China

The United States Congress is divided on pretty much everything these days. But there is one agenda item that traditionally brings lawmakers together: the defense budget. Usually Pentagon funding amounts to a pro-forma love-fest with a result — higher military spending — that is basically baked in. The defense budgeting process is usually like a boring movie, where the conclusion is foreseen about 10 minutes into the flick. Last week, the House of Representatives passed its own version of the National Defense Authorization Act by a resounding 316-113 vote. It's a mammoth 1,362-page bill that piled an additional $25 billion onto what President Joe Biden had submitted in his own $753 billion budget request.

It went virtually unnoticed in April when Donald Trump recruited Susie Wiles to oversee his fundraising operation and create a system for issuing endorsements. Wiles is a veteran political consultant in Florida, having worked for Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis and helped with Trump’s campaigns there. 'The president tells everyone around Mar-a-Lago that Susie is now in charge,’ an adviser told Politico. Despite media narratives of Jared Kushner’s withdrawal from Trump’s affairs, one source with knowledge of Mar-a-Lago’s inner workings said Wiles serves a 'buffer to give Kushner distance’. Wiles currently works with Kushner confidant Bill Stepien on endorsements. According to broadcaster Stew Peters, Wiles isn’t taking a paycheck for her work.

Just weeks after the denouement of the West’s misadventure in Afghanistan, Boris Johnson is again committing Britain to a risky international venture. Aukus, the naval partnership between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, appears to tie Britain to an Indo-Pacific strategy that is militarily and geopolitically flawed. In December 1941, the catastrophic sinking of the then imperious new battleship HMS Prince of Wales along with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse off the coast of Malaya led to the loss of Singapore and brought the curtains down on Britain’s Asian Empire. Britain was over-stretched and unable to commit resources to the defence of the Pacific. History rarely repeats itself exactly.

The West’s humiliation in Afghanistan has an older brother: climate change. As siblings, the two share characteristics, most obviously an inability to confront unwelcome facts. In Afghanistan, there was a large constituency led by the Pentagon invested in the mantra of proclaiming progress in the fight against the Taliban. Climate has its own industrial complex of NGOs, climate scientists, renewable energy lobbyists profiting from the energy transition, eager helpers in the media, and politicians posing as world saviors. Energy experts tell us renewable energy is cheaper than building new fossil fuel power stations. If they’re right, why did China build the equivalent of more than one large coal plant a week last year?

A coup by any other name and maybe even a little light treason. Those are the accusations flying over revelations in a new Bob Woodward book about what Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley did after the January 6 Capitol riots. Milley reportedly held several phone calls shortly after January 6, with both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with his counterpart in China. According to Woodward, the general gave assurances to Gen. Li Zuocheng that he would alert the Chinese to any possible coming attack, nuclear or otherwise. There is no evidence President Trump was planning any kind of strike against China, or Iran, or Florida. No battle plans were being drawn. Miller supposedly took these actions after Trump signed an executive order removing US forces from Afghanistan.