Statesmanship

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The estimable editors of The Wall Street Journal spent an entire column dunking on Vice President JD Vance (R) and his foreign policy miscues. Buried in the text, though, were a couple of nuggets.

…hedge-fund magnate Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, said he’d favor Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a matchup between the two for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination.

Unmentioned by the editors is that Rubio has already said he won’t run for the party’s nomination for President if Vance does, the plain subtext of which is he won’t risk dividing the party with such a contest. This is an assurance Vance has so far chosen not to offer.

And these, regarding the cease fire deal he thought he’d negotiated with the civilians in the Tehran branch of Iran’s government (the other branch being the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps):

I think that they see there’s a real opportunity here to turn over a new leaf so long as they do the right thing[.]
…
They want to have a much brighter future….

As the editors noted, though, the regime’s vision of a brighter future entails nuclear weapons that allow it to control the region, not prosperity for its people.

Vance’s misunderstanding of whose view of “right thing” actually was in play, along with his miss regarding whose vision was operating, are not just statesmanship misses, they’re failures of political acumen.

A Truism, and a Solution

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote this while commenting on Alexis de Tocqueville’s praise for our nation’s then-penchant for solving problems locally rather than crying to Mama Government:

A statute can’t manufacture civic energy or entrepreneurial zeal. That has to come from citizens who are politically engaged or not hindered in their efforts to continue the American dream.

That is plainly true. And, pedantically, it echoes Aristotle’s and Plato’s remarks about politics and citizens’ role in it.

The solution is just as plain, and it’s made so by the failing, and increasing depth of the failure, of our public school systems to properly educate our children. We need the competition of school choice, the freely done setup of voucher and charter schools and of homeschooling, whether individually or parents setting up homeschool pods. That competition even improves the performance of local examples of public schools.

That last, though, requires the reduction, if not elimination, of teachers unions, organizations whose management teams care not a farthing about our children, nor even of their teacher members, but only about their own political power.

Hitting Back

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After 15 years of being hacked, often severely, by Russian government sanctioned, if not government owned operators, the nations of Europe has finally gotten around to responding. With sanctions.

The European Union and the UK said the sanctions would target Russian military intelligence officers, hackers, and private companies that support the Kremlin’s cyberattacks.

As if the sanctions’ targets would care. Those folks, their companies, and their backers will just find other ways to operate. Money isn’t all that much of a critical item for their operations, and the resources they really need are largely untouched by sanctions.

We do get this sort of thing, though, in addition to those sanctions: after years of Russian hacks against the French Ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs and their networks,

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he would summon Russia’s ambassador in France in the coming days.

For what? Le goutier sans vin? No rush in any event; whenever is fine.

How about, instead, you know—work with me on this; it’s a new concept for some—maybe fighting back and hitting directly Russia’s hack networks, and the computer networks of Russia’s intelligence agencies and defense establishment?

Sanctions alone accomplish very little, as years of them already applied against Iran, northern Korea, the People’s Republic of China—and Russia—clearly demonstrate. Those nations and street gang-run areas have not changed their behavior in the slightest, for all that their pace has been reduced.

What’s necessary is direct responses targeting their ability to operate at all. Get into their networks and erase data in some, insert false data in others, and inject sleeperware in all of them, the last to be triggered at a useful time in the future.

“Black Democrats Fight for Political Survival”

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The lede identifies the source of this political…confusion.

The Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate Alabama’s congressional map has split the political future for many Black Democratic voters.

Black Democratic voters. Not American voters favoring the Democratic Party who happen to be black.

And this:

In Montgomery, Democrats believe they still have a shot at keeping their seat….

Their seat. No. As Scott Brown nearly put it a few years ago, with all due respect, it’s not the black voters’ seat, it’s the voters’ seat. Nor is very much respect at all due the racist trope that the seat belongs to black voters exclusively.

Maybe these Progressive-Democrats should consider no longer running on their race, and instead run on their Party’s domestic, foreign, and economic policies instead. The rest of us, along with our courts (finally), have figured out that the critical opening phrases of our Declaration of Independence and the opening Article of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution really do mean what they say.

Dealing with Terrorists

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In the ongoing “negotiations” with the Iranian government over the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear weapons program, our politicians are beginning to have rubbed in their faces the utter duplicity of the men and women reigning over Iran.

Though Iranian negotiators have sought to move forward on talks, the Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s powerful paramilitary force, has undermined talks with repeated attacks, according to multiple US officials.

The civilians in Tehran profess to be…negotiating…the status of the Strait while, at the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is attacking shipping in the Strait and claiming that the Strait is closed.

The fact of the matter is that the IRGC—paramilitary or formal military—is an arm of the Iranian government. Either the Tehran civilians are using the IRGC to carry out the terrorists’ duplicity, or—as increasingly seems likely—the IRGC runs the government and is using the civilian arm to carry out the terrorists’ duplicity.

Either way, the words of the Iranian government men and women are completely worthless. It’s time to leave off from the current Trumpian love taps in reaction to Iran’s attacks on shipping through the Strait and the terrorists’ disingenuousity regarding “negotiations” over their nuclear weapons program. It’s time to impose a full scope—kinetic, cyber, economic—attack on Iran, and keep it up until the terrorists are physically incapable of any further kinetic or cyber activity.

President Donald Trump (R) has said that Iran has asked for talks as these love taps have resumed. In order for those talks to occur, Trump should require the Iranian government to publicly and in writing ask for those talks. Only when that happens, should we agree to them. Even then, those talks should be allowed only if Iran sends decision-makers to a negotiation site and “makes a deal.” Any professed need for Iran’s negotiators to consult with Tehran before agreeing should be taken as further proof that Iran remains unserious, and our full scope attacks should continue apace until that deal is made.

Trump’s terms of the deal [and my addenda] are simple and straightforward.

  • Iran[—both the Tehran civilian government arm and the IRGC arm—in writing] must confirm that the Strait of Hormuz[, along with the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman,] are international waters over which Iran has no influence whatsoever.
  • Iran[—both the Tehran civilian government arm and the IRGC arm in writing] must forswear that it has no designs on obtaining nuclear weapons.
  • Iran[—both…—] must permit an international inspection force to enter and inspect [any site] in Iran the force wishes, and do so [on a no-notice basis].
  • Iran[—both…—] must permit an international team to recover the processed uranium and remove it from Iran altogether or confirm that any processed uranium remaining is unrecoverable.

The terrorists will never agree, though. The only way to get the safety of these waters restored and Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons eliminated is to destroy the terrorists’ ability to act and to destroy the terrorists themselves.