Tag Archives: defense policy

A Conservative’s View of American National Policy

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My new book is out; see the links at the right to get it in Kindle format from amazon.com.  The book also is available here.

A Conservative’s View of American National Policy is the companion piece to A Conservative’s View of American Domestic Policy. Whereas Domestic Policy discussed internal affairs, National Policy is about our actions on the global stage.

My exposition centers on two things, the first of which is this: foreign and defense policy are more than closely related. They are not even mirror-images of each other; rather, they aren’t even tightly intertwined; they’re the same thing viewed from different perspectives. There are few, if any, aspects of foreign policy that do not inform defense policy, and there are even fewer aspects of defense policy that don’t affect foreign policy. We discuss these general policies and we have separate departmental heads representing them in the Executive Branch Cabinet only to facilitate our general understanding and the Cabinet Secretaries’ more efficient execution.

Accordingly, we need to understand the unity of foreign and defense policy as a single concept, not two related ones, then develop a unitary national policy that recognizes that necessary unity and that coordinates and maximizes the strengths of each, using each to compensate for the weaknesses of the other.

The other thing is this: after having made my case regarding the essential unity of foreign and defense policy, the rest of this effort will be concerned with what we should do with that unity, how we can put a national policy to use in a practical manner for our own betterment as a nation in a globally entangled world.

I propose an active policy of political engagement and military power projection. When and where we must act overtly militarily (rather than merely project our power to act), our objective must be victory. We should never engage in a fight with the purpose of a draw, as we did, for example, in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Political engagement (and economic engagement as a tool of national policy) must be based on active policies designed to expand the geographic and popular reach of liberal democracy and individual freedom and contract the sphere of tyranny and oppression. In a world of global competition for hearts and minds, the contest between free men and subjects is most definitely a zero-sum game. We win and they lose, else it’ll be the other way around.

 

The Veterans Administration Suspends

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But it chooses, again, not to fire a failed executive.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is suspending the head of the Veterans Benefits Administration for allowing two lower-ranking officials to manipulate the agency’s hiring system for their own gain.

Deputy VA Secretary Sloan Gibson says acting VBA chief Danny Pummill will be suspended without pay for 15 days for his role in a relocation scam that has roiled the agency for months.

Pummill failed to exercise proper oversight as Kimberly Graves and Diana Rubens forced lower-ranking managers to accept job transfers and then stepped into the vacant positions themselves, keeping their senior-level pay while reducing their responsibilities, Gibson said Tuesday.

Suspended.  For two whole weeks.  For defrauding the Veterans Administration and the American taxpayers who are paying these salaries and funding this travesty of a Federal department.

Gibson needs to be terminated, too, and for cause.

Better yet, veteranos administratio delende est.

Missile Violation?

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Iran has begun launching ballistic missiles as part of their intermediate-range and intercontinental-range ballistic missile development program.  The motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair insists that these launches, while “inconsistent” with UN requirements, are not actually violations of the recently concluded nuclear weapons deal.

Here’s what that Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action actually says (the document can be seen here and here).

The E3/EU+3 and Iran commit to implement this JCPOA in good faith…and to refrain from any action inconsistent with the letter, spirit and intent of this JCPOA that would undermine its successful implementation.

It’s certainly true, though, that the letter of the agreement does not proscribe ballistic missile development efforts, but such a program plainly is “inconsistent” with JCPOA requirements, central as missiles are for delivery of nuclear warheads.  Such developments, then, are clear violations of the “intent” not to “undermine” the agreement.

As backdrop to these missile test launches, the JCPOA also says this:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be requested to monitor and verify the voluntary nuclear-related measures as detailed in this JCPOA.

Iran has refused to allow the IAEA to conduct inspections on the military bases that house parts of Iran’s nuclear weapons development program, and it has refused to allow the IAEA to inspect the nuclear reactor at the heart of its program.

And this, buried at the bottom of the first link’s article:

Iranian Revolutionary Guards senior commander was quoted as saying last week that its latest round of missiles were being designed to hit Israel.

Hmm….

Henry Stimson Has Returned

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As Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson shut down the department’s cryptanalytic office saying, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, apparently in much the same vein, did Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and innumerable others a solid by not maintaining American secrets, choosing instead to use an unsecured privately administered personal email server in her private residence.

Now we get Barack Obama’s CIA Director.  John Brennan now says that the CIA shouldn’t be viewed as an espionage agency; indeed,

I don’t support government spying….  We don’t steal secrets….   We uncover, we discover, we reveal, we obtain, we elicit, we solicit.  All of that.

This is yet another episode in Obama’s American Retreat.

Smart Diplomacy

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Iran has resumed test launching ballistic missiles, in contravention of UN resolutions and of Iran’s nuclear weapons development agreement with the Obama administration and the rest of the P5+1. But here’s the kicker:

Iranian leaders now say that they are poised to walk away from the deal if the United States and other global powers fail to advance the Islamic Republic’s “national interests.”

“If our interests are not met under the nuclear deal, there will be no reason for us to continue,” Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, warned during remarks delivered to a group of Iranian officials in Tehran.

Senator Mark Kirk (R, IL) has the right of it:

The administration’s response to Iran’s new salvo of threatening missile tests in violation of international law cannot once again be, it’s “not supposed to be doing that.”

And, yet, that’s all John Kerry (D, SecState) has had to say about it.

There’s some smart diplomacy here. Just not by the Obama coterie.