Category Archives: foreign policy

Realistic War Aims

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The first two paragraphs lay out the case, erroneous as it is.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s leaders have insisted that Russia needs to be driven out of all Ukrainian territory before any peace talks could begin.
Now, with Russia continuing to make slow gains on the battlefield and Western support for Ukraine showing signs of fatigue, Ukraine may need to come up with a more realistic plan, at least for the next year of the war, according to European diplomats.

The first mistake is the claim that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This is false, as even the authors of this missive must know: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and occupied Crimea and two of Ukraine’s major eastern oblasts.

Leave that aside, though. The larger and more serious mistake is that Ukraine needs a more realistic plan than the one it plainly stated when Russia began the second phase of its invasion in 2022. That plan is the ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine as a precondition to peace talks.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy will travel to Ukraine on Wednesday to meet with Ukrainian officials in part to discuss how best to define a Ukrainian victory and what aid it will need to achieve that, according to officials.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already defined what a Ukrainian victory would be—see above. The problems that make achieving it difficult for Ukraine are Western—and mostly caused by the Biden-Harris administration, in particular. Start with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s tacit permission to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the Russian buildup in Belorussia in early 2022—Biden said that a small invasion incursion would be OK (It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…). Continue with Biden’s offer to Zelenskyy, after Putin’s barbarians went in and tried to capture Kyiv on the fly, of transport out of the country, to which he responded I don’t need a ride…. I need more ammunition, therewith demonstrating far more courage and understanding of the situation than Biden and his team.

Continue to where we are now: Biden and the rest of the West, while bleating about unshakable support for Ukraine, do not insist that Ukraine win, only that it not lose. Worse, in keeping with that timidity and immoral support for only keeping Ukraine in the fight bleeding and dying, Biden and Europe are still(!) slow walking the arms and ammunition and logistics that Ukraine needs at the rate Ukraine needs them in order to fight to win. Biden even is telling Ukraine that US weapons may not be used against targets inside Russia except those just across the border and then only to break up an attack in progress.

With Biden preserving Russia as a sanctuary nation (and the left worries about Donald Trump “collaborating with” Russia), it’s the Biden-Harris administration that needs to better identify its role in Ukraine’s efforts to achieve victory.

Russia Gets Iranian Ballistic Missiles

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So reads the headline on the Wall Street Journal editorial. Lots of them, too.

…a recent arms shipment from Tehran to Moscow included hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles.

There’s another, more important, side to this, though.

Tehran is learning from Moscow’s military experience….

Those are tactics. Even more important, Iran also is getting live-fire testing of its equipment during actual combat operations. Just on the eve of its coming attack on Israel.

The Good and the Bad

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Chevron Corporation wants to keep operating in Venezuela. That’s not an unalloyed good thing for the US, independently of what would be good or bad for Chevron. Neither is it an unalloyed bad thing for the US, independently of what would be good or bad for Chevron.

The long and the short of these are these. The bad for the US is that Chevron’s oil production, and presumably sales, would provide revenue that a Maduro regime badly needs.

The good thing for the US is that Chevron’s oil production and putative sales would serve as an important impediment, albeit not a barrier, to the People’s Republic of China moving in and exploiting that oil for its own purposes.

It’s the balance between the two that’s hard to gauge.

A Mistaken Characterization

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The mistake is in the headline:

IBM Shuts China R&D Operations in Latest Retreat by US Companies

When an American business, particularly one as important as IBM, removes its R&D operations from an enemy nation, that’s no retreat. That’s an advance; the move makes it harder for an enemy nation like the People’s Republic of China to access our technology or our intellectual property to use our technology and our intellectual property against us.

It would be a further advance and further advantageous were more American companies, large and small, to remove themselves from the PRC and to stop doing business with the PRC and PRC businesses altogether.

Two Questions…

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…that answer themselves.

Can the US and its allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military-industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend dramatically more on defense?

Of course we can, and the path to that is in that last bit: spending more on defense (while keeping in mind that a Critical Item for defense is a strong offense) and refurbishing our military-industrial base. Convincing us average Americans to spend more on defense is simpler and more straightforward than it apparently seems to the journalist crowd. It’s necessary and simple to explain the nature and depth of the threat posed by our four primary enemies, listed in my order of risk: Russia and the People’s Republic of China tied at the top; the one as demonstrated by its active shooting war of invasion and steady threats to continue west if its current land grab is successful. The other because of its active invasion and occupation of the South China Sea, seizing territory owned by other nations around the rim of the Sea and controlling sea lines of commerce that are critical to Japan and the Republic of Korea and extremely important to us, its increasing threats to invade and conquer the Republic of China, and the cyber war it’s already inflicting on us.

In third place is Iran, with its near production of nuclear weapons, which it will use promptly to destroy Israel and then shop to its terrorist surrogates and to any others who’ll have the purchase money. This nation already shops its conventional weapons—at heavily discounted prices—to its surrogates attacking Israel and commercial shipping on the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea.

A distant fourth is northern Korea, whose rhetoric makes them worth watching carefully along with shoring up RoK’s and Japan’s defenses and our own in the northern and western Pacific, but not much more than that.

And then it’s necessary and simple, except for those politicians of both parties, to reallocate spending away from the billions of froo-froo already in the budget and toward the defense establishment. The only really hard part (and we all know what “hard” means) is getting rid of the deadwood, both civilian and in uniform, in the Pentagon and streamlining development and acquisition.

For our allies, it’s slightly more complicated (but only slightly). If they don’t want to spend more on defending themselves—especially in Europe and particularly those European NATO members who already are betraying their fellow members with their sloth—then it will be time to stand up a separate mutual defense arrangement among the US, the Three Seas Initiative nations, and Great Britain (for starters), and then walk away from NATO altogether.

And

And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?

There can be no accommodation with enemy nations whose solemn goal, often stated, is to conquer us. This is the goal of Russia and the PRC. Nor can there be an accommodation with an enemy nation whose oft-stated goal is to destroy Israel and then us. An accommodation with northern Korea is almost irrelevant, and wholly unnecessary—just do the watching and regional plussing up.

The cost of accommodating nations with those goals should be obvious—such a step would only be a step closer to their goals for those enemies. Too, that would only be the first step of a short path to our functional destruction: having accommodated our enemies once, they’ll only seek a further accommodation, and then another, then…, until we’re no longer capable of effective self defense.