With terrorist attacks from Hamas into Israel just a little over a week old and of course the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war, you would think that the American foreign policy plate is pretty full.
You of course would be wrong, just like I was.
It might be crowded, but there is more stuff to put onto that plate.
Not to mention that now our very own government is telling us that copycat attacks are possible, which is the latest story from my colleague Bob Hoge: FBI Director Warns Americans to Be on Alert for Copycats in Wake of Hamas Terror Attacks Against Israel.
A brief snippet from that article. FBI Director Wray was quoted as saying...
“History has been witness to antisemitic and other forms of violent extremism for far too long,” he said, according to an FBI transcript. “We remain committed to continue confronting those threats.
“In this heightened environment, there’s no question we’re seeing an increase in reported threats, and we’ve got to be on the lookout, especially for lone actors who may take inspiration from recent events to commit violence of their own,” he added.
Wray's warning comes after former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal designated Friday a “Day of Jihad.” Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and most Western countries. Fortunately, no large-scale terror attacks were reported in the U.S.
So now, in the aftermath of another conflict in the Middle East firing up again, we have a stark reminder that there are many other actors around the globe that want us taken down a notch or two.
So as I was reading right here today, it seems the Chinese are none too pleased with a new report that a bi-partisan congressional committee just released last week, and they are giving us a stern warning.
China has reacted to a recent U.S. report weighing up the possibility of simultaneous wars against both Moscow and Beijing by warning Washington that "those who play with fire will perish by it."
The study stated that:
The U.S. is not ready to face the challenge of the growing nuclear threat posed by Russia and China. This is according to a 145-page report released by the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States on Thursday.
"It is an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now," the report states. The panel behind the report, led by a bipartisan panel of six Democrats and six Republicans, produced the document after a year of research into the topic.
In the report, the behavior of both Russia and China is described as "militarily troubling and increasingly aggressive," something that in turn has increased "the risk of conflict with two nuclear peers." China is expected to reach nuclear parity with the U.S. by the mid-2030s, according to the report.
I have thought for a while, possibly going back to the '90s, that China was always going to end up being our main adversary.
The Chinese sat on the sidelines and watched the old Soviet Union get outspent militarily by the United States while trying to chase the dream of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars system. Which by the way is the basis for Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system.
The Chinese learned not to take on America directly one-on-one but instead crafted favorable trade deals that benefited goods coming out of their country but not necessarily goods coming into theirs. They allowed billions of dollars of foreign investment while making sure that the companies that were investing from the outside had to follow the Chinese party's dictates.
So while their economy grew, they slowly built up their military and modernized it, and the West fell for it.
Every United States president since Richard Nixon has felt that they would be able to persuade and move Chinese leadership in a way that would be a little more pro-American than the previous administration. The Chinese, meanwhile, have never moved from their main goal, which was to slowly become a world superpower based on foreign investment, while never changing their government structure which has always been a Communist dictatorship.
The Chinese have essentially won every round of this game and are now in a position to make a threat and back it up if need be with a comparable nuclear arsenal to ours.
In all reality, it doesn't take too many nukes to ruin an area but to have the ability to be able to successfully launch missiles and have them land anywhere around the world is something that most people in the mid-90s would never dreamed of China becoming capable of accomplishing.
Yet here we are today, and they can.
I feel gross in saying this, but I believe that the conclusion in this report, as strongly worded as it is, has been severely understated. How are we to deal with the problems that currently challenge the globe when this country is wrapped up in honest-to-goodness debates about whether biological men should compete in sports meant for biological women?
With all of the problems in the world, this would normally be a troubling time for the United States to be able to keep a watchful eye and handle all of these hot spots. Now with all the internal division and the seemingly endless amount of wokeness that has already grabbed a hold of our society, it seems like a hopeless task to deal with anything else.
Not the most pleasant of thoughts on this Sunday afternoon, but something that I hope and pray our leaders are paying attention to and that you the reader will make aware of to those running for office at ANY time.