Tag Archives: foreign policy

He’s Right

Posted on by
Reply

Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov says it’s…silly (my term)…to negotiate with the Russian barbarians while they’re still inside Ukraine.

“There’s no way to have conversations with them; you can’t talk with terrorists,”…citing Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure during a brutal winter. The war will not end, he continued, until the Ukrainian forces “turn everything back—all the territories.”

And

“Everything will be linked once again, including Crimea,” Danilov said. “Not one meter will be left for the taking of the enemy.”

Indeed. How is it even possible to negotiate with an entity whose first and only goal is the utter dissolution of your nation?

Readers of this blog know the peace terms I’ve been advocating for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to require.

Indications of the Extent of the Exposure

Posted on by
Reply

A Rapid City city councilman, Jason Salamun, wants to ban TikTok from city-owned devices and networks, and to prohibit city agencies from using the app. A councilwoman, Laura Armstrong, opposes the proposed ban, claiming Rapid City has bigger problems to solve, such as crime and drugs. Yet that just illustrates how easily the ban could be enacted compared with solutions to those bigger problems.

Armstrong also claims—and she’s serious—that TikTok isn’t a threat. Never mind that TikTok is wholly owned by People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance, and that under the PRC’s national intelligence law, ByteDance can be required by the nation’s intelligence apparatus to conduct espionage on American government and business entities and on individual Americans. That espionage would be done through TikTok.

Armstrong did some of her own research on the matter.

Among the things she found, the city’s exhibition center could lose business because contracts with musicians require the venue to promote gigs via TikTok, she said.
The city’s fire and police departments use TikTok to recruit, and the Solid Waste department has an official TikTok account….

That demonstrates how widespread the city’s exposure is, yet Armstrong is arguing, and again she’s actually serious, that far from demonstrating the threat, this exposure demonstrates only the difficulty of ridding the city of the threat.

Go figure.

Projecting

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is doing vis-à-vis the United States.

Washington went the furthest. … Some “unnamed officials” from the Pentagon actually threatened to inflict a “decapitation blow” on the Kremlin, but, in fact, it is a threat to physically eliminate the head of the Russian state[.]

This is the Russian thinking out loud about what he and/or his BFF and boss Russia’s President Vladimir Putin have in mind regarding our own government.

Another bit of Lavrovian projecting:

It is no longer a secret to anyone that the strategic goal of the United States and its NATO allies is “victory over Russia on the battlefield” as a mechanism for significantly weakening or even destroying our country.
…
…Washington is also solving an important geopolitical task—to break the traditional ties between Russia and Europe and to further subjugate the European satellites.

This, again, is the Russian thinking out loud about what the men of the barbarian government has in mind for themselves regarding Europe and Putin’s lost (and to be recovered and then expanded) empire. He’s also assuming that because the barbarian would do such a thing, other nations, per force, must be intent on those things.

More Destruction

Posted on by
Reply

I alluded earlier to the destruction the current crop of DoD managers are wreaking on our military establishment.

Here’s a specific example, all too canonical.

The upstate New York military academy [West Point] is removing 13 items that reference the Confederacy, including a portrait and bust of General Robert E Lee, its superintendent before the Civil War, the Washington Examiner reports.

This revision of our nation’s military history is being done on the express approval of SecDef Lloyd Austin. Because erasing history, including critical military history, is the best way to teach military principles, successes, and failures to our future military officers.

We can’t get rid of the SecDef and his syndicate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense soon enough.

Another Contemptuous Dismissal

Posted on by
Reply

By the barbarian.

The Ukrainian government has proposed a summit at the UN regarding the barbaric Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggesting it could occur within the first two months of the new year, immediately following the barbarian’s being hauled before the bar for his war crimes.

Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky responded.

What can be a “peace summit” without Russia? It’s very easy to imagine it without Ukraine[.]

This is nothing but a repetition of Vladimir Putin’s dismissal of the concept of nationhood for Ukraine as the barbarian chieftain insisted early on that Ukraine isn’t a real nation, but only a part of Russia. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the other hand, does the barbarian the courtesy of recognizing his status. Otherwise, there’d be no entity to bring before the bar.