Category Archives: foreign policy

Bound by the Prior Administration

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In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Mr Serpico had some thoughts regarding Navy Public Affairs Officer Admiral (ret) John Kirby’s, occupying a seat at Biden’s table as National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, words on the Biden Afghanistan so-called withdrawal.

John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration. In essence, it was former President Trump’s fault (“Joe Biden Isn’t Sorry About Afghanistan,” Review & Outlook, April 7).
You rarely see such an act of unashamed temerity. The Biden administration had seven months to make any changes it wanted to avoid the debacle that followed.
Are we supposed to believe that Mr Trump recommended giving up Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night? Did Mr Trump recommend that backward sequence for the removal of our Afghan partners, equipment, and personnel? Did Mr Trump recommend not telling our NATO partners that we were leaving?
Remember, it was President Biden who disregarded his internal military advice about leaving behind a residual force in Afghanistan. All of this hearkens to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s warning that Mr Biden “has been wrong on every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

What Mr Serpico said.

To which I make a minor correction: “You rarely see such an act of unashamed lying.”

And to which I add:

John Kirby…said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration.

What constraints, exactly? What Trump had set up was a series of milestones that as the Taliban met each one, the next step of our drawdown would follow, but if a milestone was missed by the Taliban, the deal was off. And that set of milestones had a residual force, large enough to be effective, remaining.

Further, that deal was no treaty; it was a President’s Executive Agreement. Executive Agreements routinely are withdrawn—entirely legitimately in process and usually for good cause, as well—by subsequent Presidents. Biden was not bound by Trump’s EA; Biden easily could have altered or rescinded it, just as he did with all of the other Trumpian EAs and Executive Orders he rescinded in the last 10 days of January 2021. He chose to ignore this one.

Biden wasn’t bound by anything other than his panic-ridden wish to get out of Afghanistan, no matter the cost, in lives, in national honor, in messaging to enemies like Russia and the People’s Republic of China.

This Should Ease the Search

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A passel (that’s the technical term) of classified documents purportedly concerning the barbarian’s war in Ukraine and a number of other items have been stolen from DoD, one or two perhaps altered, and then posted at various sites around the Internet.

The search is on for the leaker(s) and/or the security…weakness…in SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD and/or in CJCS General Mark Milley’s organization within DoD.

One discovery should ease that search, and shorten it, also, is this.

One of the most significant leaks of highly classified US documents in recent history began among a small group of posters on a messaging channel [the Discord messaging platform] that trafficked in memes, jokes, and racist talk.
Sometime in January, seemingly unnoticed by the outside world, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post files—many labeled as top secret—providing details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about US allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics.

That small number of individuals should make it much easier to locate who got the materials, and from that, how they penetrated DoD security, or in the alternative, from whom they got the materials.

Once that’s done, the security gap must be plugged promptly and the leaker(s), if there was one, must be publicly identified and metaphorically drawn and quartered.

Ignore Them

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The People’s Republic of China’s latest weapon in its economic war against the West, and against the United States in particular, is to slow-walk merger approvals on anti-trust grounds when either party to the merger, or its result, does or would do business within the PRC.

As preconditions for approving some of the transactions, the people said, officials at the State Administration for Market Regulation, China’s antitrust regulator known as SAMR, have asked companies to make available in China products they sell in other countries—an attempt to counter the US’s increased export controls targeting China.
The Chinese demands could put US companies in an impossible position as Washington has enacted legislation restricting American companies’ ability to sell to China and expanding certain types of production there.

And this, especially [emphasis added]:

For multinationals, it doesn’t take much for a merger to trigger a Chinese antitrust review. For instance, if two companies in a deal have revenue of more than $117 million a year from China, the merger needs Beijing to sign off.

This is an easy enough conundrum to solve. The two companies, along with the merged result, could simply stop doing business within the PRC and with businesses domiciled within the PRC, rendering that nation’s slow-walk irrelevant from the PRC’s lack of standing to object.

Companies should already be stopping doing business inside the PRC or with businesses domiciled in the PRC, so a merger agreement that asserts “no business to be done in the PRC” seems completely straightforward.

Data Protections

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A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section had concerns about a potential ban of People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance’s TikTok.

I disagree with their concerns.

A TikTok ban isn’t the solution. It won’t protect our data privacy, it won’t protect children from the dangers of the internet, and it is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights.

No one is masquerading banning TikTok as the solution; that’s a strawman argument. Much more needs to be done to protect our data privacy and our children—and our intellectual and technology property—but banning TikTok is a useful step. Nor is banning it a violation of anyone’s 1st Amendment rights. No one’s speech would be barred, only a tool of the PRC would be barred.

TikTok can be an effective tool for fighting corruption within the government itself.

Not when it’s controlled by the PRC government.

…a communication tool that millions of Americans use….

Congratulations to this writer: he has successfully identified the breadth of the threat, just as TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, (accidentally) did when he pointed out the 150 million American users of TikTok.

Hostage Taking and Consequences

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Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was kidnapped a few days ago while on assignment in Russia by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s FSB, and Gershkovich now is being held for ransom of some sort.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken shook his finger very firmly at Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and expressed his grave concern over the seizure, and he pressed his Russian counterpart for [Gershkovich’s] release. Lavrov was left trembling in his shoes by Blinken’s firmness. Or not.

On the other hand, Blinken, surely a very honorable and a very smart man, knows that mere words of frustration have no meaning absent concrete action.

It follows, then, that he wouldn’t “press” for an action from another nation without having a plan of consequences ready to be applied should that nation not take that action. So: what is Blinken’s plan?

It’s not much of one.