Tag Archives: defense policy

America’s Problem

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…according to Walter Russell Mead, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed. He suggested that the world will only wait out the Trump administration, and that the next administration, Trump’s or Biden’s, will face a world grown unresponsive to American leadership, not believing that American society is capable of the role any further.

He closed his piece with this:

Whatever happens in the election, the US administration next year will face a problem even more daunting than the intellectual challenge of crafting a national strategy for an increasingly dangerous time. It will have to convince the world that this time, America really means what its president says.

This overstates the case, and it perpetuates a myth that has suffused too many administrations for far too long.

We don’t have to convince the world of anything, nor should we be defining ourselves in terms of other nations’ approval/disapproval of us. We have only to do what’s best for the United States—which will include ad hoc purpose-designed coalitions, but very few hard treaties.

Putting our nation first—which is not putting our nation alone, as a mendacious press and today’s crop of Progressive-Democrats claim—simplifies Mr Mead’s problem.

Europe Objects

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The US will allow to expire/revoke sanction waivers associated with the failed Iran nuclear weapons development Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the nations whose businesses will be most affected, are unhappy. The projects in which these nations’ companies are engaged, they claim,

serve the nonproliferation interests of all and provide the international community with assurances of the exclusively peaceful and safe nature of Iranian nuclear activities[.]

What these nations must answer, though, which they’ve been at pains to not answer since the 2015 agreement’s inception, is the manner in which Iran’s nuclear “activities” are peaceful and safe when the Iranian government has said all along that Israel must be destroyed—and its nuclear weapons program would provide significant weaponry for that goal.

What these nations must answer, and which they’ve also been at pains to avoid, is how peaceful and safe Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be after the JCPOA expires in a few short years, and all fetters disappear.

Limit FISA Surveillance?

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Certainly, the process is beset with vast, and serious, problems.

Mr [DoJ Inspector General] Horowitz’s staff reviewed a sample from a recent five-year period, October 2014 to September 2019, during which the eight FBI field offices applied for more than 700 surveillance warrants on US persons. Each of the reviewed files contained errors, inconsistencies and omissions. After reviewing the report, the FISA court’s Chief Judge James E Boasberg issued a rare public order. He told the government to undertake steps to ensure the accuracy of FISA applications. Yet inaccuracy isn’t the only problem. The use of FISA against a US citizen presents a fundamental threat to civil liberties. It essentially suspends the Constitution.

The problems, though, aren’t limited to FBI misbehaviors, the FBI being the proximate target of Boasberg’s order. The existence of these errors and the long-time existence of this sort of error each and together demonstrate that men of government, when able to exercise their power in the darkness of secrecy, cannot be trusted to stay true to the straight and narrow, to the strictures of integrity.

After FISA was enacted in 1978, FBI Director William Webster set the standards for its use.

And those standards have been violated.

Over the years FISA has been amended to allow for the surveillance of Americans. But there were safeguards.

Even with that legislative drift, the evolving safeguards have been violated.

It’s enough.

Limiting FISA surveillance must begin with eliminating the Star Chamber that is the FISA Court. That court is lawless enough already, as its ready and unquestioning acceptance of false warrant applications demonstrates. Its secret proceedings, along with that history, lend no credibility to the premise that, were its approvals limited by statute to foreign nationals, that it would honor those limits any more than have the men coming before it with applications to spy on American citizens foreign nationals who happen to be corresponding with American citizens.

Nor has that secret court ever been necessary, even did it behave properly. It exists to facilitate secret surveillances supported by secret warrants. Our Article III courts, and our State courts, have long been checked out on sealing—keeping secret—warrants, and subpoenas, until it comes time actually to serve them. Our courts, and our States’ state-level and local police departments, have long been checked out on conducting quiet surveillance—while under the careful eye of our public courts and of us citizens of the United States and of the State wherein [we] reside.

The existence of this Star Chamber is at the heart of the suspension of our Constitution about which Baker wrote at the link.

An Expansionist Germany

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Not military expansion, but a more insidious one: legal expansion.

The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country’s highest court [Federal Constitutional Court] ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications.

And:

The key legal question was whether foreign nationals in other countries were covered by Germany’s constitution….

Why, yes, yes they are. Because German sovereignty reaches deep inside other nations’ borders, other nations’ legal and political jurisdictions, overrides those nations’ own sovereignty. Germany’s laws not only apply outside German borders, they apply inside other nations’ borders.

The Court’s judges’ hearts may have been in the right place, but this sets an ugly precedent regarding the allegedly inherent superiority of German sovereignty.

“The US Doesn’t Need a New Cold War”

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So says Robert Zoellick in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

We truly do not need another Cold War. But this one is being forced on us, anyway, by the People’s Republic of China and the economic war it’s prosecuting against us. The environment for this one also was facilitated by the multi-polar world so enthusiastically built by ex-President Barack Obama (D).

Baker also is operating from a defeatist proposition.

The New Cold Warriors can’t contain China given its ties throughout the world; other countries won’t join us. Nor can the US break the regime, though the Communist Party’s flaws could open cracks within its own society. The US can impose costs on China, but to what end, and at what price to Americans?

So were the Soviet Union’s ties throughout the world, yet we, in turning Nikita Khrushchev’s words back on his nation, buried them.

Other nations are joining us in the struggle against the PRC, as the PRC’s military acquisitiveness has grown more blatant and the bloody deadliness of its transgressions along with its utter lack of concern for the lives of other nations’ citizens (much less those of its own citizens) made more obvious by its performance with its Wuhan Virus and its behavior in the aftermath of the international spread of the virus.

Nor is regime breakage a goal of our government—as our government has repeatedly and openly said. Only behavioral change. And that is our overall, clearly and repeatedly stated, end.

I have to wonder, too, in what world Zoellick thinks he lives that conflict is always bloodless and costless for either side—or is Zoellick back-door suggesting we should just be quietly accepting lest our enemy become perturbed with us?

And this:

The New Cold Warriors expunge the successes of past US cooperation with China. Beijing was once a wartime enemy, a supplier of proxy foes in North Korea and North Vietnam, and the world’s leading proliferator of missiles and nuclear weapons technology. Beginning in the 1990s, China reversed course and worked with the US to control dangerous weapons. It turned from proliferation partnerships with Iran and North Korea to helping the US thwart their development of nuclear arms. From 2000 to 2018, US diplomacy prodded Beijing to support 182 of the 190 United Nations Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on states.

There never has been cooperation of the PRC with us, merely an occasional alignment of interests. Beijing has made itself an overt enemy of Vietnam, beginning with its attempted invasion of Vietnam shortly after the close of the Vietnam War.

It continues to supply northern Korea with needed supplies and technologies, even as the PRC pays lip service to the empty resolutions of the UN.

It continues to supply Iran with needed supplies and technologies, even as the PRC pays lip service to similar empty resolutions of the UN.

It continues to develop its own nuclear weapons, in secret and in underground low-yield test sites.

And those costs to us of defending ourselves in the PRC’s Cold War? Those costs surely will accrue, but the tariffs imposed, to date, have imposed little cost on American producers or consumers, the chatter of the nattering class notwithstanding: the PRC has been devaluing its currency in pace with our tariffs in order to keep their export prices—what Americans and other importers actually pay—relatively unchanged.

No, we don’t need this Cold War—but that’s merely to state the obvious: no nation needs war. But sometimes a war must be fought in defense—the survival of our nation as a free and independent polity, rather than one subservient to our enemy, depends on it and on winning this one.