Category Archives: foreign policy

What the President’s Staff Thinks about our Allies

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial panties are at it again. Now the undergarments are in an uproar over the Signal chat wherein some aspects of an attack on Houthis were discussed just before the attacks went in. The discussion certainly presents bad optics for the administration, and maybe it shouldn’t have been done on Signal.

However.

A real security scandal is that the Signal chat apparently included Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s envoy to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Press reports say Mr Witkoff was receiving these messages on the commercial app while in Moscow. This is security malpractice. Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter.

What the editors chose to omit in their hysteria is that Signal is reputed to a very secure means of group communication; it’s also one explicitly approved for secure communications by the Biden administration. To the extent that Signal is that secure—the editors elide mention of any investigation of this—the Russians could listen in to their heart’s content, but they wouldn’t learn anything, unless they had an agent looking over Witkoff’s shoulder at his phone or laptop.

One more item the editors chose to elide, which came out in so many words in Wednesday’s noon o’clock presser hosted by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: Witkoff had no personal communication devices with him on his trip to Mocow. He had only a Federal government-provided secure cell phone provided to him explicitly for the trip. I’m frankly up in the air between these editors being that ignorant of the facts or if, given my nearby post, they’re simply that dishonest in blithely repeating the disinformation of “press reports.”

There’s this overreaction, especially:

Yet Vice President JD Vance second-guessed the President’s strikes on the chat because he said only “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez [sic]” canal, while “40 percent of European trade does.” That understates the US interest in freedom of navigation. Mr Vance even suggested his boss didn’t understand that striking the Houthis was at odds with Mr Trump’s “message on Europe right now.” He added that “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” So the Vice President is willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping to spite the Europeans?

This really is a cynically offered overreaction. For one thing, which the editors omit to mention here, that conversation occurred shortly before Trump made his decision and ordered the strikes to go in. This is staff—Vance—doing its job of devil’s advocating a decision that’s still only potential, even arguing seriously against it while it’s only potential. The editors also omitted to mention that, in that same chat session, Vance said he supported the President’s decision to go ahead: once the boss’s decision was made, argument stopped, and it became everyone’s duty to get behind it and make it work.

For another thing, how well has Pretty Please worked over the last 70 years, or so, in getting Europe to see to its own responsibilities instead of relying primarily if not solely on American blood and treasure for its economic, even political, welfare? Recall that Europe’s NATO members only started getting serious about honoring their commitments to NATO after Trump threatened to leave the organization during his first term, and today a third of Europe’s NATO members continue actively to betray their fellow members with their refusal to honor their duties to the organization. The matter of the Houthis in this conversation is only tangentially related to the overall principle of freedom of navigation.

Vance is far from the only American who’s sick of bailing out Europe. The continent needs to learn, and apparently the only way they will is if they suffer real harm from their determined dependence.

The editors’ remark about being willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping is just cynical exaggeration. The Houthis may be able to severely impact shipping to-from Europe via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, but that shipping is easily rerouted, and has been, to go around Africa. That’s a route that only a few days longer, and those few days are significant only for shipping from India, Pakistan, or eastern Africa. From farther Asia, which is the bulk of commerce into Europe other than from the United States, the added days are an insignificant delay—and they avoid the toll Egypt charges for the use of its canal.

Signaling

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors want President Donald Trump (R) to stand strong against Iran vis-à-vis Iran’s push to develop nuclear weapons and the requisite delivery systems (which aren’t limited to ballistic missiles, even though news writers, herd-like, focus only on those). That add this, though, in their missive:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressed confidence Thursday that sanctions on Iran can “collapse its already buckling economy.” Now he needs the green light to cut off Iran’s oil exports to China. Mr Trump could also let a few Israeli pilots train on US strategic bombers. That would send a message.

No. Iran (and northern Korea and Russia, come to that) has been economically “buckling” for years and years. They’re nowhere near collapse. Sanctions are Critical Items, but they’re far from sufficient. Sending messages by letting foreign pilots train on US aircraft is similarly useless when we’re…messaging…enemy nations that don’t care a fig about the cost to themselves in achieving their destruction of us or our friends.

No.

Iran has shown again and again since 1979 that it wants to spread revolution rather than join and build a prosperous Middle East.

The time for signaling is long past; it never worked anyway: signaling only signals the signaler’s weakness and/or timidity. Trump has sent all the signal that’s necessary in the form of his letter to Khamenei.

The deadline for a serious Iranian response should be a very few days, not weeks or months. The next signal needs to be kinetic, with the complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear and nuclear-related sites, including its uranium storage sites; its air defense facilities; its naval and “commercial” shipping at sea; and its ports on the Persian Gulf and the Persian Sea.

Israel certainly should play the major role in that—they’re Iran’s first target for extermination—but the US should play a major role, as well, from refueling support to participating the bombing and missile attacks.

I Disagree with Israel

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Per a Wall Street Journal article centered on Israel’s revised war plans vis-à-vis Hamas, this appears to be at those plans’ core:

…a series of escalatory steps to gradually ratchet up pressure on Hamas now that talks to extend a seven-week cease-fire have stalled, plans that could lead to a resumption of hostilities in the 16-month war in the Gaza Strip.

The steps, supposedly:

• block the entry of goods and supplies into Gaza
• cut off electricity and water
• campaign of airstrikes and tactical raids against Hamas targets
• displace the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have used the cease-fire to return to their homes
• re-invade Gaza with far more military power than it has deployed so far in the conflict
• hold ground and effectively occupy territory while it attacks the remnants of Hamas

Even if it’s only something like that, gradual escalation, at its core, is a mistake: it gives the enemy time to adapt to the revising situation. Even if the escalatory pace is faster than the enemy’s OODA Loop, that leaves too much room for the enemy to catch up from the first, or first very few, response deficits. It’s necessary IMNSHO to apply maximum pressure at maximum pacing from the start. Leave no room at all for the enemy to adapt to the new and levels of violence and pacing of their application.

This is particularly the case when dealing with a terrorist entity whose avowed purpose in life is the extermination of Israel with no concern whatsoever for the cost to the civilians among whom these terrorists secrete themselves.

What Makes a Match?

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the possibility of Germany acquiring its own nuclear weapons, the news writer had this remark:

[W]ith warheads in the low hundreds, neither the British nor the French arsenals are a match for Russia’s nearly 6,000 warheads.

This comparison is silly. How many targets does Russia face? How many targets in Russia do the UK or France, or potentially Germany, face, whether individually or together?

The match is whether the Europeans have enough warheads and delivery systems to survive an initial Russian attack targeted on those systems, to launch against targets in Russia (and Belorussia and Kaliningrad, since Russia has deployed tactical nuclear weapons there), to relaunch against targets necessitated by systems failures, and to launch again against additional targets in successive waves. Especially that last, since Russian doctrine, inherited from Soviet doctrine, specifies that nuclear war is winnable and that it will be won by successive waves of nuclear attacks rather than a single spasm of everything launched.

It may be that low hundreds are insufficient for that, but it’s unlikely that 6,000 are necessary.

Ignorance of Opinionators

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In the excerpt of her opinion piece in the New Yorker that is quoted in The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable and Quotable section last Sunday, Susan Glasser decried the relative quiescence in DC compared to other nation’s capitals regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) foreign policy moves.

There were no major protests in the quiescent capital…. These acts were a far cry from the popular uprisings that presumably would have convulsed Paris or any other European city if the President of the republic suddenly and unilaterally reoriented the nation’s geopolitical strategy, turned on its major trading partners, and allowed the world’s richest man to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers and billions of dollars in government services.

Unilaterally reoriented? Never mind the petty cultural differences between the United States and European nations. Those nations’ governments do not have their legislatures and Executives as separate, coequal branches of government. Instead, those nations blur the lines between the two, with many explicitly subordinating the Executive function to the legislative.

The United States is the only nation that separates the Legislative, Executive—and the Judicial (see Great Britain for a subordinated judicial function)—into their separate and equal authority branches. In our Executive in particular, those functions with foreign policy input—State, Defense, Commerce, and some others—are explicitly subordinate to, not equal functions with, the Chief Executive of that Branch, the President of the United States.

And yet she bleated, how dare the chief of foreign policy in our system of governance be the one making foreign policy decisions instead of surrendering that responsibility to a subordinate or to a committee of subordinates?

Glasser’s ignorance of the hierarchical nature and structure of the American Executive Branch is astounding.