Category Archives: foreign policy

It’s a Start

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The Trump administration is considering sweeping sanctions aimed at cutting North Korea off from the global financial system as part of a broad review of measures to counter Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile threat, a senior US official said on Monday.

The sanctions supposedly include economic sanctions against People’s Republic of China banks and other businesses having intercourse with northern Korea and northern Korean entities.

Separately, I have to ask in the current environment: how does this sort of thing get leaked?

Well, It’s About Time, Ollie

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has spoken up in a way contrary to his predecessors regarding our policy—our very attitude—toward northern Korea.

Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended[.]

That’s not just on Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, though.  Our various administrations have tried for 20 years, or more, the idea of talking, cajoling, bribing (to the tune of $1.35 billion in “aid”) northern Korea’s various Kim dictators.  Baby Kim, in glad response, has only accelerated his drive for sticking nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles (he already has the warheads and the missiles).

Talking is nearly always a better first step than shooting, and we tried that.  Now, though, it’s become time—it’s way past time—to do something else, to stop repeating Einsteinian insanity.

Among the somethings else is taking a harder line vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China.

Mr Tillerson noted that China has been punishing South Korea economically because Seoul is deploying America’s THAAD missile-defense system. “This is not the way for a regional power to help resolve what is a serious threat to everyone,” he said, referring to China. “We instead urge China to address the threat that makes THAAD necessary.”

(It’ll be interesting, too, to see the PRC’s reaction to being called a regional power rather than the global one to which the Warring State is aspiring.)

Other somethings else include increasing further the missile and other defense capabilities of the Republic of Korea, Japan, us, and other friendly and allied nations in the region or with interests in it and the relatively explicit possibility of military strikes ranging from shooting down northern Korean missile launches, whether test or otherwise, to striking northern Korea’s missile launch facilities, nuclear facilities, and long-range artillery facilities that might be used to try to retaliate against Seoul.

Other somethings else include more direct action against the PRC and its interests: barring PRC business enterprises that do business with or in northern Korea from the US financial system.

New PRC Policy

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Robert Blackwill, writing for The National Interest, has suggested we need one.  He’s not far wrong, because as he puts it,

there is no real prospect of building fundamental trust, a peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding, a strategic partnership or a new type of major country relations between the United States and China.

The core of his new policy is this:

  • revitalizing the US economy to nurture those disruptive innovations that bestow on the United States asymmetric economic advantages over others
  • substantially increasing the defense budget and consequently shifting US defense resources to Asia
  • creating new preferential trading arrangements among US allies and friends to increase their mutual gains through instruments that consciously exclude China
  • recreating a technology-control regime involving US allies that prevents China from acquiring military and strategic capabilities enabling it to inflict “high-leverage strategic harm” on the United States and its partners
  • concertedly building up the power-political capacities of US allies and friends on China’s periphery
  • improving the capability of US military forces and allies to effectively project power along the Asian rimlands despite any Chinese opposition
  • all while continuing to work with China in the diverse ways that befit its importance to US national interests.

Expect activities that satisfy that last bullet to be few and far between.  There are very few ways in which the modern incarnation of the Warring State would be willing to work with us.

Someone else <ahem> wrote much the same sort of thing a short while ago, too.

Distrust of the CIA

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President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency secret new authority to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists, US officials said, changing the Obama administration’s policy of limiting the spy agency’s paramilitary role and reopening a turf war between the agency and the Pentagon.

This is an odd way to show distrust of the CIA.  Maybe Trump’s war against the CIA is more NLMSM fake news.

Multitasking

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Whatever happened to it?

I’m reading between the lines on a Wall Street Journal op-ed from the weekend.

While the press corps chases accusations of Russian-Trump election collusion and illegal Obama Administration wiretaps, few noticed the Pentagon’s first public confirmation last week that the Kremlin is violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).

The specific problem that seems to have escaped NLMSM notice is this:

General Paul Selva, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that Russia has deployed a land-based cruise missile that violates the “spirit and intent” of that arms pact. “The system itself presents a risk to most of our facilities in Europe and we believe that the Russians have deliberately deployed it in order to pose a threat to NATO and to facilities within the NATO area of responsibility,” General Selva told the House Armed Services Committee.

Even the process of developing of this system is an INF violation.

Used to be folks could do more than one thing at a time.  Walk and chew gum, for instance.  Or write news articles about two different subjects and figure out how to put them on the same front page.

Or maybe this lack is a measure of the depth of the NLMSM’s TDS affliction.