Category: National Security

Foreign Telegram – June 16, 2021

Mike Coté5 Comments

Welcome back to the Foreign Telegram, a series of posts in which I touch on some of the most important international stories that you may not have seen on the news. This time around, we’ll be visiting Israel to see how their new government helps debunk so many of the false narratives about the Jewish state, Taiwan to address the escalating Chinese incursions into their airspace, and Afghanistan to see how the precipitous American withdrawal is delivering the country into the hands of an unrepentant terrorist regime, as well as seeing how the Chinese-developed Sinovac vaccine is doing to stop Covid-19 (spoiler alert: not well).

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Negotiation or Capitulation?

Mike Coté3 Comments

The Biden administration’s approach to the threat of Iran seems more like capitulation than it does negotiation.

Recent reports from reputable outlets like the New York Times have suggested that the Biden administration seeks to restart negotiations with the Iranian regime as to their burgeoning nuclear weapons program. This is not surprising for anyone who has been paying attention to this issue; Biden campaigned on re-entering several diplomatic agreements negotiated by the Obama administration, including the Iran Nuclear Deal known as the JCPOA. The problem with this approach arises not from the idea of diplomacy generally, but from the specifics of the current situation with Iran. Suffice it to say, a lot has changed since Biden last worked in the White House in January 2017.

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Some Thoughts on the Capitol Riot

Mike Coté3 Comments

It’s been almost two weeks since the destructive events of January 6 in our nation’s capital. As things have settled down some and the fog of war has partially lifted, I figured that it is time to share some of my thoughts on the events of that day and the fortnight following it. This post will touch on several different aspects of the riot, the coverage, and the aftermath, including overreactions and exaggerations. I don’t plan on trying to weave these thoughts together in a coherent and smooth narrative, as my opinions on these events don’t easily fit that paradigm; instead, I’ll go through a series of discrete views that hopefully will give you the full breadth of my feelings on this complicated subject.

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Why a TikTok Ban is Necessary

Mike Coté1 Comment

A sale to an American company would only serve to create perverse incentives.

The Chinese-owned video-sharing social media app TikTok has been all over the news recently, as the federal government has been considering banning the app from the US. I am a big proponent of this strategy and laid out the case against TikTok a few weeks back on this blog. This past weekend saw a flurry of activity on the TikTok front, as President Trump first stated that he was planning to ban the app outright before backing off of that position. The current plan du jour is to allow the American technology giant Microsoft to pursue a full acquisition of TikTok’s US operations. A sale to Microsoft would include the app’s American business, as well as the user data which the app collects. This would solve the problem that I delineated, would it not?

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The Case Against TikTok

Mike Coté5 Comments

The video-sharing social network is a danger to personal privacy and national security.

If you know anyone under the age of 30 (or are in that group yourself), you may have heard of the most popular app in America’s youth culture – TikTok. The short-video creation and sharing app has rapidly become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, surpassing 2 billion downloads as of April 2020. Its growth has accelerated since the beginning of the year, especially taking off among teens stuck at home during the lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. The app’s users are predominately young, with over 63% of users falling between the ages of 10 and 29 and 37% of the app’s US user base being categorized as ‘adolescent’. If you’ve heard about TikTok recently, it is likely either because you have seen some of the viral challenges or dances that have been going around the internet or you have read the breathless coverage surrounding the possibility that the Trump administration may ban the app in the US. I am no fan of the Trump administration, but in this case, I believe that they are fully justified in banning TikTok outright.

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