Category Archives: foreign policy

Negotiations with Russia

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Boris Johnson, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, is on the right track regarding the idea of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin an end to the barbarian’s invasion. Negotiations now would be both fruitless and pointless, Johnson writes, because they would require Ukraine to surrender Ukrainian territory and they would idiotically rely on the barbarian’s trustworthiness in keeping any agreement. Negotiations now would be ill-timed, as well: the time for negotiating can only be after the barbarian has been driven entirely from Ukrainian territory and Ukraine having won, totally and decisively, the war the barbarian began.

Johnson had this, too, though:

If Mr Putin were to use a weapon of mass destruction [one of the barbarian chieftain’s many threats], he would be tendering Russia’s resignation from the club of civilized nations….

With this characterization, Johnson is being…generous. Russia hasn’t been a civilized nation, at the least, since the mass starvation the Russians—the people as well as the government—inflicted on Ukrainians and on the Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Belarussians during the kulak collectivization atrocities of the 1930s. The barbarian has demonstrated—in rivers of blood—the continuing depths of its depravity with the atrocities inflicted by the products of Russian society on Ukrainians in the present barbarian war. Atrocities Johnson describes so genteelly:

captives tortured, women raped, schools and kindergartens deliberately targeted.

He omitted the hospitals deliberately targeted, the vast lines of refugees from besieged cities that the barbarian had agreed to allow to evacuate—and then targeted for mass murder once they were so conveniently lined up on the agreed roads leading away from the city.

Those finally arrived at post-victory negotiations? [A] peaceful, orderly and lasting relationship, and friendship, between Ukraine and Russia, as Johnson so naively described them?

Keep in mind two things as you contemplate such a negotiation. The “soldiers” inflicting those atrocities today—the rapes, the tortures, the child butcheries, the attacks on hospitals, the attacks on infrastructure necessary for civilian survival during the coming winter—are the products of Russian society. Most of these armed thugs may well be from the lower tiers of that society, but who taught them to be the way they are? The rest of that society, who either condone the atrocities or actively order them, all the way up to the chieftain sitting on his throne in the Kremlin.

The other thing is the impossibility of Ukrainian friendship with a polity—barbaric or civilized—that is bent on the utter destruction of Ukraine.

No. The only outcome for the present situation is the utter, decisive defeat of the barbarian, with his being driven entirely from Ukrainian territory. The only possibility for any future relationship between Ukraine and Russia is Ukrainian eternal vigilance against the next wave of barbarians from the east. For that wave will surely come.

Red Lines

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President Joe Biden (D) is meeting today with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting occurring in Indonesia. Supposedly, on the Biden-Xi agenda will be Biden’s desire to exchange red lines with Xi—each to learn the other’s.

I’m skeptical of the utility of such an exchange.

The problems with Biden and Xi exchanging red lines are two: Biden will respect Xi’s and Xi will not respect Biden’s, and Biden will not enforce his while Xi will enforce his forcefully in the unlikely possibility Biden does stray.

And one more: what would Biden do if his red lines conflict with Xi’s. It’s clear what Xi would do.

Update: In the realization, Biden was too timid even to mention the idea of red lines. All he had were some bland words of concern regarding “Taiwan” and the Taiwan Strait. Not a syllable about the PRC’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and the PRC’s seizure, occupation, and militarization of so many South China Sea islands that are owned by other nations rimming that Sea (even if that ownership often is disputed among those nations). Not a minim about the PRC’s aggressive behavior in the East China Sea and the associated threats the PRC makes toward Japan.

Useful Talks

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The US and the Republic of China this week began direct talks regarding pushing our trade and general economic relationship.

The US and [the Republic of China] are set to begin two days of face-to-face meetings in New York on Tuesday aimed at strengthening trade and economic ties at a time of ramped-up tensions between Washington and Beijing.

It also would be useful for the US to greatly strengthen our political ties with the RoC, as well as sharply increase our defense relationship with, and arms sales and transfers to, that nation, followed by SecDef Lloyd Austin and CJCS Mark Milley traveling to the RoC to meet with Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng and Chief of the General Staff Chen Pao-yu, followed in turn by President Joe Biden traveling to the RoC to meet with President Tsai Ing-wen.

In the alternative, it would be nearly as useful for those meetings to occur at the Pentagon and in the Oval Office of the White House.

Why Do the Workaround?

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NVIDIA Corp is busily looking for ways to circumvent newly enacted rules barring export of computer chips and chip technology to the People’s Republic of China.

Nvidia Corp has begun offering an alternative to a high-end chip hit with US export restrictions to customers in China, after the new rules threatened to cost the American company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Nvidia said the new graphics-processing chip, branded the A800, meets US restrictions on chips that can be exported to China under new rules rolled out last month. The chip went into production in the third quarter, the company said.

On the other hand,

According to a memo Nvidia sent to its channel distributors last Thursday, the A800 has the same computational performance but a narrower interconnect bandwidth, the capacity of a chip to send and receive data from other chips, crucial for training large-scale AI models or building supercomputers.

It’s not the data rates, though, that matter; it’s the computational techniques and the technology used to implement those techniques that are important.

NVIDIA claims,

The A800 meets the US government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.

This is disingenuous. The chip can be reverse-engineered to learn how the computational techniques are achieved. Indeed, simply programming the chip—accepting, arguendo, NVIDIA’s claim about programmability—would be a useless enterprise when the goal is to gain the technology itself.

It’s true enough that it takes some little time to relocate manufacturing/assembly sites and to move supply chains. However, why should NVIDIA or any American company, especially our technology-based companies, do business with any PRC company beyond a—adjusted apace—period of transition away from that nation?

Why would an American company be so willing to transfer, or risk transferring, American technology to an enemy nation by doing business with that nation or any business domiciled in it?

DHS Responsiveness

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House Republicans have put Department of Homeland Security management on notice to hold onto a variety of data; they’ll be investing the department if they win a majority of the House this Tuesday (and the out-days of vote “counting”).

House Oversight and Reform Committee Ranking Member Congressman James Comer (R, LA) has warned Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that Republicans would seek to hold him and his agency accountable for the ongoing crisis at the southern border should they win in next week’s midterm elections.
“We cannot endure another year of the Biden Administration’s failed border policies,” Comer and his fellow committee Republicans wrote to Mayorkas, per the Washington Times. “We have written DHS fifteen times this Congress to conduct oversight over the border crisis. Again, we request documents and information to understand the Biden Administration’s plans, if any, to secure the border.”

Here’s a thought. Republicans should withhold funding (defund, in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s favorite jargon) for the DHS other than ICE, CBP, and other border/immigration-related agencies, and the Coast Guard unless and until all documents are turned over to the new House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s satisfaction, and DHS Secretary and Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and John Tien, respectively, have resigned.

They shouldn’t just yap about having called repeatedly for documents or bark about “we’re going to investigate the Hell out of you,” knowing there’s no hope of subpoenas being enforced—they should put some teeth into their demands. They should take their own, purse string-related, steps to enforce their demands and investigations.

The Progressive-Democrat President certainly will veto such a budget, and he’ll threaten to shut down the government. However, both the Biden administration in general and Mayorkas’ DHS are prime examples of why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Aside from that, the Obama Shutdown of 2013 is example of the harmlessness of the Federal government not operating for a time.