Category Archives: foreign policy

A Good Idea

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The sooner, the better, too, and make it broader.

The US is considering deploying Patriot surface-to-air missiles in Estonia, US Vice President Mike Pence told Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas on Sunday.

“We spoke about it today, but we didn’t talk about a date or time,” Ratas told state broadcaster ERR after the meeting.

This would be excellent.  We also should talk Estonia about deploying THAAD and ABM systems there.  And then we should deploy all three.

And put systems in Poland and Czech Republic, if they’ll have them after ex-President Barack Obama (D) suddenly cancelled the missile defense systems we were going to set up there.  And put systems in Ukraine.

That’s just for Russia’s benefit.  We also should plus up the missile defense systems deployed in the Republic of Korea (if President Moon Jae-in finally can recognize the threats of northern Korea and the People’s Republic of China) and in Japan.  We also should talk to Australia, the Republic of China, and Vietnam about missile defense deployments there.  And India.

Sanctions and Wariness

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Congress has passed and sent to President Donald Trump a bill that increases sanctions against Russia, particularly its energy sector, and against Iran and northern Korea.  It also adds limits Trump’s ability (and State’s) to ratchet those sanctions up or down in real time in response to Russian—or Iranian or northern Korean—behavior, a fillip that adds a question to whether he’ll sign it (his veto likely would only delay the thing; the bill was passed with veto-proof majorities in both houses).

Germany is “wary” of those sanctions.

The German Committee on East European Economic Relations said US plans for tighter sanctions against Russia had the potential of harming EU firms with energy interests in their giant eastern neighbor.

It went as far as to say that the latest US move appeared designed to stimulate US energy exports to Europe.

Because nothing Evil United States does is good for anyone else.  It couldn’t possibly be that any offers to sell liquified natural gas, for instance, to Europe (a small target of our global market for LNG, and for oil) might be to free Europe—and Germany in particular—from Russian extortion.  It couldn’t possibly be, either, that our increasing exports of hydrocarbons—having as they do a depressing impact on the global price of energy—would be good for Germany or for Europe as a whole.

And this bit of nefariousness:

The committee said it expected German exports to Russia to grow by 20% this year…despite all the EU and US sanctions in place right now over Russia’s perceived role in the Ukraine and Syria conflicts.

And this threat from the German government:

[German Economics Minister Brigitte] Zypries warned against a trade war over this latest round of US sanctions against Russia, saying such a situation would be “very bad.”

Nice piece you got there.  Be too bad if something happened to it.

That’s OK, though.  We’re wary of German timidity in the face of Russian energy blackmail capability, or of their active collusion with Russia.  At least there is symmetry.

A Bit on India, Bhutan, and the PRC

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Little covered in the NLMSM is a growing dispute among Bhutan, the People’s Republic of China, and India over a region of Bhutan called Doklam.  Bhutan is a landlocked, high altitude nation in the eastern Himalayas.  Who cares?  Bhutan and India do.  And the US should.

Doklam is a region of Bhutan that abuts PRC-occupied Tibet, and by seizing Doklam the PRC would be able to further isolate TIbet, the better to deal with its impertinence.  Doklam also sits along a narrow stretch of India that lies among Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh; occupying of Doklam would position the PRC to choke off a large region of India that lies beyond it: six states, three of which border on India’s Arunachal Pradesh—a state that the PRC claims for itself under the fiction that it’s a part of its occupied Tibet.

The proximate problem is a PRC effort to build a road into and through Doklam, the better (say most observers) to allow the PLA to enter and spread out into the region, sealing its occupation.  Naturally, Bhutan demurred from this, and it asked for Indian assistance in stopping the PRC.  India answered, sent troops into the region, and forced a halt to the construction.  The PRC is objecting to this “interference.”

Now the PRC, through its press organ in the region, the South China Morning Post, is insisting that the situation is none of India’s business, and India should butt out—leaving the behemoth to partition the tiny.

The PRC, through this organ, even is making the cynical claim that Bhutan can’t possibly be sovereign over a “patch of territory which [it] does not effectively control.”  Never mind that the reason Bhutan doesn’t control this patch of its territory is because the PRC is occupying it, and Bhutan alone is too small to dislodge it.  Here is the extent of the cynicism:

New Delhi must push Thimpu [the Bhutan capital] to take the lead in engaging Beijing and devise a mutually acceptable boundary protocol that acknowledges China’s effective jurisdiction of the area….

Bhutan, and India along with it, must abjectly surrender.

We should become active in supporting India and Bhutan against this further example of PRC aggression, especially as it threatens not just Bhutan, but India as well—a potentially powerful ally in southern Asia.

This also would have implications for us far beyond aiding a little guy and a potential ally.  Coming in bluntly on the side of India and Bhutan and opposing PRC aggression in southern Asia would be a clear signal (certainly, concrete action would need to follow) to other Asian nations—rimming the East and South China Seas, for instance—that pivot or no, we are moving to protect our and our friends’ and allies’ interests throughout Asia and the seas adjoining it.

International Censorship

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France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance.  Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.

The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….

It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.

It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.

The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.