Thursday NatSec Roundup

The ultimate outcome of war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil.

• The Navy is not pleased with the Presidential pardons. Nothing surprising about this; pardoning war criminal is necessarily inimical to the maintenance of good discipline, especially in elite units that tend to bristle at discipline in the best of times.
• Israel-Palestine policy is one of the areas that left critics of the Democratic Party most often cite as demonstrating that “not a dime’s bit of difference” separates the two parties. The Trump administration has worked very hard to conclusively demonstrate that this particular rhetorical flourish is absurd to the point of idiocy.
• South Korea and Japan need to get their shit together, especially since Trump has determined to shake both of them down at the same time. South Koreans don’t seem receptive, though. Militarized rivalry between Seoul and Tokyo is good for no one.
• Here’s a digestible post-mortem on how North Korea got its nuclear and ballistic missile programs on their feet, despite bitter resistance from the United States and most of the rest of the world.
• The legacy of Xi Jinping Thought will be brutal repression in Xinjiang, alongside a set of broader shifts in how China treats its ethnic minorities.
• Last week, China’s new Type 002 carrier transited the Taiwan Strait. The Type 002 (most people assume it will be named “Shandong”) isn’t yet fully operational, but is clearly capable of showing the flag.