“”the military’s ability to respond to balloons and similar craft is constrained by physics and the capabilities of current weapons,” The Washington Post reports, and you can’t really pop a giant balloon with gunfire at 40,000 feet.
“You can fill a balloon full of bullet holes, and it’s going to stay at altitude,” David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and fighter pilot, tells the Post. The air pressure that high up doesn’t allow helium to freely escape through small holes, even if fighter jets flying by at hundreds of miles per hour can riddle the near-stationary balloon with bullets.”
“Japan’s new security posture will increase the nation’s military budget by 56 percent, from about 27.47 trillion yen over five years to about 43 trillion yen (an increase from about $215 billion to $324 billion as of market close on Friday). Historically, Japan has kept security spending low due to its constitutional commitment to avoid war, but the country does have a defense budget and has maintained the Self-Defense Forces since 1954.”
…
“doubts remain as to whether Kishida can convince the Japanese people to agree to commit both the financial and human capital that his proposed scale-up would require.”
“If there is a Russian ideology, it’s ethnic nationalism. China’s case is also largely nationalism. In China, nationalism began to displace communism as an ideology in the 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution. It comes from the disappointment of the population with ideological dogma and with the great promise of a communist revolution that never happened. The Chinese Communist Party was facing a legitimacy deficit, and they were looking for things to fill it — so nationalism replaced communist revolution. The same thing happened with the Soviet Union falling apart; the Russian Federation had to reinvent itself on the basis of Russian nationalism.”
“It’s certainly true Canada has some of the most unaffordable housing prices in the developed world. Average home prices are ten times average incomes. Compare that to the U.S., where median home prices are 4.3 times median incomes, per National Association of Realtors’ data. OECD figures show that Canadian home prices have grown 43 percent faster than incomes since 2015.
And as homes have gotten more expensive, foreign homebuyers have become an increasingly popular scapegoat.”
…
“foreign buyers make up only 5 percent of homeowners in the country. Squeezing out such a marginal part of the market probably won’t have a huge effect on prices.
Foreign buyers made up around 4 percent of New Zealand’s housing market when the country implemented a ban on nonnative buyers in 2018. Home price growth continued unabated after the ban.
A heavy tax on foreign home purchases in British Columbia has managed to reduce “foreign-related” purchases from 10 percent of all sales to between 1 to 2 percent. One study of the policy showed it reduced home price growth by 1 percent, and that minimal benefit faded after a few months.
Such are the pitfalls of trying to marginally curb demand in a hot market without enough supply. Behind every eliminated foreign buyer are multiple domestic home purchasers competing over an insufficient stock of homes.
Canada’s national housing finance agency estimates the country will be short some 3.5 million homes by the end of the decade. That’s within spitting distance of the U.S.’s own estimated shortage of 4 million homes—a country with nearly ten times Canada’s population.
The country has all the limits on supply that the U.S. does, including density restrictions in the urban core and growth boundaries on the exurban fringe. Both prevent new housing from being built to meet demand. As a result, prices in the country stay stubbornly high.
Canada’s local and provincial governments are starting to address this problem with proposals to loosen zoning restrictions. Done right, that will unleash developers’ ability to add much-needed supply.
At the federal level, it appears more politically practical to run with unproductive bans and to scapegoat foreigners.”
“a senior Defense Department official said that Chinese spy balloons entered American airspace three times during Trump’s tenure and once before during the current administration.”
…
“the difference between past instances and the one from last week, Defense Department officials said, is that those balloons never stayed above U.S. territory for a significant period of time. When pressed for specifics, such as the date, location and duration of those instances, Biden administration officials refused to provide them to POLITICO, citing the classified nature of that information.”
“it’s worth noting what the anti-Ukraine aid crowd in Congress generally doesn’t support: ending U.S. weapons transfers and military funding to other countries.
Hawley, for example, has connected his opposition to Ukraine aid to his enthusiasm for Taiwan aid. Earlier this year, he introduced legislation to fast-track U.S. arms sales to Taipei. He’s also repeatedly voted against resolutions stopping weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and he likewise voted against ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen’s civil war.
Similarly, Vance has suggested that until semiconductor production is ramped up domestically, the U.S. would need to defend Taiwan against Chinese attack. Gaetz has a more mixed record—he’s willing to cut off U.S. backing for Saudi Arabia in Yemen—but he’s uniquely targeted Ukraine aid for slashing. Cutting aid to Israel is certainly off the table. Indeed, none of the representatives I’ve named here voted against $1 billion in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome last year, and Hawley and Vance are as effusive in their pledges of support for Israel as congressional Republicans tend to be.
The fuller picture, then, doesn’t show a GOP pivot to America as “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but “champion and vindicator only of her own.” A better explanation is simple partisan reaction: Many Democrats believe Trump is in bed with Moscow and made investigating his alleged ties to the Kremlin a major theme of his four years in office. That has translated to a broader Democratic focus on Russia as the primary threat to the United States and, by extension, on Ukraine as a pseudo-ally particularly deserving of our support.
In response, some Republicans have—well, not quite embraced Russia, but certainly deemphasized it as a security risk compared to what they likely would have said without the recent history of Russiagate. They’ve cast China as the primary threat instead and, by extension, made Taiwan the pseudo-ally deserving support. And insofar as backing Ukraine is a Democratic cause—insofar as Ukrainian flags flutter over “In this house we believe” signs, as they reliably do in my neighborhood—GOP opposition to Ukraine aid naturally follows, despite the obvious sympathy of the Ukrainian cause.”