Hey, before we get rolling on this, do you mind if I mention the National Review Institute cruise to Alaska this summer? As I understand it, if you haven’t reserved your cabin by March 6, the opportunity will pass you by. NRI’s Alaska cruise is taking place from June 16 to 23 aboard Holland America’s Noordam.
Some of you reading this have been on an NRI cruise before, some have not; for those of you who haven’t, it’s a bit like fantasy camp for those who are into conservative politics and journalism and law and philosophy. Yes, there are panel discussions and Q&As and dinners, but there’s also a lot of just hanging around with our writers, editors, and guest speakers. On past cruises, I remember joking around about Law and Order episodes with former senator Fred Thompson, going snorkeling with Andrew Breitbart, and trying really hard not to barf on the shoes of Daniel Hannan while seasick on a speeding ferry. I also remember Ralph Reed asking me to explain one of Jonah and Greg Gutfeld’s off-color jokes in one of the “Night Owl” sessions. You just never quite know what’s going to happen on one of these cruises. I cannot quite guarantee that you’ll end up with some “I swear to God, I’m not making this up, you will not believe what happened to me” story that you’ll be telling for the rest of your life. But the odds are pretty good.
Who’s going to be there:
- Caroline Downey, whom you know from her reporting, her podcast series The Detransitioners, and her original short videos on our YouTube channel.
- Lee Edwards, the walking, talking, living encyclopedia of the history of the conservative movement, and the founding chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
- Kevin Hassett, the senior adviser to National Review Capital Matters, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the man who had President Trump’s ear on the economy as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
- Noah Rothman, the prolific, logophile, hot-fire-spitting senior writer and co-host of The Editors.
- Thérèse Shaheen, the CEO of US Asia International, the former chair and managing director of the U.S. government’s American Institute in Taiwan (our de facto embassy over there), and a frequent contributor to National Review on issues relating to China, Taiwan, and the rest of Asia.
- Amity Shlaes, a fellow at National Review Institute who writes the column “The Forgotten Book” at National Review Capital Matters, and the author of four New York Times bestsellers including The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
- Kayla Bartsch, a current William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review, who sings with the Cathedral Choral Society at the Washington National Cathedral.
And more, including colleagues who will probably ask, “Jim, why didn’t you mention me?” The itinerary is spectacular; the Noordam is massive, sails smoothly, and has all kinds of amenities. It will be an unforgettable experience, and I hope to see you there. Book your cabin soon, because time is running out!
And now, on the menu today . . .
Cybersecurity Threats Abound
Recently, the New York Times and Washington Post have offered dueling exposés about the Chinese government’s use of hackers, revealed by a spectacular treasure trove of documents indicating that breaking into secure systems on behalf of the regime in Beijing is now a booming industry, with multiple groups of hackers competing for what are effectively government contracts.
A trove of leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked hacking group shows that Beijing’s intelligence and military groups are carrying out large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies and infrastructure — exploiting what the hackers claim are vulnerabilities in software systems from companies including Microsoft, Apple and Google. . . .
Experts are poring over the documents, which offer an unusual glimpse inside the intense competition of China’s national security data-gathering industry — where rival outfits jockey for lucrative government contracts by pledging evermore devastating and comprehensive access to sensitive information deemed useful by Chinese police, military and intelligence agencies.
The documents come from iSoon, also known as Auxun, a Chinese firm headquartered in Shanghai that sells third-party hacking and data-gathering services to Chinese government bureaus, security groups and state-owned enterprises.
Perhaps the most ominous hack described is one that would provide valuable information for a future invasion of Taiwan:
The spreadsheet showed that the firm had a sample of 459GB of road-mapping data from Taiwan, the island of 23 million that China claims as its territory.
Road data could prove useful to the Chinese military in the event of an invasion of Taiwan, analysts said. “Understanding the highway terrain and location of bridges and tunnels is essential so you can move armored forces and infantry around the island in an effort to occupy Taiwan,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a national security expert and chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank.
Back when I was in Kyiv last year, I saw an exhibit at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine about the ongoing war, revealing that at least one group of invading Russians were using the Atlas of Motor Roads of the USSR, which was published in Moscow in 1975 and depicts the highways in Ukraine as they existed in 1974. The exhibit said that the invading Russians were looking for a forest that had been turned into suburbs decades ago. If the Chinese do invade Taiwan someday, they will not be so poorly informed and under-equipped.
(Don’t count on Interpol’s cybercrime-operations division to be much use to the Taiwanese government in mitigating these hacking attacks. Remember, Taiwan isn’t allowed to be a member of Interpol because of objections from Beijing.)
The Times article begins with the fact that “the hackers offered a menu of services, at a variety of prices”:
A local government in southwest China paid less than $15,000 for access to the private website of traffic police in Vietnam. Software that helped run disinformation campaigns and hack accounts on X cost $100,000. For $278,000 Chinese customers could get a trove of personal information behind social media accounts on platforms like Telegram and Facebook.
You may recall that earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had disrupted a major attempt to target American communications, energy, transportation, and water sectors:
The hackers, known to the private sector as “Volt Typhoon,” used privately-owned SOHO routers infected with the “KV Botnet” malware to conceal the PRC origin of further hacking activities directed against U.S. and other foreign victims. These further hacking activities included a campaign targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the United States and elsewhere that was the subject of a May 2023 FBI, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and foreign partner advisory. . . .
“China’s hackers are targeting American civilian critical infrastructure, pre-positioning to cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities in the event of conflict,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Volt Typhoon malware enabled China to hide as they targeted our communications, energy, transportation, and water sectors. Their pre-positioning constitutes a potential real-world threat to our physical safety that the FBI is not going to tolerate. We are going to continue to work with our partners to hit the PRC hard and early whenever we see them threaten Americans.”
At the end of January, Wray told Congress that the Chinese Communist Party and its ongoing actions were “the defining threat of our generation”:
The CCP’s dangerous actions—China’s multi-pronged assault on our national and economic security—make it the defining threat of our generation.
When I described the CCP as a threat to Americans’ safety a moment ago, I meant that in some ways quite literally. There has been far too little public focus on the fact that PRC [People’s Republic of China] hackers are targeting our critical infrastructure—our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems—and the risk that poses to every American requires our attention now.
China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities. If or when China decides the time has come to strike, they’re not focused solely on political or military targets. We can see from where they position themselves, across civilian infrastructure, that low blows aren’t just a possibility in the event of a conflict. Low blows against civilians are part of China’s plan. [Emphasis added.]
Contrast Wray’s description of the People’s Republic of China as a threat to Americans, with the way Biden greeted and described Xi Jinping in California last November:
To host you in the United States is a great honor and a pleasure, particularly as it relates to our summit today and for the APEC Leaders’ Meeting this week. I’ve always found our discussions straightforward and frank, and I’ve always appreciated them. Mr. President, we’ve known each other for a long time. We haven’t always agreed, which was not a surprise to anyone, but our meetings have always been candid, straightforward, and useful.
Diplomatic niceties require us to pretend that the Chinese government is not constantly seeking new ways to harm and enjoy leverage over Americans and the rest of the world. Yes, Biden got some grief for calling Xi Jinping a dictator after that meeting. But Xi is a dictator! Why is our telling the truth about them considered provocative, but their ongoing actions to harm us aren’t considered provocative?
What I said about Putin this week goes double for Xi Jinping. The regime in Beijing, like the one in Moscow, is “always trying to screw us over and to find new forms of leverage against us and our allies — economic pressure, energy supplies, propaganda efforts, social-media trolls and bots, exacerbating existing social and political divisions, cyberattacks, espionage, advanced weapons technology, etc.” The Chinese government, like the Russian government, is not a global “good citizen” by any stretch of the imagination. It is, as Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, put it in a conversation in Kyiv, part of an “Axis of A**holes” operating around the world, attacking the innocent, seeking to destabilize and attack free countries, and conquering territory.
I lamented that we keep getting one president after another convinced that he can get Putin to see reason, and the same holds true of Xi. You may have missed Trump gushing earlier this month, “Look, I want China to do great, I do. And I like President Xi a lot, he was a very good friend of mine during my term.”
Finally, note that Xi Jinping is seven years younger than Trump and eleven years younger than Biden.
ADDENDUM: I think Ross Douthat’s most recent column is useful, at least for illuminating why the Russia doves don’t persuade me, even though I think there are plenty of good reasons to worry about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
For starters, Douthat takes them at their word that they’re not isolationists. I think the minute the prospect of war in Taiwan becomes real, a lot — not all, but a lot — of the “We have to pivot to Asia” crowd will say, “We can’t win a war in Asia, so it’s time for a negotiated settlement with China.” I notice we don’t see a lot of GOP House members who oppose additional aid to Ukraine straining any muscles to get the Taiwan aid passed separately. There’s $19 billion worth of planes, tanks, and munitions that Taiwan already paid for and that we haven’t delivered.
Secondly, the Russia doves don’t think that what happens in Ukraine will influence China’s decision-making, which doesn’t pass the smell test, either. It may not be the single most decisive factor, but just as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan helped shape Putin’s perception of Biden and U.S. resolve, the Ukraine fight is shaping Xi Jinping’s perceptions.
Third, Douthat didn’t mention this, but I’d note that the anti-Ukraine sentiment I see on Twitter, etc. is often just flat wrong on the facts. “We’re sending all this aid, and the Europeans aren’t sending anything!” Nope, when you add up the humanitarian and economic aid and accepting refugees along with the military equipment, the European Union outpaces us. And remember, the EU doesn’t include the United Kingdom, Norway, or Switzerland.
“We’re wasting all this money over there when we should be spending it over here!” Almost 90 percent of the money is spent on weapons systems manufactured in 31 U.S. states.
“Ukraine is the most corrupt country in the world!” Nah, Ukraine has corruption, no doubt, but at a level not all that different from the other countries in the region. And Russia is far more corrupt. In the most recent rankings, Ukraine placed 104th out of 180 countries; Russia ranked 141st.
From this, I conclude that a bunch of Russia doves don’t actually care about the facts and are making a separate argument: “I hate the establishment.”
Fourthly, the Russia doves envision some sort of sensible, rational negotiation with Putin that just doesn’t seem possible. It’s like expecting the rabid wildebeest to meet you halfway and make take good-faith, trust-building actions. The only way some people will learn to stop touching the hot stove is once they’ve been sufficiently burned.
Fifth, if Donald Trump had been a loud supporter of Ukraine’s defense from the beginning, I think anti-Ukraine voices would be few and far between, at least on the right. (If Trump had enthusiastically supported Ukraine’s defense, it is likely some Democrats would be calling him a crazed warmonger.) I think Trump, who’s always had a warm and fuzzy view of Putin, just can’t bring himself to be on the other side of Russia, and vast swaths of the GOP have outsourced their decision-making to Mar-a-Lago.