General

The Atlantic Council went out front on Jan. 28 publishing a lengthy proposal to try to overthrow China’s President Xi Jinping, linked to a policy document written by a “former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China.” Frederick Kempe, head of the Council, wrote a Foreword to the document, and published an op-ed for CNBC Jan. 30, highlighting it. The “former official,” who Kempe says prefers to remain anonymous, calls for efforts to encourage a coup d’état against the rule of President Xi Jinping in China. Called “The Longer Telegram,” the document refers to George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” (also anonymous at the time) which called for a “containment policy” against the Soviet Union.

In “Biden Must Draw Red Lines Against China and Focus on Xi Jinping’s Authoritarian Leadership,” for Politico on Jan. 28, Anonymous describes the 85-page paper for the Atlantic Council, largely taken from the paper’s Executive Summary: “Xi has demonstrated that he intends to project China’s authoritarian system, coercive foreign policy, and military presence well beyond his country’s own borders to the world at large,” the author says. “China under Xi, unlike under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, is no longer a status quo power. It has become a revisionist power. For the United States, its allies, and the U.S.-led liberal international order, this represents a fundamental shift in the strategic environment. Ignoring this profound change courts peril. Xi is no longer just a problem for U.S. primacy. He now presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world….

“The political reality is that the CCP is significantly divided on Xi’s leadership and his vast ambitions. Senior party members have been greatly troubled by Xi’s policy direction and angered by his endless demands for absolute loyalty. They fear for their own lives and the future livelihoods of their families. Of particular political toxicity in this mix are the reports unearthed by international media of the wealth amassed by Xi’s family and members of his political inner circle, despite the vigor with which Xi has conducted the anti-corruption campaign. It is simply unsophisticated strategy to treat the entire Communist Party as a single target when such internal fault lines should be clear to the analyst’s eye—and in the intelligent policy maker’s penning. A campaign to overthrow the party also ignores the fact that China, under all five of its post-Mao leaders prior to Xi, was able to work with the United States. Under them, China aimed to join the existing international order, not to remake it in China’s own image. Now, however, the mission for U.S. China strategy should be to see China return to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo….

“Given the reality that today’s China is a state in which Xi has centralized nearly all decision-making power in his own hands, and used that power to substantially alter China’s political, economic, and foreign-policy trajectory, U.S. strategy must remain laser focused on Xi, his inner circle, and the Chinese political context in which they rule. Changing their decision-making will require understanding, operating within, and changing their political and strategic paradigm….”

And again: “The overriding political objective should be to cause China’s elite leadership to collectively conclude that it is in the country’s best interests to continue to operate within the existing U.S.-led liberal international order rather than build a rival order, and that it is in the party’s best interests, if it wishes to remain in power at home, not to attempt to expand China’s borders or export its political model beyond China’s shores. In other words, China can become a different type of global great power than that envisaged by Xi.”

On Feb. 18, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover, the largest rover ever sent to Mars, will land on the red planet to begin a new science mission that seeks to not only deepen human understanding of Martian geology and answer questions about whether or not life ever existed on Mars, but also act as a trailblazer for future missions to Mars. But before the science mission can begin, Perseverance has to get through the most difficult landing maneuver that the space agency has ever attempted.

The landing sequence will begin with a fiery entry into the planet’s atmosphere, then a parachute descent down towards its landing spot in the Jezero Crater. At about 2-3 miles above the Martian surface, the “sky crane” carrying the rover will separate from the parachute and make a powered descent to the surface. Once the rover touches down, the sky crane will separate and fly off. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that entry, descent and landing (EDL) is the most critical and most dangerous part of the mission,” Allen Chen, the EDL lead, said on Jan. 27 during a NASA JPL press conference. “Success is never assured, and that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built to the most dangerous site we’ve ever attempted to land on.” A spectacular animation video of the landing sequence can be seen in this video.

Jezero Crater was chosen as the landing site because it is thought to have once been the home of a river delta and lake filled with water. “Perseverance’s sophisticated science instruments will not only help in the hunt for fossilized microbial life, but also expand our knowledge of Martian geology and its past, present, and future,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020, from Caltech in Pasadena, California. “Our science team has been busy planning how best to work with what we anticipate will be a firehose of cutting-edge data. That’s the kind of ‘problem’ we are looking forward to.”

In addition to science instruments intended to explore the Martian surface, the mission also carries technologies more focused on future Mars exploration, reports a NASA press release. MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), a car-battery-size device in the rover’s chassis, is designed to demonstrate that converting Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen is possible. Future applications of the technology could produce the vast quantities of oxygen that would be needed as a component of the rocket fuel and for breathing for astronauts.

The Perseverance mission, the NASA release notes, is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.

In remarks on January 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warned that clinical trial results from Johnson & Johnson showing that its vaccine is less effective against the South African variant of the coronavirus, were a “wake-up call.” J&J and other vaccine manufactures will have to be “nimble to be able to adjust readily” to produce modified vaccines, Fauci said. The new Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Rochelle Walensky stated at the same briefing that it is urgent to increase the level of sequencing nationwide, in order to catch new strains before they get completely out of control.

“We have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we’ve done so far,” Walensky said. The CDC has contracted with various universities and four private companies—Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix—to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said. But this is far less than what is required, according to various experts in the field, and even less than what many other countries are already doing.

“We are in a race against time because of these mutations. And in that race, we are falling behind,” said Mara G. Aspinall, a biomedical diagnostics professor at Arizona State University, in comments reported by the Washington Post. More equipment, staffing and funding are needed to increase sequencing,

“None of that exists right now. We’re incredibly behind compared to other countries,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “We have no idea what is out there in our country. We don’t even know what we don’t know.”

Southern Illinois University RNA biochemist Keith Gagnon stated: “Genomic surveillance is probably the number-one thing, besides COVID-19 testing itself, that we can do to track the virus. Without it, we are flying blind.”