Tag Archives: foreign policy

Part of the Task

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) is, supposedly, drafting an Executive Order that would create a warrior board whose purpose would be to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. The board would consist of retired general and noncommissioned officers.

The draft order [if it’s actually being drafted] says it aims to establish a review that focuses “on leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence.” The draft doesn’t specify what officers need to do or present to show if they meet those standards.

Such a review and removal has been needed for some time. Flag rank is a political rank as well as a military one, but for some years, now, the political has taken precedence over the military in the minds of too many flag-ranks. Nor do the officers need to do or present anything to show whether they meet those standards; the board, presumably, would have access to the officers’ personnel records, and the board would have in front of it those officers’ recent empirical performances in the staff and command positions they’ve been holding.

There are a couple of additional steps, though, that remain to be taken. One is that the board membership needs to be lined up, if less publicly than Trump’s Cabinet and staff picks, and ready to be appointed in the minutes after the EO is signed.

The other step is to set up a similar board to review the senior civilian posts and their incumbents with a view to removing those personages who fail to have the requisite leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence. This board also should review all of the civilian positions with a view to identifying those positions not actually needed. Those incumbents should be returned to the private sector along with those civilians who failed the explicit leadership review. The latter, however, should be returned without opprobrium or stigma.

It’s time DoD was put back into the role of building, maintaining, and supporting a lethal military establishment capable of taking on our enemies in two and a half simultaneous wars and defeating those enemies so decisively they cannot attack us again for a long time. Two and a half simultaneous wars? That was the DOC of our military at the height of the Cold War, and Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and Iran are bent on another Cold War against us, with two of them already engaged in hot wars against a friend and an ally, and the third threatening and girding itself for a hot war against another of our friends.

Time’s a-wasting.

Terrorist Chimera

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Hamas and Hezbollah say they have reached a concord regarding governing Gaza once the war Hamas inflicted on Israel and in which Hezbollah enthusiastically joined with Hamas is at an end.

Palestinian officials from both factions, long bitter rivals, have reached a consensus to create an apolitical committee of Palestinian technocrats not affiliated with either of them to manage the sensitive and massive jobs of aid distribution and rebuilding, Palestinian and other Arab officials said.

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, of the Palestinian Policy Network:

They have a lot more room and urgency for common ground now and to avoid being sidelined[.]

There expressed is the chimera of the concord. Hamas and Hezbollah don’t want to be sidelined in setting up the governing body or in its operation.

Nor will they be, if their proposal is accepted; they’ll remain in complete control: keep in mind who would be selecting these technocrats, or at the least who would have the final say in their selection. It’s beyond naïve to believe that personnel selected by the terrorist entities wouldn’t be tied to those entities.

Fundamentally Transform America

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That’s what ex-President Barack Obama (D) bragged was about to occur shortly before his 2008 election victory. He got a major step of that transformation when he nationalized roughly one-sixth of our economy with his nationalization of our health care coverage industry with his Obamacare.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party is on the verge of finishing the transformation as they sit on the knife’s edge of a sweeping election victory next week. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial headline lays it out:

[Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala] Harris has already endorsed President Biden’s plan to impose “ethics” rules on the Justices that would invite political harassment and compromise judicial independence. Now she won’t disavow packing the Court. She has called for Democrats, if they keep the Senate in November, to bypass the 60-vote filibuster rule, letting them enact such bills without even a modicum of compromise.

Those would be the final two straws in the destruction of our federated republican democracy form of government. It would be the institution of one-party rule, with the minority party not even a loyal opposition but merely irrelevant, and the conversion of our Supreme Court and of our Federal judiciary in general from its current status as an independent, coequal check on the power of the central government into a rubber stamp of Party decisions.

The WSJ editors aren’t given to hyperbole, and they’re not being hyperbolic in their closing paragraph.

Democrats are serious. They say Mr Trump is a threat to democracy and US institutions, while they’re pledging to restructure the judiciary wholesale. Do they notice the cognitive dissonance? Apparently not. But voters might.

That’s what’s at stake next week.

Paul Paints with a Too-Broad Brush

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Former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump is painting with too broad a brush with his blanket tariffs. Kentucky’s Republican Senator Rand Paul is painting with too broad a brush in his criticism of Trump’s tariff proposals.

Tariffs operate solely in the international trade arena, for all that they have domestic effects. Part of what’s not recognized by either man, although less so by Paul than by Trump, is that international trade has very little to do with economics and very much to do with foreign policy.

Paul is correct that protectionist tariffs are net detrimental to domestic economies. (I claim that protecting nascent industries with tariffs is beneficial, but only if they’re withdrawn when the nascent industries are better developed. The difficulty of withdrawing protectionist tariffs when they’re no longer needed, though, more than overwhelms that temporary benefit.) Trump is mistaken to push the blanket protectionist tariffs on all imports, including imports from friends and allies.

Paul’s China People’s Republic of China tariff example, though, illustrates his broad brush error.

Consider a [PRC]-made widget priced at 50 cents competing with an American-made version at $1. By slapping a tariff on the Chinese widget, raising its price to $2, American manufacturers have the freedom to raise theirs as high as $1.99. The consumer is left with no real choice but to pay more.

Reasonable men can debate the size of that tariff, but such a debate misses the essential fact that the PRC is an enemy nation bent on supplanting us in the world and dominating our foreign and domestic policy decisions. We have no business feeding the enemy nation’s economy. That alone argues for the high tariff and not settling for a countervailing one of merely 50 cents to make the imported price the same as the domestic one.

There’s more to this, though.

Consider [PRC]-made electronics. When tariffs are imposed on products like smartphones and laptops, as Donald Trump is proposing to do, American consumers end up paying higher prices. … [The PRC] accounts for more than 90% of US laptop and tablet imports.

Especially in the electronics industry—an industry that reaches far beyond consumer computers and cell phones into all types of communications devices, chip manufacturing, main frame assembly, data centers, artificial intelligence, and on and on—the national security risk of trading at all with the PRC is far too high to be mitigated with jawboning and pretty pleases alone. That risk, after all, runs to cyber espionage and insertion of sleeperware into our several network nodes, intellectual property and data theft, and including spyware and other malware on imported devices’ chips at the very least.

Tariffs set high enough to discourage imports from an enemy nation like the PRC are an entirely valid foreign policy move. That the tariffs might raise domestic prices is a cost of our national security, of our maintaining our independence of action.

One More Reason

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For Israel to not trust the Biden-Harris administration.

The United States is investigating the unauthorized release of classified documents detailing Israel’s planned attack against Iran, The Associated Press reported.
The documents, attributed to the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, note that Israel was still moving military assets in place to conduct a military strike in response to Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on Oct. 1. ….
The documents, which are marked Top Secret, were posted to the Telegram messaging app last week and first reported by CNN and Axios.

Supposedly, the Biden-Harris is investigating the leak, including how the data were obtained.

…whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the US intelligence community or by another method, like a hack….

Either way, this administration cannot be trusted with anyone’s secrets.

If the leak came from the administration’s intelligence community—I’m particularly suspicious, on the basis of no data whatsoever, of the NSA—that leaker should spend the rest of his life in prison, and this is would be yet another example of why the intelligence community needs a deep- and wide-reaching reform along with removal of managers from the mid-level on up to the political appointees, along with the cancelation of their security clearances once they’re no longer in government employ.

If the leak was the result of a hack job, it would be yet another demonstration of this administration’s disdain for matters relating to cyber security.

Hopefully, though, the Israelis already have learned the level of trustworthiness of this administration, and they shared false flag information in the expectation that Biden-Harris’ minions would leak them, or that they’d be hacked, and therewith mislead Iran regarding Israel’s actual plans.