Tag Archives: foreign policy

Harris Intends to Continue…

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…her boss’, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s, disdain for Israel and that nation’s obligation (not merely right) to defend itself, an obligation that of necessity requires it to destroy an enemy whose openly stated goal includes the butchery of Israeli women and children en route to the extermination of Israel the nation.

Here’s Progressive-Democrat Vice President and likely Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris on the matter of Hamas creche-mate Hezbollah’s attack on Israel’s Druze children in the northern village of Majdal Shams as cited by The Wall Street Journal:

[A]lthough Israel has a right to defend itself, she would “not be silent” about “the death of far too many innocent civilians.”

This is Harris cynically naively taking the terrorist Hamas at its word regarding the entity’s casualty claims, claims that are carefully undifferentiated between civilian and combatant casualties and that are wholly unsubstantiated. This is Harris, also, completely disregarding Israel’s statements regarding the civilian to combatant casualty ratio in this Hamas-inflicted war while also disregarding the civilian casualty losses Israel has suffered at the hands of both Hamas and Hezbollah.

Harris also is committing the moral equivalence sewage of equating Hamas and Hezbollah’s terrorism with Israel’s fight for its existence against these terrorists: she’s demanding an unconditional cease fire, immediately.

I will not be silent. So to everyone who has been calling for a cease-fire, and to everyone who has been calling for peace, I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war. Let’s bring the hostages home, and let’s provide much-needed relief to the Palestinian people.

She doesn’t care (it’s not possible to conclude she doesn’t know) that such a cease fire would benefit only the terrorists while doing nothing to recover the terrorist-seized hostages, many of whom the terrorists have already butchered while held or allowed to die of injuries while held. She doesn’t care (it’s not possible to conclude she doesn’t know) that Hamas will not agree to release the hostages or the hostage bodies unless and until Israel withdraws completely from the Gaza Strip, leaving Hamas in place to reconstitute, rearm, and resume attacking and butchering Israeli citizens. This is a straightforward continuation of Biden’s anti-Israeli policy. All that Harris lacks, so far, is a public intent to interfere with arms resupply of Israel, as Biden has done.

This is the candidate the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to put in the White House. This is the anti-Israeli policy Party wants to infuse throughout Congress by expanding its Senate majority and seizing a majority in the House.

White House Hatred of Israel

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That’s what this Wall Street Journal editors’ lede implies, if the claim is true.

Is US foreign policy on autopilot? On Wednesday we learned the Biden Administration is imposing sanctions on another Israeli while reissuing a sanctions waiver that lets Iran access more than $10 billion in frozen funds. Its priorities reflect a policy that long ago was overtaken by events.

That’s not autopilot. That’s the Biden White House continuing those folks’ long-standing disdain, extending to open hatred, of all things Israeli. Why do they think that way? The position is so irrational—Israel is our only real ally in the Middle East; it’s the only democracy there; the nation is inclusive enough to include Arab citizens and Arab Knesset members; the nation bends over backwards, even today, to avoid civilian casualties in a war inflicted by a terrorist entity for which civilian casualties, even of their own brethren, are the goal—that only those White House persons can answer the question. If they think about it at all.

The editors concluded their piece with this:

[W]e got Iran-backed war and assaults on US forces and commercial shipping. What will it take for Mr Biden and his advisers to recognize their failure and change course?

Maybe Biden, et al., don’t see a need for course correction. Maybe they don’t think their pro-Iran, anti-Israel moves are failures.

What’s at least as bad is the silence from the Progressive-Democratic Party regarding Biden’s moves vis-à-vis Iran and Israel. That the syndicate is so carefully silent suggests its own complicity in this irrational hatred.

But They are the Same Theater

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A letter writer in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section expressed his concern for NATO’s increasing emphasis on the People’s Republic of China threat in the Pacific, saying in part,

NATO, however, shouldn’t be pushing into Asia or treating Europe and Asia as the same theater.

And

…founding charter: to maintain the peace in the North Atlantic and defend its member states from a Russian attack.

Asia, the Pacific theater, dominated as it is by the enemy nation, the People’s Republic of China, and the European theater that’s formally the DOC of NATO are, in fact the same theater; the two regions are adjacent Areas of Responsibility.

This isn’t a matter of who’s got the intercontinental reach of missiles. It’s the closely intertwined—and dependency creating—trade regimes and economies, as the PRC exports at artificially lowered price its goods into Europe; the PRC engages in active cyber espionage and cyber sabotage activities; the PRC engages in active dis- and misinformation, pushing as it does its state-owned and -run social media facilities like TikTok and ecommerce facilities like TEMU, one of which actively pushes false claims (not information) and both of which actively hoover up individualized personal and business information for the use of the PRC’s intelligence community; the PRC’s PLA moves into the eastern Pacific and western Atlantic Oceans and into the northeastern Mediterranean Sea with its dual use commercial and military seaports and airports; and on and on.

Maintaining the peace in the North Atlantic, thus, requires the PRC threat to that theater be addressed. Furthermore, the PRC’s nakedly open support of Russia in the latter’s equally naked invasion of a sovereign nation makes it imperative that “defending…from a Russian attack” involve addressing the PRC threat. That’s optimally done at the source; hence the need to emphasize the threat to NATO interests and security by including Asia as one of the AORs in the NATO theater of operations.

Distance in the modern world is nonexistent. It’s entirely appropriate that NATO expand its area of regard and learn to do two things at once.

Rethinking

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Holman Jenkins wrote Tuesday about Rethinking Trump and the Ukraine War. His central thesis is the “confusion” in Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s intelligence community and throughout his administration generally about what to do about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how to respond—if at all—to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprisingly amateurish attempt to sow further confusion in our domestic politics (and the even more amateurish emphasis on those efforts by Biden’s…advisors…throughout his administration).

But my concern arises prior to any of that; it centers on the underlying misconception of the nature of that war.

That rethinking that Jenkins wants to see needs to begin with a correction to that misconception, and I’m almost as concerned that Jenkins and nearly everyone else who should know better…don’t.

Russia invaded with the purpose of erasing Ukraine the sovereign nation and reducing it to a petty satrap in Vladimir Putin’s empire, and Ukraine is fighting for its existence.

It isn’t the Ukraine war; it’s the Russian war, inflicted on Ukraine. Only with an accurate understanding of that situation can any ideas of what to do about it be developed.

All the more Reason

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The People’s Republic of China is continuing to manipulate the price of rare earths and of rare earth production and ore refinement. The nation is exploiting its current overwhelming monopoly of rare earths to hold those prices below the cost of their mining, production, and refinement elsewhere in the world, possibly below their own suite of costs.

That’s a security threat carefully aimed at the US and at Europe, since those rare earths are so critical to military equipment, computing equipment, and a host of other equipment throughout the general economy.

The US, Canada, regions in Europe, and the floor of the South China Sea each have ample supplies of the ores that, when exploited, would eliminate the PRC’s stranglehold on rare earths.

It’s time for the US and Europe, at the least, to suck up and go through the expense of developing our own rare earth resources and wrest that control away from our common enemy nation. It’s long past time to move to take back from the PRC the South China Sea, returning ownership of the islands to the nations with legitimate (if disputed among them) ownership and to return the waters to freely international status with their long-established economic zones which are held by non-PRC nations rimming the Sea. Regaining access to the Sea’s resources on and under the floor is one more critical reason for doing so.