Category Archives: foreign policy

Some Thoughts on US-Israeli Relations and Iran

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An Israeli has some. Michael Oren, lately Israeli Ambassador to the US and current Member of Knesset had this, in part, from his op-ed in Monday’s Walls Street Journal.

The abandonment of the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles climaxed over the Iranian nuclear program. Throughout my years in Washington, I participated in intimate and frank discussions with US officials on the Iranian program. But parallel to the talks came administration statements and leaks—for example, each time Israeli warplanes reportedly struck Hezbollah-bound arms convoys in Syria—intended to deter Israel from striking Iran pre-emptively.

Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy. The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr Obama, though, insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional power.”

The daylight between Israel and the US could not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been greater.

What he said.

Then he concluded:

Now, with the Middle East unraveling and dependable allies a rarity, the US and Israel must restore the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles. Israel has no alternative to America as a source of security aid, diplomatic backing and overwhelming popular support. The US has no substitute for the state that, though small, remains democratic, militarily and technologically robust, strategically located and unreservedly pro-American.

The past six years have seen successive crises in US-Israeli relations, and there is a need to set the record straight. But the greater need is to ensure a future of minimal mistakes and prevent further erosion of our vital alliance.

That, Sir, must unfortunately await a change in the administration. I hope and pray that Israel can hang on that long.

Cyber Hacks as Acts of War

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Damian Paletta asked when the one becomes the other in a Saturday piece for The Wall Street Journal. Then he conflated two different things with the question of when a cyber attack becomes an act of war in his answer. The backdrop is the People’s Republic of China’s invasion of our government’s personnel computer systems to steal a “tremendous number of personnel records—including some quite personal records.”

If the White House finds out who stole the information, what will President Barack Obama do about it?

This has nothing to do with whether the PRC’s invasion was an act of war. The question of what Obama—or any President—will or would do is strictly about what a response might be or should be. The act of war has occurred, or it has not, being merely a criminal act that wants a response.

The more serious conflation, though, is this:

But cyberattacks by nation-states are a relatively new phenomenon, in which there isn’t a road map of deterrents and responses.

That we don’t know how to respond, or that we’re presently utterly helpless and unable to respond in the face of the PRC’s actions, is wholly irrelevant to the question of whether the PRC’s actions constitute an act of war.

For the record, it’s clear to me that the PRC’s invasion is a clear, deliberate act of war, and while not as devastating (maybe, we’ve yet to learn the full range of outcomes from the invasion) as Pearl Harbor, it’s no less an act. It’s also plainly intended to intimidate a feckless and internationally weak administration, to send a signal of what’s in store if we don’t become more cooperative on a number of things of interest to the PRC (its South and East China Sea seizures come to mind), to flex PRC muscles, simply to show the school how helpless the little boy is in the face of the bully, or some combination of those.

For the record, too, a couple of things are necessary in response. One is for this (or more likely the next—and isn’t the delay a frightening thought) administration to get off the dime and get serious about cyber security. There are plenty of private and government security experts available and more than equal to the task. The biggest thing this (or the next) administration can do, then, has to do with personnel: it needs to start firing folks and disbanding agencies that don’t move fast enough to button up, including passive-aggressive resistors who won’t like the change in “corporate culture” required, and it needs to decertify unions that get in the way of such reforms.

The other thing needed is for this administration (or the next) to put together a broad-ranging response that will include cyber attacks against the CCP’s communications and data-handling computer networks with a view to erasing the hard drives, against the PRC’s port city government communications and data-handling networks with a similar goal, and the USN sailing into and around the island groups the PRC has physically seized and raising an ECM curtain around them that isolates those islands and any PRC shipping in the area from the mainland. This response need not occur in immediate response to a particular PRC attack on us, and it need not occur today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for a very long time.

We cannot shy away from this fight; the longer we let our enemies camp in our networks, the harder it will become finally to root them out. If we can find the will at all.

Partition

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Has President Barack Obama acquiesced in the partition of Ukraine?

At the G-7 meeting last Sunday, Obama appears to have written off the concept of restoring occupied Crimea to Ukraine.

[Obama’s Press Secretary Josh] Earnest said whether to keep or impose additional economic sanctions against Russia will depend on whether the country decides to keep its end of the so-called Minsk agreement, updated after Moscow annexed Crimea last year, not whether it returns the peninsula.

With Earnest’s voice, Obama talked also about the need for the G-7 to

show unity in confronting Russia over actions in Ukraine.

Meaning Obama wants everyone to stand together and in unison shake their fingers very firmly at Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Will Obama acquiesce to the further partition of Ukraine and allow Russia to keep the eastern provinces currently occupied by Russian forces and paramilitary forces?

Great Britain and its EU Referendum

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Chris Deerin, writing for CapX, has an article titled England will be torn apart by the EU referendum. The setup is this: Prime Minister David Cameron promised a few years ago that were he reelected Prime Minister (i.e., were his party reelected to sufficient strength that it could at least form a coalition government and he selected Prime Minister), he’d hold a Great Britain-wide referendum by the end of 2017 on whether Great Britain should leave the European Union. In the event, Cameron’s party was reelected to an outright majority, he was selected to be Prime Minister, and he’s moving to keep his promise: Great Britain will hold the promised referendum by the promised deadline.

Deerin is concerned, as you might discern from his article’s title. Actually holding the referendum, he fears, will mean the end of Great Britain regardless of the outcome.

Below is a letter I wrote to CapX demurring from Deerin’s position.

I don’t share your concern for a couple of reasons. In no particular order: what the pols in London think isn’t particularly relevant (Cameron has no plan, by the way? Not so much: he made a promise, and he intends to keep it; that his party has changed, or is changing, its collective mind isn’t important to honoring a commitment.) The question is for individual Brits: how do they see themselves? Your existential question, indeed: who are they?

Second, say the referendum does rend Great Britain. That works out to Scottish independence, no small matter to a significant per centage of Scots.

Third, consider the alternative: no referendum, and Great Britain stays in the EU. Our own John Jay expressed concern during the ratification debates that were our Constitution accepted as it was written, the States would bear the same relationship to the central government that counties have to a State: just political subdivisions that exist solely to ease the carrying out of the State’s decisions. That’ll be the fate of Great Britain if there’s no referendum or if the referendum supports staying in the EU.

Finally, dissolution: the recently completed referendum on Scottish departure from the Union was most enthusiastically argued. There is considerable angst among those whose position was voted down. They’re recovering, and the Union remains sound.

So it will be with Great Britain following the larger referendum, regardless of its outcome. Except that voting to leave will be a stout blow for British liberty.

Eric Hines

A New World “Order?”

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This still is President Barack Obama’s problem, and it seems to be Hillary Clinton’s as well.

The causes of war as discerned ever since Thucydides’ time are three: wars of ideology, of fear, and of gain.
…
Thucydides traced the war that ruined ancient Greece to Sparta’s fear that Athens’ growing power was crossing the line where it would be impossible to contain. Israel faces that threat from Iran, as today’s international structures for the maintenance of international security have failed to halt Iran’s drive, propelled by religious ideology, to possess nuclear weapons. Israel, bereft of its traditional sense of American support, is making ready to act against Iran’s menace to its existence. President Obama’s priority must [be to] repair relations with Israel by…convincing its leaders that the US understands Israel’s uniquely dangerous position.

And there now grows a deepening appetite for gain. America, perceived as eager to shed the burdens of world order in order to be “fundamentally transformed” through European-style social commitments, talks of engagement even when Iran’s “diplomacy” is a form of protracted warfare.

Three years later, we’re nearly at that end, and still with no serious effort by Obama—or Clinton—to repair relations.