Daily Caller
Trump Is Back And Foreign Leaders Are Taking Notice
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
That didn’t take long.
Less than a week after the landslide election of former President Donald J. Trump, America’s enemies are running for cover.
A Hamas spokesman told Newsweek it seeks an immediate end to the war.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin remarked to reporters that Trump’s desire to end the Ukraine crisis “deserves attention at least.”
China’s Xi Jinping congratulated Trump on Thursday, expressing the pair would “find the right way to get along in the new era.”
World leaders know that the past four years of U.S. dithering, insecurity, and shame are over.
America is back with the gusto of a “USA, USA!” chant.
The world sees exactly what a majority of Americans see in their president-elect: strength.
“His behavior at the moment of an attempt on his life left an impression on me. He turned out to be a brave man,” Vladimir Putin said.
Damn right.
It is a fact as old as human nature that strength, bravery and resolve create peace. Weakness invites war.
We’ve lived the latter half of that adage for the past four years.
Madam vice president thought her boss was “capable in every way,” and willfully ignored President Joe Biden’s declining faculties as he struggled to climb the stairs of Air Force One, remember the names of other world leaders or stay awake during global summits.
The Biden-Harris administration shamed the nation with its disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan. After the world watched that fiasco, deterrence collapsed like a Dollar-General beach chair under Chris Christy. Enter, stage left, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chinese spy balloons and a Middle East in flames.
Is it any wonder that military recruiting dropped under Biden, our enemies began moving pawns across the chessboard and America’s trust in its military plummeted to the lowest point in decades?
Trump’s new national security team will inherit a Middle East engulfed in violence, China marching towards Taiwan and the largest war in Europe since 1945.
The first order of business? A return to the Trump 1.0 policies that worked.
That is bad news for host of malign actors, but at the top of the list likely sits Iran and its proxies. The mullahs are probably regretting their plot to assassinate Trump.
Expect Trump’s legendary “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran to snap back in place. That plan drained billions from their despotic death cult. Sign number one: recent reports say the maximum pressure campaign architect, Brian Hook, will lead the transition team at the U.S. Department of State.
On Friday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called a meeting of all political appointees at the Pentagon — let’s hope they simply discussed the orderly and lawful transfer of power and authorities and not ways to stymie the incoming administration.
With two months of Biden remaining at the helm, most Americans are holding their breath that he won’t stumble the nation into yet another conflict before leaving the Oval Office for good.
Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.
conflict
The West Is Playing With Fire In Ukraine
National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
As wars tend to do, the battle over Ukraine continues to escalate.
It was reported this week that North Korean soldiers in the conflict total 10,000 thus far and that Russia has rewarded Pyongyang by sending its excellent air defense systems to the Korean Peninsula in exchange.
Last month, the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, warned that any North Korean troops fighting in the conflict would be, “fair game and fair targets.”
His green light delivered this week when “a high-ranking North Korean military officer [became] a casualty” according to a Wall Street Journal story on Thursday. That strike was allegedly conducted with British Storm Shadow missiles.
Just these recent events further entangle the U.S., U.K., North Korea, South Korea, and China within the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
But the week’s biggest Ukraine news rattled many Americans — the Biden administration authorized Ukraine to strike targets within Russia with the American-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS).
“The missiles will speak for themselves,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy boasted.
They sure will. First of all, the U.S. doesn’t have many of the $1.3 million missiles to lob around. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo warned an audience at the Brookings Institute this week that the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are “now eating into stocks … and to say otherwise would be dishonest.”
I’ve met and been briefed by Admiral Paparo, who is one of the most positive and straight-talking flag officers in our military. If he is publicly ringing the warning bell, U.S. policy leaders should take heed.
Putin did not take the news of the ATACMS well. In response, he announced the use of a hypersonic ballistic missile on Thursday, carefully noting that it didn’t carry a nuclear warhead. The unspoken part: next time, it might.
What’s the goal in Biden’s escalation? It seems the White House is trying to prevent the inevitable or blame Trump for Ukraine’s upcoming defeat.
What they won’t admit is that the metrics of the war are not in Ukraine’s favor, and frankly never have been. No supersonic missile will change the immutable: Russia boasts a population five times Ukraine’s and when it comes to war materiel, Russia is winning. Despite Biden’s attempt to hobble the Russian economy, Putin’s war industry is outproducing the West by three times in the basic munitions needed to prosecute a land battle.
But aren’t Russians dying en mass on the battlefield?
Western leaders keep touting Russia’s high death toll, which estimates now place at 600,000. To military strategists here in the United States, such a human cost is unimaginable. Add up every American combat death going back 160 years through the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I, and even the Union combat deaths in the Civil War, and the number does’t reach what Russia has lost in the past 1,000 days.
American and NATO leaders are foolish to underestimate Russian resolve.
Since its initial blundering and poorly-executed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has recovered from its mistakes, Russian public support for the war remains high, and the Russian economy hasn’t fallen apart. Putin may have lost the virtue-signaling battle of Ukrainian flag lapel pins, but make no mistake: he’s on a path to win the war.
Biden’s deputy Pentagon press secretary, Sabrina Singh, says don’t worry. On Thursday she told reporters the administration was sending as much American weapons and support to Ukraine as it can muster, “in the weeks and months ahead left of this administration. So, that’s what we’re really focused on.”
What did she make of Putin’s nuclear threat? “I mean, you know, we’ve seen this type of, you know, dangerous, reckless rhetoric before from President Putin,” Singh said.
“I mean, you know?” No, we don’t know. The world hasn’t seen nuclear threats like this since Harry S. Truman demanded Japan surrender.
For anyone worried about the state of our national security, January 20th can’t come quickly enough.
Daily Caller
Chinese Agents Can Now Access Every American’s Phone Calls And Texts, GOP Senator Warns
Republican South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds warned Friday that China’s state-sponsored hackers, known as Salt Typhoon, have gained the capability to spy on millions of Americans through their mobile phones. (Screenshot/YouTube/HalifaxtheForum)
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Republican South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds warned Friday that China’s state-sponsored hackers, known as Salt Typhoon, have gained the capability to spy on millions of Americans through their mobile phones.
During an event at Halifax The Forum, Rounds revealed that hackers have infiltrated all major U.S. telecommunications firms. Rounds said these hackers have penetrated every major telecom provider in the country. He also said the Chinese Communist government is capable of reading texts and listening to conversations.
“Any one of us and every one of us today is subject to the review by the Chinese Communist government of any cell phone conversation you have with anyone in America. Because they have access to every single one of our major telecommunications companies. They have broken in. They can read your texts, and they can hear your conversations,” Rounds said. “It’s just a matter of who they want to listen to and who they don’t.”
Salt Typhoon, identified as a Chinese hacking group, has infiltrated the networks of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and their presence lingers, according to Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The Washington Post reported. Warner called the breach “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history—by far.”
The breach, ongoing for over a year, affects telecom giants such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Hackers even accessed law enforcement wiretap request logs, revealing investigative targets, though the wiretap system itself remains uncompromised, WaPo said. The breach reportedly targeted communications involving former President Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and White House officials.
Despite intervention from the FBI, the hackers remain embedded in the U.S. telecom infrastructure, according to WaPo. Warner explained that expelling them will require a massive overhaul, including the physical replacement of thousands of routers and switches across affected networks.
“This is an ongoing effort by China to infiltrate telecom systems around the world, to exfiltrate huge amounts of data,” Warner said.
The group exploited outdated infrastructure and inter-network trust, enabling real-time eavesdropping and data exfiltration, the outlet reported. While fewer than 150 individuals were directly targeted, the scope of compromised data extends to millions of associated contacts.
The Biden administration urges stricter cybersecurity measures to counter persistent Chinese aggression.
“We must lock our digital doors,” Deputy National Security Adviser Anne Neuberger said.
National security officials, including Trump appointees, vow heightened focus on combating cyber threats.
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