Category Archives: foreign policy

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.

Evil Foreigners

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That’s the claim of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying, regarding the current protests against Beijing’s usurpation of Hong Kong’s right to elect their own Chief Executive from a ballot of their own choosing. All of the kerfuffle is coming at the instigation of Evil Foreigners. Carefully unnamed ones, too.

Because it couldn’t possibly be the result of misbehavior (or simple error) by the government of the People’s Republic of China. It couldn’t possibly be that the PRC government has lost the consent of the people of Hong Kong to govern them (if that government ever had that consent).

Sure. That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

Russian Aggression

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…in eastern Ukraine, but not only there.

Russia plans to increase defense spending over 20 percent in 2015, with a lot of the additional money going to rebuilding Soviet era facilities in the newly acquired Crimea. This includes radar stations and naval facilities.

Naturally, all of this will support Russia’s continued occupation of partitioned Georgia, and it will facilitate Russia’s pending aggression against the Odessa Oblast of western Ukraine on the Sea of Azov, which stands between the Sea and Moldova, another Russian target as it seeks to restore the Soviet empire. It also eases Russian support for Vladimir Putin’s ally and BFF, Bashar al Assad in Syria.

Here, too:

…there’s plenty of Russian misbehavior against other neighbors as well. Finland reports that Russian aircraft increasingly test Finnish air defenses and twice recently Russian warships have threatened a Finnish research vessel operating in international waters in the Baltic. The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are receiving similar harassment, as well as Russian offers of a large discount on what they pay for Russian natural gas if they will leave NATO.

Richard Feynman on Theory

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Cross-posted from Ricochet. It’s behind the paywall, but Ricochet is well worth the subscription price; I heartily recommend it.

Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who taught at Cornell University, but he also was a just plain scientist.

He had a thought on theory.

You cannot prove a vague theory wrong. If the guess that you make is poorly expressed and the method you have for computing the consequences is a little vague then…you see that the theory is good as it can’t be proved wrong. If the process of computing the consequences is indefinite, then with a little skill any experimental result can be made to look like an expected consequence.

Now where have we seen this vague theory technique put into action lately? In politics, perhaps?

No Travel Ban?

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In a recent Fox News op-ed, Dr Tom Frieden, Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, argued against a “travel ban” covering the western African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the nations hardest hit by the Ebola epidemic.

I answered most of his objections here.

In his latest piece, though, he raised a new objection, and he sounded like he actually meant it.

When a wildfire breaks out we don’t fence it off. We go in to extinguish it before one of the random sparks sets off another outbreak somewhere else.

Well, yes “we” do. These are called “fire breaks.” The fire teams fighting the wildfires, and the forest fires, do their best to isolate the fires to keep them from spreading by clearing a ring around the fire of combustible material, trying to make the ring wide enough that “random sparks” can’t jump the ring and set off “another outbreak somewhere else.” Nor is this an either-or proposition. While some fire teams are working hard to create that isolation, others are entering the area, fighting the fire directly, and extinguishing it.

So it should be here. We need medical expertise, teams, and supplies going into the three nations to help the locals deal with, bring under control, extinguish the current epidemic. And we need the quarantine—a ban on travel out of those nations, with the travel exceptions outlined in my article at the above link.

Frieden also raised two new objections.

We don’t want to isolate parts of the world, or people who aren’t sick, because that’s going to drive patients with Ebola underground, making it infinitely more difficult to address the outbreak.

It could even cause these countries to stop working with the international community as they refuse to report cases because they fear the consequences of a border closing.

These also are nonsense. Many of these nations’ people already are going underground, and they’re often attacking personnel trying to deal with the dead bodies. That they’re doing both out of ignorance and lack of understanding of the situation doesn’t alter the fact that they’re already doing both. This puts a premium on quarantine, to keep those underground from leaving, anyway.

The need for a quarantine also was demonstrated by the unfortunate situation involving Thomas Edward Duncan, who died last week in Dallas after having travelled from Liberia. He was symptom-free when he arrived in the US. Only a quarantine could have prevented his travel with its potential for spreading the virus.

A quarantine would cause these three nations from cooperating with the “international community” in fighting this epidemic? They would simply be cutting off their own noses. A quarantine still would leave the epidemic isolated and greatly reduced in its ability to spread throughout the same international community.

Frieden is right about one thing.

There is no more effective way to protect the United States against additional Ebola cases than to address this outbreak at the source in West Africa. That’s what our international response…will do.

Indeed. Getting after the source, though, must include a quarantine, in order to keep the source area—already large—at a manageable size while continuing entry into the area and helping the locals.