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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jim Sciutto
Read between
December 27 - December 30, 2024
We see them in the Arctic. We see them in Africa. We see them in cyberspace. We see China trying to control critical infrastructure, and we expect China to have fifteen hundred warheads on missiles that can reach the whole of Europe and North America by 2035.”
1500 warheads
China and Russia, like their leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are two very different nations. They are separated by different languages, cultures, histories, and continents. China’s GDP is six to ten times larger than Russia’s. Russia, with an estimated six thousand nuclear warheads, has about twenty times the nuclear weapons China does.
Russia vs China
The historical wrong Xi is destined to correct is older: what he and many Chinese view as the subjugation of China by the West dating back to the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s and a series of unfair treaties and conflicts that led China to cede territory under duress (see Hong Kong and Taiwan).
Historical wrongs
They made clear that their shared goal is a remaking of the global order, with Putin writing, “Our countries, together with like-minded actors, have consistently advocated the shaping of a more just multipolar world order based on international law rather than certain ‘rules’ serving the needs of the ‘golden billion.’ ”[15] (The “golden billion” is a conspiracy theory that the world is ruled by a wealthy elite serving the interests of the richest one billion people.)
Golden billion
As for Xi, when it comes to the threat to Taiwan from China, and as he watches his economy suffer and Taiwan build its defenses, he may calculate that the sweet spot for action is now: as soon as the Chinese military is ready and before Taiwan can sufficiently shore up its defenses. “We should take a little bit of comfort from the fact that they have been deterred so far, or at least up until February of last year, and that tells me that they are deterrable,” said Pottinger. “But we sure as hell are running out of time. We’re really running out of time to take steps that we need to take fast
...more
Xi timing
How and where else could this military cooperation grow? In baseball terms, Russian military cooperation with Iran or North Korea is like a major-league franchise sharing talent with a double-A team. Russian military cooperation with China would be the equivalent of the Yankees merging organizations with the Dodgers—two behemoths in their hemispheres creating a partnership to take on the world. US officials and military analysts are watching one area of potential Russian-Chinese cooperation with particular concern: submarine technology.
Russia and China
China’s massive investments in long-range antiair and antiship missiles already have eroded U.S. and allied surface and air forces’ ability to operate near the PRC’s periphery at a given level of risk, but American submarines and undersea warfare have hitherto been affected far less by these rapid improvements in counterintervention capabilities.
Long range anti ship
As CIA Director Burns told me in Chapter 1, Russia faces the risk that “they are going to end up being an economic colony of China if they’re not careful.”
Economis colony
In March 2023, CNN reported that Russia was shipping captured US weapons to Tehran, with the apparent goal of allowing Iran to reverse engineer the weapons’ technology to create its own versions. Among the systems Russia shared were advanced Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
Reverse egineering us weapons
And, in a highly unusual move, the US Navy publicly announced that it had sent an Ohio-class guided-missile submarine to the region. The movements of such submarines are among the most sensitive for the US military. To announce its arrival—in a tweet, no less—showed that not only was the US flooding the region with assets to respond to any expansion of the war, it wanted its adversaries to know it.
Navy tweet
An opinion poll conducted by YouGov and reported by Die Zeit in early 2023 asked young Germans if they would be willing to take up arms to defend their country. Only 11 percent replied yes, and only one in twenty said they would volunteer to do so. Nearly a quarter of respondents said they would flee the country to avoid service.
German patriotism
An Estonian defense official was less sanguine. “Russia put Europe to sleep in the 1990s,” he said, “and it is struggling to wake up.”
Russia put Europe to sleep
“Given the fact that fifty percent of commercial traffic goes through the strait every single day for the world, and seventy percent plus of semiconductors are made in Taiwan, well, that could be disrupted. We’d have potentially an economic crisis of global proportions.”
Taiwan Strait ~ BFD
“We need to turn Taiwan into a porcupine so that Xi Jinping wakes up every day and concludes that an invasion is not worth the costs,” Senator Wicker told his colleagues. “Now, why do you say a porcupine? Any wolf has the ability to kill a gentle porcupine. And yet such an attack rarely occurs in nature. The defense of the porcupine’s quills, which can rip through the predator’s mouth and throat, is the deterrent that protects it from attack by the wolves. That should be our approach for Taiwan’s defense.”
Porcupine and the wolf
“Between 2019 and 2021 the combined operational space fleets of China and Russia have grown by approximately 70 percent,” with China making the biggest leap in space assets.
Space junk
“A second term with him [Trump]—particularly when he would not be worrying about reelection—it would be fundamentally a catastrophe for us.” These aren’t the words of a mere outside observer of the former president, but of retired Marine Corps general John Kelly, who served nearly two years in the Trump administration, first as secretary of Homeland Security and then, for the bulk of his time in the White House, as chief of staff to the president, with
DJTx2
Bolton recalled a stunt Trump would carry out in the Oval Office. “He would hold up the tip of his Sharpie pen and say, ‘That’s Taiwan. See this Resolute Desk, that’s China.’ ” His point: that Taiwan is too small to successfully defend itself against a Chinese invasion—and too small for the US to care about.
Just the tip
It’s like history doesn’t reveal its alternatives, as Edward R. Murrow used to say.”
No alternatives
“Winston Churchill once said something like the only countries that adhere to their arms control agreements are the countries you don’t need arms control agreements with,” Bolton said. “And I don’t think the disappearance of the arms control agreements has had any measurable negative effect on global stability.”
Arm's control treaties
