Category Archives: foreign policy

At Least Some Integrity

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David Rank, Chargé d’affaires at our embassy in the People’s Republic of China, has resigned his position and is retiring from the foreign service over President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Climate Accord.

Although Rank is wrong on the matter, he has displayed considerable with his retirement: unlike so many Obama administration hold-overs (he held several senior diplomatic positions throughout Asia during those eight years), he’s chosen to leave the service rather than stay on and sabotage the new administration’s policies from within.

Related to this, albeit tangentially, is the AP’s carefully slanted final paragraph in its piece carrying this report of Rank’s resignation and retirement.

China and the US are the world’s two largest emitters of man-made carbon dioxide, considered a top cause of climate change, and agreement between them on capping emissions helped pave the way for the Paris agreement among more than 190 nations.

What the AP chose to elide here are two things: one is the fact that atmospheric CO2’s classification as a pollutant is based on pseudo-science.  The other is the fact that the US’ emissions rate has been on a downward path since the 1990s, while the PRC’s emissions have been growing markedly, and the PRC has no plan to begin reducing its emission rate until 2030—if then.

Disingenuousity in Asia

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Japan is working with the US to develop its own ballistic missile defenses, including one that can defeat incoming ICBMs.  The People’s Republic of China doesn’t like that.

Addressing a monthly press briefing at China’s Defense Ministry recently, spokesman Ren Guoqiang said Japan’s development of advanced radar systems designed to counteract incoming ballistic missiles would have a negative impact on strategic stability and damage trust between nations in the region.

Because a sound defense is a destabilizing threat to peace.  Because every nation being able to defend itself means no one can trust anyone—there’s no offensive threat with which to force “trust.”

Sure.

Never mind that, in addition to the PRC’s rapid development of its own nuclear offensive capabilities, including mobile ICBM systems and tunnel systems in which to secrete them; the PRC’s aggressions against Japanese islands in the East China Sea; and the PRC’s active occupation of the South China Sea and other nations’ islands within it, the PRC has been actively supporting (successfully) northern Korea’s drive to develop its own nuclear weapons and (nearing success) northern Korea’s drive to develop missile systems—including intercontinental-capable missiles—with which to deliver those nuclear warheads.

No, the only thing being destabilized is the PRC’s ability to threaten, to intimidate, other nations.

Tepid Sanctions

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The G-7 showed real courage in agreeing to maintain existing sanctions against Russia over its invasion and occupation of Ukraine.

Sure.

The nations agreed at a summit Saturday to maintain sanctions on Russia for its interference in Ukraine until the conditions of a peace process negotiated in Minsk, Belarus are fulfilled.

It’s too bad they didn’t strengthen the sanctions and set them to be predicated on fulfilling the conditions of the Budapest Memorandum.

The Rise of the PRC

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Graham Allison, Director of the Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, had some thoughts in The Boston Globe.  Here’s one that’s not in the usual political or military race discussion.

In STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…[the PRC] annually graduates four times as many students as the United States (1.3 million vs 300,000).

A better measure would compare the quality of those graduates and their programs so as to arrive at similarly qualified graduates.

Still, numbers have a quality all their own.  Let’s play a bit with these two.  Suppose, for instance, that 80% or American STEM graduates actually know their material, i.e., the graduates didn’t just sleep-walk their way through a mediocre program; they actually got and understood a good, solid STEM education.  That works out to 240k solid STEM grads.

Suppose that of the PRC’s graduates only 50% measure up to that standard.  That still works out to 650k solid STEM grads, or for you non-STEM folks, 2.7 times more quality grads than we’re producing.  That’s something to take seriously.

This is a long-term, generational, race that we can’t afford to lose.

I’m Looking Forward

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…to Carter Page’s testimony—in whatever venue.

Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has asked House lawmakers to let him testify in an open session to offer his side in the ongoing probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 race….

Page made his offer in a long letter to Congressmen Adam Schiff (D, CA) and Michael Conaway (R, TX), Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence  and acting lead on the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in our 2016 elections in place of the committee chairman Devin Nunes (R,CA), respectively.

So far, he’s received no response.

No matter.

He should feel free to write some op-eds if Congress declines to hear him formally.  Either way—Congressional testimony or opinion pieces, the public then could evaluate the usefulness of his words.