Category Archives: defense policy

Mistaken Goal

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French President Emmanuel Macron says the West must give Russia security guarantees as part of a peace settlement regarding its invasion of Ukraine.

This is, to use the technical term, a crock.

Macron needs to stop parroting the barbarian chieftain’s claims of security risks and, instead, say explicitly what security threats actually face the barbarian. He cannot because none exist that are unrelated to the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine needs security guarantees (which Macron so kindly conceded along with his “must give”), and those guarantees must be real, not the sham/con job that was the Budapest Memorandum that was centered on Ukraine.

The Russian barbarian, on the other hand, will receive his security guarantee in the form of his removal of his hordes from Ukraine—all of Ukraine. From that moment risks to, threats against, the barbarian will virtually cease to exist.

The reason for expanding NATO, for bringing into any sort of Western alliance nations bordering on the Russian Federation, is wholly defensive—to increase the security of those nations against the barbarian’s expansionism, an acquisitiveness empirically demonstrated by his denial of Ukraine as an actual nation followed by his invasion of that nation. When the barbarian leaves off from his expansionist policy, risks and threats regarding him will cease to exist entirely.

Russia has, after all, exactly nothing (which is to say nada, zilch, zip, zero) which anyone in the West wants that can’t be gotten far more cheaply through threat-free, peaceful, mutually beneficial free trade exchanges.

Even one so enlightened as Macron knows this.

Biden and His Iran Nuclear Weapons Deal

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He’s still after one, one that would give the Mullahs hundreds of billions of dollars in return for their delaying, briefly, development and production of nuclear weapons. This despite the Mullahs’ avowed goal of destroying Israel, its empirical history of spending billions of dollars funding its terrorist clients and their terrorism, and the Mullahs’ current terrorism against their own subjects for those subjects’ heinous crime of protesting the Iranian government’s murder of a young woman Iranian “police” had arrested and had in police “custody” at the time of her murder.

Biden refuses to change his goal vis-à-vis that deal. Refuses to, not cannot, change. Gabriel Noronha, ex-special adviser on Iran for the State Department offered this:

Biden officials feel that to announce an end to negotiations would be admitting failure, and that snapback also signals the end to the JCPOA[.]

This is just a silly rationalization, though. It would be easy enough—and highly effective—to say words to the effect of “Worth a shot, didn’t work due to Iranian government intransigence, we’re ending negotiations.”

Acknowledging that something hasn’t worked out as planned and changing to something else is the stuff of successful business, and it’s the stuff of successful politics.

But Biden, the great Senator deal maker, is desperate for his deal. And that’s to the detriment of our national security and to that of Israel and to that of our other allies and friends.

What Biden’s Border Policy Has Accomplished

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Here’s the flow of fentanyl into our nation that President Joe Biden (D) and his administration is so actively permitting with his No Southern Border policy. (For both graphs, Left-Click|Open-in-New-Tab to get a larger view.)Nor is the death and destruction limited to our southern border States.

Biden is permitting the attacks throughout our nation with his refusal to deal with our southern border.

Beyond that, it’s not just the Mexican drug cartels that the Biden administration is actively allowing to flood our nation with fentanyl through his policy. The cartels are getting, free-flowingly and cheaply, the precursor chemicals for manufacturing fentanyl from the People’s Republic of China.

Not only is the Biden administration refusing to secure our border—especially against the importation of this murderous drug—the Biden administration is refusing to take action against the PRC to put an end to its active role in poisoning Americans.

Boris Johnson is Mistaken

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Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson advocates—absolutely correctly—that the West must step up its aid to Ukraine in order to accelerate an end to the barbarian’s invasion on terms favorable to Ukraine.

But early on in his Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote a serious mistake.

Russian forces must be pushed back to the de facto boundary of Feb. 24.

Johnson’s heart is in the right place, but he’s badly mistaken here.

Johnson wrote in his immediately preceding sentence,

The war in Ukraine can end only with Vladimir Putin’s defeat.

The barbarian must be fully expelled from every inch of Ukrainian territory; that’s the only outcome that actually would be a defeat for Putin. Agreeing the 24 Feb line of more-or-less control only would agree stalemate while actively accepting the premise that put the barbarian that far into Ukrainian territory in the first place: that a Russian Anschluss is legitimate.

There is no alternative to the barbarian’s complete expulsion.

Full stop.

Cost Is Too High?

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Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s terms for negotiating with Russia an end to the barbarian’s invasion of is nation begins with the barbarian being driven completely out of Ukraine. Which raises a question that shouldn’t even be a question.

[P]ushing Russian forces out of the entrenched positions they hold in more than 15% of Ukraine’s territory will require an even greater flow of military support—possibly more than the West is willing and able to bear.

This timidity is especially rampant in President Joe Biden’s (D) administration.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The Wall Street Journal last Monday [4 December] that the US would support Kyiv in recovering territory Russia has grabbed since launching its large-scale invasion on Feb. 24, suggesting that Washington might not back Ukraine militarily in retaking areas that Russia seized in 2014, including the Crimean Peninsula.
Other Ukraine allies are adamant that Kyiv must win back all its lands.

Those others are correct, and it’s especially embarrassing that our own administration doesn’t understand that. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Tobias Billström put the matter succinctly:

Anything less than a Russian defeat in Ukraine will embolden Moscow and other authoritarian powers[.]

Those other authoritarian powers include the People’s Republic of China and Iran. Encouraging the PRC puts the Republic of China at direct risk as PRC President Xi Jinping has said openly and often that he intends to absorb the RoC into the body of the PRC, and at gun point if necessary. The mullahs of Iran will be encouraged to push their domination over Iraq, and they’ll be encouraged press their Yemen war even more zealously to weaken Saudi Arabia and then to dominate that nation.  Which puts Israel at deadly risk.

Those aren’t the only costs, either. Russian President Vladimir Putin has often said that Ukraine isn’t really a nation; it’s part of Metropolitan Russia, and he intends to erase that nation and absorb it. He’s also said he intends to recreate the Russian empire, which puts the Baltic States, Poland, and the nations on the western shore of the Black Sea at risk. Even what used to be the German Democratic Republic will be at risk. All that’s required is the barbarian’s victory in Ukraine. Even his merely holding the 14 February already occupied oblasts would only encourage him.

Go back to the PRC. Xi’s successful conquering of the RoC would cement his control over the South China Sea and all of its fisheries, undersea oil and natural gas fields, and all the rare earths on the sea floor. It also would give him control over the sea lines of commerce on which the Republic of Korea and Japan utterly depend—and through which at least 40% of the economic value shipped to the US sails.

Biden and his affiliates need to find some backbone vis-à-vis Ukraine. The problem here is, in the end, not a matter of cost—the cost of failure is far greater, and it includes the non-economic cost of the erasure of at least two independent nations from the Earth.

The problem here is the degree of political will.