Tag Archives: foreign policy

International Military Support for Ukraine

Posted on by
Reply

There is some growing angst about the amount of treasure and weaponry that we’re sending to Ukraine in support of that nation’s effort to defeat the barbarian Russian invasion and to drive the barbarian back out. Typical of the angst is Victoria Coates’ (a former Deputy National Security Advisor to former President Donald Trump) beef, which includes concern about the amount of aid the US is providing compared to that provided by the European nations on whose ramparts the barbarian would be should he overrun Ukraine:

Given the fact that the Germans and the French are not doing anything close to this in terms of support is shameful. This is not our job. This is Europe’s backyard. Europe needs to shoulder this burden.

To an extent, Coates’ beef is valid; however, as the table below shows, the European shortfall is not at all universal. Most of these data are drawn from statista; for Sweden and Finland they come from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Nation Amount Sent Billions GDP Billions (IMF) Percent GDP
Poland $2.55 $716.00 0.356%
US $46.56 $25,035.00 0.186%
Great Britain $5.13 $3,198.00 0.160%
Denmark $0.59 $387.00 0.152%
Sweden* $0.85 $604.00 0.141%
Finland* $0.36 $281.00 0.128%
Norway $0.62 $505.00 0.123%
Netherlands $0.90 $990.00 0.091%
Canada $1.35 $2,200.00 0.061%
Germany $2.47 $4,031.00 0.061%
Italy $0.65 $1,997.00 0.033%
France $0.69 $2,778.00 0.025%
*Converted from € a/o 2Mar23

 

Poland actually is providing more support relative to the size of its economy than we are. That shouldn’t be surprising, though, as the memories of the barbarian’s occupation and depredations of their nation remain fresh in Polish minds. Poland also has taken in the most Ukrainian refugees; although a factor in that is the border the two nations share, which shortens refugee travel.

Great Britain, shorn of EU political limits, is right up there with us.

The real European shirkers, especially given their extant military establishments, are Germany and France, as noted by Coates, and Italy. Their behavior is truly shameful, especially for Germany, whose eastern States were under the barbarian’s jackboots not so long ago, also. The shortfall for France is not so surprising, for all the shortfall’s…disreputableness…given that nation’s constant efforts to make nice with Russia.

My claim here is not that the we should cut back on our material—and materiel—aid to Ukraine, but that we should push—pressure—those European nations who are shirking to do much more. Were those nations to meet their obligations—moral as well as material, and not only to Ukraine but to their own peoples and to their obligations toward each other under the spirit of NATO—Ukraine would be in a much better position to destroy the barbarian invasion.

An Empty Gesture

Posted on by
Reply

OMB Issued a memo barring the installation of TikTok on most Executive Branch facilities and the removal of currently installed TikTok from those facilities.

Most of them.

…limited exceptions to the restrictions outlined in this memorandum for law enforcement activities, national security interests and activities, and security research.

Never mind that TikTok is subordinate to, a subsidiary of, ByteDance, a People’s Republic of China-domiciled company. ByteDance, as a PRC-domiciled company, is bound by the PRC’s national intelligence law that makes it beholden to the Communist Party of China’s intelligence community to conduct intelligence-gathering as demanded by that intel community. Never mind, either, that as a subordinate facility of ByteDance, TikTok is required to conduct that espionage whenever ByteDance passes the requirement along.

Why, then, is the Biden administration allowing this enemy nation espionage tool to penetrate our own police forces and intelligence community?

Counterproductive

Posted on by
Reply

The government of the People’s Republic of China now claims, at the end of its three-year Wuhan Virus shutdown, to be open for foreign business. A broad range of folks running American businesses actually are taking that government’s blandishments seriously.

Many companies that are increasing their commitments to China are consumer-facing. They still view China’s enormous market as a promising long-term bet, even if sales took a hit during the zero-Covid era.

This is, at best, counterproductive.

Any product’s technology, consumer-oriented or not, can be dual-used for military or intelligence collection purposes, and in the PRC, it will be—not only to the detriment of PRC citizens, but to our detriment and that of our friends and allies.

More than that, American investment, any sort of doing business, inside the PRC works to the benefit of the PRC’s economy.

No American company should be doing any sort of business with or within an enemy nation.

Full stop.

Disingenuosity of NATO’s “Biggest European Members”

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s the lede in the WSJ article:

Germany, France, and Britain see stronger ties between NATO and Ukraine as a way to encourage Kyiv to start peace talks with Russia later this year, officials from the three governments said, as some of Kyiv’s Western partners have growing doubts over its ability to reconquer all its territory.

Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy always has been willing to engage in peace talks with the barbarian invader, and his criteria for entering into those negotiations have been clearly stated all along. That Vladimir Putin refuses to meet those criteria—his insistence, in fact, that Ukraine isn’t even a real nation—are on the barbarian chieftain, not on Zelenskyy. Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and Olaf Scholz, the British Prime Minister, French President, and German Chancellor, respectively, know this full well. I’ll have more on that growing doubt of Ukraine’s recovering its territory (not reconquering, as those three put it) below.

There’s this from a carefully anonymous French…official:

We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable. And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.

None of these wondrous national leaders—or the Biden administration, come to that—believed Ukraine would be able to defeat the barbarian’s initial invasion, either; they expected Ukraine to fall in a matter of days. That was their rationalization for withholding weapons Ukraine—the folks actually doing the fighting, bleeding, and dying—said they needed to drive the barbarian back out. And so here we are, a year later, and the Ukrainians are still fighting, bleeding, and dying, and they have recovered much of the territory the barbarian took (and devastated and inflicted atrocities on the captured populations during the occupations, on the way back out, and still from afar. But these wonders continue to avert their eyes from that).

If these august personages, including our own President Joe Biden (D) were serious about Russia mustn’t win, or whether the war goes on for [too] long, they’d get out of the way of arms transfers to Ukraine, they’d rapidly supply the weapons Ukraine says they need, in the numbers and at the pace Ukraine says they need them, so Ukraine could avoid an attritional war, recover all of their lost territory—including Crimea—and win quickly.

Finally, there’s this most blatant bit of hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty, from Macron himself as he told Mr Zelensky that (as paraphrased by the WSJ)

even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.

Of course. But not until after Germany had been driven back completely out of France—and all other Nazi German-occupied territories. Peace talks were not even allowed until then; the Allies demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender before peace talks could begin. Zelenskyy is not holding out for the barbarian’s unconditional surrender, only that he leave Ukraine.

Any Excuse to Slow-Walk

Posted on by
1

Now the Biden Defense Department is saying that it won’t be able to deliver the “promised” M1 tanks to Ukraine before the end of this year or potentially the next. According to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, the military does not currently have the available inventory to supply the tanks. “Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh added:

We just don’t have these tanks available in excess in our US stocks, which is why it is going to take months to transfer these M1A2 Abrams to Ukraine[.]

Actually, we do have the tanks to pass along, excess or not. We have lots of them in active units both here and overseas—like in Europe. It seems that President Joe Biden (D), his SecDoD Lloyd Austin, and Wormuth are concerned about drawing down active inventory and, furthermore, do not take seriously the need to get contracts let (and to get Pentagon bureaucrats out of the way so contracts can be let efficiently) in order to ramp up tank (and other weapon systems) production.

Tanks we have in Europe could be at the Ukrainian fronts in a couple of days plus training time. And the Slavs aren’t as dumb as the German government makes them out to be; they’d train up quickly.

Separately, F-16s, European NATO fighter aircraft, and associated logistics chains could be transferred to Ukraine in a few hours plus training time. A-10s, designed from the ground up to destroy armor and other ground formations and which too many in DoD insist are excess to our needs (so no inventory about which to worry drawing down) could be delivered to Ukraine in a matter of days plus training time. It’s time to stop saying “No.”

I have to ask: what’s the value of weapons that are held in reserve and held in reserve and…? Weapons held in reserve in favor of not drawing down inventory, rather than for sound tactical reasons, are weapons that are not available to defeat an enemy’s offensive, or to punch through enemy defense lines, or to exploit breakthroughs otherwise created. (Note, for instance, that the Ukrainian offensives in the east that liberated Kharkiv and much of that oblast, and in the south that liberated Kherson, petered out by the time the one got to Bakhmut in the east, and the other to the river on the southern edge of Kherson, due to lack of armor and other mechanized systems with which to continue exploiting those efforts’ success.)

Aircraft withheld altogether are aircraft not available to shoot down the barbarian’s aircraft and missiles that the barbarian is using to destroy Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods all across Ukraine and to butcher civilian women and children.

The only effect of holding back these tanks—and of NATO nations (like Germany) slow-walking delivery of their “promised” Leopard tanks—and aircraft is to prolong the barbarian’s war against Ukraine. The only purpose for prolonging that war is to increase the bleeding and the weakening of Russia, with the side effect of increasing the odds that Russia will eventually succeed in overrunning and destroying Ukraine.

That the prolongation also increases the bleeding that Ukrainians are doing—civilian women and children as well as Ukrainian soldiers—doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to Biden and his cronies or to those European NATO nations. That increased Ukrainian bloodshed also comes in close parallel with Biden’s avowed policy of creating and then protecting the invader’s status as sanctuary, proof against Ukrainian strikes against the barbarian’s staging areas and supply dumps that are inside Russia.