Category Archives: foreign policy

Iran Warns Arab States Over Syria

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With apologies to The Wall Street Journal, from whose article I took the title of my post.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi warned Sunni-led Arab states and Turkey, who are supporting Syria’s opposition in its battle with Tehran’s ally President Bashar al-Assad, that their insistence on toppling the Syrian regime will destabilize their own countries and the entire region.

“If they continue moving in the wrong direction then let them rest assured that the consequences of this will affect them too,” said Mr. Salehi in a joint news conference with his Syrian counterpart, Walid Moallem, who was visiting Tehran Sunday.

And this is the nation our administration is so timid with regarding its nuclear weapons program.

But that’s OK—if that misunderstood al-Assad or those bad Iranians continue to misbehave, we’ll talk even more, and we’ll shake our fingers especially firmly at…someone.

Paper Tiger

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There has been a disturbing development in the South China Sea, an area of the world toward which Our government claims it’s pivoting as central to American security.

Scarborough Shoal is a dinky little set of islands lying 140 miles west of Luzon Island, Republic of the Philippines, and 750 miles south of the People’s Republic of China.  This is a wholly unremarkable set of islands, except for the rich fishing and the equally rich oil deposits below the bottom of the region there.  And it’s entirely within the Philippine 200 mile Economic Exclusion Zone.

Because of its wealth, the PRC sent its fishing vessels and its armed patrol boats to the area in a naked attempt to occupy it.  The Philippine navy responded with two of its coast guard cutters, and the face-off lasted until a typhoon forced everyone to leave.

President Obama’s response?  Against the backdrop of a 1951 treaty that binds us to the defense of the Republic of the Philippines and that’s still, nominally, in force, Obama did nothing.  Nada.  Just meekly watched from the sidelines (if he was paying even that much attention).  He did not execute his favored tactic of getting a coterie of nations together to cry out and shake their collective finger very firmly at the Chinese.  He sent no USN destroyer to the area.  He raised no objection at all.  He left our ally to twist in the wind.

While this was going on, the PRC also sent a fishing boat into the territorial waters of the Republic of Palau, another dinky little island—population 21,000—way on the other side of the Philippines.  Palau objected, and when the Chinese vessel refused to leave, they fired on it, captured it, and forced the Chinese to pay a fine for their trespass.

As the WSJ (not quite) put it, it’s a sad day when the government of a tiny speck of an island shows more courage in standing up to an enemy than does our own President.

Free Speech and the UN

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There is a carefully sub rosa international attack on free speech in progress, and unless our government takes a more active role than it has been, that attack is going to have very serious negative repercussions right here at home.  Gordon Crovitz described this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union is hosting a World Conference on International Telecommunications this December, which will be attended by all 193 of the UN member nations, including the US.  This meeting has been utterly devoid of publicity, and any knowledge we have about the agenda and goals have come to us only through leaks.  But here’s what we know, according to Crovitz.

A 200+ page “planning document” indicates the UN’s goals for the conference, and Eli Dourado, a George Mason University researcher, summarized the document’s contents thusly:

These proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.

The proposals include the following:

  • give countries authority over “the information and communication infrastructure within their state”
  • require that online companies “operating in their territory” use the Internet “in a rational way”

Since these proposals come from the People’s Republic of China, this means government authorities and government definitions of “rational way.”

Other proposals would actually let the UN regulate Internet content:

  • “protect” against computer malware or spam
  • inspect private communications
  • measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic
  • give the UN authority over allocating Internet addresses, replacing ICANN, the self-regulating body that presently ensures the stability of the Internet

These proposals come from Russia and Iran; although amazingly, Europe supports the billing drive (perhaps not so amazingly considering the penchant for government controls that EU member nations have).

So far, our government’s reaction to this assault on free speech—and on American free speech—has been…muted.  The best the Obama administration has been able to do is to mumble about

“unnecessary and beyond the appropriate scope” of UN regulation

and

the text [of the planning document] suggests that the ITU has a role in content-related issues.  We do not believe it does.

This is a far cry from the bolder response we took took when the UN’s UNESCO became too ideological and not enough concerned with science and education: we cut off funding to the organization.

This administration needs to become a whole lot more forceful in opposing this attempt to grab the Internet and to use that control to stifle free speech.

Walking Small

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With apologies to Sheriff Pusser; but the disrespect comes from the administration.  Why are we so timid in front of the People’s Republic of China?  Where did that timidity get us vis-à-vis the Soviet Union prior to President Reagan?

At the Shangri-La Dialogue conference, a gathering of the Asia-Pacific region’s national defense officials to discuss regional security questions, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ought to reassure the PRC that the new US military strategy focusing on Asia was not designed to contain them, saying

Some view the increased emphasis by the United States on Asia-Pacific as a challenge to China; I reject that view entirely.

Never mind that the PRC is an aggressive and growing threat to the US and to our friends and allies.

A PLA representative asked Panetta

My question is, sir, could you enlighten me a little more how the US plans to develop military-to-military relations with China?

Panetta responded with a list of American planned initiatives: plans to cooperate on cyber and space, creating teams to work on these difficult issues, exchanges between military commanders, and a visit to China later this summer by the secretary himself.  (And I thought President Obama had all the self-importance in the administration.  [/snark])  Notice that, though: the PRC asks what are we going to do to please them; they have no plans at all to approach us.

As Senator John McCain (R, AZ) noted after the conference,

Realities are we are retiring ships.  We are having the smallest navy since World War II.

There is great reluctance on the part of this administration to confront China’s aggressiveness toward us and our friends and allies, and shrinking capability being left to subsequent administrations who might have a greater interest in the region’s security.

Yet this timidity is part and parcel with our government’s performance in another part of the world.  While thousands of Syrians die at the hands of the Assad regime, our government sits around clucking its collective tongue and shaking its finger very firmly at Assad—and does nothing of substance.

Senator Joe Lieberman (I, CT) notes that while he thinks the administration is making progress toward a halt in the bloodshed in Syria, it “is moving too slowly.”

Lieberman went on, saying that Panetta had assured him that DoD has a series of plans that they can implement, yet:

I don’t think anybody expects that [Panetta’s claimed plans] would include American troops on the ground in Syria nor will they require the US to take on the fight against Assad alone.

So even those little vaunted and lightly touted “plans” involve nothing more substantive than continued Obamatalk—idle chit-chat and finger waving, with no intension of doing anything serious.

Then Lieberman summed up this administration’s behavior:

If we to continue to say that we won’t do anything to help the Syrian people unless there is UN Security Council authorization, that is essentially saying to the Russians, ‘you can block the world from coming to the aid of these people in Syria against your ally Assad,’ and that is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Senator McCain got right to the point:

I can’t think of a time in the many years that I have served this country in many ways that I have been more embarrassed about my country and their failure to carry out our fundamental principles.  It is shameful because the countries in the region say that they need American leadership, not American unilateral action….  It is patently obvious that this president does not believe that America leads.

And Iran.  After three years of Obamatalk, Iran now is just months away from obtaining nuclear weapons.  Even today, the administration is just sitting around talking with the Iranian “negotiators.”

We’re not even carrying Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick—nor are we prepared to use one, should one magically appear, like that McNairy County sheriff was.

China Trade Wars and the US

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The US recently imposed a 31% antidumping tariff on Chinese solar-panel makers (“green” energy devotees object to the tariff’s impact on American “green” energy prices, but those objections are irrelevant here), and of course the Chinese demur.

But we have to keep in mind the context within which the People’s Republic of China is engaging in the behaviors that required the tariff imposition, a context in which the PRC is moving aggressively and deliberately against American interests and security concerns.

The PRC already is actively prosecuting a cyberwar against us, routinely attempting to penetrate (and succeeding at an alarming rate) American companies’ information networks to gain access to and to steal those companies’ proprietary engineering data and, especially within our financial industry, to steal our companies’ fiscal data.  Even more threateningly, the PRC routinely attacks, and too often penetrates, our Defense and State information networks, obtaining critical defense and political information.  In conjunction with these cyber-attacks, the PRC, the primary global producer of rare-earth minerals, has implemented export quotas on those minerals—minerals that are at the heart of the computing and memory chips that our companies and our government use in their information networks, and on which our weapon systems depend.

Additionally, the PRC is actively looking to block efforts to inhibit Iran’s access to nuclear weapons—weapons which the Iranians will use against Israel and us, and which they will pass on to terrorist groups for use against Europe and us.  Where impediments are implemented, anyway, the PRC actively sabotages them.  This is what is behind their continued purchase of Iranian oil, rather than satisfying their needs elsewhere in the global market, and their purchase of Iranian minerals and organic chemicals.  This is what is behind the PRC’s steady shipment of nuclear reactor parts to Iran.  This also is what is behind their decision to inhibit efforts to curb northern Korea’s expansion of its own nuclear weapon establishment.

Moreover, the PRC is actively moving against American security and economic interests in the South China Sea, claiming that body for its own right up to the border waters of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of the Philippines, and the other nations that border on the Sea.  This is where the PRC militarily engages the Philippine Navy as the latter moves to protect its own interests, and where the PRC militarily threatens Vietnam for objecting to Chinese grasping.  Yet these moves are not aimed at those nations, but at the US, whose interest in open seas in that body (which contains a significant fraction of the world’s commercial shipping lanes) is made manifest by our global trade imperatives (and by those of all of our allies), and so must respond or see our influence shrink further.

Against this backdrop, the PRC is threatening a trade war if we don’t withdraw our newly implemented tariff.

We fear that if these tariffs are levied in full, Chinese companies may have no choice but to exit the US market[.]

We are “urged” to

…review the facts and make the right decision without being influenced by U.S. elections….

And:

This action by the US has hurt cooperation between China and the US in the renewable energy sector, and hurt the US itself.  We hope the US will appropriately resolve this issue.

The tariff must be an opening move, and the US must respond more aggressively and with greater initiative to the Chinese conflict.