Tag Archives: foreign policy

Women’s Rights

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The Iranian women are campaigning, with great courage, for their freedom (proximately to dress as they wish, but it’s much broader than that) against the tyrannical, murderous, and terrorism-supporting regime reigning over Iran. Many Iranian men are campaigning with them, and together, they’re struggling for broad freedoms for everyone: the freedom for Iranian citizens of both sexes to make their own, individual, decisions regarding their any of their actions.

The Progressive-Democratic Biden administration is shamefully quiet on the matter, even as it continues to beg on bended knee—from the kiddie table, yet—to be allowed to rejoin the JCPOA, the Obama-era agreement to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons after expiry of some restrictions.

This is how the Progressive-Democratic Party has chosen to interact with the terrorism-supporting regime, though. An earlier Iranian people’s attempt to fight for individual rights, joined by Iranian women that time (compared to the women’s campaign being joined by men this time), was just as shamefully ignored by an earlier Progressive-Democratic administration.

The last time the Iranian people risked their lives for freedom from the benighted theocracy that subjugates them—the 2009 protests against a stolen election—Washington chose shame. The White House turned its back on the protesters for a week until they gathered near the former US embassy building in Tehran chanting, “Obama, you’re either with them or with us.” This finally evoked a statement of support, but it was too little, too late.

Emphasis on too little. Obama’s words were—by design—empty; he followed up on those words with…nothing at all for the Iranian people, not a minim of actual, concrete support.

Joshua Muravchik is being generous in his op-ed at the first link, though, regarding Biden.

The Biden administration has been more forthcoming in its pronouncements during the current protests, but it can and should do more.

He appears to take Biden seriously in its being more forthcoming. Biden’s pronouncements are just empty words, and not even as articulately snowing as Obama’s prior chit-chat. The Biden administration can and should do more, but it won’t. It’s too desperate to get back into that nuclear weapons authorization agreement.

Those Iranian women—they’re on their own.

It’s not only the Progressive-Democratic Party administrations who are silent, though. Just as shamefully, what passes for the current American feminist movement is just as meekly quiet. And they don’t even have a sham realpolitik motive for it.

“Ukraine Needs a Guarantee from NATO”

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That’s the headline of Andrew Michta’s op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. Michta is the George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies’ College of International and Security Studies Dean in Garmisch, Germany, so he would seem to speak with some knowledge.

His piece objected to the EU’s emphasis on fast-tracking (to the extent it really is) Ukraine’s membership in that body at the expense of guaranteeing Ukraine’s security by bringing it into NATO’s defense perimeter if not actually into NATO (which Michta favors).

He’s ignoring reality here, though, and so to borrow a term from a cable advertiser, Nonsense.

Guarantees of Ukraine’s security are as worthless today as they were with the Budapest Memoranda and the Minsk Protocols.

What Ukraine needs is stepped up transfers of serious weapons, ammunition, and supply—including air- and missile-defense systems, armor, and increased supply of HIMARS, including the full-range missiles that nation currently is denied.

Full stop.

EU membership and even NATO “security guarantees” can follow only on Ukraine’s successful defeat of the barbarian’s invasion and the permanent ejection of the barbarian from that nation. Absent that, there will be no nation to bring toward the West; it will have been utterly destroyed by the barbarian, which is the avowed goal of the Vladimir Putin.

Another Reason…

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…to stop doing business with the People’s Republic of China—especially, stopping exporting American natural gas to that nation.

The Biden administration has been busily selling American, that is, domestically produced, liquified natural gas to the People’s Republic of China. LNG his administration sells there, mind you, isn’t LNG he can sell to the gas-strapped nations of Europe and Asia.

Selling energy to an enemy nation is bad enough, and it’s worse when those sales come in preference to sales of the same energy to our friends and allies.

The worst, though, is selling our energy to that enemy nation—the PRC—only to have that nation resell our energy to our friends and allies—the gas-strapped nations of Europe and Asia—at a steep profit for itself.

[PRC] companies that signed long-term contracts to buy US liquefied natural gas are selling the excess and making hundreds of millions of dollars per cargo. Buyers include Europe, Japan and South Korea.

For instance:

[The PRC]’s ENN Natural Gas Co is expected to profit from this trade when it sends the LNG tanker Diamond Gas Victoria to pick up a cargo of gas from Cheniere Energy Inc’s plant at Sabine Pass, LA, on the Gulf Coast on October 18, according to three industry sources.
Instead of dispatching the tanker to [the PRC]’s east coast, the vessel is scheduled to deliver LNG to Europe, they said. ENN is estimated to make a profit of between $110 million and $130 million on this one cargo shipment, analysts said, basing their calculations on market pricing data.

It’s true enough that the PRC’s resales to Europe and Asia are a drop in the ocean compared to those nations’ natural gas needs, but these are sales, and profits, that would be better done as a result of our directly selling our liquified natural gas to Europe and Asia, and at a lower cost, if only from cutting out the middle man. And from cutting out an enemy nation.

“Ukraine Needs More Security Guarantees”

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That’s the position of The Wall Street Journal‘s headline writer and of Andriy Yermak and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who opined as much in their Thursday op-ed. They were actually serious, too. The position is, though, to use the technical term, a bunch of bull.

They demonstrate the foolishness of their position in their lede:

When Ukraine’s army is given the weapons it needs, it defeats Russia on the battlefield. That is the lesson the world learned as it watched Ukrainian forces quickly retake the Kharkiv region this month. Since the beginning of September, Ukrainian forces have liberated more than 2,300 square miles of territory in the south and east of the country.

However.

They want to build on this success with an international “guarantee:” a Kyiv Security Compact between Ukraine and its partners. Then they muddle their position further by insisting (correctly so, here) that Ukraine should be given modern and effective air-defense and antimissile systems—in addition, I say, to much more heavy weapons of the type currently being supplied in dribs and drabs, and with the addition of tanks and other armor.

Ukraine has already been the victim of international guarantees. The Budapest Memoranda guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity if they gave up the nuclear weapons then held by the nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine agreed. Not too long later, Russia occupied and partitioned away Crimea and seized and occupied a significant fraction of the Ukrainian portion of the Donbas.

The guarantors’ response? Bleatings, finger-waggings, and the empty promises of the Minsk Protocols. These were followed by the barbarian’s naked invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities inflicted on Ukrainian women, children, and men, both civilian and soldier; those atrocities continue apace today. The Minsk guarantors’ response here? Russia was one of those guarantors…. The others responded by slow-walking and actively withholding weapons from Ukraine as the barbarian’s pre-invasion build-up proceeded in Belorussia and across the border in Russia near Belgorod.

When the barbarian sent in its invasion, the West’s guarantors continued to slow-walk serious weapons transfers until only lately. These worthies still won’t transfer tanks and other armor, led by Germany, which government men insist that Ukrainians—Slavs all—are just too stupid to be able learn how to operate a German tank.

No. No empty, misleading, won’t-be-enforced guarantees.

What Ukraine needs are the weapons it needs, but the full suite of them according to Ukraine’s articulation, not the Know Betters of the timid West. The barbarian’s invasion must be utterly crushed and the barbarian forced to tear up its roads and railroads some considerable distance into Russia from the Ukrainian border, with the -road beds and the flatter terrain between sown with the aptly named Russian olive. The horde must not be left able to invade again.

Rasmussen, especially, should know better. He was NATO’s Secretary General from 2009 to 2014. So should Yermak, come to that; he’s the sitting head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and he’s living through the outcome of the empty words of those prior “guarantees.”

European Union Sanctions on Russia

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Another round is in the offing, possibly this week or next. And there’s this hopeful claim of the EU:

EU officials say privately and publicly that the sanctions are inflicting serious damage on Russia’s economy and military….

No doubt sanctions are an important part of a necessary “all of the above” suite of moves to support Ukraine in its defense against the barbarian. But are they strong enough themselves? Will the new round be materially stronger?

After all: how many battalions have the sanctions forced Putin to withdraw from Ukraine? How many battalions have the sanctions in concert with other moves forced the barbarian to withdraw?

Zero.

The pain inflicted on the barbarian isn’t enough. It needs to be orders of magnitude stronger. The sanctions have to be orders of magnitude stronger. The only places in the world with which the barbarian should be allowed to do business of any sort are withing Russia and with the PRC, northern Korea, and Iran. And those need to be tightened down, also.