O Congresso americano se intromete no delicado equlíbrio Taiwan-EUA-China - Olivier Knox (WP)

Vai dar muita confusão e mais fervura no ambiente bilateral EUA-China.

The big idea

China committee chair makes secret trip to Taiwan The Daily 202, The Washington Post, Feb 22, 2023   By Olivier Knox with research by Caroline Anders

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) nominates Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to be speaker on the House floor on Jan. 4,. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Let’s talk about secret overseas travel with important national security dimensions. No, this is not about President Biden’s cloak-and-dagger visit to Ukraine. It’s about Rep. Mike Gallagher’s four-day trip to Taiwan over the long weekend, which he did not publicize before going or draw attention to by talking to reporters once there. And draw attention it would have. The Wisconsin Republican, a counterintelligence officer who did two tours in Iraq as part of a seven-year stretch of active duty in the Marines, chairs the House’s brand new committee on China. My colleague Ellen Nakashima spoke with Gallagher upon his return. She has the scoop on:

What he says most worries officials on the democratically self-governed island (a $19 billion backlog in American weapons deliveries, notably Harpoon anti-ship missiles and F-16 fighter jets. Those systems may not arrive “for years,” Ellen noted. How Gallagher heard from “almost every Taiwanese official” he met that Russia’s expanded war in Ukraine, now nearly a year old, was “a wake-up call” about the need to stockpile advanced weapons. How the trip fits into what he sees as the broader mission of the new committee, which will hold its first hearing on Feb. 28 (he wants to impress upon Americans the need “to arm Taiwan to the teeth to avoid a war,” Gallagher told her.)

A MCCARTHY TRIP?

The mere fact of the trip is interesting. So is the secrecy. When then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) traveled to Taiwan in August, Biden confirmed the trip before it was announced, angering China, and declared the Pentagon opposed it. Both steps made it harder for her to go.

Pelosi went anyway, becoming the most senior U.S. government official to visit in a quarter century. Once she had left, China fired ballistic missiles near Taiwan and sent warships and fighters near the island to conduct what it called training exercises. Ellen reported this interesting nugget: “Gallagher, well aware of the furor caused by Pelosi’s visit, said he deliberately kept his own visit quiet to have more productive meetings. A senior U.S. defense official made a visit at the same time, which leaked and was front-page news in Taiwan.” Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is expected to make his own visit to Taiwan this year, though his office has not announced definite plans, much less a timeline. China has warned him not to do it. There’s no reason to think he’ll back down.

“I don’t know of any active plans by Speaker McCarthy to go. If he wants to go, he certainly can,” Gallagher told Ellen. China doesn’t get a “veto” over congressional travel, he added.

“Gallagher said he intends to hold a select committee hearing in Taiwan— hopefully before summer and then report back to McCarthy on its findings. That would better inform the speaker’s plans, and he and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) could visit possibly after Taiwan’s next presidential election in early 2024,” Ellen reported. (The most provocative time for a McCarthy visit this year would probably be early March, when China’s National People’s Congress holds its annual session, because it would look like a slap in the face to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.)

BIPARTISAN SUPPORT

Gallagher wasn’t the only member of Congress in Taiwan. Huizhong Wu of the Associated Press reported on another delegation, which included Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.), Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) Support for Taiwan has deep, decades-long bipartisan roots. “We need to be moving heaven and earth to arm Taiwan to the teeth to avoid a war,” Gallagher told Ellen. “Nobody knows if and when Xi Jinping wakes up and decides to do this but all the more reason to put in place a denial posture as quickly as possible.”

Os EUA não possuem teto de gastos para ajudar a Ucrânia, na sua defesa da guerra de agressão da Rússia - Olivier Knox (The Washington Post)

 

The Washington Post, September 9, 2022

By Olivier Knox with research by Caroline Anders

Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress dropped “United Colonies” in favor of “United States of America.”

The big idea

New U.S. aid, front-line testimonials, Russian defiance – and Congress

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to media before departure at the railway station in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday. The sign on the train reads "The Victory Train". (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

It’s been a big week for the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, and for The Washington Post’s coverage of Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine. Let’s look at some of the critical developments — and a big looming test for President Biden’s policy. I teased it in the headline, so let’s get right to that test, which you may have missed because it was more of a bureaucratic development than a battlefield conundrum, a diplomatic breakthrough, or a viral social media post featuring the explosive demise of a Russian tank. Ready? One week ago, Biden asked Congress for another $13.7 billion in new money for the Ukraine war — $7.2 billion to provide Kyiv more weapons and military gear, and replenish U.S. stockpiles of arms sent to Ukraine, $4.5 billion to help the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and $2 billion to mitigate energy supply disruptions.

This week, some lawmakers, including Democrats hemmed and hawed at the request and asked the administration for more informationbefore they would commit to supporting it, as Joe Gould and Bryant Harris documented for Defense News.

That included, they reported, Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “I’m not opposed to it; I just want to know what’s in it,” they quoted him as saying. Others raising questions included Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Thom Tillis(R-N.C.) who both sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The panel’s top Republican, James M. Inhofe (Okla.) expressed reservations and pushed Biden to use his authority to send another $2.8 billion in arms to Ukraine before that authority lapses when the new fiscal year opens Oct. 1.

FUNDING FIGHT

The White House requested the money as part of a broader $47 billion emergency package that would also help combat covid, bolster monkeypox vaccine stocks and address disaster needs after floods in Kentucky, my colleague Tony Romm reported. “The official request sets up a fierce fight on Capitol Hill, where warring Democrats and Republicans face a looming, end-of-September deadline by which they must fund the government — or risk a catastrophic shutdown weeks before the midterm elections,” Tony noted. The test for the Biden administration comes in two parts: Can they resist calls for the Ukraine package to come in the form of a stand-alone bill? And can they overcome congressional skepticism — as well as growing outright oppositionfrom House Republicans? Odds are some kind of Ukraine aid legislation will pass. But it’ll require some skillful congressional navigation with threatening government shutdown clouds on the horizon and closing fast.

A WAVERING ALLIANCE?

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is toiling to reassure Ukraine of long-lasting support from Washington and to hold together the coalition of allies and partners even as Russia cuts off energy supplies to Western Europe, sending prices soaring with winter approaching. My colleagues John Hudson and Missy Ryan chronicled the latest on Thursday: Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unannounced visit to Kyiv and the administration promised another $675 million in U.S. military aid and $1 billion in military financing. “We will support the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Blinken said in a statement. John and Missy noted the visit “focused partly on a major new operation that Ukrainian leaders hope can dislodge Russian forces from occupied areas in the country’s east and south, and that U.S. officials believe would put Kyiv on a better footing for potential negotiations with Russia.”

“We know this is a pivotal moment, more than six months into Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, as your counteroffensive is now underway and proving effective,” they quoted Blinken as saying.

“While the Ukrainians have made some gains, they are taking heavy losses, and soldiers say that despite huge foreign support, they desperately need more weapons and ammunition to prevail over the better-equipped Russians,” they reported. And here, I want to strongly recommend John’s searing, searching report from a day earlier, when he told the painful stories of wounded Ukrainian troops describing their ordeal fighting to retake the strategic southern city of Kherson from Russian forces. Beyond the tragic human toll, they told John of:

Russian drones tracking Ukrainian forces from so high up in the sky that their targets never heard the unmanned vehicles’ buzz. Russian tanks emerging from newly built cement shelters, firing on Ukrainian targets, then slipping back into cover, protected from mortars and rockets. Russian counter-battery radars that let Moscow’s forces target Ukrainian artillery. Russian hackers taking over Ukrainian drones.

John’s piece serves as something of a corrective to the social-media narrative of the war, in which videos show plucky Ukrainian forces getting the better of heavier but hapless Russians. It’s a reminder that the war looks far from over.

Russia has lost up to 80,000 troops in Ukraine. Or 75,000. Or is it 60,000? - Olivier Knox (The Washington Post)

The Washington Post, August 9, 2022 

By Olivier Knox with research by Caroline Anders

The big idea

Russia has lost up to 80,000 troops in Ukraine. Or 75,000. Or is it 60,000?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during an interview with The Washington Post at his office in Kyiv, Ukraine, on August 8. (Heidi Levine/The Washington Post).

On July 20, the CIA said Russia had suffered 60,000 casualties in Ukraine since widening its war there Feb. 24. On July 27, the Biden administration told lawmakers Moscow’s losses ran to 75,000 killed and wounded. On Monday, the Pentagon’s number crept higher, to up to 80,000. Even 60,000 would be catastrophic. Over two decades of war in Afghanistan, the United States endured 2,448 dead and more than 20,000 wounded. At, 80,000, it would be more than half the 150,000 troops Russia was estimated to have massed on Ukraine’s border by Feb. 23. But if you think it’s unlikely that Moscow lost 15,000 over the stretch of a week, you’re right. Instead, officials are working not from a fixed number but a scale, and some go with the higher end, while others are more confident at the lower end.

“It’s always a range. And, you know, there’s no perfect number,” CIA Director William Burns told the Aspen Security Forum on July 20. “I think the latest estimates from the U.S. intelligence community would be, you know, something in the vicinity of 15,000 killed and maybe three times that wounded, so a quite significant set of losses.”

(“Russia classifies military deaths as state secrets even in times of peace and has not updated its official casualty figures frequently during the war. On March 25 it said 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed,” Reuters reported July 20.)

WHY IT MATTERS

This isn’t a “gotcha.” The Daily 202 wanted to look at the casualty number because so much U.S. policy toward Ukraine aims to escalate the cost to Russia of sustaining its war there, and so much of U.S. analysis of the conflict asks the question “how much more can Moscow take?”

On Monday, those two dynamics were very much in evidence as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl briefed reporters about a fresh disbursement of $1 billion in military aid for Kyiv — the largest U.S. package to date.

“There's a lot of fog in war, but, you know, I think it's safe to suggest that the Russians have probably taken 70- or 80,000 casualties in less than six months,” Kahl said. “That number might be a little lower, a little higher, but I think that's kind of in the ballpark.”

Asked how long Russia could sustain that, Kahl replied: “A lot of it would depend, I think, on the political decisions that Vladimir Putin will make ultimately about whether he can continue to recruit and send additional forces to the front, whether he was at some point, you know, willing to engage in national mobilization or some other effort.”

ZELENSKY WANTS MORE

Escalating the costs for Russia was also central to The Washington Post’s interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pressed the United States and its allies to ban all Russian citizens. Russians should “live in their own world until they change their philosophy,” he said, my colleague Isabelle Khurshudyan reported Monday. “Whichever kind of Russian … make them go to Russia.” That’s a bridge too far for President Biden’s administration, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid. “We would not want to implement a total ban on all Russians,” the official told The Daily 202.

A total ban would mean denying entry to Russian dissidents and those who have criticized the war, as well as those who are “persecuted for politics or sexual orientation,” and that would upend a “bedrock principle” that Americans welcome such people, the official said.

It would also run against a theme Biden has woven into his rhetoric about the war, namely that America’s quarrel is with Putin and his government, not the Russian people, the official said.

But that has been something of a mixed message. The unprecedented economic sanctions the United States and its partners have leveled on Russia since February are surely hitting the Russian people, while Putin rages against them but hasn’t relented in Ukraine.

Rússia: Putin está retrocedendo o país pelo menos três décadas - Olivier Knox (WP)

Putin has set back his country by decades By Olivier Knox The Washington Post, March 17, 2022

A poster of Putin on the facade of the Museum of Medical History building in front of the Russia Embassy in Riga, Latvia. Mandatory Credit: Photo by TOMS KALNINS/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

By invading Ukraine, Russia has done severe economic damage to itself that could take years to heal — perhaps however long President Vladimir Putin rules the Kremlin.  The global response to the bloody, three-week-old onslaught has not just closed Russia’s stock market and collapsed the ruble’s value, but set Moscow back 30 years, reversing decades of integration into the global economy since the U.S.S.R.’s fall. And if the 400 companies that have withdrawn from Russia, scaled back operations there, or suspended their activities (connoting temporariness) start thinking about a return, there are at least five big reasons that will prove difficult, barring global action from governments.

Let’s call them: the banking sanctions; suspending Russia’s World Trade Organization benefits; Putin’s nationalization threat; the crash of the ruble; and “I think he is a war criminal.”

This obviously may feel like a premature discussion while Russian missiles and shells pour down every day on apartment buildings, schools and hospitals, and Ukraine begs for help. Even as Putin admits the sanctions’ biting impacton his economy, he hasn’t halted his war. But Tufts University Professor Dan Drezner recently looked at ways to turn the sanctions from a somewhat ad hoc means of punishing Moscow into an institutionalized regime of containment. Typically judicious word choice: Containment helped beat the Soviet Union.

O pacote de US$ 3,5 trilhões para tentar colocar os EUA na frente de todos: vai funcionar? - Olivier Knox (WP)

 Apenas um país que pratica a TMM sem qualquer teoria, nem moderna, apenas monetária, consegue fazer esse tipo de injeção que vale por um pelotão de Keynes alinhados no Congresso.

Pode dar certo, pode não dar, mas só um país que pode exportar metade dos seus problemas para o resto do mundo, pois que possui soberania monetária (e daí pode praticar exuberâncias arrogantes) e exporta um pouco da sua inflação para os demais países, se permite trabalhar com essa ordem de grandeza.

Que não se tente fazer o mesmo aqui.

Esta matéria do Washington Post explica o que vem pela frente: não tem comparação com o New Deal, como pretendem os sabichões.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Here are some of the big things in the Democrats' $3.5 trillion plan

By Olivier Knox
with Mariana Alfaro
The Daily 202, The Washington Post, July 15, 2021

President Biden traveled yesterday to his professional home for decades, the Senate, to pitch lawmakers face-to-face on a $3.5 trillion budget proposal that may be the largest effort to retool American government since the New Deal.  

Congress and the news media have started to go through what’s in the colossal project — it turns out $3.5 trillion buys quite a lot of projects and priorities, as long as you can keep your party unified, with a zero-vote margin of error in the Senate. 

The road to passage is torturous, but the Democratic proposal packs a presidency’s worth of policy (with a corresponding price tag), and might be the Democrats’ best shot at enacting Biden’s agenda before midterm elections in which they could very well lose control of Congress.

President Biden speaks briefly to reporters after having lunch with Senate Democrats at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

My colleagues Jeff Stein and Tony Romm reported: 

ADVERTISEMENT Content from Blue Cross Blue Shield Association Expanding access to close the low-income coverage gap Millions of people could gain access to high-quality health care by expanding Medicaid. Let’s close the low-income coverage gap and create a more equitable health care system.

“Senate Democrats on Wednesday offered fresh details about their sweeping $3.5 trillion budget proposal, promising that it would augment Medicare coverage, lower prescription drug costs, invest heavily in new programs to combat climate change and tackle long-standing policy priorities on immigration. … 

The budget package would pave the way for hundreds of billions of dollars in areas including elder care, home care, child care, prekindergarten, and paid family and medical leave, its sponsors said. On health care, it would open the door for millions of seniors to obtain vision, dental and hearing coverage on Medicare and allow more low-income families to enroll in Medicaid. And it would aid parents by extending the recently expanded child tax credit, the full benefits of which will start to be paid out this week.” 

Jeff and Tony note Democrats “plan to fund much of the proposal with new taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations,” which is as much a policy goal for the party as what that money pays for. 

My colleagues Seung Min Kim, Tony Romm, Mike DeBonis, and Marianna Sotomayor have a detailed look at Biden’s field trip and note this: 

“[A] long process lies ahead: Many of the party’s most ambitious spending ideas have yet to be translated into actual policies. On thorny issues like health care, immigration, climate change and taxes, the debate easily could take months and antagonize existing political fissures within the Democratic caucus, souring the current mood.” 

They also give a sense of the scale of the work ahead: “[I]t includes plans to enact a pathway to permanent residency for immigrants who lack legal status, although how that program would be shaped is to be determined.” 

There’s quite a bit of spending to fight the climate crisis —something progressives are likely to cheer even as pivotal centrist swing voter Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has declared those provisions make him “very, very disturbed.” 

That’s not great for Democrats, who need all 50 of their senators to stick together to pass the proposal in the evenly divided Senate using a tactic called reconciliation that requires zero GOP support. 

At the New York Times, Lisa Friedman reports: 

“Democrats have agreed to include a tax on imports from nations that lack aggressive climate change policies as part of a sweeping $3.5 trillion budget plan stocked with other provisions aimed at ratcheting down fossil fuel pollution in the United States. 

The move to tax imports was made public Wednesday, the same day that the European Union outlined its own proposal for a similar carbon border tax, a novel tool that is designed to protect domestic manufacturing while simultaneously pressuring other countries to reduce the emissions that are warming the planet. 

The two actions in concert suggest that government leaders are turning toward trade policy as a way to attack climate change.” 

Lisa notes the plan “also includes a number of significant Democratic priorities on climate change, including a mechanism known as a clean electricity standard that would require power companies to gradually ratchet up the amount of electricity they generate from wind, solar and other sources until they’re no longer emitting carbon dioxide. 

There are also new tax breaks for wind, solar and other renewable energy, as well as electric vehicles, a ‘methane reduction fee’ and funding for a civilian climate corps, modeled after New Deal-era programs, to create jobs in addressing climate change and conservation, according to lawmakers. The plan does not specify how much money will be allocated to the various programs.” 

While Manchin, as the senator from a coal state, might be “very, very disturbed,” climate activists seem quite pleased, according to Matthew Daly of the Associated Press, who reported environmental groups are predicting “it would make ‘transformational investments’ in clean energy and jobs and put the nation on a path to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 50% by 2030. The plan also would move the country toward a carbon-free electric grid by 2035, with 100% of U.S. electricity powered by solar, wind, nuclear and other clean energy sources.” 

Matthew notes Manchin “signaled he will oppose plans to curb subsidies for fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. Both fuels are crucial to his rural state’s economy. … 

Eliminating fossil fuels, which are major contributors to global warming, ‘won’t happen,’ Manchin told reporters Wednesday. ‘It can’t happen and it doesn’t do a darn thing but makes the world worse.’