Tag Archives: foreign policy

Rank Cowardice

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Did these European nations learn nothing from WWII, or are they gone soft in their wealth and safety under our American umbrella? Or do they ignore the fresh lessons the nations of eastern Europe—freed from Russian occupation only a generation ago—would teach them?

Some European Union states have floated the idea of giving President Vladimir Putin an off-ramp that would make it easier for him to justify a de-escalation to his domestic audience in Russia, while a peace plan drawn up by Italy proposed autonomy for Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas.

Our own Henry Kissinger—who negotiated our preemptive surrender in Vietnam—is an especial embarrassment. Pontificating in Davos, he actually said with a straight face

…”ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante,” suggesting that Ukraine should allow Russia to retain the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and swaths of the eastern Donbas region seized by Moscow-backed separatists the same year.

And

pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine … but a new war against Russia itself.

That is Kissinger once again practicing his politics of preemptive surrender, ceding to Russia the occupied territories of Ukraine, a Kissingerian ownership based solely on their seizure by Russia at gunpoint.

It’s certainly easy enough for those far away from the fight for national survival, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, blithely to tell that nation to just give up some land and we’ll have peace in our time.

Never mind that giving away any square inch of a nation’s territory is giving away pieces of that nation’s existence. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had the right characterization of Kissinger’s words.

I get the sense that instead of the year 2022, Mr Kissinger has 1938 on his calendar. And that he thought he was addressing an audience not in Davos, but in erstwhile Munich.

One of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Oleksiy Arestovych, was more blunt:

Get lost with suggestions of this sort, that Ukraine should trade some of its territory. Children are dying here, soldiers are stopping shrapnel with their own bodies, and they’re telling us to sacrifice territory. It will never happen.

And from the second link just above:

they are telling us to sacrifice our land? Bite me, f*ckers.

Indeed.

UN Failure

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Here’s yet another.

Human rights high commissioner Michelle Bachelet attempted to temper expectations prior to her arrival on Monday, saying the trip was not an “investigation.” Bachelet will visit two locations within the Xinjiang region, where China’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs have been widely documented.
She has agreed to stay within a “closed loop” of individuals set up by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Beijing, however. CCP officials say the measures are an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19.

Bachelet should have gotten right back on her plane and left the PRC when they refused to let her and her team run around Xinjiang on her initiative rather than within the Communist Party of China’s restrictions.

And

No members of the press will be permitted to follow Bachelet on the trip.

Which is a clear indication of the Xi’s need to hide…something.

Raising the Military Age Limit

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Is Russia running out of military age bodies to feed into the barbarian furnace that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has lit off with his invasion of Ukraine? Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin:

Today, especially, we need to strengthen the armed forces and help the Ministry of Defense. Our Supreme Commander is doing everything to ensure that our armed forces win, and we need to help[.]

Then the Duma moved to raise the upper age limit on military service from the erstwhile 40 years to…no limit at all.

This age pyramid, from the CIA’s World Fact Book, illustrates one facet of Russia’s problem:

The prime age group for Russia’s army—the blocks from 20 years old to 29 years old—is the smallest set of blocks on the pyramid that are younger than 65 years old. It’ll be five years, at least, before that changes—and that change is temporary: below10 years old, the population blocks shrink again. Russia’s birth rate just isn’t there.

Prove It, Mr Biden

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President Joe Biden (D) said Monday (Tokyo time) that the US would intervene militarily if the People’s Republic of China attempted to invade and conquer the Republic of China (though Biden referred to the nation as “Taiwan”).

The president was asked if the US would get involved militarily in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan after declining to send American troops to Ukraine to fight Russia’s invasion.
“Yes. That’s the commitment we made,” he said.

Then prove it, Mr Biden. Get out of the way of arms sales to the RoC, stop slow-walking them. Do more, in fact—accelerate both the sales and their delivery.

As an aside, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promptly came out and said Biden didn’t really mean what he said. Such public undercutting should get Austin summarily fired. But it won’t.