USA

The United States is to send more troops and military aircraft to Australia, embedding spies with its intelligence agencies in an unprecedented peacetime move to counter the perceived threat from China.

Agreements reached on Sunday night also include an expansion of amphibious troops, maritime reconnaissance aircraft and the fast-tracking of missile manufacturing in Australia to supply America.

Remote northern air force bases will be enlarged to accommodate US aircraft, and Washington will start storing military supplies in Australia.

U.S. policy toward China appears to be suffering from a belief in magic – that, for instance, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be a great idea; that Putin would be happy with a “minor incursion” into Ukraine; that the Chinese spy balloon was “silly;” that the mission of education and the military should be to ensure “equity,” leading one veteran to say that the US is “trying to out-pronoun our enemies;” and that America’s southern border, with agents trying to process reportedly 8,000 illegal migrants each day, thereby leaving vast swaths of land open to traffickers, smugglers and terrorists, is “secure.”

Regrettably, the Biden Administration seems to be letting itself be outmaneuvered in countering the imminent threat of war posed by China’s leader Xi Jinping and his ruling Communist Party.

SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. — He’s been called a “big teddy bear,” a gruff “football coach” and a “cowboy” who needs to be put out to pasture. But one thing Gen. Michael A. Minihan is not: shy.
Here, where the suburbs of St. Louis meet the cornfields of southern Illinois, resides the four-star commander who, in uncommonly confrontational language for such a senior military officer, has ordered the 110,000 troops under his command to prepare for war.

With China.

Two years from now, maybe.