Tag Archives: foreign policy

Now It’s Mandatory

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is planning to visit the Republic of China next month. Zhao Lijian, Deputy Director of the People’s Republic of China’s Foreign Ministry Information Department, speaking for the PRC’s Foreign Minister demurred.

It [the visit] will have a severe negative impact on the political foundation of China-US relations, and send a gravely wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” separatist forces. China firmly opposes such a visit.

That pretty well settles the matter. Now it’s critical that Pelosi not only travel to the Republic of China, she also must meet with RoC President Tsai Ing-wen, Premier Su Tseng-chang, and the President of the Legislative Yuan, Yu Shyi-kun.

Maybe meet with National Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng, too, although matters of national defense are outside Pelosi’s portfolio.

Where in the World….

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…is Joe Biden?

Adding to the long list of European heads of state that have visited Ukraine and met face-to-face with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv and to the long list of American Congressmen who have done the same, Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D, CT) have met with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, just last Thursday.

Which raises anew the questions: where in the world is President Joe Biden (D)? Of what is he so terrified that he won’t go to Ukraine and meet with Zelenskyy face-to-face?

It’s not that Biden is unable to hack the trip itself; he’s been to Brussels in the last few months, after all.

Maybe Time to Start Holding them Liable

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The heads of the FBI and of Great Britain’s MI5 have a warning for American and British businesses regarding

the threats posed by Chinese espionage, especially spying aimed at stealing Western technology companies’ intellectual property.
In a rare joint appearance on Wednesday at the headquarters of MI5, Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Ken McCallum, Director-General of MI5, urged executives not to underestimate the scale and sophistication of Beijing’s campaign.
“The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology—whatever it is that makes your industry tick—and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market,” Mr Wray told the audience of business people. “They’re set on using every tool at their disposal to do it.”

Too much of that information aggregates to national security levels, and the lackadaisical protection of it threatens our security indirectly via the degradation of our two nations’ economic capabilities relative to the People’s Republic of China and directly through exposing our defense information to theft. That means business laxness—outright laziness in too many cases—cannot be excused with the companies involved being left simply to take their lumps.

Wray emphasized the matter as it concerns the US.

We want to send the clearest signal we can on a massive shared challenge—China…if we are to protect our economies, our institutions, and our democratic values.

To do that, business executives—particularly CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs, and their deputies—need to do their part and start taking seriously their own obligations to protect company secrets and other proprietary information, along with information of a national security kind.

It may be, then, that business executives need to start being held personally liable, civilly and criminally, for security breaches that allow hackers to steal their companies’ information. The businesses that employ them may need, as legal persons, to be held similarly liable for such breaches.

Relations with the People’s Republic of China

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Maurice Greenberg, Chairman and CEO of CV Starr & Co, an insurance and investment company with subsidiaries domiciled in the PRC and Hong Kong, said in his Wall Street Journal Wednesday op-ed that he wants the US to “rebuild relations” with the People’s Republic of China.

It is in our national interest, now more than ever, to do all we can to improve U.S.-China relations.

And

The US and China have a long history of collaboration dating to before World War II. When the People’s Republic of China reopened to the world, the US extended favorable trade terms to foster China’s economic growth….

What Greenberg ignored is that the People’s Republic of China has no relation to the pre-World War II China beyond sitting in the same geography. What he also ignored is that since the PRC “opened” and we extended favorable trade terms, the PRC has been running a campaign of stealing our intellectual property through outright theft, hacking, and coerced transfers as a condition of doing business within the PRC. That nation also has been running a parallel campaign, using the same techniques, to steal our national defense and foreign policy secrets.

Frank talks can build trust relationships with the PRC? No, the only thing we can trust of what the PRC’s government men say is their commitment to replace us on the world stage and to subordinate us to them.

We don’t to rebuild relations with the PRC. Let the PRC want to build, from the beginning, relations with us.

A Border Control Thought

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This idea came to me while watching another of the innumerable videos of illegal aliens piling out of pickup trucks at/near the Rio Grande and scattering into the Texas brush, trying to escape.

A bola is a pair of weights tied together by a length of cord

used to capture animals by entangling their legs. Bolas were most famously used by the gauchos….

My thought is this. Arm (some of) our Border Patrol agents with these, with specially designed slingshots or modified beanbag-firing shotguns to propel them, to capture fleeing illegal aliens and their coyotes. Bolas also can be hand-thrown to good effect—and originally were—but only from closer ranges, which may not always obtain.

Bolas are range-limited by their nature and nonlethal. Their use would take training, but no more than the gaucho who uses them on his ranch, or than the police need with their beanbag-firing shotguns. An additional advantage is that it will take some time for an illegal alien/coyote to disentangle himself from the bola, enabling a following Ranger to finish securing several illegals while the bola-armed Ranger continues pursuit, rather than the [two] of them having to capture and secure illegals one at a time.