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Fertilizer prices have risen to a record high in North America, threatening to boost food inflation even higher. Nitrogen products are increasing due to the cost of natural gas, which is used in the manufacturing process. 

The Green Markets North America Fertilizer Price Index soared to a record high last week of $996.32 per short ton. 

The fertilizer market has been roiled by hurricanes, plant shutdowns, sanctions, and shortages of natural gas in Europe and China, pushing nutrient prices sky-high, which will raise the cost of production for global farmers. Here are global fertilizer prices zooming higher: 

Fertilizers play an essential role in crop development for producing enough food for the global economy. The soaring costs of nutrients plus rapid food inflation will have the most severe economic impacts on emerging market economies first because low-income folks allocate a more significant part of their incomes to purchasing food. This week, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s global food index hit a new decade high, driven by gains for cereals and vegetable oils.

Expensive fertilizer will push production costs higher for farmers worldwide, which will continue to increase food inflation.

Benefiting from rising fertilizer prices is CF Industries Holdings Inc., the world’s second-biggest fertilizer company. 

The Northern Hemisphere growing season begins late March/April. It may suggest that soaring farm input costs, such as fertilizer, diesel, labor, and machinery, will pressure farm incomes and lead to sustained food inflation well into 2022. 

Authored by Alasdair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Does Europe possess the energy and the humility to look itself in the mirror, and re-position itself diplomatically?

Two events have combined to make a major inflection point for Europe:

The first was America’s abandonment of the Great Game ploy of attempting to keep the two Central Asian great land powers – Russia and China – divided and at odds with each other. This was the inexorable consequence to the US’ defeat in Afghanistan – and the loss of its last strategic foothold in Asia.

Washington’s response was a reversion to that old nineteenth century geo-political tactic of maritime containment of Asian land-power – through controlling the sea lanes. However America’s pivot to China as its primordial security interest has resulted in the North Atlantic becoming much less important to Washington – as the US security crux compacts down to ‘blocking’ China in the Pacific.

The Establishment-linked figure, George Friedman (of Stratfor fame), has outlined America’s new post-Afghan strategy on Polish TV. He said tartly: “When we looked for allies [for a maritime force in the Pacific] on which we could count – they were the British and the Australians. The French weren’t there”. Friedman suggested that the threat from Russia is more than a bit exaggerated, and implied that the North Atlantic NATO and Europe are not particularly relevant to the US in the new context of ‘China competition’. “We ask”, Friedman says, “what does NATO do for the problems the US has at this point?”. “This [the AUKUS] is the [alliance] that has existed since World War II. So naturally they [Australia] bought American submarines instead of French submarines: Life goes on”.

Friedman continued: “The NATO countries don’t have force enough to help us. It has been weakened by the Europeans. To have a military alliance, you have to have a military. The Europeans are not interested in spending the money”. “Europe”, he said, “has left us with no choice: It is not a case of the US adopting this strategy [AUKUS], it is the strategy of Europe. First, there is no Europe. There is a bunch of countries in Europe, pursuing their own interests. You can only be bilateral [perhaps working with Poland and Romania]. There is no ‘Europe’ to work with”.

A storm in a tea-cup? Possibly. But the French went apoplectic. Expressions such as ‘stab in the back’ and ‘betrayal’ were flung around. It was Europa scorned. She is bitter and angry. Biden has made a groveling apology to President Macron over cutting out France from the submarine contract, and Blinken has been in Paris smoothing feathers.

George Friedman’s blunt account of the ‘new strategy’ may not be Biden ‘speak’, but it is Military Industrial think-tank conceptualisation. How do we know that? Firstly, because Friedman is one of their spokesmen – but simply because… continuity. The incumbents of the White House come and go, but US security objectives do not alter so readily. When Trump was in the White House, his views on NATO were very similar to those just repeated by Friedman. Incumbents may change, but military think-tank perspectives evolve to a different and slower cycle.

The ‘multilateral dimension’ of relations with France would be viewed as a largely Biden preoccupation. Friedman expressed the continuity of a US slow-burn focus to seeing China as the threat to US primacy. NATO won’t disappear, but it will play a narrower role (especially in the wake of its’ Afghan débacle).

But the EU, Friedman has made ruthlessly clear, is not viewed by the US security élite as a serious global player – or really as much more than one ‘punter’, amongst others, buying at the US weapons supermarket. The submarine contract with Australia however, was a centrepiece to Paris’s strategy for European ‘strategic autonomy’. Macron believed France and the EU had established a position of lasting influence in the heart of the Indo-Pacific. Better still, it had out-manoeuvred Britain, and broken into the Anglophone world of the Five Eyes to become a privileged defence partner of Australia. Biden dissed that. And Commission President von der Leyen told CNN that there could not be “business as usual” after the EU was blindsided by AUKUS.

One factor for the UK being chosen as the ‘Indo-Pacific partner’ very probably was Trump’s successful suasion with ‘Bojo’ Johnson to abandon the Cameron-Osborne outreach to China; whereas the big three EU powers were perceived in the US security world as ambivalent towards China, at best. The UK really did cut links. The grease finally was Brexit, which opened the window for strategic options – which otherwise would have been impossible to the UK.

There may be a heavy price to pay though further down the line – the US security establishment are really pushing the Taiwan ‘envelope’ to the limit (possibly to weaken the CCP). It is extremely high risk. China may decide ‘enough is enough’, and crush the AUKUS maritime venture, which it can do.

The second ‘leg’ to this global inflection point – also triggered around the Afghan pivot into the Russo-Chines axis – was the SCO summit last month. A memorandum of understanding was approved that would tie together China’s Belt and Road Initiative to the Eurasian Economic Community, within the overall structure of the SCO, whilst adding a deeper military dimension to the expanded SCO structure.

Significantly, President Xi spoke separately to members of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (of which China is not a part), to outline its prospective military integration too, into the SCO military structures. Iran was made a full member, and it and Pakistan (already a member), were elevated into prime Eurasian roles. In sum, all Eurasian integration paths combined into a new trade, resource – and military block. It represents an evolving big-power, security architecture covering some 57% of the world’s population.

Having lifted Iran into full membership – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt may also become SCO dialogue partners. This augurs well for a wider architecture that may subsume more of the Middle East. Already, Turkey after President Erdogan’s summit with President Putin at Sochi last week, gave clear indications of drifting towards Russia’s military complex – with major orders for Russian weaponry. Erdogan made clear in an interview with the US media that this included a further S400 air defence system, which almost certainly will result in American CAATSA sanctions on Turkey.

All of this faces the EU with a dilemma: Allies who cheered Biden’s ‘America is back’ slogan in January have found, eight months later, that ‘America First’ never went away. But rather, Biden paradoxically is delivering on the Trump agenda (continuity again!) – a truncated NATO (Trump mooted quitting it), and the possible US shunning of Germany as some candidate coalition partners edge toward exiting from the nuclear umbrella. The SPD still pays lip service to NATO, but the party is opposed to the 2% defence spending target (on which both Biden and Trump have insisted). Biden also delivered on the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Europeans may feel betrayed (though when has US policy ever been other than ‘America First’? It’s just the pretence which is gone). European grander aspirations at the global plane have been rudely disparaged by Washington. The Russia-China axis is in the driving seat in Central Asia – with its influence seeping down to Turkey and into the Middle East. The latter commands the lions’ share of world minerals, population – and, in the CTSO sphere, has the region most hungry and ripe for economic development.

The point here however, is the EU’s ‘DNA’. The EU was a project originally midwifed by the CIA, and is by treaty, tied to the security interests of NATO (i.e. the US). From the outset, the EU was constellated as the soft-power arm of the Washington Consensus, and the Euro deliberately was made outlier to the dollar sphere, to preclude competition with it (in line with the Washington Consensus doctrine). In 2002, an EU functionary (Robert Cooper) could envisage Europe as a new ‘liberal imperialism’. The ‘new’ was that Europe eschewed hard military power, in favour of the ‘soft’ power of its ‘vision’. Of course, Cooper’s assertion of the need for a ‘new kind of imperialism’ was not as ‘cuddly’ liberal – as presented. He advocated for ‘a new age of empire’, in which Western powers no longer would have to follow international law in their dealings with ‘old fashioned’ states; could use military force independently of the United Nations; and impose protectorates to replace regimes which ‘misgovern’.

This may have sounded quite laudable to the Euro-élites initially, but this soft-power European Leviathan was wholly underpinned by the unstated – but essential – assumption that America ‘had Europe’s back’. The first intimation of the collapse of this necessary pillar was Trump who spoke of Europe as a ‘rival’. Now the US flight from Kabul, and the AUKUS deal, hatched behind Europe’s back, unmissably reveals that the US does not at all have Europe’s back.

This is no semantic point. It is central to the EU concept. As just one example: when Mario Draghi was recently parachuted onto Italy as PM, he wagged his finger at the assembled Italian political parties: “Italy would be pro-European and North Atlanticist too”, he instructed them. This no longer makes sense in the light of recent events. So what is Europe? What does it mean to be ‘European’? All that needs to be thought through.

Europe today is caught between a rock and a hard place. Does it possess the energy (and the humility) to look itself in the mirror, and re-position itself diplomatically? It would require altering its address to both Russia and China, in the light of a Realpolitik analysis of its interests and capabilities.

Authored by Alex Wu via The Epoch Times,

The Chinese regime has notified local authorities to prepare for a large-scale outbreak of COVID-19, according to leaked internal documents obtained by the Chinese Epoch Times.

One document, titled “Notice of Further Strengthening of Epidemic Prevention” was issued by the Chinese regime’s State Council, and forwarded by Fujian provincial government to local authorities on Sept. 30.

The other is a “National Day Epidemic Prevention Notice” issued by the State Council on Oct. 1 and distributed by the Fujian provincial officials to local authorities.

The documents are both marked “extra urgent.”

Both notices request enhanced preparations for an emergency response to the outbreak, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) putting forward at least two standards for local authorities.

One is to build central isolation sites, with local authorities required by the end of October to set up isolation centers and rooms of not less than 20 rooms per 10,000 people. The scale of each isolation site must be more than 100 rooms.

According to public data, the population of Fujian Province in 2020 was 41.54 million. As of Sept. 19, the province has set up 35,691 quarantine rooms in 296 central sites.

Based on the standard in the epidemic prevention notice, Fujian Province will need to build at least 83,000 quarantine rooms by the end of October, which is around 47,000 rooms in less than a month.

According to one expert, the requirements for the COVID-19 quarantine sites reveal the real situation of the pandemic in China.

Dr. Sean Lin, a former virology researcher at the U.S. Army Research Institute, told The Epoch Times:

“This reflects the CCP’s concern about the rise of the epidemic. It must have been concealing the true epidemic in mainland China, otherwise it would not suddenly issue a national notice of emergency preparedness.”

“Notice of Further Strengthening of Epidemic Prevention” requires the establishment of a five-layered control system.

It states:

“Township and street CCP cadres, community grid staff, grassroots medical workers, police, and volunteers shall jointly implement community epidemic prevention,” such as “strictly implement[ing] community prevention and control,” or locking down residential communities.

Lin said that the control system is actually to tighten social management in local areas, and “the CCP’s purpose is to tighten control.”

“If there is no nucleic acid test, all the CCP’s epidemic prevention measures are the same as political campaigns. For example, you can be quarantined at any time and put in a quarantine site. And the quarantine sites can also be a place of political persecution,” Lin said.

“No matter who you are, as long as the CCP says that you tested positive in a nucleic acid test, it will deprive you of all your rights. The CCP’s quarantine sites are actually an alternative form of concentration camp.”

One of the most feared planes on the modern battlefield is the U.S. Air Force’s AC-130H Spectre gunship. The service has made major upgrades to the gunship, including a new offensive laser weapon system. 

Lockheed Martin published a press release last week outlining how the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) “is ready for fielding today.” 

“Completion of this milestone is a tremendous accomplishment for our customer,” said Rick Cordaro, vice president, Lockheed Martin Advanced Product Solutions. “These mission success milestones are a testament of our partnership with the U.S. Air Force in rapidly achieving important advances in laser weapon system development. Our technology is ready for fielding today.”

The gunship, nicknamed “Hell in the Sky,” packs a serious punch with three side-firing weapons, including a 25mm Gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer. The fourth will be the AHEL, a chemical energy weapon, unleashing concentrated pulses of light to transfer energy to the target, quickly heating it and damaging it. 

Lockheed went on to say the “AHEL subsystem for integration with other systems in preparation for ground testing and ultimately flight testing aboard the AC-130J aircraft.” There was no mention of when the laser weapon system would conduct air tests. 

The 60-kilowatt laser weapon doesn’t have enough energy to punch a hole through a main battle tank or blow an enemy soldier to pieces, but rather it can melt ground-based satellite antennas and optical sensors. 

There’s also a push by the Pentagon to develop and field laser weapons that are a “million times stronger” than anything out in the field today.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via caitlinjohnstone.substack.com

An important and long-overdue debate has occurred between Iraq-raping arch-neocon Bill Kristol and the tireless libertarian war critic Scott Horton on the subject of US interventionism, and you should definitely drop whatever you’re doing and watch it immediately. The resolution up for debate was “A willingness to intervene, and to seek regime change, is key to an American foreign policy that benefits America,” with Kristol obviously arguing in the affirmative and Horton in the negative.

• The introduction starts here.
• Kristol’s opening argument starts here.
• Horton’s opening argument begins here.
• Questions from the moderator (where things really heat up) starts here.
• Q&A from the audience (in my opinion is the best part) begins here.

The winner of the debate will be obvious to anyone watching. Horton plowed through criticisms of the way US foreign policy is constantly “creating its own disasters it must then attempt to solve” from his encyclopedic knowledge of interventionist bloodbaths and their undeniable repercussions while Kristol appeared frequently flustered, passed on multiple rebuttals, and got called on blatantly false claims.

Horton rattled off nations, dates and death tolls in rapid succession and repeatedly referenced Kristol’s own role in imperialist bloodshed, while Kristol relied almost entirely on insubstantial assertions to defend his position that “we can be at once a republic and a liberal empire” and empty dismissal of Horton’s points about the destructive nature of various US foreign interventions.

In the end a deflated-looking Kristol gave closing remarks which amounted to little more than whining that Horton’s position doesn’t assume war hawks like himself are acting “in good faith”, while Horton’s closing statement just continued his blistering assault.

By the end of it you almost feel bad for old Bill.

The audience unsurprisingly sided overwhelmingly with Horton by a significantly greater margin at the end of the debate than the beginning. The only unanswered question when all was said and done was, how the hell did Kristol get it in his head that entering this debate was a good idea?

One can only assume hubris. Hubris arising from a life in an elitist echo chamber where his warped views are seldom challenged, and continual marination in the kind of unearned validation that only Beltway swamp monsters ever receive.

So watch and enjoy, folks. Participating in this kind of humiliating debate is not a mistake that any high-profile neocon is likely to repeat anytime soon.

Apple isn’t just planning on getting into the car business, it plans on getting further into your business, no matter what car you drive.

That’s because the tech giant is looking to vastly expand its CarPlay feature, which is already used by millions of drivers to control music and get directions in their vehicles. 

Apple says it is expanding the reach of CarPlay and “working on technology that would access functions like the climate-control system, speedometer, radio and seats,” according to a new report by Bloomberg. The company’s CarPlay feature allows drivers and passengers to hook up their iPhones to their vehicles, mostly for infotainment purposes.

The new project is codenamed “IronHeart” and would need to be executed with the help of automakers. Per Bloomberg, a new version of the software could include features to control:

• inside and outside temperature and humidity readings
• temperature zones, fans and the defroster systems
• settings for adjusting surround-sound speakers, equalizers, tweeters, subwoofers, and the fade and balance
• seats and armrests
• the speedometer, tachometer and fuel instrument clusters

Apple could “turn CarPlay into an interface that could span nearly the entire car” with the improvements, the report says. The all-in-one interface would be similar to the type that is being included in newer EVs.

Some drivers have complained of having to switch between Apple’s interface adn the car’s interface to manage some controls. In 2015, Apple allowed carmakers to develop third party apps to work with CarPlay and in 2019, the tech giant enabled support for the platform on secondary car screens, like digital instrument clusters. Neither of the modifications caught on broadly with automakers. 

The expansion of CarPlay would mark Apple’s most drastic move into vehicles since CarPlay was released in 2014. The feature is now available in more than 600 car models and Apple’s Siri voice assistant, works in tandem with the software. 

Some auto manufacturers, like Tesla, have balked at offerings from Apple and Google, choosing instead to develop their own software. 

The report says Apple may still cancel the project if the features wind up not showing enough promise.
 

By James Holmes,J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. Originally published in 19fortyfive.com

Back in August in the Washington Examiner, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin (and a 1945 Contributing Editor) contended that Taiwan must go nuclear in the wake of the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan. It can no longer count on a mercurial United States to keep its security commitments to the island. To survive it should obey the most primal, bareknuckles law of world politics: self-help.

QED.

Set aside Rubin’s claim that the Afghan denouement wrought irreparable harm to America’s standing vis-à-vis allies. He could be right, but I personally doubt it. The United States gave Afghanistan—a secondary cause by any standard—twenty years, substantial resources, and many military lives. That’s a commitment of serious heft, and one that gave Afghans a chance to come together as a society. That they failed reflects more on them than the United States. I suspect Taiwan would be grateful for a commitment of that magnitude and duration.

Yet Rubin’s larger point stands. One nation depends on another for salvation at its peril. Wise statesmen welcome allies . . . without betting everything on them. Taiwan should found its diplomacy and military strategy on deterring Chinese aggression if possible—alone if need be—and on stymieing a cross-strait assault if forced to it. This is bleak advice to be sure, but who will stand by Taiwan if the United States fails to? Japan or Australia might intercede alongside America, but not without it. Nor can Taipei look for succor to the UN Security Council or any other international body where Beijing wields serious clout. These are feeble bulwarks against aggression.

Deterrence, then, is elemental. But does a deterrent strategy demand atomic deterrence? Not necessarily. It’s far from clear that nuclear weapons deter much apart from nuclear bombardment—the type of aggression least likely to befall Taiwan. After all, the mainland longs to possess the island, with all the strategic value it commands. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has little use for a radioactive wasteland.

CCP overseers are vastly more likely to resort to military measures short of nuclear arms. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could launch a naval blockade or a conventional air campaign against Taiwan in a bid to starve out the populace or bludgeon them into submission. And even a direct cross-strait amphibious offensive—the PLA’s surest way to seize prime real estate on a tight timetable—would preserve most of Taiwan’s value to China.

So, it seems, a nonnuclear onslaught is what Taipei mainly needs to deter. History has shown that nuclear weapons stand little chance of deterring nonnuclear aggression. A threat to visit a Hiroshima or Nagasaki on, say, Shanghai in retaliation for low-level aggression would be implausible. Breaching the nuclear threshold would do little good strategically while painting the islanders as amoral—and hurting their prospects of winning international support in a cross-strait war.

An implausible threat stands little chance of deterring. Think about Henry Kissinger’s classic formula for deterrence, namely that it’s a product of multiplying three variables: capability, resolve, and belief. Capability and resolve are the components of strength. Capability means physical power, chiefly usable military might. Resolve means the willpower to use the capabilities on hand to carry out a deterrent threat. A deterrent threat generally involves denying a hostile contender what it wants or meting out punishment afterward should the contender defy the threat.

Statesmen essaying deterrence are in charge of capability and resolution. They can amass formidable martial power and steel themselves to use it. That doesn’t mean their efforts at deterrence will automatically succeed, though. Belief is Kissinger’s other crucial determinant. It’s up to the antagonist whether it believes in their combined capability and willpower.

Taiwan could field a nuclear arsenal, that is, and its leadership could summon the determination to use the arsenal under specific circumstances such as a nuclear or conventional attack on the island. In other words, it could accumulate the capacity to thwart acts the leadership deems unacceptable or punish them should they occur. But would Chinese Communist magnates find the island’s atomic arsenal and displays of willpower convincing?

Against a nuclear attack, maybe. If Taipei maintained an armory that could inflict damage on China that CCP leaders found unbearable, then Beijing ought to desist from a nuclear attack under the familiar Cold War logic of mutual assured destruction. The two opponents would reach a nuclear impasse.

Kissinger appends a coda to his formula for deterrence, namely that deterrence is a product of multiplication, not a sum. If any one variable is zero, so is deterrence. What that means is that Taiwan could muster all the military might and fortitude in the world and fail anyway if China disbelieved in its capability, resolve, or both. And it might: Chinese Communist leaders have a history of making statements breezily disparaging the impact of the ultimate weapon if used against China. Founding CCP chairman Mao Zedong once derided nukes as a “paper tiger.” A quarter-century ago a PLA general (apparently) joked that Washington would never trade Los Angeles for Taipei.

The gist of such statements: nuclear threats cannot dissuade China from undertaking actions that serve the vital interest as the CCP leadership construes it.

Again, though, nuclear deterrence ought to be a peripheral concern for Taipei. Beijing is unlikely to order doomsday strikes against real estate it prizes, regardless of whether the occupants of that real estate brandish nuclear arms or not. Far better for the island’s leadership to refuse to pay the opportunity costs of going nuclear and instead concentrate finite militarily relevant resources to girding for more probable contingencies.

Contingencies such as repulsing a conventional cross-strait assault.

Wiser investment will go to armaments that make the island a prickly “porcupine” bristling with  “quills” in the form of shore-based anti-ship and anti-air missiles along with sea-based systems such as minefields, surface patrol craft armed to the teeth with missiles, and, once Taiwan’s shipbuilding industry gears up, silent diesel-electric submarines prowling the island’s environs. These are armaments that could make Taiwan indigestible for the PLA. And Beijing could harbor little doubt Taipei would use them.

Capability, resolve, belief. Deterrence through denial.

So Michael Rubin is correct to urge Taiwan not to entrust its national survival to outsiders. But it can take a pass on nuclear weapons—and husband defenses better suited to the strategic surroundings.

The Golden State has long burnished its reputation as the most “progressive” (at least when it comes to superficial posturing) state in the union by adopting ultra-strict emissions standards and gas taxes (which is why Californians pay $6 a gallon right now), offering official protection to sanctuary cities, and a host of other measures, including – most recently – outlawing bacon with some new ‘animal welfare’ law.

Meanwhile, homelessness and inequality are soaring in Cali as businesses and residents (most recently Tesla and Elon Musk) have fled for the exits, flocking to places like Texas and Florida.

Yet once again, Gov Gavin Newsom demonstrated Saturday just how out of touch the state’s leadership is when he signed into law one of the most ridiculous examples of government overreach in support of enforcing the “woke” agenda that we have ever seen. From here on out, any store in California with more than 500 employees (which essentially means all the big-box stores) are legally required to establish “gender-neutral” sections for a small range of products (essentially just toys and hygiene products).

The law was inspired by “LGBT advocates” who claim that the colors pink and blue, when used in marketing, reinforce gender stereotypes that can be “harmful”.

The law will allow dividing clothing and other products into boys and girls’ sections (due to its obvious practicality) to continue. But clothing stores must also now include a “gender neutral” section as well.

As if business owners didn’t have enough on their hands dealing with COVID, the new law will require affected retailers to majorly reorganize, essentially forcing stores to shrink the sizes of their ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ sections while forcing them to place more items especially toys and things like razors that many complain have been subjected to the “pink tax”, in the new gender-neutral section.

The bill was written and championed by Evan Low, a Democrat state assemblyman representing Cali’s 28th district (in Silicon Valley). It was rejected twice before the governor ultimately signed it.

“We need to stop stigmatizing what’s acceptable for certain genders and just let kids be kids,” Low said. “My hope is this bill encourages more businesses across California and the US to avoid reinforcing harmful and outdated stereotypes.”

In reality, the law won’t have much practical effect at all since big box stores like Target and Wal-Mart have already been making “reforms” moving away from “boys” and “girls” sections in the face of agitation from LGBT activists. Although California is the first state to adopt this policy into law.

The law was opposed by some Republicans, who argued the government shouldn’t tell parents or businesses how to handle this. Interestingly, at least one big-box store – Target – already committed to easing gender identifiers attached to its products years ago.

Given the bill’s almost-laughable premise, we wonder: who will be left to “enforce” this new law? Will gender studies majors suddenly have a market demand for their expertise?