March Madness, Nike, and the Uyghur Genocide

(Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)

Basketball fans can be forgiven for wanting to leave politics at the door and enjoy March Madness. Yet Nike’s sponsorship of all six of the teams remaining in the tournament raises unavoidable questions about the connection between sports, corporate sponsors, and human-rights abuses given the company’s ties to Uyghur forced labor, writes Nury Turkel in National Review. As long as companies and individuals continue to invest in China despite Beijing’s human-rights abuses, there will be too little incentive for Chinese officials to change their behavior.

David Asher on Fox News: WHO Report on COVID-19 is a “Farce”

Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Photo by Feature China/Barcroft Media via Getty Images) 

The release of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigative report on the origins of COVID-19 has prompted accusations of whitewashing and a cover-up by the Chinese government. David Asher joined Martha MacCallum on Fox News to discuss the report, which he describes as a “farce,” arguing that the evidence strongly suggests that the virus originated in a lab.  

A Good Battery Is the Best Defense Against a Military Assault

U.S. Navy USS Winston S. Churchill. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

The energy provided by advanced batteries enables the U.S. military to sustain its platforms, weapon systems, and soldiers in the field, Arthur Herman and Nadia Schadlow write in The Wall Street Journal. With China dominating the entire battery supply chain, it is crucial for the U.S. to reshore this key part of America’s defense innovation base.

China’s Middle Eastern Aspirations

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

Last week, China and Iran announced a “comprehensive strategic partnership”—a troubling development that Hudson’s Michael Doran and Peter Rough warned against in a 2020 essay in Tablet. Doran and Rough predicted that China would push the U.S. aside in the region to advance its economic and strategic goals and advance its quest for global supremacy.

How America’s Adversaries View the Border Crisis

Migrants are processed at a holding facility run by the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) on March 30, 2021 in Donna, Texas. (Photo by Dario Lopez-Mills - Pool/Getty Images)

Rebeccah Heinrichs joined Fox News to discuss the Biden administration’s response to the crisis at America’s southern border. Rebeccah argued that the administration’s poor handling of the deteriorating situation telegraphs to adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran that the Biden administration is unwilling to defend America’s sovereignty, projecting an image of weakness at a time when the U.S. cannot afford to be viewed in this way.

BEFORE YOU GO...

Join Hudson Institute Senior Fellows Tod Lindberg and Richard Weitz and expert panelists Sarah J. Gamberini and Aurimas Piečiukaitis next Monday for a discussion on how authoritarian regimes spread disinformation about COVID-19 as a weapon in their malign influence campaigns. What impact has this had? Is the U.S. doing enough to fight back? Please join our distinguished panel for this timely discussion.