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Trade and the future of CUSMA isn't just in Trump's hands. Some people still think there's too much latitude for Chinese products to find their way into goods manufactured/assembled in Canada and Mexico and consequently enter the US enjoying the advantages of the trade deal. Their objections...

The point is that if Trump thinks a trade balance has a win side ("surplus") and a loss side ("deficit"), he is taking the wrong position. Countries with trade deficits (US trade surplus) are the ones he should be going after, because being on the "deficit" side is theoretically the place to be.

If Australia had a trade deficit, it would be in a position of advantage, provided also that it were possible to treat bilateral trade deficits as meaningful in a trading world (it is not really possible). One way or another, goods and services have to move bidirectionally in order to satisfy...

Such bellicose sentiments. I suppose there's an easy fix for Russia - enter a partnership with Iran to threaten Hormuz traffic.

The point is that the weaknesses of the elected politicians are not a flaw of the professional armed services or their equipment and materiel.

The less-than-exquisite arsenal still counts. There's no rule or provision for confining the US to exquisite-systems-only in a confrontation.

Politics, not warfighting.

A thing about buying American is that the stuff often has been or will be used in battle; there's always a lot of field testing going on. Mostly proven products.

"Generic congressional ballot" measure is relevant to House, not Senate (and not presidency either). Due to some advantages favouring Republicans (mainly, more efficient voter distribution), customarily D+1 to as much as D+3 is reckoned a dead heat. RCP average has been running between D+6 and...

Autonomous mechanical spiders programmed to gather up the threads.

Failure to fulfill the arbitrary desires of governments in the face of their equally arbitrary decisions which impede free market behaviours is not a failure of a free market. Governments impose the structures which provide some of the incentives which drive behaviours. Regardless, putting...

The usual lines on nightly news go something like this: Government (minister or premier): this is the fault of Trump's tariffs Industry: this is the fault of BC government forest industry policy I suspect both are true, owing to a generally observable chain of events: governments squeeze...

Lack (or at least apparent lack) of Iranian WMD efforts in the 2003 to 2008 frame may have been influenced by what was going on next door and how keen the US administration of the day was to choose "military intervention" from its list of options. I have no notion that any far-reaching...

I'm OK with that. They make big misjudgements and miss big things coming all the time. What are you including and excluding from "effort or work"? I count anything (theoretical, experimental, engineering, logistical) which shortens their path to a nuclear weapon. They haven't "done...

My assertion is "Iran's government is going to continue pursuing a working nuclear arsenal unless it is forcibly stopped." I don't care if it proceeds in fits and starts. What is the concensus for Iran's time-to-breakout now? A year or less? I am skeptical of negotiated delays like the...

The principles of caution of Gell-Mann Amnesia apply. If a source is wrong about things you know well, you have to assume it is wrong at least in equal proportion about things you don't know well (and thus are not easily in a position to check), and verify everything accordingly.

DNI threat assessments are not dispositive, especially in view of the track record of the IC. Any conclusion or argument based on them is much more liable to dismissal.

See after next. I expect the consequences of that decision to explode into a multi-national, multi-continental war roughly along religious majority lines, if the conflict hasn't already done so before anyone even starts threatening nukes. The Islamic demands of Israel aren't that it sit...

Yep. And as recently as the 1920s and perhaps into the 1930s the border between the US and Mexico was pretty porous, and it didn't matter much for most peoples' standard of living on which side they lived. (Working poor everywhere were pretty much the same.) More recently, though...

Rogue AI isn't a fraction of the risk that AI capable of all the same things, but under direction of rogue humans, is.