Category Archives: foreign policy

This Makes No Sense

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The German government wants to pay a bonus to refugees who’ve been rejected from consideration for remaining in Germany.

The German government wants to encourage rejected asylum seekers to voluntarily return to their home countries with a cash incentive, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told newspaper Bild am Sonntag on Sunday.

It’s also a cynical move.  Maiziere offered this as part of the bonus:

When you voluntarily decide to return by the end of February, in addition to startup help you can provisionally receive housing cost help for the first 12 months in your homeland

If these folks have been rejected even for refugee status, what have they done that would earn them any of the German citizens’ money?  These folks are refugees, or claim to be; what is there in the home country from which they say they’re fleeing that would allow them to live there in safety?

Naïve

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It’s hard to believe that this level of naivete can exist in grown human beings, especially American journalists who hold themselves out as so smart and experienced.  But here it is.  Regarding northern Korea’s just-fired ICBM, the AP’s Foster Klug had this sort of thing:

Pyongyang may simply continue its torrid testing pace of its weapons, which, despite internal and global hype, are not yet a match for those of any of the established nuclear powers.

Testing is expensive, more so when the pace is torrid; the money is coming from somewhere.  But there are no worries about that in Klug’s mind.  As to the latter, it’s irrelevant.  The weapons don’t have to be a match for established nuclear powers’ systems.  Some of the warheads—nuclear or nuclear-triggered EMP—just have to get through.  Both Little Boy and Fat Man and their delivery systems would be no match for today’s established powers’ systems; each one still devastated a city.  And we’ve already seen what an accidental EMP burst did to Hawaiian cities.

And this:

Amid the speculation over what comes next, the North chose words Wednesday that suggested it was aiming to reassure, not to panic.

No, Baby Kim’s propagandists only chose words that would suck in timid or naïve journalists and “analysts” spring-loaded to see talking as the key to placating northern Korea.  Never mind that talk has been tried across a multiplicity of administrations in a multiplicity of nations, and yet here we are.  Never mind, too, that Baby Kim won’t be placated; he’ll just reach for more in response, as his father and grandfather did before him.

Paranoid?  I’ve never bitten into an apple and seen half a worm.  And today is not St Augustine’s day: we cannot absorb a nuclear first strike—especially a nuclear-triggered EMP, which needs no reentry capability—and strike back.  We won’t survive that first strike.

It would be the height of immorality to sit meekly by and run the risk that Baby Kim won’t launch.  It would be even more immoral to allow ourselves to be held hostage and our moves influenced, much less dictated, by a threat of nuclear strikes.  Especially when those deliverables are possessed by a tempestuously mad childlike Baby Kim.

We have to act on the threatening capability, not on the rhetoric.  And not on naïve assumptions about the good offices of our enemies.

Showcase Potential

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Brussels is worried, and we should be, too, but for different reasons.  The People’s Republic of China is gaining influence in eastern Europe, and it’s doing it with one of my favorite tactics: international trade as a national policy tool.

In Hungary it is hailed as the “Eastward Opening.” Serbian authorities see it as the glue in a “reliable friendship”, while the Polish government describes it as a “tremendous opportunity.” Yet the 16+1, a grouping of 16 central and eastern European countries led by China, receives more caustic reviews in leading EU capitals, with diplomats fearing it could be exploited by Beijing to undermine union rules and take advantage of growing east-west tensions in the pact itself.

The catalyst for the group is China’s ability to finance and build the roads, railways, power stations and other infrastructure that some poorer central and eastern European countries need. But the scope of its operations has spilled over into overtly political and strategic areas, breeding mistrust among some of the western European powers that dominate the EU’s agenda.

The Financial Times piece at the first link is well worth the read, but the quoted paragraphs are the sum of it.

We should be worried, but not because Europe—the EU—is beginning to lose the contest for the hearts and minds of central and eastern Europe to the PRC, even as it’s beginning to lose the contest for the geography to an aggressively acquisitive Russia.   We should be worried because we’re not taking advantage of the opportunity the People’s Republic of China’s moves in eastern Europe presents us.   This is a contest we cannot lose, were we to enter it at all.

The way we should enter this contest is two-fold, and one of those folds also would serve to counter, and to roll back, the gains being made by that empire-seeking, domineering Russia.  One fold is to engage with eastern Europe—all of those 16, but not the +1—economically through international trade.  We should be busily pursuing free trade agreements with those 16—and contra President Donald Trump, we should be working toward a regional free trade agreement involving the 16 nations.  And Great Britain.  True enough, central Europe also is the heart of the EU, and that would complicate trade agreements, but that shouldn’t stop us from pursuing, separately and in parallel, such arrangements with the nations of eastern Europe.

There’s nothing like free market competition to increase the prosperity of the citizens involved, and so the nations involved, and from that, showcasing—again—both the fatal weaknesses of centrally planned economies in contrast with free markets, and the power of individual liberties and responsibilities for each citizen compared to the stultifying “security” of Big Government doing for the citizens, while firmly controlling what Big Government will allow those same citizens to do on their own.

The other fold is a mutual defense arrangement, much like NATO although separate from and in addition to it, with certain nations of eastern Europe.  As a first stage in setting this up, the treaty nations should include us, Great Britain, each of the Baltic States, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.  This arrangement would profit from a second stage that would include Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.  In addition to the ties generated by trade, the mutual defense imperatives would both move toward a strong barrier to Russian expansionism, and it would spur economic development as a happy side effect—to both the nations’ benefit and further to resist PRC inroads.

Two Views of the Saudi Purge in Progress

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One is that

the “purge” is not about removing political rivals who threatened MBS’s [Mohammed bin Salman, the newly anointed Crown Prince] position as heir apparent but rather about sending a message to political and economic elites that their entitlement to extreme wealth and privilege, and their impunity, is coming to an end.

Indeed,

With the exception of Minister of the National Guard Prince Mutaib bin Abdallah, the detainee list is made up entirely of individuals who had no capacity to challenge the succession.

The other view is that

Despite his youth and inexperience, he [MBS] has risen rapidly through the ranks, amassing previously unimaginable powers for a single royal. This, and his refusal to govern through consensus—as is customary—has caused deep resentment, jealousy and anger. His most prominent critics and rivals were therefore carted off on corruption charges.

So, maybe a purge after all—but of whom?  Apparently not threats to his political power:

[T]he wider significance of this can only be fully understood in conjunction with events in Israel. The Jewish state is hardly a natural ally for Saudi Arabia, but they have long shared a common enemy: Iran.
…
So the two have been working together: close diplomatic cooperation, intelligence sharing and perhaps more.

And the possibility of an actual alliance may be growing.  The purge, thus, could be a clearing of the decks in anticipation of an Iranian-backed anti-Saudi Arabia program (expanding its Yemen program—recall the Houthi launch of an Iranian-supplied IRBM against Riyadh—supporting another client’s efforts against Saudi Arabia, …) if not an overtly fought military action.

Nor are the two views mutually exclusive, and they could be entirely independent of each other.  Overt dispute with Iran or not, the Saudi economy in the post oil-only economy can prosper only with corruption in government and other high places eliminated or at least greatly reduced.  On the other hand, Iran seems intent on taking over the Middle East, and that has negative implications for both Israel and Saudi Arabia.  With Iran’s view of how to run things, too, the implications would seem to be no less catastrophic for the Saudis, regardless of the degree of corruption.

Overstating the Case

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Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, on the occasion of his visit to the DMZ separating the Republic of Korea from northern Korea, had this to say, among other things:

North Korean provocations continue to threaten regional and global security….

We shouldn’t be feeding Baby Kim’s ego by puffing up the level of influence northern Korea has on security.  We should stick to “regional security,” and leave off references to “global,” even if the real impact might be global.