to his family members and their business. According to
the Washington Times, the
money went to a company that was a long-time employer of Biden’s sister,
Valerie Biden Owens. Biden also directed funds to a law firm started by his old
campaign treasurer, which at the time also employed his youngest son Hunter.
6. James and Hunter Biden
sought to monetize off Joe Biden’s political standing.
In 2006, close to when Joe Biden assumed the chairmanship of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launched his second presidential
campaign, James and Hunter Biden purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global
Advisors. Although neither man had a strong background in finance, James and
Hunter Biden reportedly believed they could leverage Joe Biden’s political
connections to their benefits.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James
Biden purportedly told Paradigm’s senior leadership upon taking over the fund,
as reported by Politico.
“We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
Paradigm’s executives claim that James and Hunter Biden saw the
hedge fund as a way to “take money from rich foreigners who could not legally
give money” to Joe Biden’s campaign account.
“We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash
ready to invest in this company,” James Biden allegedly told Paradigm’s staff.
Hunter and James also tried to solicit labor unions to invest
their pension funds in Paradigm by relying on Joe Biden’s long record of advocating
in favor of collective bargaining.
The efforts proved to unsuccessful, though, with James and
Hunter Biden choosing to strip and sell the company off by 2010 after a number
of bad decisions, including partnering with a Ponzi scheme.
7. James Biden’s received a
$1.5 billion contract to build houses in Iraq while Joe Biden was overseeing
the region.
After his foray into the world of
high finance ended disastrously, James Biden joinedHillstone
International LLC as a vice president in 2010. The company, a subsidiary of
Hill International, at the time, was pursuing technology and construction
projects around the globe.
Although the company had been losing money for some time, James
Biden’s arrival resulted in something of a reversal in fortune. Within six
months of James Biden joining the firm, Hillstone was the recipient of $1.5
billion dollar contract to build 100,000 houses in war-torn Iraq. The deal,
which was never finalized because outside funding failed to materialize,
quickly caught attention as Joe Biden was overseeing the Obama administration’s
policy in the region.
Both the Obama White House and Hillstone denied Joe Biden had
anything to do with the deal, pointing to the fact the contract was awarded
through a South Korean group working to build homes in Iraq. Despite the
denials, Irvin Richter, the founder of Hill International, did admit James
Biden may have had something to do with the deal.
“Listen, his name helps him get in
the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” Richter told Fox Business in 2012 when
discussing James Biden. “People who have important names tend to get in the
door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama he would get
in the door easier.”
Complicating matters was the fact
James Biden was likely to get rich if the deal went through. Fox Business reported that a group
of minority partners, which included James Biden, owned 49 percent of
Hillstone. The other 51 percent was owned by the company’s parent group, Hill
International. Given Hillstone’s profit breakdown structure, James Biden and
the other minority partners would have been eligible to split more than $735
million after the deal was completed
8. Hunter Biden’s firm scored a
$1.5 billion deal with the Bank of China only days after Joe Biden and his
youngest son visited the country.
In a SiriusXM Breitbart News Tonight radio interview from last
year, Schweizer explained how the Biden-China deal unfolded:
“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for
a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” said
Schweizer. “To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted
air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have
said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We
are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan,
in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going
there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for
going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other
countries are quite upset about this.”
Report: Chinese Missiles Could Wipe Out U.S. and Allied Pacific Bases in ‘Opening Hours of Conflict’
7:40
The United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney in Australia released a report on Monday that warned America has lost its military superiority in the Indo-Pacific region and Chinese missiles could wipe out its bases with “precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict.”
“The combined effect of ongoing wars in the Middle East, budget austerity, underinvestment in advanced military capabilities and the scale of America’s liberal order-building agenda has left the US armed forces ill-prepared for great power competition in the Indo-Pacific,” the authors concluded.
The report warned that too many American politicians and foreign policy officials have an “outdated superpower mindset” because they believe China would never act aggressively because the long-term consequences would include a horrific world war.
In truth, Chinese strategy has focused on limiting American power projection in the Pacific while building up the enormous missile inventory of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The imbalance of forces has reached the point where the PLA could pull off a quick disarming strike followed by a clear, difficult-to-reverse victory.
In other words, a swarm of missiles would knock out key U.S. and allied assets in the Western Pacific within a matter of hours. The PLA would quickly move to secure its objectives, establish a foothold on the territory it desires, and then turn the logic of deterrence on its head by asking if the U.S. is prepared to suffer heavy loses in a protracted war to reverse those gains. According to the report:
Having studied the American way of war — premised on power projection and all-domain military dominance — China has deployed a formidable array of precision missiles and other counter-intervention systems to undercut America’s military primacy. By making it difficult for US forces to operate within range of these weapons, Beijing could quickly use limited force to achieve a fait accompli victory — particularly around Taiwan, the Japanese archipelago or maritime Southeast Asia — before America can respond, sowing doubt about Washington’s security guarantees in the process.
This has obliged the Pentagon to focus on rebuilding the conventional military capabilities required to deny Chinese aggression in the first place, placing a premium on sophisticated air and maritime assets, survivable logistics and communications, new stocks of munitions and other costly changes.
The Australian report describes the U.S. problem as “strategic insolvency,” meaning America now has more defense commitments than it can realistically meet with current defense spending.
Rivals like China are surging ahead with force modernization and increasing their combat power, while the U.S. and its allies invested too heavily in Middle Eastern conflicts and nation-building over the past two decades, reduced defense spending to satisfy domestic political demands, provided far too many countries with security guarantees, and convinced themselves none of those markers would ever be called in.
The shift in focus from Cold War great-power competition to counter-terrorist operations has left too many Western strategic planners – and, crucially, the politicians who finance their operations – unable to imagine how a battle between near-peer forces could unfold.
Unfortunately, the world’s heavyweight bad actors have no such poverty of strategic imagination. The University of Sydney report noted that China’s military buildup has “successfully focused on negating the technological and operational advantages that the US military has grown accustomed to since the end of the Cold War,” saying:
Long-range ballistic and cruise missile complexes, in addition to other counter-intervention systems, now threaten American and allied bases and operating locations from Japan to Singapore. These weapons could see China sink or destroy expensive allied warships and aircraft for a fraction of the cost of US power projection. As the majority of America’s forward-deployed air power is concentrated on vulnerable bases within range of Chinese missiles, US aircraft are unlikely to achieve air superiority during a crisis. If unaddressed, this will undercut America’s efforts to blunt Chinese aggression and is likely to be compounded by the fact that US surge forces and logistical support assets are also under resourced and vulnerable to Chinese counter-intervention capabilities.
In short, U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region no longer have the mass to absorb a sucker punch like the missile swarm envisioned by the report. It has become disturbingly feasible for the Chinese to hit enough crucial targets to neutralize America’s presence in the Pacific for long enough to put Chinese troops on the ground in places such as Taiwan, at which point the game would change from fending off a Chinese attack to dislodging an occupying force without inflicting horrendous civilian casualties and destroying valuable infrastructure.
Launching such an attack might seem even more attractive to China because it would devalue American security guarantees around the world, greatly amplifying China’s sales pitch that it can provide better security to its client states with fewer harangues about human rights.
The report recommended “hardening” vital facilities to make them harder to neutralize with a first strike, although China’s vast size and closer proximity to likely theaters of conflict give it an inherent advantage – it can launch large numbers of missiles and aircraft quickly from a wide assortment of bases, and they have shorter flight times to contested areas, allowing the PLA to more easily maintain the rapid tempo of operations seen in conflicts like the Gulf War. With these logistics in mind, the report recommended the U.S. develop missiles with longer ranges and heavier payloads, so that every punch it throws is a haymaker.
The University of Sydney report gave the Trump administration credit for setting the right priorities with respect to China, but found a dismaying lack of follow-through from Washington, in part because increased defense spending and more aggressive military recruiting are tough sells on Capitol Hill:
America’s capacity to enforce its vast liberal order has also correspondingly declined. Whereas the United States and its allies accounted for 80 per cent of world defence spending in 1995, today their share has fallen to just 52 per cent — leaving them less well-equipped to address an ever growing line-up of international challenges.
As Harvard University academic Stephen Walt observes of US strategy during this period: “The available resources had shrunk, the number of opponents had grown, and still America’s global agenda kept expanding.”
The consequences of this overstretch are now coming home to roost. Not only have the direct costs of liberal order-building been astronomical — by some estimates, the Department of Defense has spent over US$1.8 trillion on the global war on terror since 11 September 2001 for little strategic payoff — but the worldwide diffusion of American resources and attention has left the military under-prepared for the return of great power competition. This is what the Pentagon is now working to address.
The report advised Australia, and other key regional allies such as Japan, to step up their efforts and help the United States address its “strategic insolvency” issue in the Pacific. This posture would transform Australia from a “security contributor to a front-line ally” and prepare for a “more unstable future in which the Australian Defense Force may be required to provide large-scale independent strategic effects to secure its vital national interests.”
This is interesting advice in light of President Donald Trump’s arguments with European leaders over their contributions to NATO funding. Some of the grumbles about Trump’s approach come from Europeans, and Americans, who essentially think of the whole thing as a fiscal game, an argument about how much money to stuff into a jar for a rainy day that will never come because a great-power invasion from Europe has become unthinkable.
From the perspective of “strategic insolvency,” however, it is clear that every American partner must make the maximum contribution so that U.S. security guarantees don’t look like overdrawn checks written from an anemic military bank account. As long as the U.S. appears strategically insolvent, adversaries will consider calling Washington’s bluff and triggering a cascade failure of U.S. credibility.
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