Category Archives: foreign policy

We’re Capable of So Much More

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In a related article, I described how even Progressive Europe recognizes the retreat of the US from the global stage and from our responsibilities as a major power.  Yet we have the economic and resource capacity to do so much better, as Spiegel International Online notices.  Fracking provides an example of both our capacity and of our willful impotence.

The United States is sitting on massive natural gas and oil reserves that have the potential to shift the geopolitical balance in its favor.  Worries are increasing in Russia and the Arab states of waning influence and falling market prices.

And

American drilling experts began using a method called “fracking,” with which oil and gas molecules can be extracted from dense shale rock formations.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the United States will replace Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas in only two years.  The Americans could also become the world’s top petroleum producers by 2017.

And

…the boom could generate 600,000 new jobs, and some experts even believe that up to 3 million new jobs could be created in the coming years.

And

…the United States will benefit the most from the development of shale gas and oil resources.  …the political threat potential of oil producers like Iran will decline. Optimists assume that, in about 15 years, the United States will no longer have to send any aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to guarantee that oil tankers can pass unhindered through the Strait of Hormuz….

However.  There’s always a however.

President Barack Obama’s EPA continues to manufacture “investigations” of ground water pollution from fracking where none exists—their Wyoming fiasco, for instance.  His EPA continues its war on oil, gas, and coal by instituting output regulations that Congress already had rejected.

Obama continues to slow-walk oil and gas drilling permits on Federal lands and at offshore sites.  He has moved to cancel unused oil leases, never caring that the lessees had been reluctant to act on their leases due to uncertainty over Obama’s handling of hydrocarbons generally.

Obama even is slow-walking approval (and that approval is not a foregone conclusion, even now) of the Keystone XL Pipeline project, now that all environmental objections have been cleared with Nebraska’s approval of an alternate route.  This pipeline doesn’t directly address the resource explosion that fracking provides, but it remains symptomatic of his administration’s disdain for practical energy self-sufficiency.

It’s very unclear whether we will be allowed to realize the fruits of this technology and to bring into use these vast energy resources.

Paper Tiger

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We’re in the middle of a war far more damaging, far more threatening to our survival as a free nation, than wars President Barack Obama is so proudly walking away from.  This is a cyberwar that the People’s Republic of China is waging against us, and we’re losing it.  Badly.

One set of incidents includes this:

[Wall Street] Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. said Thursday that the paper’s computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers, apparently to monitor its China coverage.  New York Times Co disclosed Wednesday night that its flagship newspaper also had been the victim of cyberspying.

Every computer in the NYT was hacked, and every password of every journalist (among other things) was taken.  The reason was the two newspapers’ articles critical of PRC leadership.  And they did this with ease and with impunity.  The hacking went on for months and only recently was stopped, maybe.  And that’s just a couple of newspapers.

There are no consequences for the PRC or for individual hackers, because the US is utterly powerless to do anything.

President Barack Obama is talking and shaking his finger very firmly at the Chinese, however.

The Obama administration is considering more assertive action against Beijing to combat a persistent cyber-espionage campaign it believes Chinese hackers are waging against U.S. companies and government agencies.

And

…the administration is preparing a new National Intelligence Estimate that, when complete, is expected to detail the cyberthreat, particularly from China, as a growing economic problem.  One official said it also will cite more directly a role by the Chinese government in such espionage.

Yeah, that’ll show them.

Erstwhile Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview on her way out the door,

We have to begin making it clear to the Chinese—they’re not the only people hacking us or attempting to hack us—that the United States is going to have to take action to protect not only our government’s, but our private sector, from this kind of illegal intrusions.  There’s a lot that we are working on that will be deployed in the event that we don’t get some kind of international effort under way[.]

This war has been underway for a number of years, our vulnerability is uncorrected, and we’re “going to have to take action?”  We’re not already?  Clinton let the cat out of the bag on our capacity to protect ourselves later in that same interview:

Obviously this can become a very unwelcome and even dangerous tit-for-tat that could be a crescendo of consequences, here at home and around the world, that no one wants to see happen[.]

This administration is afraid to respond, because striking back might angrify those who are hurting us.

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, exposes with his commentary another aspect of the problem:

In the next year there will be an effort to figure out a way to engage the Chinese more energetically.  The issue now is how do we get the Chinese to take this more seriously as a potentially major disruption to the relationship.

This flows, though, from a false premise: the Chinese don’t care about our relationship as much as we do, and they see the relationship materially differently from us.  We’re also too desperate to have a relationship with them.  Indeed, in an aptly titled editorial (“Barbarians at the Digital Gate”), the WSJ notes

…hacking—both for purposes of monitoring and to steal commercial intellectual property or government secrets—has become the Chinese way.

You can see from all the idle chit-chat—we’re still trying to talk to the PRC and still avoiding concrete action—that our government is too timid, too powerless, and too ignorant actually to do anything to protect our country.

When Even Europe Notices

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Gregor Peter Schmitz notes in an introductory paragraph in his recent Spiegel International Online article

Global politics have come to a standstill in recent years, with the United States unwilling to show leadership….

He repeated this theme near the end of his article:

You would think it were high time for Obama to jump back into the saddle [referring to restoring American global leadership] before he gets reduced to a lame-duck status.  But no matter how many blinding smiles the notoriously perky Biden flashes in Berlin and Munich, this is probably too much to expect.

In emphasizing this American withdrawal, Schmitz noted a couple of things:

In 1998, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called America the “indispensable nation.”  But now, 15 years later, it is primarily an exhausted one, a global power in decline that has its gaze turned toward the domestic front…

which he said matter-of-factly, as an established truth.  And

[W]hen Obama recently gave his second inaugural address, he avoided making any reference to John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, in which he said that America would “pay any price, bear any burden…in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” around the globe.  Instead, the key sentence of Obama’s speech was: “A decade of war is now ending.”

It’s especially telling that the continent that for so long decried America the “global policeman” and American “arrogance” now is noticing the pell-mell retreat from the world that the Obama administration is effecting.

This is a Secretary of Defense?

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Toward the end of his SecDef nomination hearing in the Senate at the end of last week, Chuck Hagel offered this assurance [emphasis added]:

A number of questions were asked of me today about specific programs: submarine programs, different areas of technology and acquisitions, and our superior technology.  And I’ve said, I don’t know enough about it. I don’t.  There are a lot of things I don’t know about. If confirmed, I intend to know a lot more than I do.  I will have to.

Huh?  On what is he waiting?  Why doesn’t he know more now?  He’s known for months that he’s up for this job.  He’s been a critic of DoD for his political career.

As to his last sentence, well, NSS.

Technology Transfer

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Is this the administration’s new paradigm?  Barnini Chakraborty, writing for Fox News, reports

More than a decade of advanced American technology could be handed over to one of the country’s top economic rivals unless the government intervenes to stop the sale, lawmakers say.

The concerns surround the sale of A123 Systems—a firm backed for years by U.S. taxpayers—to a company run by a Chinese multi-millionaire with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Chakraborty understates the case, though.  More than mere economic rivals, the People’s Republic of China are our political and military foes, also, as events in the South China Sea demonstrate, as the PRC’s active blocking of meaningful steps to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons and to prevent northern Korea from spreading their nuclear weapon technology demonstrate, as the angry words and covert threats of the PRC leadership against the US whenever we protest their misbehavior demonstrate.

This particular technology transfer

would essentially transfer sensitive battery technology with “key military applications….”

And

…the technology behind [A123 Systems’] ultra-light lithium-ion phosphate batteries being bought will play a major role in modernizing the way electricity is generated and distributed. The new tech could also be used in key military operations and to power satellites and unmanned military drones.

This is one example, and it hasn’t yet played out.  The transfer may still be blocked, at least officially and legally.

There are other examples wherein this administration has acted positively to prevent such transfers to the PRC.  It’s entirely possible that this isn’t a new paradigm (although it’s hard to understand why the question still is an open one and the transfer not already blocked), but merely an example, alongside those others, that shows this administration…has no clue of what it’s doing with American technology.