China looks to expand its Cuban base; Pentagon pencil pushers find $6.2bn more for Ukraine arms

(Originally published June 21 in “What in the World“) After breaking the story about China’s plans to pay Cuba to let it build a spy base that the White House then revealed China had built four years ago, The Journal has broken a corrected version of that story: China is paying Cuba to let it build a military training base there.

The report puts in starker light Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip this week to Beijing, where he met China’s President Xi Jinping in an effort to halt a downward spiral that has wound them relations back to their worst since they were normalized in 1979.

The Journal report, matched by an official who spoke to Politico, this time cites several unnamed current and former officials citing fragmentary, but “convincing,” classified intelligence. Why China would want to train troops in a country where it doesn’t have any remains a mystery. Exactly! Which is why, the Journal says, officials are worried the training base is just a prelude to permanently stationing Chinese troops just 90 miles south of Key West.

The White House hasn’t commented on the Journal’s latest story, but if things go like last time, we’ll next find out China already has a full-fledged naval base in Cuba like those the U.S. has in Japan, South Korea, and its de facto bases in Singapore and the Philippines—and now Taiwan.

Russia has meanwhile launched drone strikes against Ukraine’s biggest cities and new land grabs in eastern Donestsk and Luhansk provinces, even as it fends off Ukraine’s counteroffensive to the south. It has also drawn a red line around Crimea. Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu warned Tuesday that if Ukraine uses its Western-supplied missiles to attack targets there it will consider the West “fully involved” in the conflict and retaliate by attacking “decision-making centers” in Ukraine.

And more of those U.S. weapons will soon be on the way, without any need for White House or Congressional approval. The bookkeeping boffins at the Pentagon now say they’ve managed to conjure up even more weapons for Ukraine, simply by properly depreciating the value of the weapons sent there already from the Pentagon’s own arsenal.

Congress gave the White House a specific budget for how much it could “draw down” from the Pentagon’s existing arsenals and give as hand-me-downs to Ukraine. As the Pentagon explained last month, though, it had been valuing each weapon at how much it would cost the Pentagon to replace with a new one. Because, you know, all those weapons will have to be replaced with new ones to keep the U.S. ready to fend off attacks from the usual bogeymen: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Islamic terrorists, alt-right Trump supporters on Capitol Hill. The list goes on.

But according to the green-visored folks at the Pentagon, they should have been valuing those weapons at their depreciated book value, like you would a used car. By doing that, the Pentagon reckoned it had just freed up another $3 billion of weapons to send to Ukraine. Now, it says that its accounting move has generated even more savings—$2.6 billion for fiscal 2022 and $3.6 billion in the current year.