Category Archives: foreign policy

Brexit Failure in the Offing?

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Great Britain’s Labour Party is about to offer legislation that looks a great deal like it [emphasis added].

It shall be a negotiating objective of Her Majesty’s Government to ensure the United Kingdom has full access to the internal market of the European Union, underpinned by shared institutions and regulations, with no new impediments to trade and common rights, standards and protections as a minimum.

There’s very little difference between this and Remain.  Labour is suggesting Britain’s abject surrender in the Brexit negotiations with the Moghuls of Brussels.

Maybe not failure.  Maybe this is Labour’s betrayal of the British people, who voted to leave the EU because they wanted out of the EU.

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Deal

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“Senior European officials” are sad because the deal might be in jeopardy.  They even wrote a letter to President Donald Trump, worrying that

their efforts to save the Iranian nuclear accord by maintaining major trade and investment with Tehran are buckling in the face of planned US sanctions.

My heart bleeds.  These worthies shouldn’t be trying to trade with a terrorist-supporting nation bent on getting nuclear weapons.  Especially since Iran will use those weapons to fulfill its long-standing commitment to destroy Israel, and it will sell such weapons to its terrorist clients for them to use…on Europe as well as on us.

Another Facebook Fail

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Chinese firms Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL were among numerous handset makers that were given access to Facebook data in what the US company said was “a controlled operation.”

The social media giant’s vice president of mobile partnerships, Francisco Varela, confirmed a report in The New York Times Tuesday that Facebook had given Chinese device makers deep access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent.

A “controlled operation.”  Meaning the accesses were deliberately granted, consents were deliberately not requested in advance.  Which raises the question: were any consents actively withheld and those denials ignored by Facebook?

Huawei already has been identified as a threat to our national security.  Lenovo is headquartered in Beijing, Oppo (Electronics Corporation) is headquartered in Dongguang near the south coast of the People’s Republic of China, and TCL is headquartered in Huizhou, just down the road a piece from Dongguang.  These three are each under the influence, if not the control, of the PRC government.  Facebook knew these things at the time they engaged in their “controlled operation.”

Here’s Varela again, this time in his best What, me worry? impression:

…we wanted to make clear that all the information from these integrations with Huawei was stored on the device, not on Huawei servers[.]

Well, that settles it, then.  Huawei has no way at all to copy data “stored on [its] device” to its servers.  Nope.  Can’t be done.

Sure.

A New US-RoK Alliance?

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That’s what Michael O’Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution wants.  He thinks a continued, but greatly reduced alliance would be a useful tradeoff for northern Korea’s elimination of its nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons development program along with a reduction in its conventional military forces.  Aside from the utter naivete of the suggestion that northern Korea would reduce its conventional capability along with giving up its nuclear capability—or especially in light of that cessation—one comment at the end of his piece really illustrates the naivete of his idea.

The heavy Army brigade now in Korea might be transformed into a light brigade, better suited for peacekeeping missions.

Peacekeeping missions are wholly incapable of keeping the peace unless they’re fully capable of fighting.  Unfortunately, peacekeeping missions are incapable of fighting a serious enemy (and police forces are better suited for dealing with unserious enemies—criminals).  A light brigade on that peninsula would not be a peacekeeper, it would be a target.

Offensive, Is It?

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Recall that President Donald Trump has decided to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum on national security grounds, and that these tariffs impact Canadian (among other nations’) imports to the US.  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finds it offensive that Trump considers Canada a security threat to the US.

Really, he said that.

No, what’s offensive is Trudeau’s cynical distortion of the purpose of those tariffs.  The national security threat for us is our inability to produce our own steel and aluminum, not the steel and aluminum we might import.  Whether tariffs are the best way to encourage recovery of that ability can be debated, but it’s clearly self-sufficiency that’s our concern, not imports per se.

Trudeau is young, and he has much to learn.  But he knows this much full well.