Tag Archives: foreign policy

Foolish

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And contradictory. The Trump administration wants Europe to go back to buying Russian natural gas, only do it through the pipelines running through Ukraine (and relying on Russia to deposit the proceeds in an escrow account run by a third party pending the end of it war on Ukraine). The thinking, such is it might be, is that by doing so, Ukraine and Russia can be persuaded to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure, which would, supposedly, also lead to a reduction in global energy prices.

There are at least two things wrong with this foolishness.

One is that the move would put more money into Russian coffers with which to pursue its barbaric invasion and potential conquering of Ukraine.

Another is that Ukraine needs to heavily damage, if not destroy, Russia’s ability to produce the fuels its invading hordes need to move weapons, ammunition, fuel, food, soldiers, etc. from their origins through staging points to the front so that the barbarians don’t have the wherewithal with which to continue their assault, or even to hold on to what they’ve occupied.

Astute readers likely can come up with more avenues of the foolishness of this ploy.

This is an idea (I use that term loosely) that needs to die promptly.

I Have a Question

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In his article centered on the right-next-door-to-a coup d’etat playing out in Poland and by extension in Europe, the news writer likened both situations to the 11th century Investiture Controversy, a kerfuffle over who got to appoint Bishops in the Catholic Church, the Pope as head of the Church, or the Holy Roman Empire’s Emperor, as the guy with the armies. In the modern case, instead of letting the Poles deal with its internal dispute without external molestation, the EU has chosen to butt in and demand that the Polish supreme court, however populated, comport itself with EU law.

The analogy isn’t exact, but it’s extremely close. With the EU’s active interference, the argument is over

who has the authority to judge laws and constitutions in member states.

The Investiture Controversy, played out, left Europe in very weakened straits, with the Turks baying at their eastern marches and the Saracens hounding up from the south. Today, with the EU demanding unquestioned authority over the sovereign member states, the continent will be left just as weakened and divided with barbarian Russia howling at the continent’s eastern ramparts and a freshening flood of illegal aliens pouring up from the south.

Which brings me to my question, an old one, but still current: how many divisions does the European Union have?

Assumptions

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In their article centered on the domestic woes of the People’s Republic of China’s automobile industry, the news writers had this claim:

Beijing shows little sign of doing anything about its car mess, partly because it doesn’t enjoy full control. Local government officials who promoted car manufacturing are reluctant to pull the plug, said Tu Le, managing director of consultant Sino Auto Insights.

That’s partly true, but it’s erroneous to assume it’s the only factor. PRC Electric Vehicle exports are hammering the European auto industry, and it’s getting into Canadian auto industry. The US auto industry is getting hammered, albeit not as extremely, by the tariffs imposed in an effort to protect it from PRC auto imports.

This hammering is part of a sub rosa two-pronged assault on the West. One prong is holding Western industry hostage to PRC control over rare earths—both of the ores and of the capacity to process them into finished items. The other prong is to deindustrialize the West by pushing hard goods—not just battery cars—into Western markets at prices and in volumes that Western nations cannot match, inducing those populations to buy PRC goods in preference. The domestic auto industry kerfuffle is a price the PRC is willing to pay in order to achieve its aim of dominance over the US and over the West in general.

This is a long-term threat to Western security, but there’s a near-term security threat, also. As WWII demonstrated, a viable automobile manufacturing facility is at the core of the ability of a nation to produce its military establishment’s combat vehicles and related weapons systems.

There is a solution to this, which itself involves addressing both prongs. One facet is to take advantage of the PRC’s domestic industrial strait and either impose very high tariffs on all imports originating from the PRC, regardless of the path those imports take between the PRC and the final destination, or outright boycott all PRC products. Either would limit PRC sales to its already paltry and declining domestic market.

The other prong is to get off the dime and move to develop Western rare earth mining—there are a plethora of rare earth ore regions throughout North America, for instance, and on the accessible sea bottoms of the eastern Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea—and processing facilities, thereby eliminating the PRC-controlled bottleneck and associated fist on the throat of Western industry. In parallel, or at least in tight sequence, that rare earth supply chain adjustment should be extended to supply chains for all Western manufacturing and assembly facilities, removing all dependence on PRC supply.

Of course, this solution will be extremely expensive to bring about, especially were the PRC to cut off access to its rare earth output—as seems likely, along with restrictions on other supply chain materials—in response to moves to develop non-PRC accesses. That effects of that cutoff would last, though, only until Western accesses come on line. The relatively shorter-term cost, too, must be compared with the longer-term cost of PRC dominance over the US and the West and our remnant industrial output.

Defeat Iran with Slow and Steady?

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That’s the recommendation of Michael O’Hanlon, Research Director of the Foreign Policy Program of Left-leaning Brookings Institution. His rationalizations include these:

[A]s Iranian oil inventories on ships around the world diminish, overland supply routes are pressured, and other sources of Iranian regime income are gradually curtailed, it is increasingly likely that time is on our side in the economic dimension of the war, even if the global pain from the conflict is significant. … Iranian leaders aren’t like the Taliban; they like money, pomp, and power. Today they are hurting.

Lacking money, pomp, and power though doesn’t mean the Iranian terrorists are hurting. To conclude that assumes—naively or cynically; you decide—that their pain points in any way resemble ours. And there’s that global pain that the rest of the globe feels: we’re supposed to be as indifferent to that as the terrorists are to their own?

[A] major bombing campaign would run a near-certain risk of intensified Iranian retaliation, in the region and beyond, further depleting US missile defense interceptor inventories while running the risk of much higher fuel prices and higher casualties, perhaps even on the home front.

This emphasizes an essential contradiction in O’Hanlon’s argument, which he exposed earlier in his article, apparently obliviously.

[M]ore than 30,000 additional US combat sorties, including strike missions attacking some 13,000 aim points, have been less effective against other targets. Perhaps one-third to two-thirds of Iran’s missile force was put out of action, yet some has likely been rebuilt. Drone production continues apace, even as US regional allies remain vulnerable to Iranian attack.

 

Despite our Navy is largely successful efforts in escorting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s terrorists continue to attack that shipping, with enough success to keep maritime insurance costs at several times their levels a year ago and so still sharply elevates the price of oil, even though “limited” to those higher prices. Moreover, Iran still lobs missiles across the Arabian Gulf at Arab nations’ energy production and transportation infrastructures while continuing to arm the Houthis and its Iraqi militias so they can join in the infrastructure attacks.

Steady certainly could be useful, especially if it’s steady total conflict—kinetic, cyber, economic. Slow, though, is maliciously foolish and punishes, only and severely, the Iranian people, who are not the bad guys here. The bad guys—the terrorists—are the IRGC and its civilian political arm who are in charge of the government that’s reigning over the Iranian people.

Slow has, and will have, no effect on those terrorists: they’re too married to their ideology and too indifferent of the effects of their ideology on the people over whom they rule. More broadly than that, those terrorists’ value set, concept of morality, means of getting others to live by their imperatives, and view of the costs of these to others are so radically different from our own, from those of western civilization, as to be orthogonal to them.

The only way to defeat Iran consists of two steps. First is to distinguish between the Iranian government and the Iranian people. That distinction is largely in place. Second is to mount that total war and keep it going at maximum pace until the terrorists are dead. Part of their value set: if they’re still alive, they’re winning, no matter how many others suffer catastrophically or are killed. It’s that latter cost, those others’, that is maximized by fits and starts conflict and by “slow,” regardless of how steady.

A Small Quibble…

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…within a larger problem. In the WSJ‘s Tuesday house editorial regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) quest for a grand bargain creating a global triumvirate (the editors’ term, but it’s apt), the editors had this characterization of Trump’s “Yalta 2” goal:

The Yalta analogy isn’t entirely apt since Stalin and Churchill were US allies in 1945.

That’s only half right, and that’s my small quibble. Stalin was by no means a US ally in 1945 or at any other time. The US and the USSR were on the same side in that war; the USSR was a co-belligerent of convenience, only for the duration.

The larger problem is that Trump wants to divvy up the world with our two most dangerous enemies, one of which badly regrets as a global catastrophe the collapse of the USSR late last century and is currently pushing at gunpoint his western border further into Europe while expanding his “gray zone”—a very dark shade of gray—conflict with the rest of Europe even as he kidnaps journalists that write things he doesn’t like, and the other of which has publicly and repeatedly stated its overriding goal of replacing us as a serious player around the world (which is tantamount to saying take functional control of our foreign policy and of our economy) and has a long-standing law requiring each business domiciled within it to conduct any espionage its intelligence community requires of it.

This is a meeting that should never take place. As the editors put it,

A new triumvirate that divided the world into spheres of influence would blow up America’s global credibility as a reliable ally.

Worse than that, it would badly weaken the US itself, making us vulnerable to defeat politically, even kinetically, in any conflict with either of these two nuclear powers, one of which is extremely powerful cybernetically, already holds the trump cards in rare earths, and currently has a first strike capability.