Category Archives: ethics

Typically Liberal “Misunderstanding”

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It’s William Galston, this time. Galston, in his op-ed for last Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal disparaged SecDef Pete Hegseth’s alleged disdain for the laws of war.

Leave aside the fact that Galston cynically and deliberately chose not to cite any of these laws of war. Instead, he actually wrote extensively about Hegseth’s supposed disdain for rules of engagement. In this vein, Galston generalized, without logic or facts, Hegseth’s disdain for particular rules into a disdain for all rules of engagement.

However, Galston’s more serious…error…is this. Rules of engagement are not Laws of War. RoE are the particulars, tailored to specific combat and short-of-combat environments, intended for particularized implementation of those general laws of war. Yet he opened his piece with this lede, and his piece continued solely in that vein.

It’s no surprise the US Navy’s September 2 strike on an alleged drug-carrying boat near Venezuela has been controversial. The man who now leads the Defense Department has ridiculed the laws of war throughout his military career.

I’m not that convinced, though, that Galston’s mistake is a misunderstanding Given his high skill as a journalist for a leading news outlet, for whom words are his stock in trade, I lean more toward outright distortion in his use of rules of engagement and laws of war interchangeably.

Oh, and one more “leave aside:” The controversy surrounding that second strike is entirely a journalistic construction. Those of us with actual military experience and who are not trading on that experience for political gain see no fault in sending in a second strike to finish a task that the first strike had not completed.

An Empty Promise?

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Supposedly, the US has offered a security guarantee to Ukraine in the form of support[ing] European security guarantees and seek[ing] Senate backing for Washington’s promised role as a means of breaking the current peace talks impasse.

This supposed guarantee

would include monitoring, verification, and deconfliction, the officials said, and would lay out the role the US would play if Russia breached a peace deal and came back to attack Ukraine. They would also include the provision of weapons to deter a Russian force.

Yeah, sure. “Monitoring:” we see you, Russia, resuming your invasion, we’re watching the hell out of you. “Verification:” Yup, Russia really is resuming its invasion. “Deconfliction:” What does this mean? European forces entering Ukraine to fight the barbarian alongside Ukrainian forces? Traffic control to deconflict traffic jams on Ukrainian roads for Ukrainian forces and civilians moving in the other direction? Something else?

“Provision of weapons for deterrence:” This is risible. Europe already is refusing to provide the weapons the UA needs, in the numbers it needs them, or on the schedule it says it needs them. Excuses range from fear of provoking the barbarian to insisting the UA doesn’t really need them like that to claims they don’t have the weapons to provide the UA, having drawn down their armories already with transfers. That last, given Europe’s disdain for any thing military, at least has a measure of plausibility.

The supposed guarantee also purports to include

legally-binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event of a Russian attack.

What is the timeline for implementation of a related peace agreement? Would the agreement go into effect before or after “Senate support” had been secured? If after, what support for Ukraine’s continued fight for its survival would be in the offing pending that Senate agreement? If before, how would Ukraine recover or be aided in recovering, from the barbarian’s virtually guaranteed violation of the terms? What would be the Or Else should the barbarian violate the agreement—more monitoring, verification, and…”deconfliction?” All the nations’ governments—including, shamefully, our own—have already been slinking away, their tails covering their crown jewels, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nattering on about nuclear weapons.

However sincerely offered, this seems like an empty promise. There’s no guarantee that the Senate, with its two-thirds majority treaty ratification requirement, would support such a thing. A simple Senate majority-voted resolution of support would be meaningless, legally, politically, and morally. Nor is there any guarantee that an alternate path to securing support—bills passed in both the House and Senate, which would require only majority votes (after a 60-vote cloture success in the Senate)—would succeed.

There’s this bit, too, that overhangs any security “guarantee” that might be offered Ukraine. Three of the participants in the Budapest Memorandum—the US, the UK, and France via its separate individual assurance—already have betrayed Ukraine by dishonoring the security and territorial integrity guarantees contained in that document. The Memorandum also was a legally binding commitment.

Foolish

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But a matter of little choice and less practical change.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has—reportedly—dropped his insistence on a path to NATO membership as a condition to an end of the war that Russia has inflicted in his nation. Instead, Zelenskyy has said that he would be open to a security arrangement that has

Washington and European states offering security guarantees in the event of another invasion, according to the Financial Times. “We are talking about bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States—namely, [NATO] Article 5-like guarantees…as well as security guarantees for us from our European partners and from other countries such as Canada, Japan, and others,” he said.

Zelenskyy had little choice in making this offer, since Ukraine had little chance of joining NATO for all the pre-war favorable talk about such a thing. The acceptance of a new member requires the unanimous agreement of the existing members, and too many members, out of timidity, ego, or being too close to Russia would say no to the accession.

The offer represents even less as a practical matter. Many of the same nations that would guarantee Ukraine’s national security in the event of another invasion are the same signatories to the Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukraine’s national territory and sovereignty and who promptly betrayed Ukraine over 10 years ago when Russia invaded and occupied Crimea and first invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Still, Zelenskyy has little choice but to make such an offer, regardless of its practical foolishness. That’s the outcome of the West’s collective decision to withhold from Ukraine the wherewithal to defeat the barbarian and drive him back out of Ukraine, a victory that Ukraine almost certainly could achieve were it not being held back.

Contradiction in Terms

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This time, regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) move to remodel and expand the White House East Wing so that, among other things, important diplomatic events involving large groups of dignitaries, their significant others, et al., can be held indoors inside a facility fitting for the occasion rather than outdoors, in the White House’s back yard, in tents.

Leftist critics, of course, object. One of their more risible objections is this:

Critics say Trump barreling through bureaucracy to reshape an iconic piece of American history reflects a wider disdain for democratic norms.

Never mind that giving an unelected bureaucratic authority functional veto power is what violates democratic norms.

Another Progressive-Democrat Foolish Lawsuit

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Blue State AGs don’t like President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order imposing a $100,000 fee on H1B visa applicants.

A group of Democratic state attorneys general on Friday filed a challenge to President Donald Trump’s imposition of a $100,000 fee to apply for an H-1B visa.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, lead AG on the case, based it on this:

Oregon’s colleges, universities and research institutions rely on skilled international workers to keep labs running, courses on track and innovation moving forward. This enormous fee would make it nearly impossible for these institutions to hire the experts they need, and it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended. This threatens Oregon’s ability to compete, educate, and grow.

It may make colleges, universities, and research institutions efforts to hire certain skilled workers more difficult. That, though, is a business model question, not a legal one. No enterprise has an inherent right to pursue the business model of its choice, and government has no obligation whatsoever, to comport laws or regulations to the requirements of any business model. Those entities must alter their business models to accommodate changing legal environments, just as they must with changing market environments.

The only thing threatening [Oregon’s] ability to compete, educate, and grow is those institutions’ insistence on their entrenched models as they are, rather than adapting them. The question of whether the EO goes beyond Congressional intent is a separate matter, and the AGs’ claim of that is wholly conclusory.

This frivolous and foolish lawsuit is just another instantiation of Party’s dislike of all things Trump, independent of merit or lack regarding a Trump move.