The Navy Captain and the Coronavirus
The Navy Captain and the Coronavirus – Wall Street Journal Editorial
Social distancing is a luxury you don’t have aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. So a word about Thursday’s firing of a Navy officer who showed up in the news asking for help containing a coronavirus outbreak on his ship, the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Many have been quick to lionize Capt. Brett Crozier as a hero who spoke up in defense of his crew. His March 30 four-page letter, which leaked to the press this week, said he urgently needed to offload some 4,000 deployed sailors to quarantine in Guam to arrest the virus. It is bracing reading. “If we do not act now,” Capt. Crozier wrote, “we are failing to take care of our most trusted asset—our Sailors.” It isn’t clear who leaked the letter.
Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said Thursday that he’d relieved Capt. Crozier for showing “extremely poor judgment.” Mr. Modly said the captain sent his letter to 20 or 30 people over an unclassified channel and was operating outside normal procedures in the chain of command. These are serious, fireable offenses, and Capt. Crozier could have offered his resignation instead if he felt he’d exhausted his ability to care properly for his sailors…
Violence Imperils Coronavirus Response in Conflict Zones Around the World
Violence Imperils Coronavirus Response in Conflict Zones Around the World by Danielle Paquette, Susannah George and Sudarsan Raghavan - Washington Post
The head of the United Nations has urged a global cease-fire. So has the Pope. Yet violence keeps battering swaths of Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe as governments struggle to fight both insurgents and the coronavirus pandemic.
“It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said recently during a virtual speech.
The Islamic State is calling on loyalists everywhere to capitalize on the chaos, according to its media channels. The Taliban is launching major attacks in Afghanistan while handing out masks, gloves and soap.
In conflict zones across the globe, the threat of airstrikes, ambushes and roadside bombs is blocking health-care workers from patients, medical experts say, and national security forces — newly tasked with enforcing strict lockdowns — are stretched thin…
Coronavirus: China, Russia Make a Play for a New Order
Coronavirus: China, Russia Make a Play for a New Order by David Kilcullen – The Australian
Academic publishing timelines being what they are, I finished The Dragons and the Snakes — the book about how adversaries have evolved since the Cold War — a year ago, well before the coronavirus crisis. Yet that crisis, along with the oil shock triggered by Moscow’s sudden exit from its OPEC-Plus deal with Saudi Arabia and the resulting collapse in global oil prices, reinforces several of the book’s arguments.
It shows how dangerously dependent on communist China our manufacturing base and supply chains have become, and how overly reliant Western nations are on Russian oil and gas. It illustrates how our narrow definition of warfare (which does not consider strategic supply-chain manipulation, health-system destabilisation or the “oil weapon” as acts of war) contrasts with the understanding in Beijing and Moscow, where strategists include these actions and others in a much broader conception of conflict.
And the chaotic pandemic response highlights how the international community — once relatively unified under the leadership of Western democracies, co-operating through institutions such as the UN and the EU — has fractured. Lockdowns, travel bans and border closures have thrown globalisation into reverse…