Final Word from Thursday, January 31, 2019

Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. elections in part because of his early identification of China as a commercial and military menace. On May 19, 2015, he tweeted that "Our debt finances China's military. It's time to get tough." His first National Security Strategy put the Chinese and Russian threats front and center, and his moves to ban Huawei's technology are an extension of this. In contrast, the CR's most visible general, Petr Pavel, seems to have discovered the Chinese threat in mid-Dec., when the NÚKIB cybersecurity office did. His interviews before then rarely mentioned China; interviews since then invariably do. Active-service Czech generals still aren't pushing the China agenda, but the next military-intelligence report will no doubt now be full of it. Trump can be criticized for his approach to dealing with the Chinese threat, but not for failing to identify it. Czech generals have been building a "modern" army while barely even seeing the Chinese threat coming. [ Czech Republic Huawei ZTE presidential ]