Tag Archives: foreign policy

It’s a Weapon that should only Work Once

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Vladimir Putin is extending his murderously physical war on Ukraine into an economic war against Ukraine’s European nation supporters.

Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom PJSC throttled deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany this week….

And

Russian natural gas deliveries through a key pipeline to Europe will drop by around 40% this year, state-controlled energy giant Gazprom said Tuesday….

And

Slovakia’s state-owned gas importer SPP said it expected Thursday’s Russian gas deliveries to be reduced by about 30%, while Czech power utility CEZ said it had seen a similar fall….

And

France’s multinational utility corporation Engie said on Thursday that Russia has reduced gas shipments….

This should be a one-shot effort by Putin, and then his energy production should find no buyers outside of India and the People’s Republic of China—to which there are inadequate delivery routes for several years. The single shot aspect of this, though, requires the European nations to have courage and to move apace to find alternative sources—and there are a plethora of them. And then, Russia, which depends on exports of extractions rather than of manufactured goods would be…stuck. The Indian and PRC markets just aren’t all that.

Where in the World is Joe Biden?

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Last Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi all travelled to Kyiv to meet face-to-face with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a show of support, even by the three European national leaders who are the most wobbly in their support for Ukraine.

Which once again raises the question: where is the guy who sits in the American leadership chair, Joe Biden?

Not in Ukraine. Not ever in Ukraine. Mostly Biden is laying low in Delaware, with occasional sojourns to the White House Oval Office to sit in the big boy’s chair at the Resolute Desk and to spend the night, like a celebrity tourist in the Lincoln Bedroom, in the Presidential Bedroom Suite.

“Negotiate”

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French President Emmanuel Macron is at it again vis-à-vis Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Ukraine would eventually have to hold peace talks with Russia, while Ukrainian troops fought hard to hold back the Russian invasion force in the country’s east.
“At some point, when we will have helped Ukraine as much as possible to resist, when I hope Ukraine will have won and fighting will have stopped, we will have to negotiate,” Mr Macron told reporters while visiting French troops in Romania.

Whose definition of victory, though? Whose definition of what’s possible? Whose definition of fighting will have stopped?

Will the fighting have stopped because the Ukrainians have run out of weapons and ammunition because wobbly (to use a Margaret Thatcher term) nations like France have decided for Ukraine that it’s enough and stopped supporting Ukraine materially and materiel-ly?

Will Macron decide for Ukraine that fighting—or supplying Ukraine—is no longer possible? Will Macron decide for Ukraine when “victory” had been achieved?

Ukraine is in a war for its very existence as a polity and as a society, and it’s fighting a barbarian bent on destroying that polity and society. Macron apparently has forgotten his own nation’s struggles for existence in two wars in the last century, the first of which threatened its existence but for the unalloyed aid of other nations, and the second of which did erase France from the map except for one part that was a satrap of another nation and the other part that was a rump country wholly subsidiary to that other nation, an erasure undone only by the unalloyed aid of other nations.

The only victory possible for Ukraine has already been articulated by Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That victory consists of the Russian barbarian (my term) gone entirely from Ukrainian territory.

I suggest that the only negotiation with the barbarian that is possible once he’s driven from Ukrainian territory is how far back into Russia from the Ukrainian border all roads and railroads must be torn up and plowed over.

“We, Europeans, we share a continent, and geography is stubborn: it turns out that at the end of it, Russia is still there,” [Macron] said.

Macron’s cheap snark, despite itself, puts a premium on victory on Ukrainian terms and on subsequent negotiation on my term. We do, indeed share a continent under stubborn geography. However, France is still there, as I noted above, only because other nations came, without hesitation or reservation, to its aid.

So it must be for Ukraine. France above all owes this debt to Ukraine, owes this debt to Europe.

Wrong Answer

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President Joe Biden (D) and his equally progressive crony DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas now intend to move illegal aliens crossing our border into the interior of our nation, at taxpayer expense, where they will live in accommodations also provided at taxpayer expense.

The plan is designed to lessen the crowding now taking place along the border, where illegal immigrants have flooded the shelters in many cities, causing Customs and Border Protection agents to reportedly release the crossers onto the streets.

This, of course, is the wrong answer to the (over)crowding now occurring along our border.

The right answer is to not have the crowding at all, by not allowing the illegal aliens to come into our nation in the first place, and to promptly deport those who do cross our border illegally and are subsequently caught.

No one—not armies, not individuals, not collections of individuals—has any intrinsic right to enter another country without that country’s prior permission. No country has any intrinsic obligation to grant that permission. Borders and permission-granted entries are how a nation protects its own culture—and in the particular case of the United States, it’s how we protect the American culture and opportunities that make our nation a desirable place to live and to come to.

But the Biden administration knows this. The flooding of our nation with illegal aliens is one aspect of Joe Biden’s and his predecessor and BFF/mentor, ex-President Barack Obama’s (D), promises to fundamentally transform America.

This Isn’t Espionage?

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Three US companies—Quicksilver Manufacturing Inc, Rapid Cut LLC, and U.S. Prototype Inc—have been caught shipping technical drawings and blueprints for satellite, rocket, and defense prototypes to the People’s Republic of China, ostensibly for their cheaper 3-D printing capabilities. As a result,

Commerce Department on Wednesday suspended the export privileges of [the] three…for 180 days….

Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Matthew Axelrod:

Outsourcing 3-D printing of space and defense prototypes to China harms US national security.
By sending their customers’ technical drawings and blueprints to [the People’s Republic of China], these companies may have saved a few bucks, but they did so at the collective expense of protecting US military technology.

Well, NSS.

Nevertheless,

A [Quicksilver] company employee signed a non-disclosure agreement, which included that the work be conducted in compliance with US export control regulations, the [production order from an unnamed US aerospace and global defense technology company] said. Those regulations required licenses that likely would have been denied.
But Quicksilver fulfilled the order that August without seeking a license, and included an invoice that indicated the products had been shipped from China[.]

The companies’ export “privileges” have been suspended for a whole six months.

How is Quicksilver’s behavior in particular not espionage? Why is Quicksilver in particular still in business?