MICHAEL WALSH: Minding Our Own Business.
Regarding Taiwan, America needs to find another option to the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and other Taiwanese chip manufacturers, who account for about half of chip production worldwide. (Rebuilding the U.S. chip industry is one purpose of the tariff regimen, and should be clearly explained as such.) There’s not much the Navy can do to stop the mainland’s invasion of Taiwan short of dragging the U.S. into a shooting war with the CCP, and the loss of the island would not be a crushing blow to American military interests in East Asia.
As for Russia, the current mess can be directly laid at the feet of Bush 42’s predecessor, his father George H.W. Bush, on whose watch the American victory in the Cold War was squandered. Russia could have been bought for pennies on the dollar and brought into the West with timely investment and political reform. Instead, sensing a vacuum, it was taken over by KGB ronin like Putin and mercantile gangsters who had already been feasting on the corpse of the USSR even before it was dead. The only beneficiary of America’s failure to capitalize on the triumph of its primary foreign policy objective of the forty years between 1949 and 1989 has turned out to be George Soros.
Washington concluded his address with these words: “In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish—that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good, that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism—this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated.”
By George, he’s right.
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