Category Archives: foreign policy

Were they Tipped?

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The lede raises the question in my mind.

On New Year’s Day, an oil tanker partially filled with sanctioned crude slipped out of Venezuela’s main export terminal and sailed toward Iran. The next day, another tanker escaped with Venezuelan oil, scrambling its signals to hide its course. Satellite imagery later confirmed it was headed to China.

Just two days later, US forces and law enforcement personnel entered Venezuela and seized the nation’s dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, bringing them back to the US for trial.

That timing raises my question: did someone tip off the Venezuelans that we were coming, and that’s why at least one of them left while only partially loaded? Or was that all the oil Venezuela had available for shipping at the time?

This is Foolish

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President Donald Trump (R) has decided to impose an additional 10% tariff on several European countries, starting next month, in an effort to get them to push Denmark into selling Greenland to us.

Greenland is important to us from both a national security and an economic perspective, but this is the wrong way to go about satisfying those two imperatives.

We don’t want to own Greenland. Begin with the fact that we don’t want to incur the bill for the $1 billion annually in subsidies that Denmark currently pays Greenland because the Greenland economy is so deficient.

Set aside that unnecessary expense. It’s cheaper and win-win all around for us to cut deals with Denmark (and Greenland, to the extent the island’s autonomous territory status within Denmark gives it a seat at the negotiations) to greatly expand our basing rights in Greenland and to expand our access to and development/exploitation of Greenland’s oil, natural gas, coal, and rare earth resources, of each of which Greenland has a wealth. Maybe even get exclusive rights to access and develop/exploit the rare earths.

The win: we get what we need strategically and economically without bringing in a population unenthusiastic about joining us and without our having to absorb those $1 billion annually.

The other win: Denmark gets an infusion of money from the royalties involved in those resource developments, and Greenland gets a large expansion of its economy from its cut of those royalties; the large jobs expansion from construction, drilling, mining, and all the supporting and ancillary businesses that will appear; and it will see a broad diversification of its economy away from the fishing industry that is virtually is sole current economic activity.

Open Borders and Racism Still are Progressive-Democratic Party Planks

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If there were any question about whether the Progressive-Democratic Party was walking away from its open borders position, there shouldn’t be anymore.

It was probably no surprise that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar [D, MN]…announced the Congressional Progressive Caucus has “adopted an official position” to defund Immigration & Customs Enforcement.

Mainstream Progressive-Democrats are too far Left to voice any opposition to this lawlessness. In fact, one of the more mainstream Progressive-Democrats, Seth Moulton (MA), has introduced a bill that would, at bottom, sharply reduce funding for ICE, thereby greatly reducing its and our nation’s ability to maintain our national borders short of moving DoD military personnel to the border—over which, of course, Party members would raise a loud hue and cry, too. As cited from the Associated Press,

[Moulton] introduced a bill on Wednesday that would—without adult supervision in Congress—gut the $75 billion funding increase ICE received in President Donald Trump’s [R] Big Beautiful Bill and dump the money into propping up…Obamacare….

Congressman Dave Min (D, CA) wants more. He’s

back[ing] impeaching Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and has called the work of enforcing immigration laws “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” He’s got the backing of Omar and her Squad pals at the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.
Min [also]…has called a House committee investigation into Minnesota’s massive fraud scandal “partisan and racist.”

This is Party, not only wanting to abolish our borders and calling enforcing our laws somehow unconstitutional, but also projecting its own intrinsic racist bigotry into the argument. There is, after all, very little more insidiously racist than injecting that bigotry into a discussion where there is no racism.

Trump and a Chinese Idiom

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Walter Russell Mead’s Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed opened with this subheadline:

For him [President Donald Trump (R)], extreme volatility and risk are not a problem but an opportunity.

Here’s an old and hoary Chinese idiom:

危機

These characters, 危 + 機 in their combination translate to Crisis, and the term is composed of characters meaning Danger + Opportunity

Mead’s piece expands on his theme of President Donald Trump’s (R) use of volatility and risk, but that’s just another way of saying, in Western diction, that Chinese idiom. The only difference between the two is whether the deviation is imposed from the outside or it’s created by deliberately deviating.

That idiom, and the Western rephrasing of volatility and risk, are essentially correct. Gains are not made without taking the underlying risks of deviating from the status quo. Great gains are possible only with making great deviations. Both Crisis and Volatility and Risk are those opportunities from great deviations.

Those who fear crisis or volatility and risk to the point of paralysis seek to have the rest of us similarly paralyzed lest they be left behind.

One More Warning?

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General Jack Keane (USA, Ret) thinks President Donald Trump (R) should give the Iranian government one more warning before striking, if we’re going to strike at all.

“The president has told them, ‘If you kill them, I’m coming for you,'” Keane said during an appearance on Life, Liberty & Levin on Saturday.
“They’ve already killed more than 40 people, and they’ve jailed many more. And in jail, they will execute them.”
…
“I think the president could give one more warning and then take down some of the leaders responsible for conducting violence against the Iranian population[.]”

No. One warning is enough, they heard him that first time, and they’ve already answered him. No more warnings, no more talking. It’s time to act, and more forcefully than merely taking down some of the leaders. There needs to be no teeth and claws left for their follow-ons to use.