Category Archives: foreign policy

Don’t Accept His Credentials

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The British government has nominated Lord Peter Mandelson to be their ambassador to the United States. I write “nominated” because he’s not it until we accept his credentials as British ambassador.

This is what Mandelson has said about Trump in the recent past.

What Donald Trump represents and believes is an anathema to mainstream British opinion.

More:

Even those who have a sneaking admiration for Donald Trump because of his personality, nonetheless regard him as reckless, and a danger to the world.

Especially this:

little short of a white nationalist and a racist.

Now he says,

Frankly, I think President Trump could become one of the most consequential American presidents I have known in my adult life.

Mandelson already has shown what he means by this circumlocution.

And this:

I made those remarks six years ago in 2019, led rather along this by an Italian journalist….
I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong.

Of course those prior remarks weren’t his fault. Never mind that he’s an experienced politician (even though he pretends otherwise) in which profession words are the stock in trade, and he has years of experience dealing with the press. Aside from that, of course he’s claiming to have changed his mind: he wants the prestige and wealthy perks of an ambassadorship.

This is a “diplomat” who’s already demonstrated a level of integrity and bias that shows he can’t be trusted to report to his government objectively about our government’s doings or to treat with our government honestly in his government’s name.

He’s not worth the trouble of dealing with. Don’t accept his credentials.

Dealing with an Enemy Nation

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The good editors of The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece on the challenges to Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent, on the assumption he’s confirmed. The editors, though, have misunderstood some of those challenges.

Hitting China with enormous tariffs will compel Beijing to dig in, not change its economic model, but Mr Bessent might use the threat to urge China to recognize its self-interest in rebalancing.

It’s not important whether the People’s Republic of China changes its economic model. The nation is an enemy of the United States, openly averring its goal of supplanting us on the world stage, and from there controlling our actions on that stage. The PRC needs to be isolated and contained.

By contrast, a mercantilist purchasing deal would fail to address China’s fundamental problem. The Trump administration would be better positioned to rebalance with China if it weren’t simultaneously declaring economic war on the rest of the world.

Mercantilism is irrelevant to the PRC’s fundamental problem, which the editors don’t recognize in their piece. The PRC’s fundamental problem is their shrinking population which is caused by their birth rate being far below even the replacement rate necessary to maintain an existing level. A critical subset and outcome of that problem is that its population is aging and already doesn’t have enough workers to sustain their retired and aged citizens, much less to man its factories. Aside from raw bigotry, this is another reason for the forced labor of Uighurs in PRC factories.

There’s less than no need to rebalance with the PRC: that nation is an enemy nation bent on replacing and controlling us. Rebalancing, along any dimension that doesn’t include gaining, regaining, and expanding our superiority, would only facilitate its effort.

It’s true enough that an economic war with the rest of the world is counterproductive, but it’s relevant to the need to isolate and contain the PRC only to the extent that mercantilist tariffs on so much of the rest of the world waters down the effects of foreign policy tariffs on the PRC and our ability to get other nations to support that isolation.

At bottom, the editors have confused tariffs used to influence an enemy nation—foreign policy tariffs—with mercantilist tariffs—protectionist tariffs used to make other nations’ exports to us more expensive relative to our domestically produced products. I’m surprised that the editors do not understand the distinction.

Testing?

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Some folks think that Baby Kim, the gang leader of northern Korea, is beginning to question the loyalty of the youngest adult and near-adult cohorts in that area.

He is particularly worried about the foreign media trickling into his information-repressed country….
At risk is Kim’s ability to maintain the illusion of North Korea as a socialist paradise, which is key to his ability to maintain power. And no group is more vulnerable to ideological slippage than North Korea’s youngest citizens.

Thus,

That is why Kim has handed a central propaganda role of late to the Paektusan Hero Youth Shock Brigade. …hailed as national heroes for helping to rebuild a western border region leveled by summer floods. Over four months, they erected 15,000 houses, schools and hospitals, the country’s state media claimed.
…
The construction work, Kim was quoted as saying in state media, had represented a “good opportunity for training our young people to be staunch defenders and reliable builders of socialism.”

That’s one test. Baby Kim also has sent 12,000 soldiers to fight on the side of the Russians against Ukraine. Those soldiers, despite their claimed reputation for prowess, are performing extremely poorly, even after accounting for the Russian tactics they’re expected to operate within.

Could Baby Kim be testing Ukraine as his version of being sent to the Eastern Front? It’s true enough that a severely wounded northern Korean soldier kills himself rather than risk capture, or his comrades murder him to prevent that capture, even as they run away from the battlefield. Those incidents, possibly representing a newly claimed loyalty in an attempt to protect the family left behind, are quite rare, though, compared to the casualty rate they’re experiencing.

What’s the Downside?

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A Wall Street Journal article ruminating on Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio and his relationship with a number of diplomatic envoys who would report directly to President Donald Trump (R) had this concern:

[T]he system appears designed to expand Trump’s policymaking role while diminishing that of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security staff….

Of course. State, DoD, and those staffers all work for the President, they are not independent mini-government branches.

The President—every President—is the one in charge of foreign policy, both its development and its implementation. It’s imperative to our system of republican governance that those agencies, and all the other agencies in the Executive Branch, be brought back under control and reined in.

Time to Go

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Here’s yet another Federal agency that needs to be eliminated, its budget returned to the Treasury, and its personnel—all of them—returned to the private sector rather than reallocated within the Federal Leviathan.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [emphasis added]:

  • its role in organizing the Election Integrity Partnership—the private group that worked with social media companies to censor content during the 2020 election
  • did not implement effective controls for the selected High Value Asset (HVA) system per Federal and departmental requirements
    • DHS OIG found inactive user accounts were not consistently disabled or removed, according to established rules—40% of nearly 2,800 “users”
    • 15% of sampled users missed initial or annual cybersecurity training
  • did not follow its own recommendations when conducting its own review of the system, failing to detect the access control deficiencies identified by the watchdog

When the agency personnel aren’t being overtly corrupt, they’re being patently incompetent. The organization is far beyond redeemability, and it’s new enough (created out of whole cloth in 2018) that there are much fewer entrenched interests in preserving its corruption or its incompetence.