Category Archives: foreign policy

That’s Our Client State

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Leave them alone.  That’s the People’s Republic of China’s reaction to the US/Republic of Korea agreement to station an anti-missile defense system in the RoK, a setup explicitly designed for defense and deployed in response to northern Korea’s missile and nuclear warhead buildup.

PRC’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang:

We demand the US and South Korea change their attitude.  By agreeing with the US side to deploy this system, South Korea has gotten itself involved in a situation that damages the current balance on the peninsula.

Yeah—the balance the PRC and their client were trying to develop, from which the better to intimidate the RoK and other regional nations.  Because defensive systems are threats, but PRC/northern Korea offensive systems cannot be.

Lu also refused to rule out economic retaliatory measures against the impertinent RoK.  Roughly 25% of the RoK’s exports go to the PRC.  This comes, also, with the PRC’s history of economic retaliation, as it did against Japan when the Japanese successfully disputed the PRC’s attempt to seize Japan’s Senkaku Island group.

Tony Blair Misunderstands

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Great Britain’s Ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair has sensed danger from the Brits’ vote to leave the European Union.

Blair said in a Friday column in The Daily Telegraph that the future of the United Kingdom is at stake as the country faces negotiations on the terms of leaving the European Union.

Of course there’s danger—there always is when a change as large as this is embarked on.  But Great Britain didn’t get to be as great as it was and still is by being timid.  This move is a great opportunity for the nation, much more so than it is a risk, however real that risk is.

Blair also worried:

Britain is dangerously divided, with “profound dismay” felt by many of the 48 percent who wanted to remain in the EU.

He’s missing the other question, though: would Great Britain be any less divided had they voted to Remain?  Not a bit.

Look forward, not backward.

Democrats Quibble

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In the Democrats’ preemptive release of their own version of the House Benghazi panel investigation into the fiasco in our Benghazi consulate that culminated in the terrorist murders of our Ambassador to Libya and three of his staff (a preemption that itself demonstrates the Democrats’ fear of the truth), they claim that ex-Secretary of State and current Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton

never personally denied any requests from diplomats for additional protection.

Never personally denied.  The quibble, apart from the separate and early release, gives the lie.  Clinton was the Secretary of State.  Her security chief didn’t do anything—approving or denying—regarding consular security without the boss’ prior permission, either specifically to a given act or generally through the rules and procedures Clinton approved.

Further to the dishonesty:

The panel’s five Democrats said after a two-year investigation that the military could not have done anything differently on the night of the attacks to save the lives of four Americans killed in Libya.

Perhaps, perhaps not.  What these Democrats carefully elide is that Clinton’s State Department decision to not react to the ongoing terrorist attack was made in real-time as the attack began: Clinton had no way of knowing for how long the attack would continue or for how long our Ambassador and his protection detail and the personnel at the annex to which survivors of the initial stage of the attack retreated would hold out.  A decision to have military and other units move rather than to sit and watch might have reduced American fatalities.  Or maybe not.

The key point here is that Clinton’s denial, in advance of the attack, of added security, and her subsequent denial of real-time support while knowing she could not know whether that support would arrive in time, contributed to the success of the terrorist attack.

The panel’s five Democrats know this full well and choose quibbling and obfuscation rather than truth.

This is News?

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US Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday urged Britain and the European Union to manage their divorce responsibly for the sake of global markets and citizens….

Kerry said

The most important thing is that all of us, as leaders, work together to provide as much continuity, as much stability, as much certainty as possible[.]

Empty remarks by the motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair.  After all, what else would he say—that the EU and Great Britain should go for each other’s throats, and the first slash wins?

On the other hand, after President Barack Obama threatened the Brits should they go against their Betters and vote to leave, maybe this is news.

Criminal Negligence

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Further to the matter of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server and her State Department’s handling of them.

…revelations from new court-released documents in a lawsuit by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch. They show the State Department temporarily turned off security features in 2010 so that emails from then-Secretary of State Clinton’s personal server would stop going to the department’s spam folders.

That’s not just dumb (or, in the words of Colonel with whom I once worked, the dumbest thing I ever heard), it’s got to be criminally negligent.

It’s too easy—and a very routine thing to do—to fish (as opposed to phish) out of those spam folders Clinton’s emails, both those from her and those to her.  It’s too easy—and another very routine thing to do—to adjust the spam filters to pass acceptable emails.

And: it’s too easy—and yet another very routine thing to do—to block access, any access, from an unsecured server of any purpose to State’s official business network, much less its classified network.

As Bob Gourley, former Chief Technology Officer for DIA, put it,

You’re putting not just the Clinton server at risk but the entire Department of State emails at risk.  When you turn off your defensive mechanisms, and you’re connected to the Internet, you’re almost laying out the welcome mat for anyone to intrude and attack and steal your secrets.

Of course Clinton’s State Department IT staff knew this.

Of course Clinton, who was the ultimate State Department classifying authority for this sort of thing as well as for all matters related to security, knew this.

Elections have consequences.