Monthly Archives: April 2017

Hot Air and a Strong United States

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Recall the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was going to heavily reinforce “all ocean features controlled by Manila” and plant the Philippine flag on them.

Now, it turns out that the People’s Republic of China has instructed its newest client state not to do so, and Duterte has obeyed.  He’s withdrawn his “threat”

because he values Chinese friendship.

PRC Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang:

Beijing is “happy to see the Philippine side working more closely with the Chinese side.”

Duterte’s strong words having been exposed as so much hot air clearly demonstrates the need for a revitalized and strong American presence everywhere in the South—and East—China Seas.

False Premise

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University of Alberta Political Science Professor Wenran Jiang had a piece in The Globe and Mail claiming that the road to peace on the Korean peninsula lay exclusively through diplomacy.  In attempting to downplay the degree of influence the People’s Republic of China has over northern Korea and the boss of its gang, Baby Kim, Professor Jiang made this claim:

Beijing has to walk a fine line between persuading the North not to pursue nuclear weapons and not being seen as colluding with the United States and Japan to undermine its security.

Be seen by whom as colluding?  The only ones who both care and are in a position have their concern cared about are the PRC, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Russia, and us.  Four of those aren’t going to worry about collusion, nor would we read cooperation as collusion: there are too many points of disagreement between the PRC (one of those four) and the other three to read collusion.  Russia has little interest in the matter one way or the other, save whether any disagreement might spill over onto Vladivostok, Nakhodka, and points north in that barren bit of land.

There is, in fact, little reason for the PRC to be as inactive as it has been—for years—from any appearance concerns.  There is much reason for the PRC to be as inactive as it has been, though, since that dovetails so nicely with its efforts in the South and East China Seas: to poke sticks in the eye of America, to humiliate us in our impotence in supporting our friends and allies around the Seas, and then to pry those friends and allies away from us while rendering us impotent in fact as well as in reputation.

The time has come to move on without the PRC and by eliminating the northern Korean threat (by diplomacy and/or economic means preferably, including economic steps against the PRC government and businesses doing business in or with northern Korea, by other means if necessary), and thereby take the first step to demonstrating the PRC’s irrelevance.

Syrian Refugees

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One Syrian, Kassem Eid an erstwhile media activist in Syria, and a victim of the gas attack that was Bashar al-Assad’s calling of then-President Barack Obama’s (D) bluff of a “red” line and that exposed Obama has being too timid to back his words, had a thought about aid and support to Syria’s refugees in a recent Wall Street Journal.  Here’s the money quote.

America, if you really care about refugees, then take to the streets, call your representatives, and ask for even further action against the murderer who displaced us. President Trump could order strikes to fully ground Assad’s air force, whose bombing forces civilians to flee. The Assad regime still has more than a dozen operational military airports from which to continue its attacks. Help civilians by creating safe zones and no-fly zones.

If you really care about human rights, work to remove Assad, the tyrant who has killed, raped, gassed, burned, tortured and displaced millions of civilians. If you really care about eliminating Islamic State, oust the dictator who for years has supported extremist terrorist groups like al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah and who buys oil from ISIS.

Because, as Eid emphasized at the start of his piece,

Syrians—like the people in the other Arab Spring countries—didn’t rebel against the dictatorship as a way to gain entry to the US as refugees. We rebelled because we wanted to live for the first time as equal citizens in our own nation. We wanted to stay home and make Syria a better place.

What he said.

Restrain

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In a piece about PRC President Xi Jinping telling President Donald Trump that the former wants a peaceful resolution to the problem of northern Korea, The Wall Street Journal‘s Te-Ping Chen quoted John Delury, an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul:

Beijing is in somewhat of a new dilemma here, where they’re trying to restrain both Trump and Kim Jong Un[.]

This is inaccurate on a couple of counts.  On the one hand, Xi is in no position to presume to restrain Trump, what with his own naked aggressions in the East and South China Seas, nor is he in a position to restrain when he has steadfastly refused to take meaningful steps to restrain Baby Kim, and his father Kim the Younger before him.

On the other hand, “restraint,” which is to say obviating the necessity of American unilateral action vis-à-vis northern Korea and its race for deliverable nuclear warheads, could readily be achieved were Xi to act on his words and positively and manifestly restrain Baby Kim: stop his nuclear weapons development and bring about the dismantling of his nuclear weapons facilities.

Shrinking the Federal Government

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…is more than just reducing spending; although that’s a major component of the necessary shrinkage.  Shrinking also must include reducing the physical size of the government, reducing its payroll.  To that end, the moves by President Donald Trump and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney will prove valuable if Congress will cooperate.

The hiring freeze of the last 11 weeks was an important first step, but it produced no actual shrinkage.  Its value consisted in halting the growth in payroll and in demonstrating over the last 11 weeks the lack of need of additional hiring.  In this latter regard, it’s much like the government shutdown of 2013, during which many Departments and Agencies were forced to furlough many of their employees—and still functioned.  The EPA, for instance, furloughed nearly 95% of its employees and ran just fine.  Treasury, Labor, and Interior furloughed over 80% each and those Departments did just as well as before.

Now the broad-based hiring freeze is about to be lifted, but all Departments and Agencies are being required to form plans to do targeted reductions in their work forces in expectation of seeing actually reduced budgets, with effect FY2019, which begins in October 2018.

This is all on the right track.  Now, it’s certainly true that the hiring freeze didn’t reduce the number of folks actually working these last several weeks, as I noted above.  It’s also true that the agencies during the government “shutdown” were on emergency manning and only so for roughly the same number of weeks.  But domestic matters should be handled, in the very large main, by the States.  The Federal government should be involved in domestic matters, in the very large main, only in emergencies.  Thus, the Departments and Agencies, in the very large main, don’t need employee complements much larger (but some larger) than emergency levels.

There are a couple of exceptions to these planned reductions.  Budget increases coupled with commensurate hiring increases will be proposed for Defense and Veterans Affairs.  The VA’s planned increases are from the best of intentions—the nearby backlog of veterans’ claims has exceeded 100,000, and so more bodies added to the payroll would seem to be needed in order to reduce this additional VA wait list fiasco, for instance—but the VA’s long-term, broad, and resolutely uncorrected failure to perform, too often with lethal results, mandates a different outcome.

Eliminating the VA and using its budget for veterans’ vouchers would be entirely consistent with shrinking the government’s payroll, even if spending associated with the VA would not shrink.  But in this case, at least the spending could be known to be going to the purpose for which it was passed originally—our veterans’ well-being, both now and, since the VA manages our military cemeteries, post mortem.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.