Tag Archives: foreign policy

Concerns Regarding Ukraine

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James Carafano has some. I have some thoughts regarding a couple of his concerns.

The administration needs a clear strategy for how to look like a real global leader….

Key to looking like a “real global leader,” prior to having a strategy, is to act like one. Stop reacting to what the enemy does, and seize the initiative. Make the enemy react to us. Neither the President Joe Biden (D) half of the Biden-Harris presidency nor the Vice President Kamala Harris (D) half know how to do any of that. Or, as Biden has demonstrated too many times, he’s too timid to. Biden-Harris’ methodology is to completely cede control of the crisis to the one who created the crisis.

Even now, the US can’t muster the full support of NATO allies for bolstering Ukraine’s self-defense. Biden’s good buddies, such as the Germans, have been embarrassingly recalcitrant.

Global leaders—any leaders—don’t wait to take action until they have gained universal consensus. That’s just more reaction, here to the actions of potential allies, rather than initiative-taking. Leaders act as soon as the efforts at coalition building have identified the recalcitrant. Delay beyond that only feeds the enemy. In some circumstances, the pace of events requires leaders to lead, to seize the initiative and act with no delay or hesitation, whether or not any sort of coalition has yet been built.

For instance: Germany has long made plain that they’ve abandoned NATO in all but formal exit—Germany doesn’t even trouble to maintain a viable military for its own defense, much less to support its supposed NATO allies and co-members. They’ve made particularly clear vis-à-vis Ukraine that they’re in the Russian camp, forcing UK arms shipments into Ukraine to go around German airspace and blocking Estonia from transferring arms—arms that Estonia would desperately need in the event of a Biden-Harris-permitted “incursion”—to Ukraine if those arms came from Germany.

There’s this, too, regarding how deeply into the Russian purse Germany has gone:

One German admiral made headlines arguing Germany make nice with Putin and worry about Beijing. (He then immediately resigned.)

That German Admiral was Navy chief Kay-Achim Schönbach, speaking in India at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, and he didn’t say anything that his government hadn’t already approved. He resigned afterward? A knight sacrifice, as any chess player—like Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps—would recognize.

A leader would recognize that it’s past time to move without Germany. Waiting on it only strengthens Putin’s control of the schedule and his position concerning Ukraine.

And this:

He [Putin] has never, however, triggered World War III. He’s likely smart enough to figure out how to wring something he wants out of this crisis without setting the world alight.

Putin is very likely to get everything out of this crisis without setting the world alight. He’s smart enough to have already figured out that that Biden-Harris won’t fight back in any meaningful way. All the latter has on offer are inchoate threats of heavy economic sanctions, accompanied by furious Biden-Harris finger wagging, after Putin has gone into Ukraine and seized the nation. See above re reacting.

But, yes, Carafano’s leading concern is spot on. People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping will be the larger winner if—when—Putin conquers and occupies Ukraine. Biden-Harris losing Ukraine will hand the Republic of China to Xi on a cheap pewter platter.

Not Sure Why

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Finland and Sweden seem to be thinking about joining NATO in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s overt aggression toward and threat of invasion of Ukraine.

Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin:

We retain the option of applying for NATO membership. We should uphold this freedom of choice and make sure it remains a reality….

And

Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Anne Linde also asserted that Russia does not have a veto on whatever alliance Sweden chooses to join.

It’s hard, at this date, to see why either nation—or any other—would want to join NATO.

A successful invasion and occupation of Ukraine by Russia would only demonstrate just how impotent NATO has become. NATO is toothless with Germany unarmed and timid under Angela Merkel and now Olaf Scholz and his Social Democratic Party, and the US is just timid under Biden-Harris.

That Ukraine is not presently a NATO member is a coward’s copout. Russian occupation of Ukraine would only magnify the threat to the NATO nations. In recognition of that, very few member nations—you can count them with the fingers of one hand—out of the 30 current members have even been willing to offer Ukraine economic or political support, much less arms with which to defend itself and drive Russia out of currently occupied Ukraine.

NATO would be no protection at all for Sweden and Finland.

Talking Past Each Other

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Or one not taking the other seriously. The disconnect between President Joe Biden-Kamala Harris and Russian President Vladimir Putin—or the fact that Putin doesn’t take the Biden-Harris administration seriously—doesn’t get much more clearly demonstrated than by this lead image from a Friday Wall Street Journal article about continuing US-Russia “negotiations” regarding Ukraine.

So What if it Is?

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Great Britain, in a move toward filling the vacuum left by President Joe Biden’s (D) dangerous timidity when facing Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sent serious arms into Ukraine to help that nation prepare for the coming Russian invasion. (It’s telling that Germany, dependent as it has sold itself into, on Russian energy, forced the British supply aircraft to fly around German airspace to get to Ukraine.)

Putin reacted to that and trotted out his Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, to object to plussing up Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. As cited by Fox News, she said that

Ukraine perceives Western military assistance as a “carte blanche for a military operation in Donbas.”

I certainly hope Ukraine has that perception, and that the perception is grounded in fact. The Donbas is, after all, Ukrainian territory, for all that Russia currently occupies most of it.

Flaw?

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The People’s Republic of China government requires everyone attending the Beijing Olympics next month to load a tracking app on their cell phones:

Those who attend the Olympics, including athletes and journalists, are required to download the app and upload their health and vaccination information to track potential outbreaks of COVID-19.

The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, has identified what it terms a security flaw.

It turns out that the app, MY2022, fails to validate some SSL certificates. That means it’s a trivial matter for…others…to bypass any security measures, including encryption, that the phone’s owner might have implemented. Those others then can easily intercept and otherwise gain access to the cell phone owner’s sensitive information: all the medical information the PRC government requires to be loaded into the app, ostensibly for Wuhan Virus tracking, along with wholly unrelated information like all traffic in which the phone might be or have been engaged, all passport information, all medical information whether or not related to the Virus, and all other information stored on the cell phone—images and videos, contact lists, other emails, Web sites and bookmarks, and on and on.

The Lab’s key findings are

  • MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
  • MY2022 is fairly straightforward about the types of data it collects from users in its public-facing documents. However, as the app collects a range of highly sensitive medical information, it is unclear with whom or which organization(s) it shares this information.
  • MY2022 includes features that allow users to report “politically sensitive” content. The app also includes a censorship keyword list, which, while presently inactive, targets a variety of political topics including domestic issues such as Xinjiang and Tibet as well as references to Chinese government agencies.
  • While the vendor did not respond to our security disclosure, we find that the app’s security deficits may not only violate Google’s Unwanted Software Policy and Apple’s App Store guidelines but also China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection, providing potential avenues for future redress.

It’s doubtful, at least to me, that China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection are being violated, though, given the PRC government’s already widespread surveillance of all of its citizens. The PRC’s 2017 national intelligence law, too, requires all entities to cooperate with the government’s intelligence community and provide whatever information that community requires, which means that the app’s spying is no violation of the PRC’s own laws.

And there’s this:

[The] Citizen Lab said it had notified the Chinese organizing committee for the Games in December about the potential issues but had never received a response.

The Beijing Organizing Committee’s refusal to respond is itself instructive.

No, this is no flaw; neither PRC government programmers nor Beijing Organizing Committee programmers, who are the ones who officially built the app, are that amateurish. It’s deliberate, and it’s one more reason to not only skip the Beijing Olympics (including not watching them on NBC), but to skip doing any sort of business with any sort of PRC company.

The Lab’s report can be read here.