This is the last Jim-written Morning Jolt until Thursday, June 27, as I depart tomorrow for the National Review Institute cruise to Alaska. If you’re going on the cruise, I’ll see you in a few days. If you’re not, you’ll get a sizable portion of Dominic Pino and Audrey Fahlberg and a side-order of Noah Rothman over the next two weeks, and I’m sure the NRI cruise is going someplace cool next year, too.
(Because I have exceptional timing, this means I’ll be on a cruise ship the day Dueling Six Demons is published, one week from today. I’d say it makes a great Father’s Day present, but Father’s Day is this coming Sunday. Maybe Dad would want an Alito flag?)
On the cruise, my co-panelists and I will be talking about Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, and the upcoming presidential election, with a bit of Israel and Hamas likely thrown in. That seems like a good roundup to cover this morning.
A World of Worry
The Axis of a**holes, or Axis of the Devils, or whatever you want to call the opportunistic cooperation between China, Russia, Iran, and other states hostile to the United States and its allies, is constantly probing the borders of the West, testing new provocations and watching how we react. As Elizabeth Braw wrote in the Financial Times last month, “Russia and China are challenging the global system of national boundaries at sea and in inland waters.”
In the eyes of Moscow and Beijing, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable. One day you’ve got marker buoys in a river between Estonia and Russia, the next morning they’re gone. In case you’re wondering how that shook out, Estonia has not replaced the marker buoys, the U.S. issued a firmly worded statement, and the Russian Pravda.ru website scoffs, “Small European state of Estonia has no guts to tease Russian bear.”
(Ahem. Joe Biden, November 24, 2019: “Putin knows that [when] I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”)
Tamsui is a district of New Taipei City, in north Taiwan, sitting at the confluence of the Taiwan Strait and the Tamsui River, which flows into the sea through the national capital of Taipei. Military planners in both China and Taiwan still study the battle of Tamsui in 1884 for lessons to apply to a potential future battle.
Somebody might accidentally drive their speedboat up the Tamsui River without authorization, communications, or warning if they were drunk, high, or particularly dumb. But when that speedboat driver is a former Chinese PLA Navy captain, it’s much harder to believe it’s an accident:
A Chinese man arrested after his speedboat illegally entered a Taipei harbor is a former navy captain who could have been probing the island’s defenses, senior Taiwanese officials said on Tuesday.
Taiwan’s coast guard arrested the man on Sunday at the coastal neighborhood of Tamsui after his boat entered a river that leads into Taipei, an incident that happened amid ongoing tensions between Taiwan and China. . . .
Kuan Bi-ling, head of Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council, which runs the coast guard, told reporters at parliament that the man was “quite refined and well presented” and had previously served as a Chinese navy captain.
Over the past year or so there have been 18 similar cases, mostly involving Taiwan controlled islands that sit next to the Chinese coast, Kuan said.
“Looking at the accumulated cases in the past, we can’t rule out that this is a test,” she said, referring to Taiwan’s abilities to spot such vessels. . . .
Taiwan Defense Minister Wellington Koo, also speaking to reporters at parliament, said the boat incident could be another example of China’s “grey zone” tactics against the island.
Taiwan has complained in recent years that China has been using so-called grey zone warfare designed to exhaust a foe by irregular tactics without resorting to open combat, such as floating surveillance balloons over the island.
“These grey zone tactics have always existed,” Koo said. “We must always maintain our vigilance and cannot rule out the possibility of taking countermeasures.”
Probably the most encouraging thing on the China beat is the news that Admiral Samuel Paparo, the new head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin that the U.S. does indeed have a workable plan to buy time to hold off a Chinese invasion — a factor that may well enhance our odds of deterring Beijing’s military aggression against Taiwan:
The key to thwarting Xi’s assumed strategy is a U.S. strategy called “Hellscape,” Paparo told me. The idea is that as soon as China’s invasion fleet begins moving across the 100-mile waterway that separates China and Taiwan, the U.S. military would deploy thousands of unmanned submarines, unmanned surface ships and aerial drones to flood the area and give Taiwanese, U.S. and partner forces time to mount a full response.
“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities,” Paparo said. “So that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”
“I can’t tell you what’s in it,” he replied when pressed about details. “But it’s real and it’s deliverable.”
Elsewhere on the China beat, our Jimmy Quinn notes that former Global Times editor in chief Hu Xijin greeted the rescue of Israeli hostage Noa Argamani by declaring, “Hamas treated her humanely after taking her hostage.” The hell they did; the hostages were malnourished, forced to work for their captors, and regularly threatened and terrified. His old employer, Global Times, is owned by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese government wants you to think well of Hamas. That’s why there’s so much pro-Hamas and pro-Palestinian material on TikTok, and the algorithm is serving it up to teenage users who don’t even ask to follow news from the Middle East.
Good thing we’re getting rid of TikTok — oh, wait. “I will never ban TikTok,” former president Donald Trump said while speaking about his larger strategy to reach young voters in a conversation with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
Azov Is Coming, and They’ve Got U.S. Weapons Now
Anywhere from 1,500 to 7,000 Ukrainian combatants who were previously barred from using U.S. weapons are now allowed to use them, after the U.S. State Department determined that they have not committed human-rights violations. Ukraine’s Azov Battalion was sufficiently tied to far-right extremism for the U.S. to ban any military assistance to the group in 2015 . . . then to rescind the restriction in 2016 . . . then to reinstate the ban in 2018 and to reemphasize the ban in 2022.
In the near future, the Azov Battalion will be firing American-supplied weapons:
The Biden administration will allow a Ukrainian military unit with a checkered past to use U.S. weaponry, the State Department said Monday, having lifted a ban imposed years ago amid concerns in Washington about the group’s origins.
The Azov Brigade, known for its tenacious but ultimately unsuccessful defense of the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol early in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is regarded as a particularly effective fighting force. But it was barred about a decade ago from using American arms because U.S. officials determined that some of its founders espoused racist, xenophobic and ultranationalist views, and U.N. human rights officials accused the group of humanitarian violations.
Now the brigade, a one-time volunteer militia absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2015, will have access to the same U.S. military assistance as any other unit. The policy shift was disclosed as Kyiv starts the summer fighting season and faces down a Russian military that has intensified its pressure on objectives in eastern Ukraine and the country’s energy infrastructure.
“After thorough review, Ukraine’s 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade passed Leahy vetting as carried out by the U.S. Department of State,” the agency said in a statement, referring to the “Leahy Law” that prevents U.S. military assistance from going to foreign units credibly found to have committed major human rights violations. It is named for former senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who wrote the legislation.
The State Department found “no evidence” of such violations, its statement says.
Back during my first trip to Ukraine, I asked the chief rabbi of Ukraine, Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, about Azov and whether its members were still extremists:
It’s clear that the issue of Ukraine’s controversial Azov Brigade — now integrated with the Ukrainian National Guard — is a particularly sensitive topic. Ukrainians largely adore the brigade, saluting its soldiers as tenacious fighters in some of the most difficult battles, such as the long and hellacious battle in the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works during the 2022 siege of Mariupol. But it undoubtedly has at least some extremists in its ranks; an Azov spokesman contended in 2015 that the group is only 10 to 20 percent Nazis.
Azman says he knows of at least one Jewish soldier who joined the brigade. Another member, he says, thanked him and the synagogue’s relief programs for medical aid they provided him. And wives of Azov fighters have visited the synagogue to thank the rabbi’s office and its affiliated charities for their work.
The National Museum of the History of Ukraine has a large exhibit that memorializes many lost members of the Azov unit:
The third floor was a massive memorial and exhibit on the battle in the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol, which went from February to May 2022 and ended in a Russian victory. Mariupol was effectively leveled in the process, killing anywhere from 21,000 to more than 100,000 civilians. AP journalists Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko, and Lori Hinnant were the last journalists in Mariupol, and offered a harrowing, gripping portrait of fleeing the city as the Russians attempted to hunt down them specifically.
I should note that almost every soldier memorialized in this exhibit was a member of Azov, which has evolved from a regiment to a brigade to a battalion, and is now part of the Ukrainian National Guard. Azov has an infamous reputation here in the West. For starters, Azov couldn’t have picked a logo that looked any more like the Schutzstaffel or SS if they had tried, and there’s no way that they haven’t been informed that using that symbol makes them look like Nazis in the eyes of many Westerners. It supposedly is meant to look like an intersecting “I” and “N” for “Ideya Natsiin” or “National Idea.” The Azovs stick with the symbol anyway in defiance, insisting that the symbol means what they believe it means, not what outsiders from other places contend it means.
The 2024 Presidential Race Is Wrinkled Neck and Wrinkled Neck
In the FiveThirtyEight average, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 37.6 percent, the lowest ever by that particular measuring stick.
FiveThirtyEight also announced this morning:
At launch, our forecast shows President Joe Biden locked in a practically tied race with former President Donald Trump, both in the Electoral College and national popular vote. Specifically, our model reckons Biden has a 53-in-100 chance of winning the election, meaning he wins in slightly more than half of our model’s simulations of how the election could unfold. However, Trump still has a 47-in-100 chance, so this election could still very much go either way.
I’m slightly more bullish about Trump’s chances, but we’re in the same ballpark — this is basically a jump ball between two erratic and narcissistic old men who aren’t good at jumping. That’s not all that different from the look of the latest RCP average or the latest projection from Decision Desk Headquarters. (Perhaps the most intriguing development in recent weeks? How close my home state of Virginia looks lately.)
The Biden plan, apparently, is to wait for Trump to immolate himself in the upcoming debate. A Democratic strategist advising the pro-Biden political action committee Unite the Country tells NBC News, “The ‘out of sight, out of mind’ concept of President Trump is real. I think people forget the way he interacts, the way he communicates, the inaccuracies of the things he says and promises to the American people.”
They really think the electorate is misremembering Donald Trump as a levelheaded, calm, rational, buttoned-down, detail-oriented guy, huh?
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, I write:
CIA Director William J. Burns has essentially taken on a second full-time job as lead U.S. negotiator, trying to get the American hostages released, to persuade U.S. allies in the region to pressure Hamas — and to get Hamas to see reason.
U.S. efforts are going nowhere but not for lack of trying. The problem is not an insufficient number of Israeli concessions. The problem is that there is little sign Hamas is willing to give up its best remaining bargaining chips.
Israeli intelligence contends that Hamas leaders such as Yehiya Sinwar are using some of the surviving hostages as human shields. Hamas won’t even say how many of the hostages are still alive. The best clues come when Hamas releases propaganda videos, such as the one released in late April that showed Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin with his left arm, which had been severely injured during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amputated below the elbow.
The Biden administration, and much of the world, are sitting and waiting for Hamas — a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — to suddenly have a change of heart and become much more reasonable negotiators. These are the same guys who still regularly promise to “bring annihilation upon the Jews.” How many different times and ways does Hamas have to say it? It’s not interested in a peace deal, it’s not interested in a cease-fire, and if it has any interest in releasing any hostages, it’s hiding it exceptionally well.
My favorite comment over there so far: “Sadly, despite the writer, there is some sense here.” Yeah, pal, you’d be surprised how often that happens.