Over one-third of the US is affected.

Foreign Affairs Blinken Puts Lipstick on the Pig The secretary of state insists the world is better off today than in January 2021, despite all evidence to the contrary. Reading Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s latest essay in Foreign Affairs was a lot like listening to the famous “Joe Isuzu” auto ads almost 40 years ago. Joe would make the most outrageous statements about a car, followed by the declaration “he’s lying.” In an article entitled “America’s Strategy of Renewal,” Blinken made a similar series of unbelievable statements. Only the “he’s lying,” was missing. Nearly four years into the Biden presidency, declared Blinken, “President Biden and Vice President Harris pursued a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.”  Indeed, that understates the president’s influence, at least according to the president. Attempting to justify his abysmal performance in his debate against Donald Trump, Biden insisted: “Not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world. Not—and that’s not hi—sounds like hyperbole, but we are the essential nation of the world.” That the president believed the results of his policy warranted praise demonstrated his mental decline. Blinken’s enthusiastic embrace of the results, claiming the U.S. to be “in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago,” is less excusable, a desperate attempt to preserve what little remains of his reputation. After all, who can look at the world today and imagine the American people saying to Blinken, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.” (Matthew 25:23) Unfortunately, the world wasn’t looking so good in January 2021 when Blinken took office. By almost every measure the world is a lot worse today. Led by the United States, NATO is engaged in a proxy war against Russia, a nuclear-armed power, over Ukraine, which matters much more to Moscow than to the West. The conflict was tragically unnecessary, the result of Russian aggression, but only after three decades of Washington’s arrogant determination to treat Moscow like a defeated power and expand the transatlantic alliance up to Russia’s borders. Despite multiple warnings from Moscow, successive administrations challenged its security interests in ways the U.S. would never accept on its border. The Biden administration’s refusal to negotiate over NATO expansion in early 2022 was the final trigger for war. The allies are now promoting a seemingly endless conflict with a country likely to expand and escalate the fight if it fears defeat. Cynical American policymakers defend the war as degrading Moscow’s military capabilities for just a few score billion dollars—while ignoring the tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian deaths. Alas, there is no guarantee that the U.S. and its allies won’t be drawn into the struggle, especially if the Putin government decides to strike nations supplying Ukraine with arms or employ nuclear weapons against Kiev’s forces. Moscow also has embraced China, North Korea, and Iran, and such cooperation could grow even closer. Russia once promoted nonproliferation. Now Washington policymakers speculate on Moscow’s willingness to aid North Korean missile and nuclear development, which would put the American homeland at risk. The Middle East is perhaps even more incendiary. The region’s multiple hostilities, conflicts, and crises, reflecting decades of counterproductive U.S. intervention in the region, are merging. Biden continues a long line of presidents putting foreign governments before the American people. The next iteration of today’s combat could involve full-scale war between Israel and Iran, with neighboring Arab states dragged in. Regional stability and peace are impossible as long as Israel refuses to accept Palestinian self-determination. Yet Biden has provided essentially unconstrained financial, diplomatic, and military support for a government corrupted by violent ethno-nationalism. His administration also has left American personnel needlessly at risk in Iraq and Syria and would further entangle the U.S. in the region by turning the American military into a modern janissary corps, bodyguards to the Saudi royals, with the apparent mission to make the region safe for absolute monarchy. Finally, Asia has slid closer to conflict on Biden’s watch. Almost delusional is Blinken’s description of administration policy toward North Korea, which is adding nuclear weapons and developing ICBMs, hoping to target the American homeland. He declared: “We were similarly clear-eyed when it came to” Pyongyang, making “clear our willingness to engage in direct talks with North Korea, but also that we would not submit to its saber rattling or its preconditions.” However, virtually no one believes that Kim Jong-un is willing to yield his nuclear arsenal. Unless Washington is prepared to adapt its approach to that reality and pursue more limited arms control, the North will become even more dangerous in the future. Worse, the biggest potential conflict of all, between the U.S. and China, looms larger on Biden’s watch. Most importantly, the potential crisis over Taiwan has grown more acute, with the administration doing nothing to calm Chinese concerns over what it believes to be Taipei’s move, with American support, toward independence. With that a likely red line for Beijing to act militarily, Washington should press all sides to stand down. The administration also has put American credibility on the line over territorial disputes of little consequence, risking war over assorted rocks and other geographic features, such as Mischief Reef, Senkaku Islands, and Scarborough Shoal. The independence of Japan and the Philippines is important. Their control over every bit of territory they claim, not so much. Worse is increasingly treating the People’s Republic of China as an enemy. The administration has engaged in an economic war against the PRC, intensifying Donald Trump’s protectionist campaign and seeking to deny China access to pacing technology. Although the administration has sought to expand official dialogue, it is reducing the shared economic interests which draw the two nations together. There are important issues over which Beijing must be confronted, but it is essential not to treat China as an enemy, which could help turn it into one. Today the PRC is increasingly willing to challenge the U.S. elsewhere—indirectly aiding Russia against Ukraine, significantly reducing pressure on North Korea, and aggressively challenging other Asian states. Blinken makes much of the value of allies, treating them like Facebook Friends, the more the merrier. He declared, “The United States is in a demonstrably stronger position in both consequential regions today because of the bridge of allies we have built. And so, for that matter, are America’s friends.” Allies are useful when pursuing interests of mutual interest. Yet many, indeed, perhaps most, of Washington’s supposed friends and partners are security black holes, taking far more than they give. At the very moment friendly states should be stepping up to take over responsibility for their own and their region’s security, the administration has been deepening allied dependence on the U.S. Biden has “reassured” governments which need to be scared to do more for themselves; he has “reaffirmed” security commitments to nations capable of defending themselves. Blinken’s policy undermined the very purpose of NATO. President Dwight Eisenhower insisted that the US military presence be temporary, a shield behind which the devastated continent could rebuild. He believed that if U.S. forces remained a decade later the policy would have failed. In contrast, Biden increased American force levels after the Russian invasion and devoted more money to Ukraine than any European nation. He continues those policies, despite growing opposition by Americans more concerned about the many challenges facing the U.S. Particularly misguided is Blinken’s enthusiasm for “the most consequential shift” not “within regions but across them,” thereby “bringing about unprecedented convergence between Asia and Europe, which increasingly see their security as indivisible.” While the idea of allies promoting US objectives beyond their own areas sounds good in theory, it fails in practice. First, security is not indivisible. Moscow is many things, but it poses no threat in Asia. Unlike China, Russia has never been at war with India, Vietnam, or Korea, and has no ongoing or prospective conflicts with Japan. The PRC has no territorial or other security issues with European governments.  Second, it is more important for friendly states in Europe and Asia to fulfill their most direct responsibilities. Europeans still fail miserably in creating effective militaries and integrating their forces with those of their neighbors. Japan continues to lag well behind deploying sufficient capabilities to restrain China. What would best aid the U.S. would be European allies taking over responsibility for their continent’s security, and Japan taking the lead in preserving peace and stability in Northeast Asia. Instead, having allies playacting—wasting valuable resources and effort far abroad better deployed close to home—ultimately increases the burden on Americans. (In contrast, there are abundant areas for cross-regional cooperation in other areas, including economics and cyber.) Whatever his intentions, Blinken has been a failure as secretary of state. U.S. policy consists of constant demands and threats, endless sanctions and penalties, and promiscuous intervention and war. In many areas, such as reflexive support for Israel, the administration’s foreign policy hasn’t been much different from Trump’s approach. In other ways Blinken & Co. have done worse. At least Trump demonstrated some reluctance to use military force. Relations with China are less stable today, with the increasing likelihood of naval confrontation in the Asia-Pacific. The Biden administration failed to exhibit any creativity in attempting to engage North Korea. Most dangerous is Biden’s intense proxy war against Russia.  Overall, Americans are at greater risk today than in January 2021, when Blinken took over in Foggy Bottom. The administration’s policies, particularly its counterproductive intervention around the world, have put more distance between today’s reality and the ideal he says he sought to promote, “a world where countries are free to choose their own paths and partners, and … where international law, including the core principles of the UN Charter, is upheld, and universal human rights are respected.” The United States is and should be engaged in the world. As Blinken observed, Americans benefit from “a free, open, secure, and prosperous world.” However, Washington’s ability to remake the world, at least at reasonable cost and risk, remains limited. And the interests of the American people should always come first. They are doing the paying and, more importantly, the dying, when it comes to Washington’s grandiose misadventures abroad. Something too often forgotten by Blinken, and so many other members of the foreign policy establishment. Renewing America at home doesn’t prevent Washington leading abroad. Nevertheless, renewing America should come first. The post Blinken Puts Lipstick on the Pig appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Grand Strategy Must Begin with Homeland Defense Chaos at home constrains our policy abroad. Foreign policy experts have been debating which of America’s geostrategic interests in Asia, Europe, or the Middle East should take precedence. But recent polling tells us that the American people have a totally different top priority. They want our leaders to focus more on the security of our U.S.–Mexico border. Both the former President Donald Trump and Vice President Harris have a track record on border issues. Trump increased border protections and reduced the inflow of illegal aliens. He is credible when he promises a strong border and massive deportations of illegal aliens. The Biden-Harris administration caused and encouraged the current invasion-like 10 million border encounters with people from over 160 countries. As border czar, Harris did nothing to address this emergency. Her only border plan is to revive a proposed bill that failed to pass the Senate and was rejected by the speaker of the House.  It is clear what caused America’s border problem. Right after the inauguration, the Biden-Harris administration stopped the construction of the Trump border wall and announced a complete reversal of his border policies. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) put it well during the vice-presidential debate: “We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies. Ninety-four executive orders suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system, that has opened the floodgates.”  The problem is multi-faceted and grave. It affects the safety of Americans. Just last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement admitted that as many as 425,000 illegal alien criminals are currently in the United States. Over 60,000 have been convicted of assault and16,000 of sexual assault. Nearly 57,000 are guilty of crimes involving dangerous drugs. Because of the collapse of order at our southern border, our border agents are spending their time processing the relentless flow of illegal aliens instead of stopping the flow of illegal drugs. As a result, fentanyl from Mexico has caused the death of over 100,000 Americans and can be rightly viewed as a weapon of mass destruction wielded against our fellow citizens. The FBI thinks that a large number of public safety and national security threats are at elevated levels all at once. Topping the list are a terrorist attack and cartels pushing fentanyl “into every corner of our country.”  These risks and others are exacerbated when millions of illegal aliens are released into the country without proper background checks. Just last month, a report by the House Judiciary Committee documented that “during fiscal year 2024, Border Patrol has encountered tens of thousands of illegal aliens nationwide from countries that could present national security risks, including 2,134 Afghan nationals, 33,347 Chinese nationals, 541 Iranian nationals, 520 Syrian nationals, and 3,104 Uzbek nationals.” Even worse, the report also reveals that “the Biden-Harris Administration released into the United States at least three illegal aliens with potential ISIS ties after the aliens used the Administration’s CBP One app to arrive at a port of entry and be processed into the country.” In this environment, there is an increased risk of another 9/11-type attack.  The immigration problem also has a prosperity downside. There is ample evidence that adding to the workforce large numbers of low-skilled immigrants reduces the wages of working class Americans. In the 1990’s, Milton Friedman remarked, “You cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and free immigration.” Today’s immigration crisis proves him right when illegal aliens are a net fiscal drain and a heavy burden on social services like schools and health care. Furthermore, Americans have to pay more to buy a home because the housing demand by the millions of illegal aliens has pushed up prices. In a seminal article entitled “The Return of Peace Through Strength,” the former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien argues that President Trump’s purposeful and decisive foreign policy advanced peace for America and the world. He contrasts this with the Biden-Harris administration’s weak policies that encouraged bad actors to start hot wars in Europe and the Middle East, and to sharply increase tensions in Asia. The weak border policy is just par for the course: “The Biden administration’s inability to secure the southern U.S. border is perhaps its biggest and most embarrassing failure.”  America needs a second Trump presidency to implement urgently a decisive and comprehensive border security plan. Among the actions to be considered should be the following. First, restart comprehensive work on the wall because walls are effective. Numerous countries around the world have reached the same conclusion. The Biden administration itself begrudgingly approved limited wall construction in Texas and Arizona. Even Harris herself flip-flopped on building a wall and is now in favor of it.  Second, reinstate the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that the Biden-Harris administration recklessly abandoned. Asylum claimants who illegally cross the southern border should not be paroled into the U.S. and given a court date in several years, as the Biden-Harris administration has been doing. They should be processed at the U.S. border and asked to wait in Mexico for action on their asylum claim. This policy would discourage those who are not legitimate asylum seekers seeking protection from persecution but simply economic migrants trying to game the system. Government data show a success rate as low as 15 percent for those claiming asylum. Third, the United States should take the fight to the Mexican cartels. These criminal organizations are increasing their wealth and power by smuggling into our country people and drugs, especially the deadly fentanyl. The stronger the cartels are, the more they harm the security and prosperity of the American people. Proposals in the House and the Senate would designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. There are many issues to consider in this matter, but arguments in favor outweigh those against. Importantly, it would give the U.S. government tougher monitoring and sanctioning tools. Trump declared his willingness, if asked by Mexico’s president, to get the U.S. military involved in fighting the drug cartels. He observed that “the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army.” He tweeted, “If Mexico needs or requests help in cleaning out these monsters, the United States stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively.” This would be a repeat of the successful Plan Colombia of the early 2000’s during which the United States helped the Colombian government financially and militarily to defeat its drug cartels. Some believe that the U.S. must go further and attack the cartels even without permission from the Mexican government. They argue that these narcoterrorist groups are more like ISIS than like the American mafia. Because they are killing Americans with their drugs, we should confront the cartels as national-security threats, not manage them as a law-enforcement matter. If in the 1990s the U.S. had taken this approach with Islamic terrorists like Al-Qaeda, we might have prevented 9/11. We cannot afford another such mistake. Action in this direction is a joint resolution proposed by Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Michael Waltz (R-FL) giving the president authority to use the U.S. military against Mexican cartels trafficking in fentanyl. The chaos at our southern border and the resulting grave harm to the American people must move to the top of the list of national security concerns for the next U.S. president. Getting results will take toughness and persistence. Whom do you trust with this job, Trump or Harris? The post Grand Strategy Must Begin with Homeland Defense appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Court Applies Environmental Law to Biden-Harris Border Disaster The Biden administration unlawfully failed to perform the required environmental impact analysis before admitting millions of illegals. Credit: image via Shutterstock The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality estimates that each border crosser leaves approximately six to eight pounds of trash in the desert during his or her journey. If you do the rough math, the total amount of strewn garbage caused by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas greenlighting millions of illegal migrants, all trampling their way across the southern frontier, is stunning.  Americans have probably wondered why federal environmental law does not prevent, or at least slow, Mayorkas from bringing about this mess. After all, the Biden-Harris administration has done much more than simply benignly tolerate or mildly encourage this massive human movement. The president and his cabinet have not only loudly proclaimed that they “welcome” the arrival of these illegals, but made it clear that this unprecedented immigration was central to their foreign and domestic policy. They have pushed their legal authorities beyond the limit, inventing out of thin air new immigration programs, mobilizing thousands of federal officers, and spending and reprogramming billions of dollars to make it all happen. On our southern frontier, the resulting chaotic human activity—clandestine camping, trekking, consuming, and disposing—has had a profound impact on the natural environment as well as on towns, ranches, and small communities. Yet Biden-Harris environmental and health officials are silent about the countless heaps and tons of garbage, plastic, and abandoned human junk all over the border region.  These illegal immigrants have thrown up makeshift encampments wherever they wanted, trampled through private property, disrupted normal activities and—lacking adequate sanitary facilities—deposited human waste all along extremely vulnerable waterways, like the Rio Grande, that are already too inadequate fully to serve the desert-like region.  In normal times, in the wake of such violent human attacks on land and water, the American environmental protection community would have been on the warpath. But groups like the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, indeed the entire establishment environmental community, have all remained silent and done nothing to respond to the Biden-Harris reckless immigration policy. Resisting this kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants federal policy that enables destructive human activity hostile to the environment is, in theory, their raison d’être.  Normally, reacting to such a catastrophic environmental situation, groups like Greenpeace would be mobilizing thousands of fanatical activists, some perhaps chaining themselves to close traffic on the bridges over the Rio Grande, while a battery of lawyers from the Environmental Defense Fund would be in federal court filing lawsuits. In theory, they all sincerely believe that man-made activities like the Mayorkas migrant diaspora contribute to climate change and leave lasting damage to unspoiled natural areas.  Moreover, Biden’s “immigration program” is not only enticing waves of humanity to trample through an unprepared and vulnerable region, but it is also growing the country’s population, practically overnight, by millions of new people. For years, groups like the Sierra Club saw population growth—including by immigration—as fundamentally at odds with protecting the national environment. It is a fair question that conservatives, too, should ask: How many millions do we want living in our country?  What happened to change the environmental movement was yet another Fabian victory of wokeism ideology. Wokeism (of which open-borderism is a direct offshoot) has seriously infected and subdued the entire U.S. environmental movement. Wokeism conquered the leaders of the American environmental movement just as it did their counterparts in organized labor. When organized labor and its traditional political allies, like Bernie Sanders, stopped resisting the open-border extremists and signed on to cheering the arrival of millions of low-skilled workers surging into the country, it was a watershed political moment. Labor’s foundational principle, which had for more than a century resisted importing cheap foreign workers, was thrown under the bus to advance open-borders in the name of wokeist social justice.  The same wokeist putsch was also occurring in the environmental movement. New woke leadership has remade the traditional green and conservationist cause so as to address the movement’s historic “exclusionary and racist ideas.” The woke executive director of the Sierra Club explains that his group now “fights for environmental and social justice.” John Muir is not to be remembered primarily for his great achievements as a naturalist and conservationist but for his unforgivable racist dicta. The environmental mission has been retrofitted into an examination of an intolerant past and atonement for its “substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.” That means that the green movement has simply put aside its core mission of protesting and fighting the defilement of the American environment in support of Biden-Harris-Mayorkas open borders. The establishment environmentalists will not resist nor even voice cautionary complaints as the White House is on a path to grow the U.S. population by up to 15 million new inhabitants.   Astonished and disappointed by such a transformational sellout of America’s great traditions of protecting the country’s natural bounty, one astute writer for The American Conservative explained:  For some time, environmentalists accepted that caring about population growth in the United States required caring about immigration policy. In 1989, the Sierra Club’s board adopted the policy position that “migration to the United States should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the United States.” However, by the mid-1990s, political and donor pressure convinced the Sierra Club to declare first neutrality on the immigration issue and finally, in 2013, support for amnesty. That writer was Julie Axelrod, who is director of litigation at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Today, Axelrod is leading the CIS federal court lawsuit that asserted that the Biden administration’s open-border policies have unlawfully ignored the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Under NEPA, any federal agency considering a “major federal action” must comprehensively evaluate its “environmental effects.” Axelrod’s lawsuit argued, correctly, that DHS did not do any such evaluation before encouraging, facilitating, and subsidizing millions of illegal migrants to “surge to our border.”  President Nixon signed NEPA into law in 1970. Although it has mainly been a legal tool for leftwing environmental activists to thwart economic development activities, applied wisely, the statute can undergird main-street conservative values that seek to protect local communities from radical and reckless “social justice” projects. Main-street America’s environment is much more threatened by Washington’s extreme social justice activism than anything that comes from fracking and burning fossil fuels. Nothing illustrates this better than today’s open-border extremism which is depositing uninvited illegal foreign migrants in communities all over the country. Americans must reach for any tool, including statutes like NEPA, to resist a lawless presidency that regularly commits ultra vires acts, while an ineffectual Congress does nothing.   In Axelrod’s lawsuit, known as Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform v. Department of Homeland Security, a federal district court judge ruled on September 30 that DHS has indeed violated NEPA by failing to conduct the statutorily required environmental impact analysis before opening the border. For the first time, a court has applied NEPA in a way that can help to slow Washington’s massive and extreme migration policies. Yes, Alejandro Mayorkas has an environmental law problem. If, dear reader, you feel an authentic schadenfreude moment, please enjoy it. You can thank CIS and Axelrod, who explained: This ruling represents a victory for American citizens harmed by the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border policies and reinforces the requirement for environmental reviews in federal policy-making. It is astonishing that no major environmental group took action on this, but the Center was proud to step in and lead the charge. The judge ruled that “Presidential administrations enjoy significant discretion in the enforcement of our Nation’s immigration laws and protection of our borders. But this latitude does not license violations of other laws.” We do not often find such wisdom on the federal bench. This is an important case to follow as it moves forward. The post Court Applies Environmental Law to Biden-Harris Border Disaster appeared first on The American Conservative.

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by Geoffrey Grinder, Now The End Begins: Hurricane Milton threatens to reach maximum limits, sparking calls for a new Category 6 designation for hurricanes, is HAARP to blame for this? Late last night, Hurricane Milton reached a fat Category 5 with winds up to 200 miles per hour as it churned in the Gulf of […]