On the menu today: Okay, if you don’t like the coverage of lunatic high-profile journalists and House votes on the Epstein files, today we turn to the biggest issues. These include the rising power and confidence of Xi Jinping’s China, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the consequences of our current methods of enforcing U.S. immigration laws. And a birthday worth remembering.
All Bark on Beijing
Just a quick update on the current Trump administration policies toward China . . .
First, from Reuters: “China bought at least 14 cargoes of U.S. soybeans on Monday, two traders with knowledge of the deals said, its largest purchase since at least January.” This is the first real consequence of the trade deal reached between Trump and Xi Jinping earlier this month. That sum is at least 840,000 metric tons. However, in 2024, before “Liberation Day” and the Trump administration’s trade war, China imported nearly 27 million tons of U.S. soy. So, we’re inching our way back to the pre-trade-war status quo.
We have suspended port fees for Chinese ships, and they have done the same for our ships.
If you thought the purpose of Trump’s tariff regime was to economically uncouple from China — one of the few areas where I agree with the protectionists — this is good news for soybean farmers but bad news for everyone else.
Second, we learned a Chinese-government-sponsored group attempted to carry out the first known espionage campaign with artificial intelligence leading the way. (Man, AI is coming for everybody’s jobs, even malevolent Chinese hackers.)
Third, the president of the United States continues to insist that the U.S. needs about 300,000 Chinese students to study on American campuses each year, because without them, “If we were to cut that in half, which perhaps makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business . . . historically black colleges and universities would all be out of business.” (How many Chinese students have you seen walking around historically black colleges and universities?)
Fourth, TikTok is still banned under federal law, but the administration continues to refuse to enforce that law. Three weeks ago, the White House said the deal to keep TikTok running under U.S. law would be finalized within a week.
Fifth, there’s a little bit of good news on Taiwan: In the past week, the U.S. has agreed to more than $1 billion in arms sales to that island nation, covering air defense systems along with fighter jet and other aircraft parts. (Yeah, you heard me. “Nation.”) Of course, an announced arms sale does not necessarily mean an arms delivery, as Taiwan has purchased but the U.S. has not yet delivered roughly $21.5 billion worth of weapons systems.
Earlier this month, President Trump said that Taiwan “didn’t come up” in his meeting with Xi Jinping. Then on Monday in the Oval Office, Trump characterized Taiwan as an economic competitor while explaining why he believed America still needed a lot of H-1B visas: “We’re going to have a big portion of the chip market. But we have to train our people how to make chips because we didn’t do it. We used to do it, and then foolishly we lost that business to Taiwan. Very foolishly because if they had a president that thought like I did they would not have let that happen.”
Sixth, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission issued its annual report to Congress and concluded:
China has continued to rapidly advance its capabilities to launch a successful invasion of Taiwan. The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) intensifying military activities near Taiwan — along with its introduction of new platforms designed to support an amphibious attack — have made it so that the PLA could pivot from a routine exercise to an actual blockade or invasion with almost no advance warning. Moreover, a troubling divergence has emerged between China’s English-language and Chinese-language propaganda about Taiwan — a split that suggests Beijing may be taking initial steps to prepare its people for the possibility of war. Whereas Chinese statements aimed at international audiences downplay the possibility of an invasion, China’s domestic propaganda has stated that Taiwan’s “provocations” could justify military action in the near future. While there is no indication that China is planning an imminent invasion — and Beijing still hopes to pressure Taiwan to surrender without a fight — the United States and its allies and partners can no longer assume that a Taiwan contingency is a distant possibility for which they would have ample time to prepare.
Seventh, that same report determined, “Beyond its specific efforts to enhance capabilities for a Taiwan contingency, Beijing has continued to rapidly modernize its military forces across all domains with the goal of being able to fight and defeat ‘strong enemies’ like the United States. China views space as a crucial warfighting domain, and the PLA is rapidly expanding space and counterspace capabilities that could be used to target U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific and incapacitate U.S. space-based assets.”
Eighth, the commission found “China has built roughly 350 new intercontinental missile silos and expanded its nuclear warhead stockpile by 20 percent in the past year.”
Add it all up, and I fear we have a president who screams like an eagle when discussing China at home, and who turns into a pussycat when he’s in the room with Xi Jinping.
Our Mark Wright, Reporting from Ukraine
I am not the only staffer at National Review to head out to Ukraine this year. The excellent Mark Antonio Wright — our executive editor — is currently in that war-torn country on a trip sponsored by the humanitarian aid group Razom for Ukraine, and he filed his first report from Dnipro, which is pretty far east and not all that far from the front:
But people are tired. They are tired of getting hit and hit . . . and hit. Sometimes getting to a shelter means quickly dressing at 3 a.m. and hustling your kids out the door, into the cold, and down the block to the nearest bomb shelter. Sometimes you do this and nothing happens, and then you are tired and broken at work the next day. Sometimes you decide to take the risk — just this once — and stay in bed, and the result is what happened to Artem, who fled Donetsk in 2022 ahead of the full-scale Russian invasion and ended up with his wife and young daughter here, in Dnipro.
He lost his car and his house when the Russians stormed into the east. Now he has lost this new apartment as well. When the missile hit his building and blasted a hole four stories up, Artem and his family were trapped in their flat by an avalanche of rubble, which blocked the exits. He lived, thanks be to God. But the Russians are still advancing, and Artem is worried.
He is a construction engineer. His wife is a nurse. His daughter just began first grade here, and even though they could certainly find work elsewhere in this ravaged country, they’d rather not pick up and move yet again. But he may have to — away from Dnipro, to the far west of Ukraine, away from the Russians who continue to insist on trying to take everything from him. “I think Americans don’t know what is happening here,” Artem tells me, holding a cardboard box of food and a few other possessions. “I am worried about the Russians. They keep coming.”
When I was in Dnipro in February, the locals told me that — ironically — it had become something of a boomtown since the start of the war, as people fleeing from the eastern oblasts (provinces) had ended up there, swelling the population and stirring wartime economic activity. It was also a good city for aid organizations to set up shop, near where people needed them but relatively safe as far as that region goes. Dnipro’s sense of “relatively safe” appears to be changing, and not for the better.
Why Are ICE Officials Dismissing REAL ID as Fakes?
This newsletter, back on November 7: “Imagine how it feels to be a Latino U.S. citizen and worrying that someone might accuse you of being an illegal immigrant, or you might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some ICE agent thinks he should slap handcuffs on you.”
If you want to say you don’t trust the reporting of ProPublica, fine, but many of the cases they cite are based upon lawsuits and court records:
We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.
We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.
Then there’s this detail:
Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.
I thought the whole point of making everyone change over to a REAL ID was that it couldn’t be faked. (Unnervingly, one experiment indicated that “REAL IDs were actually 36 percent more likely to be flagged as fraudulent,” and said, “REAL IDs can be faked just as easily as any other identity document.” The federal government took 20 years and a couple billion dollars to create and implement this program, and it’s no better than what we had before.)
Any way you slice it, we have cases where Latino U.S. citizens have been treated as illegal immigrants by ICE agents, even when they’re carrying identification proving they’re in the country legally. Wrongful detainment of a U.S. citizen or green-card holder is not something we can just hand-wave away.
Perhaps you can dismiss this as an inevitable and acceptable consequence of the kind of immigration enforcement you want to see. But a whole bunch of Latino voters may not shrug off these cases as easily as you can, and they’re likely to show up in a whole bunch of places in the midterm elections.
ADDENDUM: Today is the 70th birthday of National Review. “We began in a mediascape dominated by broadsheet newspapers, weekly magazines, and two television networks. Now everything from porn to Plato is in everyone’s pants pocket. Through it all we have labored to assemble the best words — clear, amusing, stirring whenever we can. We remember the great writers who passed through these pages and have passed away; we delight in presenting the next young tunesmiths to come along. At 70 we give thanks — to our colleagues over the years; to our supporters and readers; to the United States of America; and to the God of victories, and of mercy.”