The Morning Dispatch: A New Indo-Pacific Partnership

Happy Friday! Scientists, please do not attempt to bring woolly mammoths back from extinction. We have watched a lot of movies, and we can pretty much guarantee something is going to go badly wrong.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• French President Emmanuel Macron announced yesterday that a French drone strike last month killed Abu Walid al Sahrawi, the leader of the Islamic State in Greater Sahara. The U.S. government had offered a $5 million reward for information regarding Al Sahrawi’s whereabouts, as he was the mastermind behind a 2017 ambush of U.S. forces in Niger that killed four Green Berets.

• A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from continuing a Trump-era policy—Title 42—that allowed immigration officials to quickly deport or expel migrant families arriving at the southern border on public health grounds during the pandemic. U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan’s ruling only applies to families, meaning the Biden administration can continue to turn away single adults seeking asylum. Previously under Biden, only unaccompanied children had been exempt from Title 42 enforcement.

• Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Trump/Russia investigation, announced the indictment of attorney Michael Sussman on Thursday. The indictment accuses Sussman of lying to the FBI in 2016 over the capacity in which he provided allegedly damaging information about Trump’s dealings with a Russian bank; he was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign at the time.

• GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez—one of 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching former President Donald Trump in January—announced Thursday night he will not run for re-election in 2022. “While my desire to build a fuller family life is at the heart of my decision,” he wrote, “it is also true that the current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party, is a significant factor in my decision.” Gonzalez was facing a Trump-backed primary challenger in Ohio.

• Initial jobless claims increased by 20,000 week-over-week to 332,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. The Census Bureau, meanwhile, announced yesterday that U.S. retail sales rose 0.7 percent from July to August—a significant improvement over the 1.8 percent drop from June to July.

There’s An AUKUS Among Us

In the wake of the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration is preparing for possible military engagement elsewhere: the Indo-Pacific. 

“Today, we’re taking another historic step to deepen and formalize cooperation among all three of our nations because we all recognize the imperative of ensuring peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific over the long term,” President Biden said Wednesday in a virtual press conference alongside Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Biden’s remarks solidified the formation of AUKUS, a new trilateral partnership between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia that will focus on sharing sensitive military technology between the three countries in the cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and undersea domains in the Indo-Pacific. 

China went unmentioned in Wednesday’s press conference—and a senior administration official told reporters in a call outlining the agreement that “this partnership is not aimed or about any one country”—but Biden’s vague references to “strategic stability” in the Indo-Pacific are plainly meant a response to China’s aggressive efforts to expand its power and influence in the region.

A joint press conference Thursday between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and their Australian counterparts helped fill in the blanks. “We spoke in detail about China’s destabilizing activities and Beijing’s efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms,” Austin said. “And while we seek a constructive, results-oriented relationship with the PRC, we will remain clear-eyed in our view of Beijing’s efforts to undermine the established international order.”

As Thomas Joscelyn explained in his latest Vital Interests newsletter, Australia—a member of the informal “Quad” alliance with the United States, Japan, and India—has been “on the frontlines” of U.S.-China policy for quite some time. But the country has also been a long-time trading partner with China. “The idea that Australia has to choose between China and the United States is not correct,” Morrison’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, said in 2017.

Australia’s decision to join AUKUS suggests that its posture toward Beijing has shifted significantly. China-Australia relations have grown strained over the past year following Australia’s demand for an independent inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with China’s decision to slap costly tariffs on Australian goods.

“The world saw China’s aggressive response when Australia led calls for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19,” Blinken said Thursday. “Beijing has seen over the past months that Australia will not back down, and threats of economic retaliation and pressure will not work.”

“Australia’s tired of being pushed around by China,” said Yan Bennett, an expert on the region at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. 

The first priority on the AUKUS agenda is to assist in getting Australia up to speed on nuclear submarine capability. It’s a historic move, seeing as the United States has only shared such technology with another country once: with Great Britain, as part of 1958’s mutual defense agreement between the two countries. Johnson maintained Wednesday that the submarines will be “powered by nuclear reactors, not armed with nuclear weapons.”

Not everyone is thrilled. Australia’s decision to join the alliance also means the country’s $90 billion submarine contract with France from 2016 has been abandoned. France’s foreign affairs minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called Australia’s move a “stab in the back.”

Beijing has not taken well to the news either. Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said Wednesday that countries “should not build exclusionary blocs targeting or harming the interests of third parties,” and “should shake off their Cold-War mentality and ideological prejudice.”

Part of this outrage reflects an insecurity about China’s military capabilities in the region. In recent years, China has embarked on an extensive effort to modernize its military, the People’s Liberation Army. But one area that has been lacking is undersea and submarine warfare.

“They’re very sensitive to other countries engaged in submarine operations near China because they have difficulty finding and tracking and targeting submarines,” explained Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Hence the Chinese government’s extreme reaction to the announcement. “The nuclear submarine cooperation between the U.S., the U.K., and Australia has seriously undermined regional peace and stability, intensified the arms race, and undermined international non-proliferation efforts,” Zhao Lijian, a CCP Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said during a press conference Thursday.

China experts claim that the PLA’s weaknesses extend beyond its undersea capabilities. In June 2020, a skirmish that erupted between Chinese and Indian soldiers on the Himalayan border left 20 Indian border troops and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers dead. Reportedly in keeping with both countries’ de facto border code to not fire weapons across the border, fighters on both sides resorted to fighting with fists, rocks, wooden clubs, and pieces of fence. 

Bennett says the unconventional warfare used during this skirmish highlights  profound weaknesses in China’s military. “Is that indicative of a force that could invade an island off its coast? No, I don’t think so,” Bennett said. “That’s not what a confident military would do, which speaks to their chain of command. So in terms of China’s military, we can’t compare it to the United States at all.”

Mastro expects China to focus less on the West’s military capabilities and more on how the partnership reflects the United States’ evolving relationship with its allies. “To date, countries—even though they’re U.S. allies—are reluctant to militarily be very close with the United States because they don’t want to provoke Beijing’s ire because they’re so economically close to Beijing,” Mastro said. 

That’s changing. Mastro says China will have to come to terms with the fact that “a no-joke coalition is forming against them” in the Indo-Pacific region. “It really is a very costly political signal to Beijing that the United States and its allies are not messing around and if Beijing is going to continue to engage in dangerous and aggressive activities like that, they’re now going to face pushback from more than just the United States,” Mastro said.

Should OSHA’s Mandate Exclude Natural Immunity?

In yesterday’s TMD, we noted that the legality of the Biden administration’s vaccine/testing mandate will likely depend on how “narrow” the emergency ruling from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ends up being. Will it exempt remote workers who do not interact with any of their colleagues in person? Will the requirement apply to those who have some natural immunity to the virus through previous COVID-19 infection?

The latter question is the subject of Andrew’s latest piece, up today on the site. “Biden’s insistence that the vaccinated need to be protected from those around them raises eyebrows, given that the vaccines remain incredibly effective at staving off serious COVID illness and death,” he writes. “But another important question about the forthcoming mandate remains unaddressed too: What about those unvaccinated workers who don’t pose even that miniscule level of threat to their co-workers, because they’ve already acquired immunity by recovering from the coronavirus?”

It’s possible the OSHA rule will make an exception for the previously infected. But don’t count on it.

OSHA, which Biden has tasked with creating the rule in question, has yet to release the specifics of its requirements. But there’s little reason to suspect that the previously infected will receive any dispensation from the eventual requirement. The CDC’s recommendations for who should get the vaccine make no distinction between those who have previously had COVID and those who have not. In response to an inquiry from The Dispatch, an administration official said that question would be part of OSHA’s rulemaking process, and deferred questions about who should get the vaccine to the Department of Health and Human Services: “It’s a health question, not [one for the White House].”

The data on exactly how good natural immunity is remains preliminary, but is certainly strong enough to show the formerly infected unvaccinated don’t present a ‘grave danger’ to those around them.

An emergency temporary OSHA standard is no joke: The governing statute requires the agency to demonstrate a “grave danger” exists in the workplace, one that requires an emergency rule to protect workers. And it’s no insult to OSHA’s brain trust to say they’re going to have a bear of a time trying to think up a definition of “grave danger” that gives a green light to those who are vaccinated but not to former COVID patients who are not.      

The most significant recent piece of data on this question comes from a huge (albeit not yet peer-reviewed) Israeli study, which found that “natural immunity”—that obtained through infection—confers “longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease, and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.”

If that’s true, it’s arguably the whole ball game—if natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity, it’s laughable on its face that former COVID patients would be compelled to be vaccinated out of a desire to protect their already vaccinated brethren. Other preprint studies found less striking results, putting the effectiveness of natural immunity roughly at the same level as that of vaccination. But even these underscore the silliness of treating the vaccinated as safe as a matter of policy while shunning the formerly infected unvaccinated as possible workplace Typhoid Marys.

There’s not a consensus among public health officials regarding natural immunity.

“If we’re going to OSHA mandates,” Offit said, “it’s not an unreasonable thing for someone to say, ‘I have been naturally infected, I think I’m likely to be protected against severe disease, and I would prefer not to get a vaccine.’ I think that’s something someone could reasonably say. It just means you have to prove it, you know, with an antibody test, which is expensive and time-consuming.”

The possibility of allowing previously infected people to opt out of mandates would doubtless create additional bureaucratic complexity—which is part of the reason why some public health experts want to see OSHA forgo them altogether.

“When we go into the military, we don’t sort people out—tall, short, fat, skinny,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt, told The Dispatch. “Line up! You’re all getting the vaccine! Thank you, next! Next! And that’s the trick: Stop being so prissy. When we move into public policy, the operative rule is KISS: Keep it simple, stupid.”

“It has everything to do with implementation,” Schaffner continued. “We can’t say—‘Well, I think I had it back in January.’ ‘Well, do you have a doctor’s statement? Do you have a positive test?’ ‘No, but I felt like it, and my Aunt Suzie had it, and I was exposed to her—’ Sorry. Roll up your sleeve, bang.”

But needless overcomplication may be less of an issue in a workplace vaccine verification system, where employers aren’t administering vaccines—just documenting them. It isn’t clear why it’d be more complicated, for instance, for a workplace to accept documentation of a recent positive COVID antibody test in place of vaccine documentation, if OSHA were to permit them to do so.

Worth Your Time

• Even if it’s true, Yasmin Tayag thinks President Biden should stop referring to COVID-19 as a pandemic of the unvaccinated. “The way the mandates are being presented is driving a wedge between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. If the goal is to inoculate enough people to reach herd immunity, this approach may eventually backfire,” she writes in The Atlantic. “‘If you get into these scenarios where you start pitting one group against another, you create tension, you create resistance,’ says Simon Bacon, a behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. ‘What you really need to do is totally deflate that.’”

• The back and forth over Gen. Mark Milley earlier this week is a perfect example of why the best approach to the news is often to just take a deep breath and wait for more information. “According to several senior Trump administration officials I spoke with this week, the truth is more complicated than either Milley’s attackers or defenders admit,” Josh Rogin writes in The Washington Post. “When proper context is added to the Milley calls, the picture that emerges is not of a brave military officer saving the country from a crazy president hellbent on starting World War III. It’s a more mundane, but all-too-common Washington story of several powerful men with big egos who can’t get along, causing government dysfunction and diplomatic confusion. The episode also illustrates how deeply U.S. foreign policy nowadays is falling victim to our hyperpolarized domestic politics.”

• Few reporters are more plugged in to intra-Democratic Party politics than Dave Weigel, and his ‘The Trailer’ newsletter on the California recall election aftermath is well worth your time. “Democrats now believe vaccination mandates can win votes,” he writes. “The turning point in the recall election came early in August, when Newsom announced new vaccination-or-testing mandates for health-care and education workers — and then, days later, began running ads about them. The recall election, the ads warned, was a ‘matter of life and death.’ The campaign’s own polling found that a supermajority of Californians supported the policy, and the idea of ripping it away was a powerful motivator.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Jonah’s former colleague Ramesh Ponnuru stopped by The Remnant this week for a conversation about the jurisprudence of abortion and the state of the pro-life movement. Plus: Inflation, common good conservatism, and Star Trek. 

• In his French Press yesterday (🔒), David makes the case that The Billionaire Space Race is good for all of us. “Elite innovation tends, in relatively short order, to be democratized and improved,” he writes. “From cars, to planes, to ships, to hotels, to our own homes, virtually every single mode of travel and luxury that we now take for granted started its life on this earth as a luxury enjoyed by a tiny few.”

Let Us Know

Where do you fall on the questions of the OSHA mandate we discussed today? Should previously infected unvaccinated people be exempted? Or should we not be talking about exemptions at all, given that the mandate as a whole will be facing significant legal challenges?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).