Category Archives: foreign policy

Isn’t that the Point?

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From the subtitle of a Wall Street Journal article at the time I wrote this post:

Russian Foreign Minister Says Sanctions Are Aimed at Hurting Economy

It’d be a poor set of sanctions, even for the Obama administration, if they weren’t having the intended effect.

And he had this:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday accused the West of “seeking regime change” in his country by imposing sanctions against Moscow.

Probably not, just behavior change. But if regime change did happen, what would be the downside for us? At worst, we’d just get another KGB has-been or another oligarch in charge. But the Russian government might get replaced by something better. It is, after all, on the far left side of the distribution curve for quality of governments.

The present Russian government has annexed the Ukraine’s Crimea and is occupying eastern Ukraine, and it has invaded, partitioned, and now occupies parts of Georgia. It’s conducted damaging cyber warfare against the Baltic States. It’s repositioning ground forces near the Polish and erstwhile Ukrainian border.

Back to that behavior change: get Vlad to withdraw from Ukraine, and maybe the sanctions will get lifted. Go one better: get him to withdraw from Georgia and pull back from the Polish and restored Ukrainian borders. See how that works, Sergei Viktorovich.

John Kerry’s Crocodile Tears

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Motorboat skipper, accuser of the American military as war criminals, and Secretary of State John Kerry had this to say about the recent Palestinian terrorist attack on an Israeli synagogue in Jerusalem:

“Innocent people who had come to worship died in the sanctuary of a synagogue,” Kerry said, his voice quavering [quavering!]. “They were hatcheted, hacked and murdered in that holy place in an act of pure terror and senseless brutality and murder. I call on Palestinians at every single level of leadership to condemn this in the most powerful terms.

He had these things, though, just prior to, and during the Israelis’ defense against the Palestinians’ terror war last summer. First, his…suggestion…that Israel was flirting with apartheid:

…a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.

Then his “peace” proposal for that war, presented as a fait accompli to Israel, had this:

The document recognized Hamas’ position in the Gaza Strip, promised the organization billions in donation funds and demanded no dismantling of rockets, tunnels or other heavy weaponry at Hamas’ disposal.

And his “negotiations” kept putting those Palestinian terrorists on the same moral plain as an Israel defending itself against those terrorists.

Kerry is Grubering us. And in a most shameful way, that makes Jonathan Gruber look like an altar boy.

Should NATO Cooperate with Russia?

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Can it, even? NATO’s new head, Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, thinks so. After all, “Russia [is] NATO’s biggest neighbor and both [are] here to stay.”

Sure. Enemies must cooperate, because they’re both big. Makes sense. Yeah.

“We simply can’t ignore each other. One way or another, we will have a relationship. The question is what kind of relationship,” he said.

NATO continues to aspire to a cooperative relationship with Russia but to get there Russia would need to want it and to take clear steps to make it possible.

Well, he’s half right: we can’t ignore each other. But Russia’s view of “cooperation” has been clear. It invaded and partitioned Georgia, with one effect being the prevention of that nation from joining NATO as it had wanted to do. It invaded and is busily partitioning Ukraine for the explicitly stated purpose of keeping it from aligning with western Europe, much less joining NATO, a move Ukraine had indicated it was interested in exploring. It has threatened Poland with nuclear attack if it accepted basing American missile shield facilities on its soil. It has moved troops close to the Baltic States and pursued cyberwar against them.

Yeah, we need to cooperate with this enemy. Or NATO needs a new politician to head it up who understands the situation.

Is the Distinction Important?

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The Wall Street Journal ran an article by Danny Yadron and Siobhan Gorman earlier in the week that talked about the penetration by Russian hackers of Federal government computers and those of companies doing business with the government. It’s an important article, and I recommend you read it all, but I want to focus on a couple of statements made in it that go to the heart of why we’re having so much trouble dealing with our enemies.

The statements are these:

A US official said differentiating between Russian criminal hackers and government hackers is difficult because the government uses cybersurveillance tools created by criminal groups and criminals use tools developed by the government.

And

“It [the recent hacking of JP Morgan Chase & Co] looks to be criminal and of Russian origin,” the US official said. But when it comes to gauging whether that criminal element is working with the government, “you’re back into that gray area. You really can’t tell.”

Russia is a totalitarian state, for all that it has “elections.” All the modern, cool totalitarian states do this anymore. As such a regime, the “criminal” hackers are limited in doing what they do without the Russian government’s active condoning of that behavior. This is further substantiated by the ubiquitousness of the free exchange of tools between these hackers and their government.

Whether any particular hack job is done by hackers or by formal agents of the Russian government, both are working for the benefit of Russia and for (not only to) the detriment of us.

Misunderstandings like these, of the fundamental character of certain of our enemies, are at the heart of why we’re having so much trouble defending ourselves from them and ultimately of defeating them.

Trust

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I’m going to poke my nose into European affairs, again.

The backdrop is the French budget crisis. The backdrop to that is this. In one of the EU’s responses to their part in the global economic crisis of 2008-2009, the EU passed the Stability and Growth Pact, which authorized the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (though the Commission has its own president, the body acts like a President-by-Committee) to require EU member nations to submit their national budgets to Commission approval. If the Commission disapproved the budget and the nation in question refused to make Commission-directed corrections, the Commission could levy very serious fines on that nation.

Among the rules of the Pact is that a national deficit cannot exceed 3% of its GDP: cuts to spending and/or increases in taxes could be required by the Commission to bring the nation’s deficit in line. Various smaller nations in the EU already have been subject to budget disapproval and Commission-required corrections or fines. Belgium, for instance, faced a fine of some €800 million in 2011 ($1,131 million dollars in 2011) until it made corrections. Greece and Italy also have been hit with Commission budget mandated corrections, and they have complied.

Enter France. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has indicated flatly that France will not play by the EU rules to which it is signatory.

I will not permit people to discuss France in this context. France is a big country. We won’t [comply with Commission budget reform requirements].

The French Finance Minister has echoed his boss.

[W]e won’t cut more anywhere, and we also won’t raise taxes.

The Germans, though, despite being economically powerful enough—because it’s still economically sound—to get France to comply, is apparently too timid to do so. Chancellor Angela Merkel has dragged out an old chestnut of hers: “contractual agreements.” These are

written agreements between the European Commission and a Eurozone country that commit that member state to undertake specific savings measures or clearly delineated structural reforms. Under the original plan, the country could then obtain financial aid from a special fund in return. For France, the reward would be a further suspension of the deficit rules.

However. With France saying it’s going to welsh on one contract that it’s signed—that Stability and Growth Pact—how could it be trusted to honor another contract it might sign, a “contractual agreement?”

Manfred Weber, who leads the European People’s Party (think of them as all of Europe’s various Christian Democrats) in European Parliament emphasized the problem.

Europe is at a crossroads. The European Commission’s credibility is at stake with its review of the French and also the Italian budgets. France’s budget has to be rejected. President Hollande needs to make improvements.

There are two questions here. Is the EU’s word worth anything? Can they be trusted to carry out their own mandates? That question won’t be answered until the end of the month, when the Commission will attempt to give its final answer regarding the French budget.

The other question is whether the French word has any value, whether it’s possible to rely on any contract France or a French entity might sign. That question seems clearly answered.