Category Archives: foreign policy

Trump Gifted Francis

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During his visit to the Vatican, President Donald Trump gave gifts to Pope Francis, a normal exchange of gifts between heads of state.

Trump gifted Pope Francis a first-edition set of writings from Martin Luther King, Jr. The White House said the set includes the five books King wrote in his lifetime. Each one is custom-bound and the books are in a custom display case. It also included a piece of granite from the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial in Washington.

Maybe Trump should have included, in addition to those, a copy of Martin Luther King, Jr’s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, along with a section of the bar of the cell in which MLK was imprisoned while he wrote his Letter.  A copy of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses would have been a good gift, too.

Mike Flynn Demurs

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Regarding ex-NSA chief Lt Gen Michael Flynn’s (USA, Ret) refusal to “cooperate with” Congress’ subpoena to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee and to provide subpoenaed documents to it: he says he’ll invoke his 5th Amendment right not to testify against himself.

It’s certainly his right to invoke his right not to testify against himself, and no conclusion regarding his guilt or innocence of any crime can be drawn from that.  Nor should one be.

However, he has no right not to appear before the committee and testify.  The committee should send the capital police to get him and bring him before the committee to testify, even if against his will: his will has no bearing here; the subpoena has not been quashed.  Then, the committee members should put their questions to him, one by each, putting each question onto the record and thereby putting each of his 5th Amendment invocations similarly on the record.  The committee also should ask for those documents, one by each or by category, requiring him to invoke the 5th each time there.

The committee also should obtain and execute a search warrant to get those documents.

No more delays.  No more stalling.

Not Entirely

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Jay Solomon, commenting in The Wall Street Journal on the recently concluded re-election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president, has missed the mark.

The landslide re-election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threatens to put the Trump administration on a collision course with Europe over future policy toward Tehran.

No, what it does do is “threaten” to put Europe on a collision course with the Trump administration over future policy regarding Iran.  This is because Europe, more importantly, has missed the mark:

European officials hailed the news of Mr Rouhani’s win as heralding a more moderate path for Iran over the next four years.

And

Many European governments hope he will use his next four years to moderate Tehran’s overseas policies….

Aside from the simple fact that hope is not a policy, not a strategy, nor even a useful tactic, there has been nothing moderate about the Rouhani administration’s push for a nuclear weapons deal that codified Iran’s “right” to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, nor has there been any semblance of moderacy in the Rouhani administration’s open support for butchery in Syria or for terrorism against Israel or for arming and controlling Shiite “militias” in Iraq, whose purpose is to serve as tools for manipulating the Iraqi government.

Hailing Hoping for a change from that to a more moderate path in this administration’s second term is…foolish.

The PRC and Northern Korea

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Harry Kazianis tried to explain, in his Real Clear World piece, why the People’s Republic of China “won’t solve” the northern Korea crisis for us.  It’s complicated for the PRC, he said.

He [Kazianis’ carefully unidentified “Chinese scholar” and “retired official of the People’s Liberation Army”] pressed his case, noting, “look at this problem from where I sit in Beijing. I see a world of trouble when it comes to North Korea. I see war. I see death. I see superpower showdowns. We must all agree we don’t want this. Yes, nuclear weapons are bad, but North Korea could create far more trouble than you realize, and China would have to deal with most of it.”

Kazianis then dragged out a couple of bromides that have been arguing against doing anything serious about northern Korea, one maintaining that a desperate Baby Kim, with his energy imports reduced, would start a nuclear war if we got serious; the other insisting that, with northern Korea’s food imports reduced, a desperate population would riot—and a failed coup would lead to civil war that would become nuclear and involve the PRC, the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the US.

Kazianis ignored a simple fact, though.  Baby Kim is going to use his nuclear weapons, either for blackmail or for actual strikes, as soon as he can deliver them.  He’s intimated as much often.

If Kazianis’ unidentified, anonymous source actually exists, that just puts a premium on the PRC getting started.  Even if this “source” does not, the principle and its outcome remain the same: Baby Kim is going to do what he’s going to do unless overt, serious steps are taken to deprive him of the tools with which to do them.

Handling Classified

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FBI Director James Comey had this about Huma Abedin and her role in the ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) classified email scandal:

Somehow, her [Clinton’s] emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information.  His then-spouse, Huma Abedin, appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him to print out for her, so she could deliver them to the secretary of state.

Comey justified his lack of action with this:

We didn’t have any indication that she had a sense of what she was doing was in violation of the law[.]

There is, however, no requirement for mens rea under the relevant law; if nothing else Abedin’s actions fit the law’s gross negligence felony charactistic.

With such a bold, declarative statement about what Abedin was doing, then, I have to wonder why there’s been no indictment and subsequent prosecution.

Probably for the same reason he declined to bring a case against Clinton after having said her actions were excessively careless: it’s not politically expedient.