Month: October 2024

The Trump Foreign Policy Brain Trust

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Ross Douthat does the public service of interviewing two people likely to be at the top of a Donald Trump foreign policy team, Robert O’Brien and Elbridge Colby. (gift link) O’Brien was Trump’s national security adviser in 2019 and 2020, and Colby served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in 2017 and 2018. These short tenures remind us of the chaos that was the Trump administration.

O’Brien and Colby have a lot of lies to offer up along with their baseline distorted view of the international situation. Back in 2016, Thomas Wright analyzed Trump’s long-term inclinations in foreign policy. The article stands up well today and gives a framework within which to understand O’Brien’s and Colby’s statements.

In sum, Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal international order it helped to create and has led since World War II. He has three key arguments that he returns to time and again over the past 30 years. He is deeply unhappy with America’s military alliances and feels the United States is overcommitted around the world. He feels that America is disadvantaged by the global economy. And he is sympathetic to authoritarian strongmen. Trump seeks nothing less than ending the U.S.-led liberal order and freeing America from its international commitments.

There’s too much in Douthat’s column to pack into one post, so I’ll just give a few examples.

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Another Contract To The Silicon Valley Boys

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

The Department of Energy just awarded four contracts for enriching uranium up to what they call HALEU status. That’s high-assay low-enriched uranium, enriched to 5 to 20 percent, just up to the cutoff for weapons-grade. Some of the new reactors being designed will need HALEU. If you want a smaller reactor, higher enrichment is one way to get it.

This is a forward-looking contract, although there is some pressure to have HALEU available within the next few years. “[A]nother critical step by President Biden and Vice President Harris to bolster America’s energy and national security, achieve a net-zero emissions economy by 2050, and build a strong, reliable domestic nuclear fuel supply chain free of influence from adversarial foreign nations.”

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A Long Ago Los Alamos Colloquium

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Ah, we’re talking about women’s emotions at that time of the month again. This perennial subject always reminds me of an incident at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Harold Agnew was director. And yes, that’s Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The name wasn’t changed until 1981.

It must have been 1970 or 1971. The Lab had a colloquium for staff members most Tuesday mornings at 8:10, since the Lab was run by the University of California. All technical people with advanced degrees were staff members, no subdivisions of that title. The weekly colloquium was a direct descendent of Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project colloquia.

This colloquium was to be given by Estelle Ramey. It might have been the first in which a woman was the speaker. Ramey was a professor of endocrinology at Georgetown University. She was married to James Ramey, who was an Atomic Energy Commissioner and a friend of Agnew’s.

Ramey started out her talk with “Everything living has cycles. Carrots have cycles. Pigs have cycles. Men have cycles.” The last occasioned the intake of breath that characterizes physicists preparing to rebut. But she continued. The talk was basically a refutation of the nonsense about women’s emotions and their hormones, just like what we are seeing on social media today, fifty years later.

She also managed to work the word vagina into her talk, probably the first time it had been uttered over a microphone in the Ad Building auditorium. Agnew was sitting down front, and you could see the red overtaking his ears.

He was a good sport about it, though, as he would later be in response to some of my actions.

Photo: Photograph of the 1946 colloquium on the Super at Los Alamos. Front row left to right: Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J.M.B. Kellogg. Second row left to right: Colonel Oliver G. Haywood, unknown, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Phil B. Porter. Third row left to right: Edward Teller, Gregory Breit, Arthur Hemmendinger, Arthur Schelberg.  Los Alamos National Laboratory – http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/welcome/history/17_org-chart.html Archived.

Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money

Punditing On Russia’s War In Ukraine Continues

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Man, you look away for a few days, and all sorts of nonsense creeps in.

Like most of us, I’ve been focusing on the presidential campaign. What happens to everything else depends on that outcome. But Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, and so does opinionating on that war. Some of it is pretty bad.

But first, a long take that pretty much overlaps with mine: A peace deal in Ukraine is not going to happen. I’ve thought about how that war ends and read a bunch of articles advocating that talks start now to shape a peace deal. I’ve also read Volodymyr Zelensky’s comments and speeches, reports of how the war is going, and a great deal from Vladimir Putin. I’ve read speculations about how the war is being received in Russia, but most of those are thin or questionable. I don’t see a way the war ends except for when one or both sides are depleted. And I can’t see how that “peace” can hold.

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Keith Alexander and the Iron Companies

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Beyond Donald Trump’s direct and obvious grifts is a secondary industry of grifts that both live off the direct grifts and support them. And third-rate hangers on and more. It’s a grift ecosystem. A possible intermediate-level predator just died.

To fully chart the entire ecosystem would require a houseful of walls with sticky notes and yarn, with so many yarn connections going from one room to another that movement inside the house would become impossible.

Early on, when the Steele Dossier was published, I thought I might follow some of those connections, but it turned out that the project was incompatible with living anything like a normal life. I’ve picked up pieces of it from time to time. Marcy Wheeler has worked with bigger chunks.

Some names reappear through various grifts: Recently, George Papadopoulos, Gal Luft, Keith Alexander, and Jack Keane.

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Russia’s Nuclear Threats

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Vladimir Putin has announced plans for changes in Russia’s nuclear doctrine. How much difference will this make in how his war in Ukraine is being fought? Probably not much.

Fabian Hoffmann has categorized Russia’s actions relative to nuclear weapons:

  1. Cheap talk: “…Most of Russia’s nuclear threats fall into this category. A good example is the discussions regularly held by eccentric guests on Russian talk shows, who fantasize together with the moderator about launching nuclear weapons against cities like London, Paris, Berlin, Washington D.C…. These threats are not state-sanctioned, occur in a vacuum, and completely ignore the tremendous costs nuclear use would impose on Russia. Thus, these threats are inherently non-credible and should be ignored.”
  2. State-sanctioned rhetoric: Also rhetorical, but from official channels. “In this case, the nuclear threat is made directly by Russian decisionmakers, including Putin himself… Putin’s latest and very direct nuclear threat related to lifting targeting restrictions for Western long-range strike weapons also falls under this category. So does the announced nuclear doctrine change, as a nuclear doctrine essentially is a formal policy document reflecting state-level discourse on nuclear weapons.”
  3. Preparations for limited nuclear use. This involves activating the military unit responsible for nuclear weapons and moving the warheads to be mated to their delivery vehicles.
  4. Preparations for largescale nuclear use. This would involve activating the long-range missiles and bombers.

The last two would be observed by the US, by satellite and other means of intelligence-gathering. The Biden administration declassified observations of the Russian preparations for war to warn Putin against attacking Ukraine. It’s likely they would do the same if it looked like Russia was preparing for a nuclear strike.

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