Tag Archives: defense policy

There’ll Be Blowback

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But it’ll be badly misplaced.  President Donald Trump is moving to stop further direct aid to the Caravan Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras over those nations’ failure to control those caravans by putting to actual use that aid—which was intended to support improved economies, the living conditions within those economies, and training to deal with gangs and the drug trade.

[T]he State Department…notified Congress that it would look to suspend 2017 and 2018 payments to the trio of nations, which have been home to some of the migrant caravans that have marched through Mexico to the US. border.

This comes as Honduras has formed and put on the road a caravan of 20,000 people.  In response to this, Trump said

We were giving them $500 million. We were giving them tremendous aid.  We were paying them tremendous amounts of money, and we’re not paying them anymore because they haven’t done a thing for us.

Indeed, the blowback has already begun.  Senator Robert Menendez (D, NJ), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is claiming

Instead of doing our part to help stabilize the situation in the Northern Triangle and stem the flow of children and refugees to our borders, President Trump reportedly wants to make matters worse by blocking resources for programs that get to the root causes of this humanitarian crisis.

Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL), a member of the same committee, presaged the blowback with his October tweet:

I understand instinct to cut US aid to punish countries for failing to stop illegal migration. But our aid to #Honduras & #Guatemala isn’t cash.  It’s primarily equipment & training to stop drugs headed to US & to deal with the gangs causing people to leave those countries.

The sad fact is, though, that neither Menendez nor Rubio understand the underlying facts, that the aid, cash and equipment and training, are not going to the folks who need it—those people being gathered up into caravans.  It’s going through those governments to the oligarchs and thieves.  The people—and the putative trainers and trainees—are not seeing a cent or a centavo of the aid, nor are they getting a single bit of the equipment or training.

Beyond that, Mexico has already offered “migrants” and “asylum seekers” jobs and job opportunities and asylum.  That these folks ignore or reject Mexico’s offer gives the lie to the claim that they’re coming here to escape terrible conditions at home or to seek the protection of another government.

Crimea and the Golan Heights

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A writer to the Letters to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal, actually tries to equate Israel’s hold on the Golan Heights with Russia’s occupation of Crimea and of the People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea.

And he’s serious.

Approval of Israel’s seizure lends support to Russia’s claims that the Ukrainian territory seized by Russian “separatists” now belongs to Russia, as does Crimea. President Trump’s stance also gives sanction to China’s seizure and fortification of islets in the South China Sea.

This is just idiotic. Israel’s seizure and retention of the Golan Heights was a defensive move: terrorists acting with Syrian (at least tacit) approval, along with the Syrian army, were using that higher ground to shoot at Israel and Israelis.

No one was shooting at Russia from anywhere in Ukraine; Russia’s seizure and occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine is nothing but a gun-point land grab.

No one was shooting at the People’s Republic of China from anywhere at all, much less from the South China Sea. The PRC’s seizure and occupation, and militarization of the occupied islands, are nothing but a gun-point land and sea grab for the resources in and under the Sea and from which to threaten the surrounding nations.

There’s no equivalence here.

Inconsistent

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Venezuela’s interim President—and only legitimate President—Juan Guaidó has sent his emissaries, his ambassadors around the globe to represent his government to other nations, as ambassadors are designated to do.  He has sent Otto Gebauer to Germany to represent his government to the German government.

There’s the rub.  Germany recognizes Guaidó’s presidency, but that government refuses to recognize his ambassador.

For the purposes of conducting official talks, on March 13 the government described him as the “personal representative of interim President Juan Guaidó….”

The rationalization for this inconsistency has been articulated by the Social Democratic Party’s Helge Lindh (and per his resume, Head of Working Group “Strengthening Foundations” (together with Andreas Bialas MdL):

Recognizing Guaidó was a political decision and a signa.  But, in the current situation, it doesn’t make sense to confirm Guaidó’s shadow ambassadors, as that ignores the fact that the power remains with Maduro and his system.

Sadly, Maduro’s ability to cling to power is facilitated by this willingness to continue to recognize—to tacitly support—his power. This paralysis also contributes to Germany’s maintaining Maduro’s policy of denying entry into Venezuela even the most basic survival foods and medicines, solely on the basis of their originating from the wrong nations.

It’s time for Germany to get off the dime, accept Gebauer as Venezuela’s ambassador, and eject the Maduro man.

Germany’s Hans-Joachim Heintze, of the Ruhr University Bochum’s Institute for International Law, is worried about America’s past gunboat diplomacy and doesn’t want Germany to make the same mistakes.  This is another misguided rationalization, here borne of Germany’s guilt complex over a four generations removed war.

Still, if Germany truly is worried about our unilateral action (of which there has been very little related to the current crisis), Germany should work with the OAS and with individual South American nations—particularly Brazil and Colombia, who are bearing the brunt of the flow of Venezuelan refugees—to assemble a South American military coalition to enter Venezuela, force Maduro out, and allow the Guaidó government to function.

Dithering serves only to prop up the thug to the continued abuse of the Venezuelan people.

Naïve

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A bunch of non-defense and non-foreign policy folks—and so experts on both—don’t think we should be moving to defend ourselves against our enemies.  Such actions might…provoke…them.

Dozens of scientists, health care professionals and academics have written a letter to the UN calling for an international ban of autonomous killer robots, saying recent advances in artificial intelligence “have brought us to the brink of a new arms race in lethal autonomous weapons.”

These tools might also fall into the hands of terrorists and despots.

Such a withdrawal or failure to engage in the first place, though, would amount to unilateral disarmament in the face of our enemies: an agreement—done at the UN or done between nations—cannot be expected to be honored by those who wish us ill.  It’s necessary only to see the years-long Russian violation of the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty in Europe and its partition and occupation of parts of Georgia and Ukraine.  It’s necessary only to see the People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea and the islands therein—the territory of other nations around the Sea, albeit disputed among those nations—and the militarization of those occupied islands.

It’s necessary only to see the continued nuclear weapons arming of northern Korea, despite past agreements to stop.  It’s necessary only to see the continued drive toward nuclear weapons development in Iran, despite past agreements not to.

Our enemies will—and are—racing to development “killer robots” regardless of any piously agreed treaties to not.  Many of these enemies—Iran, for instance, and northern Korea—would be happy to sell the weapons to terrorists and despots to facilitate their ability to do us harm.

We should be leading in this development and deployment not hiding from it.  That’s the only way to maximize our ability to control their use: from understanding how to counter them to minimizing through deterrence the likelihood of our enemies using them or selling them on.  That’s the only way to maximize our ability to defend ourselves.

Aside from all of that, an arms race is itself a useful tool in facing down our adversaries.  It’s necessary only to recall the space-based missile defense race, the economic toll that took on the Soviet Union, and the outcome of that price exaction.

At best, these folks are naïve.

Defying Trump?

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That’s what the headline would have it.

The German government is poised to renege on its pledge to raise military spending, the latest gesture of defiance by Chancellor Angela Merkel toward President Donald Trump.

And

Under the new budget plan, unveiled by the finance ministry Monday, [Germany’s] spending would rise to 1.37% of GDP next year, but then decrease again to 1.33% in 2019, 1.29% in 2022 and 1.25% in 2023.

However.

Germany won’t be defying Trump. It’ll be betraying NATO and its fellow members.  Especially those eastern European members that front on Russia and behind which Germany ducks.