Tag Archives: defense policy

“Rioting”

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Recall the teenage protestor in the Hong Kong protests earlier this week, the one who was shot in the chest at point blank range by a Hong Kong cop who thought he was being threatened by the boy.

A Hong Kong court charged 18-year-old student, Tsang (Tony) Chi-Kin, with rioting, a charge carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Tsang was among seven people charged with rioting on Thursday.
The secondary school student also faces two additional counts of attacking two police officers, punishable by up to six months in prison.

Riotous bastard dared to interfere with the cop’s bullet.  Nor were the cops in any great hurry to get the boy treatment or to let any protestors help him.  Despite that, he’s in stable condition in a Hong Kong hospital.

This is the kind of despotic tyranny that People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping intends to impose on Hong Kong.  And on the Republic of China later.

Aid for Ukraine

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One of the topics discussed by President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskiy in “that telecon,” was the degree of aid Germany has provided Ukraine in the latter’s on-going struggle against Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.  Neither considered Germany’s actions anywhere near adequate.

Deutsche Welle demurs from that position.

[A]ccording to the latest OECD figures, Germany is the third largest donor to Ukraine after the European Union as a whole and the US.

Those amounts?

[F]igures provided to DW by the German Foreign Ministry indicate that since 2014, the country has pumped almost €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) of bilateral financial aid into Ukraine. This total includes some €544 million of official development cooperation, €110 million in humanitarian aid, a financial loan of €500 million, and some €25 million for stabilization measures, such as conflict monitoring and the promotion of the rule of law.
Germany has paid another €200 million to Ukraine via EU aid contributions.

That works out to all of €240 million ($260 million) per year.  And none of it actual material assistance: no money at all for defensive weapons systems or even individual protective equipment, much less systems that would help Ukraine drive the invader back out.  And money for “conflict monitoring?”  Ukraine is already fully capable of watching the Russians in their nation.  The other aid, in other circumstances, would be very useful, but with Ukraine in the military and political straits in which it exists today, the results of that aid are very much in doubt in the face of that Russian occupation and the continued Russian effort to drag the nation back under the Russian yoke.

Third largest amount of aid behind the EU and the US: what a statement of the paltry level of aid that is—especially considering that, during the Obama years, the US also refused to provide any serious aid at all to Ukraine, limiting our “largesse” to blankets and medicines, but not a single bullet or other self-defense capability.

Returning to Germany’s alleged contributions: far from helping Ukraine, Germany has utterly betrayed the nation, functionally repudiating the Budapest Memorandum as it has.  Instead, Germany has pushed for the quickly-failed Minsk Protocol, and continues pushing for Minsk II.  Both of these codify the dismantling of Ukraine that the Memorandum was supposed to prevent—hence the betrayal.

Pressure

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Here’s an excerpt from the Trump-Zelenskiy telecon transcript [the odd characters at the beginning of each President’s remarks are lined out classification markings: (S/NF)]:

t:;’HP) The· President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your weal thy people… The server, they say Ukraine has.it There- are a lot. of things that went on, the whole situation… I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.
(l!l-,’HP) President Zelenskyy: Yes it is. very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer.

Yeah, that’s pressure, all right.

And here’s the “pressure” of a request—one request, mind you, not eight times repeated:

There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.

The entire transcript can be read here.

Political Tactics

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The Wall Street Journal says the “Ukraine call” will

leak eventually, so Trump might as well get it out.

No.  Telecons between American and foreign heads of state must, necessarily, remain strictly between heads of state, else it’ll be impossible for an American President to engage in “frank and open” dialog and polylog with foreign leaders or to conduct serious foreign policy in general.  No transcript should be released.

Alternatively, and in second place in the order of priorities for such things, let the leak(s) occur.  Then release the transcript and let the truth burn the leaker(s) and those who jumped onto the leak-related opprobrium bandwagon knowing they didn’t have the facts.

In the realization, something close to that second place has already happened.  In their hysteria to get President Donald Trump and to undo the outcome of an election the Progressive-Democrats consider to be their personal property stolen, the House Progressive-Democratic caucus has forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) to authorize an “impeachment investigation.”  In the immediate wake of that stampede, Trump has decided, with the permission and agreement of Ukraine’s President Volodomy Zelenskiy, to release the unredacted transcript of the call, with the so-called whistleblower’s “complaint” to be released by week’s end.

And that will be irrelevant, at least in the eyes of Progressive-Democrats: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) is saying it doesn’t matter what the transcript says; Party wants to “see what happened.”  Because the transcript isn’t actually what happened.

Intransigence

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that if he’s reelected later this month, he’ll begin annexing territories in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea.  Naturally, the Palestine Liberation Organization and its European Union apologists are in a snoot over it. An anonymously presented EU spokesperson says

The policy of settlement construction and expansion…is illegal under international law and its continuation, and actions taken in this context, undermine the viability of the two-state solution and the prospects for a lasting peace[.]

The PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi says that

Netanyahu exposed his “real political agenda of superimposing ‘greater Israel’ on all of historical Palestine [and] carrying out an ethnic cleansing agenda.”

And so on.

Yet, this is what Palestinian intransigence, along with the steady drumbeat of the PLO’s Hamas terrorism, lately enhanced by Iran’s Hezbollah attacks from within Syria, have pushed Israel into.  The Israelis have nothing to lose with this move, and there is nothing possible to gain from continuing the past policies of failure.