Category Archives: foreign policy

Ambassador Sarah Palin?

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Leave aside Michael Taube’s knee-jerk anti-Trumpism and his obsession with cute snark-bites liberally (in two senses of that word) sprinkled through his missive in the National Review.  He writes about an interesting thought that may or may not be circulating in the Trump White House—Sarah Palin as ambassador to Canada.

A long-standing rumor that Palin is being considered by President Donald Trump to be the next US ambassador to Canada has gained momentum in recent days.

Oh, yeah—it’s also necessary to leave aside the NLMSM’s penchant for rumor-mongering rather than original reporting.

Ambassador Sarah Palin isn’t so outlandish an idea.  Though, for grins and giggles, I’d rather see her ambassadoring in Russia or the People’s Republic of China.

A better use of her talents, though, would be to post her to Poland or to one of the Baltic States.  A useful signal to the Warring State on the mainland would be a formal diplomatic posting of her to the Republic of China.

Mexican Terror Threat

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Mexico is upset with President Donald Trump’s efforts to tighten border security and especially with his efforts to deal more thoroughly with illegal aliens present in the US, many of whom are Mexican.  A coalition has formed—a group of Mexican officials, legislators, governors and public figures planning to meet [in the US] with migrant groups—to plot ways in which to interfere with our enforcement of our immigration laws.

One of those ways was described by Mexican ex-Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda:

The backlog in the immigration system is tremendous [the idea is to double or triple the backlog]….

Notice that: the idea isn’t to protect and enforce such rights as illegal aliens have in the United States, but simply to overburden our court system.  That’s nakedly cynical, but that’s mild.  This coalition is plotting worse.

Here’s Senator (Party of the Democratic Revolution) Armando Ríos Piter and an attendee of the coalition’s meetings in Phoenix over the weekend:

Mexico is helping on the fight on terror and that collaboration should be put under review given the attitude of Trump.  It’s important to make clear to them the possible consequences if Trump keeps a hostile and aggressive stance.

American government plans and methods for dealing with illegal aliens are certainly legitimate subjects for discussion and debate.  Threats to increase our vulnerability to terrorism unless we surrender our law enforcement to Mexican demands are unacceptable in those discussions and debates and anywhere else.

We should—at the least—accelerate our enforcement against illegal aliens who are Mexican citizens or who entered the US illegally via Mexican routes until the Mexican government publicly and explicitly repudiates Piter’s threat and any others like it.  With regard to Piter, we have laws against making terrorist threats, and they should be enforced against everyone in the United States.  Including Mexican government officials.

A Test

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The Moscow Times, one of several mouthpieces of Russian President Vladimir Putin and of his Kremlin government, sees the current flareup of shooting between government forces on the one hand and “rebels” and their Russian bosses and reinforcements in the Donbass region of Donetsk as a test.  Recall that Donbass is on the road to Black Sea coastal Mariupol, a key urbanized area on the coastal road to Russia-occupied Crimea.

The organ is right.

Moscow clearly wants Kiev to implement its vision of the Minsk agreement—a special status for the separatist controlled areas, retaining Russian-backed armies and de-facto control of the border with Russia, with only nominal oversight from Kiev.

The Kremlin wants to retain political control over separatist-held territory as a “structural veto” on Ukrainian security and foreign policy. Moscow hopes that the Trump administration alongside France and Germany will pressure Poroshenko to accept Russian demands under Minsk-2.

But the real test actually is two tests.  The first is whether President Donald Trump will, instead, recall and implement the Budapest Memorandum, which among other things requires signatory Russia to respect and honor Ukrainian territorial integrity, and begin enforcing the Memorandum by sending arms to Ukraine with which it actually can defend itself against those “rebels” and the Russian armor and artillery forces both in Donetsk and in Lukhansk.

The other test is whether Trump will do anything about Russia’s occupation of Georgia.

OK, a third test, too: whether Trump will follow through, promptly, on deploying an anti-missile shield into the eastern European nations bordering on Russia, as ex-President Barack Obama (D) had chit-chatted about doing late in his administration (and in southeastern Europe, too, against Iranian missiles).

The Business with Iran

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The Wall Street Journal opined on Iran’s missile launch last week and President Donald Trump’s imposition of sanctions against Iran in response.

[I]t does look as if President Trump may be willing to do what Mr Obama refused to do, which is to rigorously enforce the [nuclear weapons development] agreement….

Trump said during the campaign that he might not tear up the Executive Agreement, but instead enforce it to the letter.

Why would his doing so now be such a surprise? Oh, wait, the NLMSM spiked that part of his commitments while focusing, disparagingly, on his earlier musing about tearing up the EA.

The EO That Banned Muslim Entry into the US

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Or at least that’s what House and Senate Democrats, along with the NLMSM, claim President Donald Trump’s Executive Order does.  It’s certainly true that the EO suspends, for a time, entry from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.  Wow, that’s a lot.  That’s 199,200,000 Muslims.

However.  There is some small bit of information that’s carefully ignored by those Democrats with their badly manufactured tears and by the NLMSM.  The EO doesn’t touch some other predominantly Muslim nations; their ability to come and go into the United States is deliberately left untouched.

Minor nations like Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, The People’s Republic of China, Malaysia, Russia, Niger, Philippines.  And on and on.  Globally, there are roughly 1,700,000,000 Muslims.

That terrible order that’s targeted at the terrorist or terrorism-sponsoring seven that ex-President Barack Obama (D) himself designated as terrorist or terrorism-sponsoring affect a small minority of Muslims and it does that much solely as a side effect of the effort to keep out terrorists.