Category Archives: foreign policy

Trump Wasn’t the First

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Since NATO’s creation, the European nations have, in the main, been shirking their obligations to the alliance and with that betraying their fellow alliance members. Then-President Jack Kennedy (D) was among the first American government officials to grow tired of that shirking and to object to it out loud.

John F Kennedy in 1963 told his National Security Council that “we cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share.”

Then it was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1981 in front of the Munich Security Conference:

[T]he United States cannot be expected to improve and strengthen US forces in Europe, unless other allies increase their own contribution to the combined defense effort.

With the end of the Cold War almost 35 years ago,

NATO asserts that almost half its members won’t spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense this year, a decade after the alliance affirmed that baseline expectation.

But those were just a bunch of polite noises.

Nor is Trump the only one objecting to European NATO members’ sloth and perfidy today, although today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are standing silently on the sidelines in a reversal (repudiation?) of their Democrat predecessors.

[I]ncreasingly prominent voices in the US think “the time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet,” as Senator JD Vance (R, OH) put it recently.

Trump still is right, and it’s been his sharp rhetoric as opposed to those 50 years of “pretty please” that has gotten more NATO members—but not all of them, shamefully—to start honoring their fiscal and equipment commitments to NATO.

US Is Even More Vulnerable

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The mostly unfettered inflow of “refugees” from—pick a source, but mostly the Middle East—into Europe is beginning to awaken Europe’s western and central nations to the terrorist risk they face from that flow (eastern Europe’s nations have long been well aware). That relatively uninhibited flow, with its sample that have been caught, should be clanging alarm bells for us, too.

Authorities in Europe say they have foiled several terror plots, some involving suspects posing as refugees, raising alarm about a growing array of threats from extremists.

Threats from terrorists, I’ll say, since The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities are too timid to call the spade a spade. Examples of those terrorists’ plots—those that have been discovered—abound.

German and Dutch investigators…arrested four people for allegedly receiving the order from Hamas to open a secret cache of weapons and attack Jewish targets in Berlin and elsewhere in Western Europe.
German prosecutors said Hamas had buried the weapons underground in Europe years ago but that the suspects, all longstanding Hamas members involved in the group’s overseas operations, wouldn’t reveal where.
Investigators found pictures of Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on some of the suspects’ mobile phones….

And

…arrest late last year of a group of Tajik nationals suspected of planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna around Christmas. Both churches fill with hundreds of visitors for the holiday season.

And

Italian authorities said they had detained three Palestinians suspected of being members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, designated as a terror group by the US and the European Union. The three were preparing to attack civilian and military targets in Europe, the Italian National Police said.

And on and on. That bit about pre-caching weapons for later retrieval and use is especially troubling, or should be, for us in the US and for our government. Europe doesn’t seem to be getting the large inflow of PRC military-age single men that we are, although Russia’s penchant for exporting little green men for sabotage and battlespace shaping is well enough known, as is the difficulty of detecting them before they go operational. Among those PRC young men flowing so freely into our nation could well be PLA special forces operators; an outcome of the PLA’s broad and rapid buildup, including its special operations units.

Nor can we in our nation say how many Iranian/Iranian-backed terrorists have come in over our borders, unchecked, unhindered in any way, perhaps at a time of their choosing to link up with the weapons other illegal aliens have secreted for them.

This is the risk—in spades—that Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is creating for us with his deliberately opened borders policy and the associated wholly unfettered flood of illegal aliens. It’s the risk from the upwards of 1.5 million illegal aliens coming in every year whose entry would be codified in the shameful Border Insecurity bill which the Senate enacted.

Biden Doesn’t Want Israel to Win

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is busily telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to go into Rafah to finish the task of destroying Hamas.

It is a red line, but I am never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. So there is no red line I am going to cut off all weapons, so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them. But there’s red lines that if he crosses….
[As paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal] He added that a complete cutoff of weapons shipments wasn’t an option.

He went on to cite Hamas’ own claim of 30,000 civilian deaths and said that was an unacceptable casualty count. With that, Biden continues to provide zero evidence that Israel isn’t trying to protect civilians as it goes after the terrorists; by implication he’s blaming the casualties on Israel. Biden also continues to ignore the fact that Hamas’ casualty count has been demonstrated to be entirely bogus.

Biden’s threat to provide only enough support to keep Israel in the fight bleeding and dying while preventing the nation from winning the war Hamas has inflicted and is prosecuting isn’t necessarily antisemitic, though; it’s part and parcel with his moves to prevent Ukraine from winning with his slow-walking and blocking delivery of weapons needed for actual, and relatively prompt, victory.

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

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And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another reason to ban TikTok stems from this claim made by the company in response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s unanimous vote (that’s 50 (of 52 Committee members; 2 weren’t present to vote) Representatives of both parties agreeing on something) to advance legislation that would require TikTok to be sold by ByteDance to a non-PRC affiliated company or be barred from operating in the US. That claim by an anonymous spokesman for TikTok:

This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.

That’s a lie on two fronts, explicitly intended to create hysteria. The first front is the business about “total ban.” It is no such thing, and TikTok managers—and their ByteDance owners—know full well: that claim cynically ignores the primary option the legislation offers, the sale of TikTok to an acceptable, non-PRC affiliated buyer.

The second front is that business about stripping TikTok users of their Constitutional right to free expression. Of course, it’s no such thing, as those TikTok and ByteDance persons also know full well. Were ByteDance to refuse to sell and TikTok barred, no one’s free speech would be stripped away, only a single pipeline would be stripped away. All of TikTok’s users, every single one of them, would have access to any and all of a plethora of other pipelines through which to speak, pipelines like Facebook YouTube, Gab, Truth Social, CloutHub, GETTR, MeWe, LinkedIn, Parler, X, and on and on. Further, were TikTok to be sold, that question would never even arise since the TikTok pipeline would be free to continue operating.

Additionally, the ability of this PRC company to mobilize all of its members to manipulate an American internal political matter demonstrates the influence the PRC is able to exert on American domestic politics.

As lawmakers prepared to consider the legislation on Thursday, users of the app…saw notifications urging them to complain to their House representative about the bill. Then the app let people call their representative with a few presses of buttons, fueling congressional concerns about TikTok.
TikTok’s campaign quickly overwhelmed the phone lines of some congressional offices…illustrated how TikTok could mobilize an army of people and gather data to push user behavior, which some lawmakers say is the exact reason they don’t want the company to have ties back to [the PRC].

That PRC manipulation by itself is yet another to ban TikTok altogether.

Biden Wants a Port on the Gaza Strip

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He said so in his Thursday State of the Union speech. He said he’s ordering the US military to set up and establish a port on the coast of the Gaza Strip. He’ll do it, though, with no US boots on the ground. US personnel will be on offshore military vessels, but they will not install the port onshore.

He was careful not to say, though, who would distribute the humanitarian aid that would be coming ashore. The only distribution personnel ashore, though, are UN, Hamas terrorists, and the IDF.

With the UN actively supporting the Hamas terrorists through its UNWRA arm and those same terrorists so busily and successfully intercepting and stealing aid coming in through the Strip’s border with Egypt, this only means that Biden will be supporting Hamas terrorists with more humanitarian aid more directly.

Lastly, with US personnel not being the ones to install the temporary port, our Navy is losing the only thing of value to the effort: practice in rapidly installing a temporary port under unfriendly, if not outright hostile, conditions.

On other thing, beyond lastly: for how long after Hamas’ war on Israel is over will this temporary port remain in place and who will pay for it? Biden won’t say.

Not even Jimmy Carter was this foolish. He, at least, was willing to take a direct shot at freeing American hostages, even if that effort blew up in his face, from bad weather among other problems. Biden is too timid even to try to get our hostages away from the Hamas terrorists. He’d rather supply them and push Israel to stop short of destroying the terrorists in his naked attempt to pay ransom to Evil.