ANALYSIS – Déjà vu all over again. Just like the establishment back in the 1960s and 1970s facing a massive Soviet nuke buildup, Team Biden and his top general Mark Milley, are simply throwing their hands up in despair.
“We are probably not going to be able to do anything to stop, slow down, disrupt, interdict, or destroy the Chinese nuclear development program that they have projected out over the next 10 to 20 years,” said the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee.
“They’re going to do that in accordance with their own plan.”
Sound familiar?
Yes, this is the same top general who has overseen a cascade of woke policies at the Pentagon and thought the Capitol riot was about “white rage.”
Well, under (sometimes) conservative president Richard Nixon and his Machiavellian national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, the U.S. stopped our nuke arms race so the Soviets could catch.
Jimmy Carter then bent over backward to appease the USSR. According to our establishment ‘nuclear luminaries’ then, nuclear parity was more stable than U.S. superiority.
Is Joe Biden hoping to do the same with China now? If not, Milley needs to wake up.
At least one expert believes America can do something to slow down the rapid rise of China’s war machine, and it doesn’t involve us unilaterally surrendering.
Gordon Chang, a respected academic, China hawk, and the author of The Coming Collapse of China, argues that economic warfare is America’s trump card (no pun intended).
His advice, similar to Ronald Reagan’s approach against the Soviet empire, is simply – “bankrupt China”.
Chang writes in The Daily Caller:
Milley is wrong about China’s nuclear weapons ambitions. He is, unfortunately, expressing the same pessimism that pervaded the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, when the American foreign policy establishment took the Soviet Union as a given and therefore promoted détente.
America can stop China’s nuclear weapons development and other monumental programs. The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it.
Like Reagan and the Soviets before him, Chang focuses on the severe economic conditions plaguing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that are hiding in plain sight.
While in hindsight we all now accept that the USSR was a third world country with a huge military, few see analogies with the modern, vibrant and growing Chinese economy. One that is allegedly either equal to, or rapidly closing in on, the United States.
But many argue China’s economy is a house of cards. Specifically, Chang identifies China’s lack of cash, or liquidity.
He quotes Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy as saying:
“The one resource which Xi Jinping’s ambition has overreached is cash. Beijing cannot, in the short term, provide the cash needed to dominate the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other places.”
Chang adds: “The fundamental problem for the audacious Chinese ruler is that China’s economic growth is stumbling. China’s official National Bureau of Statistics reported that gross domestic product last year grew 3.0%, well below the regime’s announced target of ‘around 5.5%.’”
This is especially salient as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been steadily taking much larger slices of the Chinese economic pie. Last year, China’s military budget, according to official sources, increased 7.1% while the economy, ‘officially,’ grew only 3.0%.
The reality is likely far less.
The PLA needs more cash to keep growing. But the Chinese economy isn’t growing nearly fast enough, if at all.
That’s China’s dilemma, and its Achilles heel.
Chang goes on to describe myriad factors in China’s economic stagnation, before issuing his verdict: “In sum, the Chinese economy is anemic.”
“China, therefore, needs factory orders from abroad and foreign investment.”
He then makes his case for economic warfare against Beijing: “The American president can crimp both of these lifelines by, among other things, using his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and by joining or liberalizing free-trade agreements with other countries.”
He adds a few other policy proposals to hit Beijing where it hurts – its pocketbook.
They may not have an immediate impact, but with a little time, they will hold China back.
Chang writes:
In the short term, therefore, China can afford its nukes, but the budget of the Chinese central government is strained because of Xi Jinping’s other grand ambitions, such as his building and maintaining an enormous surveillance state — this costs more than the Chinese military — and his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) worldwide infrastructure-building program.
The China hawk notes: “Xi has diverted the state’s resources for nuclear weapons. He can do that for a time, but soon the cash will run out.”
Chang concludes: “So here is a message for General Milley: There is a lot America can do to stop China’s fast buildup of its most dangerous arsenal, and in any case Americans must not under any circumstances fund, with trade and investment, the weapons pointed at them.”
“President Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by reducing the flow of cash to Moscow. It is now time to bankrupt China.”
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
US Navy Vet Back Online as Pro-Russia Disinformation Queen
ANALYSIS – Just months after the Department of Justice (DoJ) opened an investigation on her for posting leaked Pentagon intelligence on Ukraine, a US Navy veteran-turned-pro-Russian propagandist is back online.
Sarah Bils, a divorced 38-year-old New Jersey native, and former Navy technician, was unmasked in April after falsely posing as a Russian Jew reporting from occupied Ukraine. And deplatformed shortly thereafter by X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube.
But the attractive Bils, who had a security clearance while in the Navy, is back online on both platforms, as well as Telegram, spewing anti-American and pro-Putin propaganda under the name ‘DD Geopolitics.’
She has repeatedly posted since the relaunch faithfully parroting the Kremlin line. Bils has also encouraged followers to donate to the Russian army and the brutal Wagner Group mercenaries.
In a bizarre rant on September 4, she lashed out at the United States, blaming it for ‘constant meddling’ and provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Pekka Kallioniemi, an expert on Russian disinformation at the University of Tampere in Finland, questioned how Bils was able to restart her pro-Kremlin operations so soon after the opening of that DOJ probe.
‘I find it surprising that the FBI appears to be turning a blind eye to the online activities of people who are clearly working on behalf of America’s enemies,’ he said.
Well, it is called freedom of speech, and as we have seen under the Joe Biden regime, one person’s disinformation is another’s strongly held political convictions.
The best way to combat false information in a free society is with truth, not government or social media censorship.
Meanwhile, as the Daily Mail reported:
Bils began her rise as the preeminent English-language pro-Russian disinformation queen just eight months before she was demoted and discharged from the Navy in November 2022. She had been serving since 2009.
While the Navy hasn’t provided reasons for her demotion and discharge, divorce papers filed in the state of Washington show that prior to her discharge she had been suffering from a variety of health problems.
Still, many suspect that her pro-Russia postings, and possible connections to Jack Teixera, the ex-U.S. Air National Guardsman who leaked a treasure trove of highly classified materials online, were related to her being demoted and dumped from the Navy.
Soon thereafter, DoJ opened an investigation into Bils earlier this year when she distributed stolen, classified documents about U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.