Tag Archives: defense policy

Mexican Terror Threat

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Mexico is upset with President Donald Trump’s efforts to tighten border security and especially with his efforts to deal more thoroughly with illegal aliens present in the US, many of whom are Mexican.  A coalition has formed—a group of Mexican officials, legislators, governors and public figures planning to meet [in the US] with migrant groups—to plot ways in which to interfere with our enforcement of our immigration laws.

One of those ways was described by Mexican ex-Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda:

The backlog in the immigration system is tremendous [the idea is to double or triple the backlog]….

Notice that: the idea isn’t to protect and enforce such rights as illegal aliens have in the United States, but simply to overburden our court system.  That’s nakedly cynical, but that’s mild.  This coalition is plotting worse.

Here’s Senator (Party of the Democratic Revolution) Armando Ríos Piter and an attendee of the coalition’s meetings in Phoenix over the weekend:

Mexico is helping on the fight on terror and that collaboration should be put under review given the attitude of Trump.  It’s important to make clear to them the possible consequences if Trump keeps a hostile and aggressive stance.

American government plans and methods for dealing with illegal aliens are certainly legitimate subjects for discussion and debate.  Threats to increase our vulnerability to terrorism unless we surrender our law enforcement to Mexican demands are unacceptable in those discussions and debates and anywhere else.

We should—at the least—accelerate our enforcement against illegal aliens who are Mexican citizens or who entered the US illegally via Mexican routes until the Mexican government publicly and explicitly repudiates Piter’s threat and any others like it.  With regard to Piter, we have laws against making terrorist threats, and they should be enforced against everyone in the United States.  Including Mexican government officials.

A Test

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The Moscow Times, one of several mouthpieces of Russian President Vladimir Putin and of his Kremlin government, sees the current flareup of shooting between government forces on the one hand and “rebels” and their Russian bosses and reinforcements in the Donbass region of Donetsk as a test.  Recall that Donbass is on the road to Black Sea coastal Mariupol, a key urbanized area on the coastal road to Russia-occupied Crimea.

The organ is right.

Moscow clearly wants Kiev to implement its vision of the Minsk agreement—a special status for the separatist controlled areas, retaining Russian-backed armies and de-facto control of the border with Russia, with only nominal oversight from Kiev.

The Kremlin wants to retain political control over separatist-held territory as a “structural veto” on Ukrainian security and foreign policy. Moscow hopes that the Trump administration alongside France and Germany will pressure Poroshenko to accept Russian demands under Minsk-2.

But the real test actually is two tests.  The first is whether President Donald Trump will, instead, recall and implement the Budapest Memorandum, which among other things requires signatory Russia to respect and honor Ukrainian territorial integrity, and begin enforcing the Memorandum by sending arms to Ukraine with which it actually can defend itself against those “rebels” and the Russian armor and artillery forces both in Donetsk and in Lukhansk.

The other test is whether Trump will do anything about Russia’s occupation of Georgia.

OK, a third test, too: whether Trump will follow through, promptly, on deploying an anti-missile shield into the eastern European nations bordering on Russia, as ex-President Barack Obama (D) had chit-chatted about doing late in his administration (and in southeastern Europe, too, against Iranian missiles).

The Business with Iran

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The Wall Street Journal opined on Iran’s missile launch last week and President Donald Trump’s imposition of sanctions against Iran in response.

[I]t does look as if President Trump may be willing to do what Mr Obama refused to do, which is to rigorously enforce the [nuclear weapons development] agreement….

Trump said during the campaign that he might not tear up the Executive Agreement, but instead enforce it to the letter.

Why would his doing so now be such a surprise? Oh, wait, the NLMSM spiked that part of his commitments while focusing, disparagingly, on his earlier musing about tearing up the EA.

Security Holes

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Recall the hoo-raw over Apple’s refusal to help the FBI hack an iPhone used by the San Bernardino terrorists, the FBI’s claim that they couldn’t get into the iPhone without Apple’s help, and then the FBI’s successful penetration of the iPhone from hiring a third party to do hack it.  Recall further the FBI’s subsequent refusal to tell Apple about the security hole in Apple’s iPhone software (supposedly limited to the generation of cell phone used by the terrorists) that was exploited by the hack and the FBI’s associated refusal to tell Apple how the hack itself worked.

The FBI has been in court defending those refusals.

…the Justice Department argued that the information it withheld, if released, could be seized upon by “hostile entities” who could develop their own “countermeasures”….

This is curious logic, indeed.  The FBI is leaving the security hole in place on the assumption, apparently, that hackers can’t already identify the hole and exploit it—as that third party did so promptly after being hired by the FBI.  So, leave the hole unplugged; a countermeasure would just be found by hackers.

Never mind that any hack—all of them to date, against any software in any milieu, as well as any future hack—is a countermeasure against the software being penetrated.  There’s nothing static about any of this; software security and hacks are in a dynamic arms race.  It’s foolish to leave existing holes in place in the expectation that the arms race will stop.

Obama’s Asia Pivot

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On top of President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama’s (D) acquiescence to the People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea and his timid response to the PRC’s aggression against Japan in the East China Sea—hallmarks of his “pivot to Asia,” we get the following pivot outcomes.

A Chinese attack submarine made an unprecedented stopover in Malaysia this week in a rare public display of China’s expanding undersea force and a further sign of power realignment in Southeast Asia.

And

The visit came as two Russian warships docked in the Philippines—a US treaty ally—and Moscow offered to sell Manila advanced weaponry in another challenge to longstanding U.S. military relations in the region.

Wonderful job on the pivot by our On-The-Way-Out Commander in Chief.

Sort of makes one wonder which way he was pivoting in Asia.