Category Archives: foreign policy

We Can Help

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And we should.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has pledged to step up defense spending to defend the self-ruled island’s sovereignty in the face of China’s growing military assertiveness in the region.

A good start would be to sell missile defense systems to the Republic of China along with modern aircraft—both air defense, like updated F-16s and F-15s, and ground attack, like F-16s and A-10s.

We also should resume sea and air patrols of the Taiwan Strait, something we’ve not done for far too long.

A Caliphate Has Collapsed?

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That’s what Renée Rigdon, Tristan Wyatt, and Karen Leigh would have us believe in their recent Wall Street Journal piece.

It’s true enough that the Daesh—that JV team of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) estimation—ran through the Iraqi “army” a few years ago, exploded through Syrian territory, and wound up controlling a significant fraction of Iraqi and Syrian land.  Their physical expansion was stopped in the immediacy of the situation only by Iraqi Kurds and the confused and fractious condition of Syria.  It’s also true that under President Donald Trump, a US-refurbished Iraqi army allied with those Kurds and local militias, with the support of an unleashed US-led coalition of air forces, recaptured nearly all of Iraqi territory in very short order while that same coalition of air forces supported a US-led coalition of rebels (albeit of at best dubious provenance) have disinfected most of Daesh-held Syria.

However, it’s naïve to suggest that the Daesh’s “caliphate” has crumbled, as the article’s title claims.  The Daesh, like its forerunner al Qaeda, is a polity that is first and foremost a network entity.  It has physical nodes existing parasitically in a broad swath of nation-states, ranging from western People’s Republic of China through northern Africa.  It has cells throughout Europe and in the United States.  These nodes and cells are connected via the Internet and the world’s cell phone network.

All that’s happened with the physical rollup of the Daesh in Iraq and Syria is that this terrorist polity has been freed from the shackles of geography.  Now our battle must shift to the virtual world; it’s far too soon to cry Victory.

Heads up.  Be very heads up.

Prove They’re Serious

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and his satrap, Bashar al Assad, want to hold peace talks in Sochi with a view to ending the fighting in Syria.  At least 40 groups in the al Assad opposition demur and are refusing Putin’s attempt.

“We reject this, and we affirm that Russia is an aggressor that has committed war crimes against Syrians,” the statement signed by 40 rebel groups said. “Russia has not contributed with a single move to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people and it has not pressured the regime it claims it guarantees to move an inch toward any real path toward a resolution.”

These groups would rather continue the UN’s efforts to mediate, even though the UN has been useless futile since its mediation attempt began in 2014.

My suggestion: don’t go running off to the comfort of a resort town as many as 800 miles away from the theater. Putin and his satrap should offer to hold the talks in Idlib or Kobane or Ghouta.  Ghouta even is convenient to al Assad’s capital.

So should the UN’s “negotiators,” come to that, prove they’re serious.

A Rival Power

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President Donald Trump, in his national strategy speech, labeled the People’s Republic of China as a rival power and as a revisionist power.  Which they are, regardless of how heinously politically incorrect the truth is.  After all, this is the nation that only pays public lip service to sanctions levied against northern Korea over the latter’s drive to develop deliverable nuclear weapons.  The PRC wants northern Korea as a stick in our eye and as a wedge with which to drive us apart from our Pacific allies and out of the western Pacific altogether.

This is the PRC that has seized the South China Sea, including waters and islands that belong to the Philippines, Vietnam, the Republic of China, Borneo, and nearly all the other nations rimming that Sea, and that is engaged in a military buildup there.  This is the PRC that has routinely threatened Japan and its islands in the East China Sea.  This is the PRC that economically threatened the Republic of Korea over its acceptance of American defensive missile systems against the threat from northern Korea.

This is the PRC that engages in hacking into our government’s computer systems and that engages in intellectual property theft—by fiat as a condition of doing business inside the PRC and via corporate espionage—in order to harm our national security at least as much as for its own economic gain.

And there’s this from bit of disingenuosity by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying:

China will never seek development at the price of sacrificing other countries’ interests[.]

Right.  See above.  Here’s Shen Dingli, Professor of International Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University:

The US isn’t wrong in perceiving Chinese competition for its place at the center stage of global affairs.

Yep.  And for all of the years of the prior administration, the US has shrunk away from that challenge.  See above for the inevitable result of that timidity.

With the PRC having long since restored Cold War policies against our interests and those of our friends and allies, it’s long since time we responded in a serious manner.  Now we need to follow through on our rhetoric.

Progressive-Democrats, Drugs, and Nuclear Weapons

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It’s a long read, but Politico‘s piece is worth the time.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

Project Cassandra was making serious headway against Hezbollah’s drug dealing and money making—a $1 billion per year business that would seem to dwarf its terrorist activities—but as ex-President Barack Obama (D) and his (ex-)Secretary of State John Kerry got closer and closer to concluding Obama’s Executive Agreement with Iran that put a fig leaf over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Cassandra was increasingly restricted.  David Asher, a DoD finance forensics analyst who helped establish Project Cassandra:

The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away.  So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations—even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission—it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.

And here is the confession of all of that by Obama administration personnel who are figuratively hiding their faces so as not to be identified and called to account:

Former Obama administration officials declined to comment on individual cases, but noted that the State Department condemned the Czech decision not to hand over Fayad.

Because ObamaTalk always was so effective at changing the behavior of our nation’s enemies.

And

Several of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were guided by broader policy objectives, including de-escalating the conflict with Iran, curbing its nuclear weapons program and freeing at least four American prisoners held by Tehran, and that some law enforcement efforts were undoubtedly constrained by those concerns.

There it is.  Curbing the drug trade, cutting Hezbollah off from its major source of money were not as important as that administration’s public appearances regarding peace in our time with Iran.  What else was less important than appearances?

…insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and Russian governments—all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad, and Putin….

And more directly, getting at “the Ghost,” Abdallah Safieddine, Hezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who was—and still is, courtesy of these decisions

a major supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people.

All bought and paid for with the proceeds from that drug trade.  Al Assad gassing his own people, after all, just wasn’t that important.  All enriching Hezbollah, too, and funding its own weapons inventory and increasing its threat to Israel.  Notice, too, that drug trade connection to Iran, with whom Obama and his Kerry were so desperate to conclude a deal with which they could pretend to look good in the eyes of the American Left.

There’s lots more in the Politico piece.

It’s hard to believe that the Progressive-Democrats in Congress at the time, at the very least the Party’s leadership, didn’t also know about this preference for an enemy’s—a terrorist organization’s—prosperous drug trade.

This is the set of priorities, the level of morality, that the Progressive-Democratic Party will have on offer in the 2018 mid-terms, the 2020 general election—imagine another Progressive-Democrat President—and beyond.