(This article first appeared in the EuroNews at https://www.euronews.com/2021/12/28/the-west-must-stand-firm-to-combat-russia-s-threats-to-ukraine-view)

Updated: 28/12/2021

Distracted by Omicron and Christmas, only a few can now recall US President Joe Biden’s video call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on 7 December, when Biden voiced deep concerns of both the United States and its European allies about the threat of Russian troop movements to Ukraine.

Putin’s dismissive response has been to intensify cyberattacks on Ukrainian government agencies, including the national police and electricity infrastructure.

One expert has described this as ‘preparation of the battlefield’.

For months now the Russian people have been subjected to a massive, perverse government propaganda campaign to strengthen their resolve in the face of the ‘threat’ from the West.

We can expect mobilisation of ‘peace movements’ in Western countries as Putin escalates his military posture.

Months of ground-laying by Moscow

After Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its proxy war in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, NATO sent symbolic reinforcements to member countries that are regarded as most vulnerable to Russia.

Twenty-two years after the first of the former Warsaw pact countries joined NATO, Putin has now demanded a reset and wants all NATO forces withdrawn. In effect, he wants recognition that these nations are within Moscow’s sphere of influence.

At the same time, Putin is adept at gradually creating and promoting divisions between Western states: the EU’s constant vilification of the Polish and Hungarian governments, the threat by Republika Srpska to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia’s wooing of Turkey, are all examples.

What is Putin really up to? He is testing Western resolve. He wants recognition of his gains in the Donbas region and Crimea, full control of the Sea of Azov coastline, domination of the Black Sea, and ultimately the return of Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc countries to Moscow’s sway.

Ukraine has warned that an attack could be as imminent as early January.

Putin will not listen to the West’s concerns unless he sees a united front against his designs and US moves to reinforce a strategic posture in Europe, and also faces serious financial pressure, including from a crash in crucial gas exports.

The need for targeted sanctions against Russia, alongside the provision of equipment and expert cyber assistance to Ukraine, cannot be understated.

Could Ukraine join NATO?

While American officials have had extensive discussions with European partners on coordinating the response to Russian military activities, NATO is revealing little of how it would react to Russian territorial aggression.

The EU, of course, has no credible military capability separate from those of its own members that are already in NATO, although it does have powerful economic tools at its disposal.

NATO has said it is monitoring the situation closely and will continue to offer “political and practical support” for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and its right to decide its own future, free from outside interference.

At the last summit in June, NATO also reiterated a pledge that Ukraine would become a member of the alliance in due course.

Like any democratic country, Ukraine is free to apply. For its part, NATO will balance political and strategic considerations before it extends its massively powerful umbrella over another country. Russia is determined to ensure that this threshold is not crossed.

Given Putin’s ambition to reincorporate Ukraine into the Moscow bloc, he will go to enormous lengths to prevent Ukraine from exercising free will and joining the Western clubs.

The West must demonstrate resolve – and fast

Parallel to the aggressive military threats and cyber abrasions, Russia is applying pressure in other areas. Ukraine is currently battling a $3-billion (€2.65bn) Eurobond case in the UK Supreme Court: a loan Russia forced on it shortly before the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea, and which Ukraine fairly argues it shouldn’t be required to pay back under the circumstances.

This is an example of a prolonged campaign of legal and economic Russian belligerence that threatens to undermine Ukraine at a critical moment. Ukraine needs tangible support.

Russia thinks, after the Afghanistan debacle, that the West is on the back foot and unwilling to get embroiled in another messy military situation. Deterrence will not work unless the West demonstrates its resolve. It must minimize its internal differences and act with unity and solidarity over Ukraine.

For the EU, that means downplaying any idea of separateness from the US or UK in pursuit of its ideas of ‘strategic autonomy’, and strengthening its economic and political support for Ukraine, including for enhanced military capabilities.

In parallel, the West should consider further economic and political sanctions against Russia as credible deterrents. Escalatory options could include full blocking of major Russian state banks and investment agencies.

Sectoral sanctions could be broadened to areas such as mining, metals, shipping, and insurance. And maybe a cyber-shot across Russia’s bows would serve as a warning.

Both NATO and the EU now need to demonstrate a concerted effort in addressing Russia’s dangerous military build-up on Ukraine’s border and its steadily escalating cyber-attacks.

The significance of Russia’s actions and the need for resolute action should be clearly explained to the Western public as well as Moscow. It would be a tragedy if conflict were to break out on Eastern frontiers because of any failure of deterrence. Garbled messages and misunderstandings are how wars start.

Geoffrey Van Orden is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Gold Institute for International Strategy. He was formerly a senior British military officer and long-standing member of the European Parliament, where he was Conservative Leader and Defense and Security Spokesman

(This article first appeared in the American Spectator at https://spectator.org/bye-bye-007-where-is-008-when-we-really-need-him/?fbclid=IwAR3xkUhlHK2S-cRYuck-7ckp3vEBOKNVja_lJiydtDzit8o8r3Pwyw3kGFM)

By: John C. Wohlstetter, Senior Fellow

Time to take a break during the holidays—impossible during last year’s kerfuffle after the 2020 election—and hence the delay in publishing this piece on a legend who left us on Halloween 2020; and quite a bio he had–before and after his cinematic alter ego.

Those of us who remember seeing the early films realize how risqué they were for the time, and how comparatively tame they seem now. The series should have been cancelled no later than after Roger Moore’s GQ-style 007. Connery made his last Bond film in 1983, Moore in 1985. Bond hanging up his Super-Spy spikes at 23 would have been plenty.

Nothing much has come along since. Bond has become an empty vessel into which anyone can be placed. How would Sir Ian react to the just-released LGBTQ 007? How many stunt-driven car chase scenes, how many ridiculously protracted digitally-created fight scenes, do we need to see?

Yet much was added to Fleming’s characters early on, by the original actors playing supporting roles. “Q” (Desmond Llewelyn), MI6’s fictional acerbic armorer (2:39); Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), the trusty secretary with a crush (3:06) on 007; Bernard Lee, the formidable MI6 chief, “M.” The spy agency’s intrepid crew faces arch-villains galore: Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya)–who’d have thought that the sinister director of SMERSH (acronym for smiert shpionam,—“death to spies”) was the lovely lass married in youth to composer Kurt Weill, who gave us the immortal tune, Mack the Knife? Lenya’s instrument for dispatching 007 to the hereafter was psychopathic killer Donovan “Red” Grant (Robert Shaw). Then came Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe), who cheated at cards and golf, losing to 007’s slicker cheating both times; and his thuggish bodyguard, karate-killer Oddjob (pro wrestler Harold Sakata), carved seemingly from granite, only to be electrocuted by 007 just in time to save Fort Knox; and for perennial menace, who could have topped Jaws (Richard Kiel), a worthy successor to earlier film Frankensteins.

All hail, Connery Bond belles: Ursula Andress, whose legendary Playboy pictorial and penchant for displaying her ample charms earned her the sobriquet, Arsula Undress; Daniella Bianchi, first runner-up to 1960’s Miss Universe; Honor Blackman, who had the honor of being the first Bond belle to flip 007 on his keister; Shirley Eaton, best known for her being painted a suffocating gold; and Lana Wood, whose “plentiful” charms (2:37) livened up a dice game. But their feminine charms extraordinaire.often did not include their actual voices. Incredibly, from 1962 to 1979—Dr. No through Moonraker—many Bond-belle voices were voice-overs by German-born Nikki van der Zyl, including that of Brit Shirley Eaton. Van der Zyl’s voice was thought sexier than those for whom she dubbed.

Moore-era Bond femmes like Jane Seymour (Live and Let Die, 1973); Swedish-Polish Ford model Maud Adams—Octopussy, 1983 & The Man With the Golden Gun, 1974; Britt Ekland (also in TMWTGG), another sexy Swede, whose wedding night gift to husband Peter Sellers was a near-fatal coronary, offered audiences “Moore” of the sexy same. How many players –if any–from later Bond flicks match the cavalcade on these lists? Those of the later Bond flicks I passed idle time on nights in hotel rooms with limited video fare and inadequate light for reading.

Central to the success of Bond films was nonpareil set designer Ken Adam. He worked on all Connery Bond films save 1963’s From Russia With Love and 1983’s Never Say Never Again. He created the spectacular supertanker set (4:17) for 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, on the then-largest sound stage in the world. In 1965’s Thunderball, Adam’s underwater stagings (9:18) offered a technology showcase in small submersibles and the hydrofoil Disco Volante—“flying fish”). Adam was set designer for film classics Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Ben-Hur (1959) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). Work on Strangelove precluded his working on From Russia With Love. Besides his film work, the German-born Adam was one of three German expatriates to fly RAF combat missions in World War II.

No appraisal of the great era of Bond films would be complete without mention of the music. Two songs stand out above the rest: 1964’s Goldfinger, composed by John Barry, whose Bond music and conducting work spanned 26 years. With lyrics by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, it was sung memorably in the film’s opening title sequence (2:49) by Shirley Bassey, spiced up by the nude (though shadowed) image of Bond girl Margaret Nolan. The 1977 Marvin Hamlisch/Carol Bayer Sager jazz-rock Nobody Does It Better, in the title sequence (2:43) for The Spy Who Loved Me, showcased superstar Carly Simon’s nonpareil rendition.

Add four cool instrumentals. The world-famed James Bond 007 Theme was originally a song from a failed musical, composed by thespian Monty Norman; the tale of the tune (5:47) is a lulu. John Barry arranged and orchestrated the movie version (1:44). A second 007 theme offers a minor-key melody (2:19) for the gypsy camp battle in From Russia With Love, and adds a major-key melody (4:47) for an aerial panorama in 1967’s You Only Live Twice. Throw in 1964’s Welcome to Miami (1:33), that introduces Bond’s first encounter with Eaton while being massaged by bikini-clad Nolan. In 2011 the Palms aired a rousing tribute (9 min.) to the early films.

Gambling games figure prominently in several Connery/Bond films. Bond makes his gambling debut at the baccarat—chemin de fer—table in Dr. No: “Bond, James Bond.” Best game scene: the spectacular bridge game in Moonraker (1979) at the fictional Blades, with the 18th century “Duke of Cumberland Hand“–that fooled King George III, no less–leading villain Hugo Drax (played by Michel Lonsdale, who bore no resemblance to the physical description in Fleming’s novel) to ruin. Drax, a talented card cheat, thinks he has a grand slam in clubs, but against a diamond lead and a mistake by the dummy player, instead the defenders run 13 non-suit tricks in diamonds. Octopussy has Bond in India, facing off against Louis Jourdan in backgammon, winning big by getting hold of what he knows is the villain’s loaded dice—always comes up two sixes—by claiming “player’s privilege,” a rule that does not exist in the real-world game.

Add some choice selections from Imdb’s voluminous Bond-flick trivia collection. Start with From Russia With Love. Its Orient Express climactic fight scene was based upon a real 1950 episode: a Red agent assassinated his victim and tossed the body off of the celebrated train. The decoding machine that was the object of 007’s desire in that film—when he was not distracted by the honey-trap charms of Bianchi’s delectable Tatiana Romanova—was based upon the real-life World War II delivery of the Nazi “Enigma” cipher machine. Thought unbreakable, its code was broken at Bletchley Park. Ian Fleming, a WW-II intelligence officer, was involved on the intel side of the so-called “Ultra” secret, vital to the Allied victory. The retractable shoe toe-knife that Lenya’s Rosa Klebb tries to kill Bond with at the end was in real life an actual weapon employed by the Soviet KGB. In an 1961 interview, President Kennedy listed the book as one of his all-time favorites. This led the producers to make this the second Bond film. Screened at the White House Nov. 20, 1963, it was the last film JFK saw.

From You Only Live Twice came a case of truth stranger than fiction. Key Bond-film figures did, in a way, live twice. On March 5, 1966, during the filming in Japan, five key players were to board BOAC Flight 911—a number designation that proved tragically apt—for Hong Kong and London: co-producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman; director Lewis Gilbert, who would later direct two more Bond films; Freddie Young, winner of three Academy cinematography awards; and set designer Ken Adam. But just before departure they were invited to a special ninja demonstration, to help plan the final fight scene inside Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s subterranean volcano lair. Minutes after take-off, the Boeing 707 airliner they missed disintegrated upon crashing into Mt. Fuji.

And finally there is Fleming’s literary connection with legendary sci-fi novelist Jules Verne. Bond’s most durable antagonist, Blofeld, was inspired by Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Card-cheat Hugo Drax was drawn from Verne’s sci-fi inventor, the arch-villain Robur, whose flying machines appear in two of Verne’s lesser-known novels.

Enjoy Sir Sean’s TV guest stint (6:07) on What’s My Line?. A perfect setting for a festival party would be the Cote d”Azur mountainside Bond-style mansion Connery built; at this writing it remains on the market.

Sir Sean was a larger-than-life superstar—the rare “man’s man” and “woman’s man.” The producers originally thought of casting Rex Harrison, romantic “sexy Rexy” of British stage and film; David Niven, epitome of highbrow British suave; and Richard Burton, legendary Shakespearean player, as 007. Harrison, a dashing romantic lead in his youth, had become middle-aged Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady; Niven, ever debonair, fared far better as the suave jewel thief in the original Pink Panther film (1963). Both were also much too old for plausible fight scenes. Burton, at 37 only five years older than Connery, was already well into alcohol-fueled decline. His spy persona was to be fixed in 1965’s gritty Cold War black & white The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Author John LeCarre’s moral ambiguity went far towards both sides being equally immoral; Fleming’s hero harbored no such reservations in confronting supreme evil. Indeed, Sir Ian’s Cold War hero became openly allied with the Soviets in later films, teamed against the fictional S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, & Extortion).

The “man’s man” side of Sir Sean earns bonus points for literally stomping Johnny Stompanato, a top enforcer for L.A. Mafia kingpin Mickey Cohen, in a fracas. Seems tough-guy Stompanato decided Connery was having an affair with his main squeeze, 1940s sex symbol Lana Turner, then starring in a 1958 film with Connery as her lover. He confronted Connery and pulled a gun, only to be disarmed and decked by the future 007.

But what of 008? First mentioned in 1964’s Goldfinger, M delivers a stern warning to 007:

• M : Gold? All over?
James Bond : She died of skin suffocation. It’s been known to happen to cabaret dancers. It’s all right as long as you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.
M : Someone obviously didn’t.
James Bond : And I know who.
M : This isn’t a personal vendetta, 007. It’s an assignment, like any other. And if you can’t treat it as such, coldly and objectively, 008 can replace you.

No one in Hollywood today comes close to the cinematic original 007. It is long past time to close up shop. Sir Sean, nobody did 007 better.

John C. Wohlstetter is author of Sleepwalking With the Bomb (Discovery Institute Press, 2d. ed., 2014).

The Gold Institute for International Strategy is pleased to welcome Honorable William A Chatfield as a distinguished Fellow.

William A. Chatfield became the 11th Director of Selective Service in November 2004, having been nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. He was directly responsible to the President for the management of the Selective Service System.

Mr. Chatfield, of Texas, brought to that position more than 25 years of experience working with the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.

He commenced public service as a staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the late Seventies. He then performed in several appointed positions of increasing responsibility in both terms of the Reagan Administration: Department of Defense; Civil Aeronautics Board; Office of Personnel Management; Consumer Product Safety Commission; Department of the Interior; and Interstate Commerce Commission.

From 1987 until his appointment with the Selective Service, he was engaged in governmental relations and public affairs consulting. After leaving public office at the end of the Bush Administration, Mr. Chatfield returned to consulting. The main focus of his practice was in the field of advancing effective healthcare protocols, specifically dealing with our nation’s wounded warrior population.

He is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, with 34 years of active duty and reserve service.

Mr. Chatfield joined the Trump Presidential Transition Team in September of 2016. He was the policy lead on VA reform for candidate Trump and a leader on the transition effort for the president-elect at the Department of Veterans Affairs from election day to inaugural day. In the Trump administration, he served as a Department of Defense Fellow for the White House Liaison at the Office of the Secretary of Defense; working with the Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness and the Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs, providing liaison with the Defense Health Agency, focusing on the latest protocol for the effective treatment of the wounded warrior community.

In the Trump-Pence 2020 reelection effort, Mr. Chatfield worked with Election Operations, coordinating effective voter participation efforts and providing ballot security measures.

At present, in the private sector, he is advocating for the latest advancements in mental and physical treatment for our nation’s veteran community.

(This article first appeared in the American Spectator at https://spectator.org/resignation-assignation-and-deterioration/)

Today’s generals fail upward, having stood by while the Afghan catastrophe they were certain would come to pass did just that; our Veep sails on, seemingly oblivious to nearly everything; and a Democrat Congress fulfills the legislative design of the 1974 budget pseudo-reform law, piling up trillions in debt without even the semblance of fiscal or budgetary restraint. A look at this trifecta of crises offers nothing to cheer.

Resignation.

Historically, senior official resignations have been relatively rare in America. Our leaders resist resigning over policy failure, no matter how egregious. Elsewhere, entire parliamentary governments fall over truly disastrous failures. Not so here. When Cyrus Vance resigned as secretary of state after the Carter administration’s failed attempt to rescue American diplomats held hostage by Iran, it was the first such resignation by a secretary of state since William Jennings Bryan did so in 1915.

Conrad Black lists high-ranking officers who have either been president, or served one or more presidents:

There have been nine presidents who had been generals: Jackson, both Harrisons, Taylor, Pierce, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Eisenhower, and two senior officers, Captain McKinley, and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. There have also been Vice Presidents (Colonel) Richard M. Johnson, (General) Charles Gates Dawes, secretaries of state, (Colonel) Henry L. Stimson, Generals George C. Marshall, Alexander M. Haig, and Colin L. Powell, and unsuccessful presidential candidates-Generals Lewis Cass (1848), Winfield Scott (1852), George B. McClelland (1864), Winfield Hancock (1880), and the first Republican presidential candidate Colonel Charles Fremont (1856).

Black identifies Douglas MacArthur as the only general who played in the political ring whilst serving as combat commander—in his case he merely indicated he’d be available for a draft to be GOP presidential candidate in 1944. While this was flatly wrong, at least MacArthur was open about his desire. Miley, by contrast, intrigued behind the scenes against a president that he was supposed to loyally serve.

Resignation generally comes in three flavors: (a) principled rejection to an administration’s chosen course of action, of which Vance’s decision is an exemplar; (b) departure because of an official’s own association with a failed policy, as with the 1987 resignation of Ronald Reagan’s chief of chief, Donald Regan, enmeshed in the Iran-contra affair; and (c) a personality conflict, reportedly a key factor that led National Nuclear Security Administration chief Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to resign in 2020, following frequent clashes with the secretary of energy.

The Afghan debacle has led many people, in an out of government, to call for resignation of senior Pentagon officials. Thus, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) recently called for the resignation of secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, CENTCOM commander Richard Mackenzie and joint chief of staff chairman Mark Milley. The three had testified before the Senate, and told senators that they had warned the president against cutting troops below the 2,500 needed to ensure a safe evacuation.

Which raises this question: While ordinarily a senior official’s resignation over a policy dispute should be made without undercutting presidential policy, are some prospective consequences of bad policy so catastrophic that resignation is justified in an effort to force a policy change?

That the policy was doomed was clear long before the administration belatedly began withdrawal. Members of Congress began pressing the administration to begin evacuation immediately after the president announced in April that final withdrawal was to be accomplished by August 31. Such efforts were to no avail. Worse, a Marine who spoke out against a bug-out that everyone knows has been a horror show pleaded guilty this week; among the charges to which he pleaded are “showing contempt toward officials, showing disrespect toward superior commissioned officers and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” He faces up to 17 years in prison for speaking the truth, whilst those on top skate.

The generals had a superior, potentially viable option: They could have told the president that they would resign en masse if he did not allow keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan until all Americans and their Afghan allies were safely evacuated. Instead, America stands almost universally condemned at home and abroad. Allies no longer trust us; our enemies exult and are energized. Barring a miracle—more likely, several miracles—America will suffer the consequences for at least a generation. A prospective calamity of this magnitude called for senior leaders to take extraordinary steps. They didn’t do so. Indeed, no senior national security official has resigned or been fired. Nor is there any indication that either will transpire.

Assignation.

Our first female vice-president, who rose to political prominence through strategic assignation, is AWOL during the southwest border crisis; her latest absence was skipping high-level meeting in Mexico City between U.S. and Central American senior officials, so she could visit with moms and babies in New Jersey. As well she has been AWOL over Afghanistan despite saying that she was the last person in the room when decisions were made. Of the border crisis, Barack Obama, after noting the hardships—“heartbreaking”—visited on migrants, said as to massive migrant inflows:

At the same time, we’re a nation state. We have borders. The idea that we can just have open borders is something that . . . as a practical matter, is unsustainable.

Instead, Harris recently contented herself by praising a student for publicly hurling a blood libel at Israel as representing an expression of the student’s “personal truth.” Recently she took a 24-hour jaunt to Palm Springs to an undisclosed location, for an undisclosed purpose. There is nothing inherently wrong in this, but again, it is an indicator of her penchant for making herself absent in times of grave crisis. Vice-presidents like Dick Cheney (Bush 43) and Walter Mondale (Carter) immersed themselves in such times, eager to play an internal advisory or formal negotiating role.

Deterioration.

Soaring oil and natural gas prices, a consequence of Team Biden’s hostility to fossil fuels, act as a massive tax hike and have led to a weakening of America’s energy position; Uncle Sam had been a net exporter of energy in 2019 and 2020, for the first time in generations. America’s dilapidated infrastructures will require at least $6 trillion to rehabilitate, but only $1 trillion of proposed new federal spending is on physical infrastructures.

As our federal financial balance sheet dramatically deteriorates, does the collapse of budget negotiations herald failure of the system? Hardly, if one goes by the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. That law created the budgetary monster we face today. And that was precisely the intent of the law’s drafters. The legislators of 1974 were trying to spend more money than Richard Nixon would accept. So they took total control over the budget process, conceding the president only his power, under the presentment clauses of the Constitution, to either veto the entire bill, or sign it into law in toto.

The 1974 Congress: (a) stripped the president of the power to impound funds; (b) created the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to end their dependency on numbers provided by the executive branch; (c) moved the fiscal year date from July to October, giving Congress more time to produce a budget. Yet since FY 1997 Congress has failed to pass a budget. operating instead by continuing resolution (CR). In all, from FY1998 through FY2022, Congress has passed 125—NOT a misprint—CRs! The 1974 law thus enabled the Congress to declare presidential budgets D.O.A., and work solely among themselves, if so inclined—always when Democrats were confronting a Republican president, sometimes even working against Democratic presidents.

And by the way, who has time to read a 2,500-page monstrosity of an omnibus budget reconciliation bill? The author recalls in February 2009 wading through the online posting of the $800 billion stimulus bill ISO “shovel-ready projects”—an unkept campaign promise that in 2010 had president Obama telling the New York Times: “There is no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” Many such bills are unreadable to the general public—even to most members of Congress. Typical legislative language often resembles this: “Section 2548(b)(2)(A) of the Save the Planet Act is amended by adding section (b)(2)(B) which provides….” A few hundred pages—let alone a couple thousand pages—of digesting endless thickets of legalistic verbiage will send anyone to a shrink. Such bills often conceal poison pills—items that otherwise would be stopped by Congress. In this case, the poison pill slipped in by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the budget reconciliation bill itself, tacked onto a popular infrastructure bill.

This week, the GOP showed political wisdom, agreeing to allow passage of a $480 billion debt ceiling increase—on party lines with no crossovers. This punts the funding mess post-election, to early December. The GOP rarely wins showdowns, as Democrats can count on their media shock troops to blame the GOP and scare voters by portraying partial shutdown as total closure. Such would help Terry McAuliffe’s race for the Virginia Statehouse.

The Treasury’s Historical Debt Outstanding pages tell the tale of federal government indebtedness: What was $475 billion as of the end of FY1974 and now stands at $28.428 trillion at the end of FY2021. N.B., 2021’s $428 billion add-on towards the next trillion is 90 percent of the total accumulated debt from 1789 through 1974—186 fiscal years.

All of which brings to mind Sarah Palin’s best line ever, when speaking to a Republican National Committee audience during the 2010 fall campaign: Referring to Barack Obama’s spendthrift ways, Palin said: “Please nobody should tell the Democratic president what number comes after a trillion.”

Bottom Line.

The collective series of events recounted here lead inexorably to a melancholy conclusion: In less than eight months, a hapless administration has brought the country to near ruin. A recent major poll showed a sharply widening divide between blue- and red-state voters, with 52 percent of Trump voters and 41 percent of Biden voters responding that they’d favor a breakup of red and blue states, a sentiment that even a decade ago would have been confined to left and right fringe elements.

America is now in greater danger than at any time since the anxious fortnight of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In this case, our existential crisis is metastasizing before our very eyes into an incurable multi-cancerous condition.

John Wohlstetter is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for Interanational Strategy.

This article first appeared in the American Spectator (https://spectator.org/an-open-letter-to-american-academia/)

During my educational lifetime — K4-12 in private school (Riverdale Country School, NYC 1956-65); college (University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, 1965-69); law school (Fordham University School, NYC, 1974-77); and graduate school (the George Washington University, Washington, DC, 1983-85) — I was under the tutelage of over one hundred professors.

My instructors encompassed a broad political spectrum, from progressive far-left to conservative far-right. Needless to say, none were true extremists — avatars of imposing totalitarian belief systems on free societies. Most were disciples of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a political philosophy that dominated American life from FDR’s first presidential win in 1932, to the revolutionary year 1968 that shattered the Roosevelt Coalition.

I can remember most of my teachers whom I encountered during those 18 years spent in educational institutions. A few were truly great teachers; many were good to excellent; others were so-so; and inevitably there were a few who were bad apples. A few regarded me, in turn, as excellent or good; many thought me so-so; and a few thought me a royal pain. All of them were correct: like many pupils, I did well when I liked the teacher and subject, so-so when I liked one but not both, and awful when I liked neither.

Although their pedigree spanned most of the American political spectrum, and their competence levels ran the gamut, so to speak, from A to Z, they all had several things in common:

• None of them even attempted to indoctrinate me, nor did I witness them trying to do so with my fellow classmates.
• None of them would have considered grading me poorly if I did not share their political beliefs.
• None of them would have refused to reveal to parents what material they were teaching us — let alone brazenly lied outright.
• None of them worked in schools that would have denied the rights of parents to know what was being openly taught in the classroom.
• None of them would even have dreamed of encouraging students to inform on their parents, monitoring their elders for any of the myriad, and constantly expanding, violations of multicultural political correctness — “micro-aggressions” in today’s debased parlance.

Yet today we find ourselves in such a poisonous academic environment that school boards around the country openly scorn parental rights, as they seek to do to this generation’s students what was never done to us. Ground Zero for today’s movement to hyper-politicize Academia is the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state whose ancestors provided more Founding Fathers and Constitutional Framers than any other — all now under withering fire from the “woke” professoriate and other occupiers of the commanding heights of American culture.

The Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, a former occupant seeking to return to the Statehouse, also the leading fundraiser for the Clinton machine during its dominant years in power, openly proclaims that parents have no right whatsoever to know what their children are being taught in the state’s schools. We will know this November if the voters of Old Dominion share his view of the power and prerogative of the professoriate and their teachers unions.

Once before, after the former Soviet Union shocked the world on October 4, 1957 by launching Sputnik I into low-Earth orbit to ignite the Space Race, Americans saw education recast to place more emphasis on mathematics and the hard sciences. America rapidly responded by launching its first satellite, Explorer I, on January 31, 1958. The culmination of that effort was the July 20, 1969 Moon landing. But Americans last walked on the Moon in December 1972. The unified America that rose to meet that grand challenge is a distant memory. In the event, sparking cultural revival today is a far more complex challenge than was merely revamping parts of the educational curriculum.

In a country whose factions have become divided to the point of civil war, it will take serial mass voter uprisings against educational tyranny to restore educational institutions to their traditional role — or if need be, replace the current deeply corrupt system if it cannot change. If Academia continues its current course, it will produce an America less free, less prosperous, less civilized, a former superpower permanently weakened on the world stage.

And American Academia will then discover the truth first revealed by Jacques Danton in 1794, as the French Revolution turned on its creators:

All totalitarian revolutions, like the Roman agricultural deity Saturn, eventually devour their own children.

As we come upon the 64th anniversary of the challenge to explore the Heavens, there is some good news. For its part, NASA has put land rovers and a helicopter on Mars — the first-ever flying machine to circle another planet in our Solar System. And private spaceflight with reusable rockets has become a prominent feature of present and future space exploration.

The next step should be to reform academia so as to promote and preserve the society that made so many things possible that were once thought impossible. We cannot do this if our elite educational establishments graduate students with more credentials in “woke” pseudo-studies, and fewer in disciplines airily dismissed by today’s totalitarians as “white supremacy” studies.

Those remaining in Academia who wish to reverse the downward spiral in student achievement and academic freedom must make their voices heard. They must ally themselves with voters of all persuasions who share the same goals. It may already be too late to undertake this endeavor. But if it is not so, the time to begin rebuilding our educational institutions is now.

John Wohlstetter is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for Interanational Strategy.

This article first appeared in the American Spectator (https://spectator.org/9-11-2001-20-from-grace-and-power-to-disgrace-and-cower/)

The divisive speech given by President Biden last Thursday — seeking to shift focus from his cowardly bug-out from Afghanistan to COVID, and to make Republicans — to Biden, a/k/a “the dark forces” — the issue rather than his horrendous first eight months in office, came on the anniversary date — 9/9/2001 — when Al-Qaeda assassinated the Northern Alliance’s greatest warrior-leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud; his son continues the resistance today. Tellingly employing suicide bombers disguised as photo journalists, with bombs concealed in pseudo-cameras, that strike was the kick-off trigger event for activating the suicide hijackers, already in America, to carry out the the 9/11 attacks. That horrific day, begun in September sunshine, descended into a dark inferno of searing flame, noxious gases, flying debris, and falling bodies; a total of 400 first-responders, who went into the crumbling structures knowing they’d likely not survive, saved thousands by their sacrifice. The aftermath saw a nation united in shock, grief, and outrage, and generated the motive force for America to project its military might 7,000 miles to confront Al-Qaeda.

From that extraordinary display of grit and grace in adversity, followed by “shock and awe” firepower in response, we now reel in disgraced disarray, our leaders cowering, prevaricating, posturing, and deflecting blame. To cover our failure to evacuate those Afghans who helped us — a number that SecState Blinken just told Congress may be not 100, but “several thousand” — the administration evacuated thousands of Afghans that the Taliban allowed us to take — who had not done anything for us. Think there just might be a few sleeper agents slipped into the mix?

We did not simply leave Afghanistan, but openly, abjectly surrendered to an enemy now hugely revitalized by our shattering defeat — to say nothing of a bonanza in military equipment — making ourselves a state sponsor of terrorism. Add to that an intelligence coup in giving biometric data on all Afghans who helped the Americans. Those who launched jihad 20 years ago are now poised to relaunch globally.

For their part, the newly empowered Afghan Taliban marked 9/11 by hoisting the Taliban flag over the Presidential Palace. The Taliban is torturing and killing Afghan counterterrorism agents who cooperated with the allied forces. And worst of all, it is beginning to round up Afghan males 12 and over, taking them to undisclosed locations — possibly to commit genocide. The area targeted for the round-up is the Panjshir Valley, a key region where the opposition Northern Alliance is based. As all this goes on, the president goes golfing.

During Saturday’s remembrance ceremonies, Biden and Harris found time to throw in their party’s favorite identity politics mantra: “Diversity is our strength.” Of viewpoint diversity the most they can manage is to pay lip service, while pursuing phantom armadas of white supremacy.

Meanwhile, what preoccupies the administration as the world is falling apart? NOT MAKING THIS UP: Confederate monuments.

Three days before the 9/112001 memorial ceremonies the most famous statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was torn down. Lee was, in fact, not only universally respected in his time by friend and foe alike; no one else could have brought the South to the peace table in Appomattox. Had Lee not done this, the likelihood is that Confederate diehards would have commenced a guerrilla war that could have lasted decades. The fearsome Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose cavalry bedeviled several Union armies — who himself had killed 31 men in hand-to-hand combat, and had 30 horses shot out from under him — would have led the fight. Instead, in 1866 he became the first Imperial Wizard of the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan.

In a chillingly prophetic letter written in 2005, Civil War historian Shelby Foote wrote of Robert E. Lee:

They can tear down his statue. Lee would have been embarrassed by it. However, they cannot reverse the verdict of history. Lee will forever stand for duty and honor in opposition to tyrannical power. Those that want to dispute that comment and hurl insults must defend the status quo leading this nation into oblivion.

The statue, displaying “Marse Robert” on horseback, which stood in Richmond at the head of Monument Avenue for 131 years, was destroyed with the enthusiastic support of Virginia’s corrupt, power-drunk governor. The statue was desecrated, hacked up, and sent into oblivion by “woke” mobs — drunk with the arrogance that ignorance breeds. Thus was a once-revered figure in America’s national memory cast into the dustbin of history by neo-fascist servitors of the most tyrannical administration in American history. Along with their cultural elite allies — foremost in mass and social media — this unholiest of alliances poses the greatest security threat ever to America and the freedom that once was every American’s birthright.

The signs of tightening tyranny come from the top. Both Biden and Kamala Harris accused Americans of targeting Muslims after the 9/11 attacks: Said Biden, “We also witnessed the dark forces of human nature. Fear and anger. Resentments and violence at Muslim-Americans, true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion.” Harris, for her part, threw in Sikhs as well: “Sikhs and Muslim-Americans were targeted because of how they looked or how they worshipped.” The FBI’s Hate Crimes Statistics database shows that in 2001 55.7 percent of religiously motivated attacks targeted Jews, and 65.9 percent targeted Jews in 2002. For Muslims the 2001 figure was 27.2 percent in 2001 and 10.8 percent in 2002. At most one can argue that there was a bump immediately after the attacks; but omitted — naturally — is the fact that Jews targeted vastly exceeded Muslims in both years. The latest FBI figures, for 2020, show Jews were targeted in 57.6 percent of religiously motivated attacks — 676 out of 1,174 — while Muslims were targeted in 69 out of 1,174 — 5.9 percent. Thus, in 2020, Jews were targeted just shy of 10 times as often as were Muslims. (If the argument is that Muslims were reluctant to step forward, the same can equally be said for other religious groups; absent supporting data, elevating by bald assertion any group’s silent victims versus others is classic bootstrapping.)

Biden and key administration figures like press secretary Jen Psaki have joined with ostensibly private social media companies to censor speech critical of the government’s policies on COVID vaccines — even blocking balanced discussion of vaccine pros and cons. They are nominating judges who are militant secularists; the administration’s arguments for curbing religious freedom have already been rebuffed by the Supreme Court, including several 9-0 adverse rulings. The president said that from the outset the Second Amendment has limited the type of people who can own a gun and the type of guns they can own. The State of Texas is going to build a 733-mile wall to secure the Texas-Mexico border, of which only 150 of 1,250 miles are currently protected by barriers; and Team Biden does next to nothing to vet illegal migrants for disease and eligibility.

The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker sees a serious decline in Biden administration credibility, despite a pernicious double standard mainstream media employ to protect him for behavior they condemned when judging Trump:

His credibility problem isn’t simply sapping Mr. Biden’s poll numbers or even his ability to advance his political agenda. It’s further eroding trust in government, undermining America’s tattered reputation in the world and making it immeasurably harder for authority — now and in the future — to maintain the kind of trust that is essential to the functioning of a free society.

Among America’s most important allies there is no longer any trust that Mr. Biden can be relied on as a serious partner. They’re now making their own plans. At home, people are so bewildered and angry about the endless inconsistencies on masks, lockdowns, and vaccines that many of them have simply stopped paying attention.

Perhaps worst of all, save assaults on free speech: the Treasury announced IRS plans to monitor all monetary transactions of $600 or more:

This proposal would create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime.… This requirement would apply to all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts, with the exception of accounts below a … gross flow threshold of $600 or fair market value of $600.

Dennis Prager sees our greatest threat from the union of radical, totalitarian Leftists who seek to control others, and the growing number of people who increasingly accept such control as legitimate:

They currently dominate four of the five English-speaking countries (the United Kingdom may be the one exception). The ease with which Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders have accepted the loss of liberty in their respective countries has been the saddest and most frightening development since the rise of totalitarianism in the early 20th century.

Even sadder and more frightening has been the acceptance of authoritarianism by half of the American people. America has been the beacon of liberty in the world. America was the country to which France gave the Statue of Liberty. America has been, as President Abraham Lincoln characterized it, “the last best hope of Earth.” America’s self-image has been that of a “sweet land of liberty” and of “the land of the free and home of the brave.”

Four unchecked years of the Biden/Harris administration bid fair to undermine American freedom and prosperity. Former Trump director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe called President Biden “our greatest national security threat.” He has, he said, gotten everything wrong over his first eight months. Truly “profound and grave damage” has been done, because we will not be able to get human intelligence — this is a “ripple effect” that will hurt us everywhere. Ripple damage is generic: It is not particular to the direct damage done in Afghanistan; rather, it damages our standing across the entire geopolitical spectrum — allies, neutrals, and foes, on all seven continents, militarily, politically, economically, and culturally.

Bottom Line. As our foreign adversaries gain strength and resolve, whilst our allies wilt in despair, we are coming undone by the metastasizing malignancies of internecine strife. Either these baleful trends are soon reversed, starting with the 2022 mid-term elections, augmented by courts that step up to affirmatively block unconstitutional infringements on our freedoms, or America will rapidly fall into a civilizational death spiral.

At the dizzying speed at which Team Biden is moving, waiting for 2024 amounts to putting a band-aid on multiple simultaneous Stage 4 cancers. Preventing implosion requires that a critical mass of the public see the myriad dangers, sense their immediacy and gravity — and, above all — express their disgust where it counts most: by a landslide vote for change.

John Wohlstetter is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for Interanational Strategy.

(This article first appeared in Newsweek https://www.newsweek.com/israel-joins-arab-club-us-sponsorship-opinion-1628991)

By: Simone Ledeene, senior fellow and Victoria Coates

Last week, a laconic statement from the Department of Defense marked a tectonic shift in Middle East security cooperation, as the United States formally designated that Israel would now be part of the U.S Central Command (CENTCOM). President Donald Trump announced the proposed change on January 15, 2021, and while the escalation of violence in Gaza this spring seemed to put the designation in some jeopardy, it went into effect on September 1, 2021. The initiative to move Israel into CENTCOM is a direct result of the Trump administration-led Abraham Accords normalization agreements between the United States, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signed one year ago today on the South Lawn of the White House.

CENTCOM got its name because the Middle East is literally located in the middle of everything. Israel is the most central point in that centrally located region, sharing as it does a maritime boundary with a European country (Cyprus) and a border with an African country (Egypt), as well as boasting Asian neighbors such as Jordan. In the wake of the Abraham Accords and the resultant burgeoning economic and cultural ties among the signatories, the timing is now ideal to develop a similar regional security relationship. This relationship would expand cooperation and improve Israel Defense Forces (IDF) integration with U.S. and partner forces throughout the region. It would also help CENTCOM promote a more holistic and inclusive regional security framework. There would be opportunities to conduct joint military exercises that include the IDF, which would indirectly provide Israel the occasion to communicate with countries that have yet to sign normalization agreements. Additionally, Israel would now be able to assign IDF liaison officers to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa—and, hopefully in the future, to subordinate headquarters across the region.

As events in the Middle East crashed into the American consciousness due to the Iran and Afghanistan crises in 1979, President Jimmy Carter established the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (JTF) as a response mechanism for rapidly unfolding events. In 1983, under President Reagan, that JTF became CENTCOM. Its area of operation runs from the Pakistani border with India to Egypt’s border with Libya. U.S. military regional combatant commands, including CENTCOM, are responsible for the deployment, support and operational employment of U.S. forces in their areas of responsibility, as well as for developing military relationships with allies and partners in their respective regions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump, Bahrain Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan pose from the Truman Balcony at the White House after they participated in the signing of the Abraham Accords where the countries of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates recognize Israel, in Washington, DC, September 15, 2020.

In the course of the 1983 reorganization, Israel, Syria and Lebanon remained part of the European Command (EUCOM), which was established after World War II. At the time, placing Israel under EUCOM made some sense. Israel had existed for just 35 years and had formal diplomatic relations—chilly ones, at that—with only one Arab country: Egypt. All the others refused to recognize or maintain formal ties with the Jewish state. Memories of oil embargoes and the 1970s-era Arab boycott were still fresh, and it seemed only prudent to consider “diplomatic sensitivities” by making CENTCOM the U.S. military’s interface with the Arab world. EUCOM provided assistance to the IDF and conducted joint exercises and contingency operations with the IDF and America’s NATO allies.

In 2004, however, President George W. Bush moved Syria and Lebanon to CENTCOM, and Israel alone among the countries of the region remained in EUCOM. This encouraged the unfortunate perception that Israel is somehow separate, or different, from the rest of the Middle East. Major threats to Israel were, and are, within CENTCOM’s boundaries—specifically, those from Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Israel’s airspace is also under CENTCOM’s area of operations, including assets involved in detection, suppression and prevention of missile threats in the broader Middle East. The situation has become increasingly awkward, as the European Union is now significantly more anti-Israel than the Arab world; during the 2014 escalation of violence in Gaza, for example, EU complaints about Israel and advocacy for the Palestinians complicated an already-thorny situation. Given that Israel now has full relations with four Arab countries and is developing additional relationships in the region, the Trump administration concluded it was no longer necessary to maintain the fiction that Israel is somehow in Europe. It therefore initiated the process that came to fulfillment on September 1, 2021.

The consequences of President Joe Biden‘s recent chaotic and catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan, which is also part of CENTCOM’s area of operations, may take a generation to fully comprehend. But even in this bleak context, the restructuring of CENTCOM to incorporate Israel stands out as a beacon of hope that, thanks to the Abraham Accords, American national security interests in the Middle East may yet be salvaged—and, if properly supported and encouraged, even strengthened in the future.

Victoria Coates is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and a former deputy national security advisor for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council staff.

Simone Ledeen is a senior fellow at the Gold Institute for International Policy and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

(This article first appeared in The Hill: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/571115-democrats-are-abandoning-us-allies-is-egypt-next?rl=1)

By: Simone Ledeen, Senior Fellow

The Biden administration and leftist congressional allies have perpetuated a tired charade of prioritizing human rights over other security-focused considerations with regard to relations with several key partners, including Egypt. One of the loudest Democratic voices in opposition to continued security assistance for Egypt is Sen. Christopher Murphy (Conn.), who questions a number of established partnerships supporting U.S. objectives across the Middle East.

In the past weeks, much has been revealed by our appalling abandonment of U.S. citizens and allies in Afghanistan. If promoting human rights was a primary consideration, the Biden administration would not support the Taliban — a designated terrorist organization under the United Nations and U.S. Treasury Department — which, this past week, blamed the U.S. for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

With this new reality, it is worth circling back to the administration’s dangerous approach to the U.S.-Egypt relationship, where some hard questions must be asked of Democrats advocating a halt to critical security assistance.

Egypt faces multiple security challenges and requires urgent assistance in order to continue providing leadership on regional security matters. The nation and its president, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, are critical bulwarks against the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical islamist groups. It is clear that if security assistance is not provided by the United States, Egypt will seek it elsewhere, likely with Russia or other strategic rivals.

The House passed a 2022 foreign aid bill that proposes withholding $150 million from Egypt — a larger amount than in previous years — and that does not include the standard national security waiver for a portion of that withheld assistance. Due to long-standing fiscal problems, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Cairo is financially strapped and now risks losing U.S. financial assistance, which constitutes a big chunk of its annual military budget. Meanwhile, as its budget is expected to remain in a deficit through 2025, pressure is building in Egypt for more austerity measures. With citizens under 30 representing more than half the total population, the trajectory is unsustainable.

Our interests are harmed without Egypt as a key partner. Egypt has fought a Sinai insurgency, which at times, has spilled over into other parts of the country. The ISIS affiliate in Egypt has claimed responsibility for most attacks and the country has been under a state of emergency since April 2018, when two ISIS-claimed suicide bombings at churches in Alexandria and Tanta killed at least 45 people.

Next to the Sinai Peninsula, Sisi helped to broker peace — at least for now — in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Although Egypt has historically played an important role in Israeli-Palestinian relations, many were caught off-guard by this development. It is a fragile peace, but this Egyptian-negotiated ceasefire highlights the critical regional leadership Cairo can and should provide.

Egypt faces a strategic challenge on its western border from the multi-year civil war in Libya and significant related security threats. Cairo is concerned that Turkish-sponsored Syrian mercenaries, combined with Erdogan’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, could create an Islamic-oriented government in Tripoli. While a ceasefire was signed in 2020, Libya remains volatile and insecure.

Building on U.S. strategic security relations with Egypt, Central Command is currently engaged in a massive regional military exercise called Bright Star. In its statement on the exercise, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo states that the U.S.-Egypt security partnership plays “a leading role in regional security and efforts to combat the spread of extremism.” To illustrate the size and scope of this exercise, other countries participating include: the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, Kuwait, the UAE, Tunisia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania as well as Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Greece and Pakistan. This exercise is in addition to the counterterrorism training that took place earlier in the year.

Cairo’s security is also challenged from the south, as the Nile River flows through Sudan and into Ethiopia. Egypt depends on the Nile River to meet 95 percent of its water needs. Ethiopia, which also relies on the Nile for water, built and filled the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam despite objections from both Egypt and Sudan. Both countries say that once filled, this dam will increase water instability; a particularly serious problem for Egypt as its major cities are growing exponentially. Searching for sustainable solutions to this emerging water crisis, Egypt has requested assistance from U.N. and African Union friends and allies to reach a rapprochement with Ethiopia and hopefully avoid a military confrontation.

Egypt is facing massive security challenges — both internally and externally. The United States needs Egypt to continue as a key regional leader in maintaining peace and stability, which are both in our long-term interest. Congressional Democrats must abandon their anti-Egypt rhetoric and focus on providing necessary security assistance in order to ensure U.S. national security interests are aggressively protected.

Cairo has taken a leadership role in addressing a number of important regional security challenges and should be encouraged and supported, not punished.

Simone Ledeen is a senior fellow at the Gold Institute for International Policy. She previously served as deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy. Twitter: @SimoneLedeen

LETTERS@THETIMES.CO.UK

Friday September 03 2021, 12.01am, The Times

Sir, Further to Nathalie Loiseau’s Thunderer (“Britain and the EU must forge strong foreign policy bond”, Sep 2), it is France that determines the EU’s foreign policy. There cannot now be a call for a new and strong EU-UK partnership on foreign, security and defence policy when we cannot trust France as a friend.

In spite of our bilateral defence treaty and our support for France’s efforts to defeat terrorism in the Sahel, France was a poisonous influence throughout the Brexit negotiations. It exploited the Irish border and fisheries issues and sought in every way to undermine the City of London. France has also allowed the Channel migrant scandal to be a running sore for 20 years. It seeks access to our technology for its own advantage and has blocked our continued involvement in projects in which we had massively invested.

In this small, dangerous world, there should of course be close co-operation in all policy areas with our continental neighbours. But it is paramount for all who seek to protect our freedom, prosperity and way of life to revitalise the transatlantic alliance (Iain Martin, “The end of Pax Americana leaves us all in the cold”, Comment, Sep 2) in a reliable and meaningful way. Trust is at the heart of all friendships.

Geoffrey Van Orden, a distinguished fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, is a former leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament.

(The article first appeared in the Tennessee Star: https://tennesseestar.com/2021/08/15/exclusive-erik-prince-blames-afghanistan-debacle-on-cosplay-national-security-apparatus-that-believes-their-own-bs/)

By: Neil W. McCabe, Media Fellow

The Founder of the Blackwater private security firm and the author of a comprehensive plan to save Afghanistan by shifting the country’s security to private contractors and away from the American military told The Star News Network on Sunday he warned U.S. diplomats the government of President Ashraf Ghani would fall before Labor Day.

“I told a number of ambassadors in the region there; they should expect a collapse of Kabul by Labor Day, and I said that back in April, based on when the U.S. air pressure, when the Air Force really stopped bombing, when that threat largely disappears, then the Taliban would be able to group and mass as they have done, and then they start blowing up cities,” said Erik Prince, the Navy SEAL veteran and national security entrepreneur.

“It’s a very predictable outcome that all these smart people in the military didn’t pass that kind of information off the chain of command so that the president even last month makes as dumb a statement as he does,” Prince said.

“We have a cosplay national security apparatus that sits and talks to itself into believing their own B.S., and sadly, the Taliban are feeding into us at the end of the bayonet right now,” he said. The term “cosplay” is defined by dictionary.com as “the art or practice of wearing costumes to portray characters from fiction, especially manga, animation, and science fiction.”

“This is not rocket science, but it’s a failure of imagination,” he said.

“It’s a failure to look at history to see what’s worked by our conventional military leadership and utter an abysmal failure,” he said. “The Afghan army has lasted a couple of weeks. The government built by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan lasted four years after the Russians pulled their forces out, four years not two weeks.”

Prince said once Taliban forces started rolling up provincial capitals, they could not be stopped by the Afghanistan government.

“The continued Taliban victories have certainly given them a very key element in the military success, and that’s momentum,” he said. “It certainly caused a lot of paralysis. When that momentum causes fear amongst the defending population and a few links in their chain suddenly disappear, they lack the resiliency, and so it all goes apart quickly.”

Kabul falling as it did will have a long-term negative impact on America’s reputation, he said.

“It will have second and third-order effects because everyone that thinks that they’re an ally of the United States is going to look at us today,” he said. “The United States walked out of there, like a bad one-night stand, and: ‘They just left us hanging.’”

In 2017, Prince presented a comprehensive plan to senior military and diplomatic leaders in Washington, which would have private military contractor personnel take over the Pentagon’s advise and assist mission with Afghanistan’s security forces.

The plan was rejected in favor of a mini-surge of 8,400 additional troops to Afghanistan proposed by National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Harold R. “H.R.” McMaster and backed by Vice President Michael R. Pence approved by President Donald J. Trump in August 2017.

According to Politico, McMaster rehearsed his presentation with Pence while blocking Prince from meeting Trump to make his pitch.

The purpose of the McMaster plan was to create a permissive environment for U.S. forces to leave the country in the hands of Afghanistan’s security forces as Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters continued to resist the U.S.-backed regime.

Despite the machinations of McMaster, Prince said he was able to get his plan to Trump and others, but he could not overcome the national security bureaucracy’s inertia.

“What I recommended in very clear written terms to President Trump, to H.R. McMaster, to Mattis, to the CIA, was a specific plan to give a, call it a skeletal structure support, to the Afghan forces to give them some resiliency they could depend on at a very cheap price compared to the cost of all the U.S. active-duty presence and very, very expensive logistics,” he said.

The three elements of the Prince Plan: Mentors, Air Power and Logistics

Prince said the first part of his plan was to break the cycle of constantly changing U.S. military partners assigned to work with Afghanistan’s military units with teams of military veteran contractor personnel attached to each Afghanistan battalion for three to four years.

The Hillsdale College graduate said he based his plan on the lessons learned from the successful long-term mentorship of U.S. special operations personnel provided to Afghanistan’s commandos.

“The only part of the Afghan army that’s demonstrated a willingness and ability to fight is the Afghan commandos because they were trained by the U.S. special operations counterparts, and that worked,” he said.

“All I was doing in taking the mentor model to the Afghan army is replicating what’s worked with the Afghan commandos, that being attaching, would have been 36 men mentor teams so that they had enough so that whenever that Afghan battalion was deployed somewhere, there would be enough,” Prince said.

“These mentors would make sure the key enablers were provided leadership, intelligence, communications, medical, and logistics expertise,” he said.

Because of the constant nine-month rotation of U.S. military units and personnel, he said there is no follow-up over time and no time for proper bonding between the mentors and their charges.

In effect, he said that each rotation had become its own new war with new people and new tactics.

“We’ve had 33 rotations at least,” said the former SEAL officer, who left the service upon the 1995 passing of his father Edgar D. Prince, an engineer and industrialist, whose businesses included die-cast machines and auto parts.

“I would have contracted guys that would have gone and stayed in the same area for three and four years,” he said. “They go in for 90 days, come home for 30. Back in for 60, home for 30.”

The goal is to create tactical stability, said the author of “Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror” about his groundbreaking creation of the private security industry.

“Always rotating to the same unit in the same terrain, so they get to know the area, Prince said. “They know who’s good, who’s bad, but the Afghan unit members see them, trust them, brothers in arms,” and that would have, I say with 100 percent assurance, the mentors, in place, attached, living with, training with, and fighting alongside that entire Afghan conventional army, would have greatly enhanced their willingness to fight, especially when the second part is provided and that being air power.”

Prince: Airpower means tactical support, medical support to fighters on the ground

“I would have provided 90 aircraft. I used to have 50 of my own aircraft in Afghanistan doing support for the U.S. forces,” said the native of Holland, Michigan. “Doing food, and fuel, and movement, and medevac, surveillance, et cetera, providing those aircraft that show up reliably with no excuse.”

Prince said as a private company with a no-fail contract; he could have provided air support for the entire country.

“We would have provided close air support on 30-minute notice from anywhere, from the bases we would have staged, to anywhere in the country, so from a maximum of 30 minutes lag time between someone calling for help, having aircraft with the ordinance, overhead and ready to go,” he said.

Prince said he would train each of the private contractor military mentors as joint terminal attack controllers, or JTAC, technicians capable of talking to aircrews with targeting information and other data from the ground.

One of the reasons the regular Afghanistan soldier was under-motivated to fight was the lack of battlefield casualty care, he said.

“To one year, three years, 10 years ago, you were seven times as likely to die if you’re an Afghan that got wounded,” Prince said.

“Afghan soldiers just lost confidence in the whole system because their supply wasn’t coming, their pay wouldn’t show up, they wouldn’t have food, and worst of all, they wouldn’t get the ammunition,” he said.

A tragic example of this was the Taliban’s June 16 ambush and massacre of 24 Afghanistan commandos and five local police officers in Farah Province. No aircraft were sent to help, rescue, resupply or medevac the men as the insurgents pinned them down.

“They were slaughtered after running out of ammunition,” he said. “They begged and pleaded, calling for help, calling Kabul news media, T.V. stations, begging for someone to help them, and no one came. That’s how you destroy the morale of an army, and that’s why it collapsed so quickly. This is really basic stuff.”

Prince Plan would have professionalized military logistics in Afghanistan

“The third part of the deal is combat logistics support,” he said.

He said that part of that would be using modern bookkeeping to find the ghost soldiers and take them off the books.

“You heard rumblings about the massive theft of pay, with the ghost soldiers, like a 100,000-plus, completely named, listed on the employment rolls, but not really people showing there, because the senior officers were skimming the pay, all the way up to Ghani,” he said.

“The third part of this is a combat logistics element to keep the food, fuel, parts, ammunition flowing reliably, and as low a corruption loss as possible, certainly different than what’s been done over the last 20 years,” he said.

“The great error of the U.S. is thinking that they were going to empower Afghans and dropping these many resources into a 90 percent illiterate country with endemic corruption,” he said.

Prince said American bureaucrats failed to set up left and right flanks to corral the corruption; then, the American officials gave up on corruption altogether.

“I guess the laziness caused people to say: ‘Oh yeah, they can handle the whole thing. Just turn it over to them, give them the checkbook,’” he said. “The reality would have said: No, we’re going to be very, very limited, defined things, and we can reevaluate that, and we can do this on a cheap, small footprint approach and not the very big, expensive, DOD approach that we had the last 20 years.”

Prince Plan based on the East India Company model

Prince said he modeled his plan on England’s East India Company’s success and its stewardship of India. It developed its commercial interests in India with a concession from the crown.

“Everything I laid out in this plan is based on 250 years of successful security operations by the East India Company in the South Asian continent, building local units with a few expats attached, like a 5 percent expat ratio,” he said.

Most Americans only know the East India Company as the company which owned the ship full of tea attacked by the Sons of Liberty in the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Yet, despite this chapter of the American Revolution, many colonial leaders supported a proposal to the British Parliament to give the American colonies the same independence inside the British imperial system the East India Company enjoyed.

In fact, the American flag is a direct lift from the flag of the East India Company.

Prince Plan would have fostered the development of natural resources

Prince said the linchpin of his plan was the development of Afghanistan’s natural resources made possible because of his plan’s security.

According to a 2011 U.S. Geological Survey report, Afghanistan’s natural resources include gold and strategic metals, such as copper, chromium, lead, zinc, and cobalt.

The Navy SEAL veteran said there is also oil.

“All the fuel, diesel fuel that the U.S. burned in Afghanistan, largely came from Greece on a big DLA, Defense Logistics Agency contract,” he said.

“It came down the Suez by boat, through the Red Sea, all the way around to Karachi, and then it got on a truck and trucked all the way up into Afghanistan with a massive tolling regime in place,” he said.

“There’s definitely an investigation that should be done there, as to all the people that got paid for moving that fuel. That’s why the fully-loaded costs per gallon of fuel for U.S. forces in Afghanistan were $250 per gallon,” he said.

“The disgusting thing is the Russians actually drilled oil fields in the north of Afghanistan,” he said.

“They explored, they drilled, they proved, and then they properly cemented the wells when they left,” Prince said. “All those wells are still sitting there and the U.S. military, or a private operator, could have drilled it, put it in production, slapped a $100 million refinery there and provided all the hydrocarbons needed for the entire country, including the U.S. military, for a tiny fraction. That thing would have paid for itself in probably four months, 20 years ago, and would have provided significant employment and other secondary electrical applications.”

The businessman said he knew a local Afghani who tried to reboot the old Russian wells.

“An Afghan friend of mine was the local partner, and he was exasperated because he could never get the right people to engage on it,” he said. “Ghani and Karzai were so damn corrupt that the other subsequent licensing was always held up because it was always asking for a greater bribe.”

Afghanistan’s oil resources are not widely known. Still, its copper deposits are both well-known and readily exploited—and the mining jobs would have pulled Taliban fighters off the battlefield, he said.

“Another example is Mes Aynak that is basically a mountain of copper; it’s about 50 kilometers south of Kabul,” he said.

“They have been mining copper there for more than a thousand years, and you could have put that in production and employed 10,000 Taliban because the Taliban was paying around $10 a day,” he said.

“You could have paid them $12 a day, given them picks and shovels, mined copper profitably, and sucked an entire infantry division’s worth of Taliban manpower away from them.”

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Neil W. McCabe is a Media Fellow at the Washington D.C. based Gold Institute for International Strategy, a foriegn policy and national security think-tank. He is a Washington-based national political reporter for The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. In addition to the Star Newspaper, he has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and national politics for One America News, Breitbart, Human Events and Townhall. Before coming to Washington, he was a staff reporter for Boston’s Catholic paper, The Pilot, and the editor of two Boston-area community papers, The Somerville News and The Alewife. McCabe is a public affairs NCO in the Army Reserve and he deployed for 15 months to Iraq as a combat historian.
Photo “Erik Prince” by Miller Center CC2.0