What Happened Today: March 14, 2022
China’s advantage; COVID-19 funds corruption; Iran’s missile strikes
The Big Story
The longer the war between Russia and Ukraine goes on, the clearer it becomes that NATO and the European Union have little influence over its course compared to China—which, despite being on a different continent, has emerged as the strategic linchpin of the conflict. On Monday, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arrived in Rome to meet with a delegation of senior Politburo members including the country’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi. According to the White House account, the purpose of the meeting was for Sullivan to warn Jiechi that China would face severe penalties for assisting the Russian war effort and helping Moscow evade sanctions. “We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them,” said Sullivan. And, bolstering that impression, U.S. officials leaked reports to the press prior to the meeting that indicated Russia had directly requested military assistance from China, including equipment, since invading Ukraine. Yet the meeting in Rome, like the larger axis of U.S.-Russia-China relations, is not as clear-cut as that would suggest. With the United States reluctant to enter any open military confrontation with Russia, and reliant on Moscow’s cooperation to secure a new deal with Iran, a high priority for the White House, it’s not Washington, D.C., but Beijing that is holding the cards at the moment.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/us/politics/russia-china-ukraine.html
And get more background here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/winner-ukraine-russia-america-china
In The Back Pages: War and Its Place in God’s World
The Rest
→ The government has barely begun to account for where the $6 trillion distributed in COVID-19 relief funds was spent, but the results so far point to massive amounts of waste and corruption. A group of nonprofit organizations in Minnesota that received roughly $65 million from federal food programs during the coronavirus pandemic were engaged in “a massive fraud scheme,” according to recent court documents filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The same groups embezzled aid money to ”purchase real estate, cars, and other items. Some other examples of where the money went, according to Bloomberg.
As little as 23% of the $800 billion doled out by the Paycheck Protection Program actually found its way into workers’ pockets. A Department of Labor study estimated that more than $87 billion in emergency unemployment benefits were improperly paid. The Small Business Administration has (among other blunders) disbursed more than $6.2 billion to loan applicants it now suspects of identity theft.
And, not to discriminate against the unliving, the IRS issued “2.2 million stimulus checks—worth about $3.5 billion—to dead people.”
Read more: https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/where-did-6-trillion-in-covid-funding-go
→ The White House was in a very charitable mood Sunday, turning the other cheek after Iran fired 12 missiles that landed near the U.S. consulate in Erbil, a Kurdish city in northern Iraq. No Americans were injured in the attack, which was carried out by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards who were supposedly targeting Israeli “strategic centers” in the area in retaliation for recent Israeli strikes inside Syria. The U.S. government response to the attack could be summarized as “no harm, no foul,” with Iran’s claim that the American consulate wasn’t a target of the attack treated as credible.
→ With reports that the United States and Iran are close to reviving a nuclear framework agreement, a coalition of 49 Republican senators—all of them except Rand Paul—announced Monday that it would block any deal that is not first submitted for a vote in the Senate, as required by law. The warning is an attempt to preempt a recurrence of what happened with the original Iran deal, which former President Obama enacted through an executive order because he couldn’t secure the necessary support in Congress to ratify it as a treaty.
→ The gossip coming out of The New York Times these days oozes with details of double-crossing, backbiting, and vicious intrigue that you’d expect to find in a royal court that’s fallen on hard times. Not an ideal environment for people to calmly report the news without giving in to hysteria or emotional blackmail, to say the least. Times staffers laid into the paper’s executive editor Dean Baquet at a private meeting last week, according to Politico, after one of their colleagues, national security reporter Matthew Rosenberg, was caught on a secret recording taken by the conservative activist group Project Veritas “divulging details about sensitive newsroom dynamics and disparaging his colleagues.” What’s more, Rosenberg “suggested that the media was overhyping the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, scoffing at colleagues who were there that day who said they were traumatized, and blasted what he called left-leaning younger Times reporters wrapped up in a ‘woke’ culture influencing coverage.” See you in the gulag, Rosenberg.
→ This was a fun exchange.
→ Following its policy of locking down cities in indefinite police-state conditions, China placed the southern city of Shenzhen, a critical tech and shipping hub in the global supply chain and home to some 17 million people, under lockdown Sunday. China is reportedly experiencing a surge of infections in its worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years, suggesting that prior lockdowns failed to achieve the government’s “zero COVID” policy. The quarantine order in Shenzhen has already led to the shutdown of Foxconn, a primary supplier of parts to Apple, which, along with several other critical manufacturers of tech components, has a massive operation in the city.
→ Faced with a shortage of the all-important semiconductor chips that are vital to modern cars and high-tech electronics, a number of car manufacturers have started selling downgraded vehicle models that are missing certain features that require the chips. The chipless models of the popular Explorer sold by Ford come without heating and cooling controls for the rear seats but are being sold below sticker price by dealers.
Read more: https://interestingengineering.com/ford-suvs-missing-chips
→ Professional football player Tom Brady, the winningest quarterback of all time, swore that he was retiring and released what seemed to be a sincere statement to that effect, which we duly covered here at The Scroll. Now, all of 40 days later, Brady has made liars of us by announcing that he is not really retiring and will come back to play another season with Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It’s one thing for boxers to constantly stage fake retirements so they can then hype up big comeback fights by “coming out of retirement,” but the 44-year-old Brady has no such excuse.
Rabbi Daniel Feldman on the Necessity of Preparing for War
As the conflict in Ukraine continues to escalate, many of us are forced to come to terms with a grim realization—namely that the bloody realities of war, far from being a thing of the past, remain a constant, even in societies that celebrate their achievements and overall progress.
This means that we are all advised to rethink the ways we think about war—not only how we fight it but, just as important, why fight at all, a question that has theological as well as moral implications. In doing so, we may take a page from Israel, where a network of religious academies known as “hesder yeshivahs”—in which young men enroll for a number of years, alternating periods of intense Talmudic study with terms of service in the Israel Defense Forces—has changed the way many approach the realities of armed conflict.
The earliest of these academies, named “Kerem B’Yavneh,” was founded in 1954. Its inaugural dean was profound scholar Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Goldvicht (1924-1994), who would serve in his leadership role for more than three and a half decades. Rabbi Goldvicht was not an obvious match for a Zionist institution that would emerge as a spiritual home for scholar-soldiers. He hailed from a traditionalist, non-Zionist background and was a widely recognized master of the rabbinic texts that define Jewish philosophy.
In his own writings, he took up the question of war and its place in God’s world. He addressed the issue from a theological perspective that saw all the components of creation as having a potential positive purpose, even if, once in existence, they could be egregiously misused. Essentially, he argued, war, in its expression of personal sacrifice and risk toward a goal, represents the extreme manifestation of commitment. In theory, it is the devotion any human can have to a cause, ideally one of justice, converted into the primary focus of one’s existence. However, once this concept exists, it can also be harnessed in the service of venal, unjust, and oppressive pursuits, as it has for so much of the history of a flawed humanity. And this, Rabbi Goldvicht taught, was why it was crucial to constantly question the justification of taking up arms, a process for which Jewish theology was very well equipped.
Although he was never himself a soldier, Rabbi Goldvicht trained so many who would fight valiantly for Israel’s right to exist and thrive before assuming leadership positions in the rabbinate, academia, science, medicine, law, politics, and every other field. When he was questioned as to whether he indeed saw the hesder system as ideal, Rabbi Goldvicht would respond that an ideal world would have no war. And yet, as long as there was the reality of military conflict, his students would rise to the challenge, together with thousands of others in similar institutions that would be established across the country.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminds us that as deep as our desire for peace may be, we’re likely to find ourselves faced with unchecked aggression, and when we do, we have no choice but to wage war. It also reminds us that war requires preparation, ethical as well as tactical. It may be time for us all to emulate the hesder model and raise generations who are as adept at thinking seriously about war’s moral implications as they are in fighting and winning it.
Daniel Feldman is the author of 10 books in Hebrew and English about Talmud, Jewish law, and contemporary life.
The NY Times is an expensive Twitter page with a horrible record on the rise of Communism Nazism and on anti Semitism as well as opposing Israel and its right of self defense