Tag Archives: foreign policy

What Biden’s Afghan Job Well Done Looks Like

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Ambassador Kelley Eckels Currie, former US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues:

Currie’s group organized buses to take roughly 700 Afghans, women and their families, to the [Kabul] airport, maintaining communications with the State Department, vetting the evacuees in advance and sharing passenger lists for the buses.
“The State Department was aware of the groups we were trying to assist,” Currie said. “I was told that this information had been raised at the highest levels; we had very senior people reaching out to State leadership.”
That included at least one message sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, she said. And she personally wrote a note to Undersecretary of State for Management Ambassador John Bass.
Authorities told the group to wait in a staging facility for 24 hours before the State Department reversed course and said it couldn’t help fly them out.

Those women remain stranded, abandoned by President Joe Biden’s team.

And this:

Taliban supporters in Afghanistan holding a mock funeral while hoisting coffins draped with flags from the US and other NATO countries.

None of this counts the hundreds (thousands?) of Americans Biden also has stranded—abandoned—in Afghanistan.

These represent the victory of which Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, JCS Chief General Mark Milley are so proud of accomplishing.

Escalating

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First (well, almost first, but the early large), President Joe Biden (D) surrendered in Afghanistan, and he did it so abjectly that he abandoned Americans (he was correct when he said through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, that he wasn’t merely “stranding” them), allies’ citizens, and Afghan partners in his desperation to meet the terrorist Taliban’s deadline.

Then Baby Kim has resumed northern Korea’s weapons grade plutonium-producing nuclear reactor—and not even troubling to conceal that effort.

Now this.

In a move that could have ramifications for the free passage of both military and commercial vessels in the South China Sea, [People’s Republic of China] authorities said on Sunday they will require a range of vessels “to report their information” when passing through what China sees as its “territorial waters,” starting from September 1.

And

[The PRC] claims under a so-called “nine dash line” on its maps most of the South China Sea’s waters, which are disputed by several other countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

And by Japan and most of the rest of the world, including—used to be, anyway—the United States.

It’ll be instructive to see how the Biden/Harris administration responds to this demonstration of contempt for their timid fecklessness. Compare their response, then, with the prior administration’s reaction to the PRC government’s declaration of an ADIZ that encompassed significant swaths of the South and East China Seas airspaces and tried to require all air traffic to check in with the PRC. (Spoiler: that administration ignored the PRC’s demand, and so did most of the rest of the world.)

It’s shaping up to be a disastrous period of American headlong retreat under this Progressive-Democrat administration.

Is Biden at it Again?

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Is this another dangerous failure of the Biden/Harris administration?

US officials have approved license applications worth hundreds of millions of dollars for China’s blacklisted telecom company Huawei to buy chips for its growing auto component business, two people familiar with the matter said.

Apparently, it’s been going on behind our backs since shortly after Biden took office.

But in recent weeks and months, people familiar with the application process told Reuters the US has granted licenses authorizing suppliers to sell chips to Huawei for such vehicle components as video screens and sensors.

It’s true enough that these moves are only claimed by Karen Freifeld’s childhood invisible “people familiar with” friend, but Biden’s actions here, if true, would be of a piece with his empirically demonstrated timidity in the face of our enemies.

Some Words from our Vice President

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Vice President Kamala Harris (D) said these things on her gallivant through Southeast Asia.

We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea. Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.

And

It is in our vital interest to stand united with our allies and our partners in Southeast Asia in defense of a free and open Indo-Pacific[.]

It would be nice if we could take her seriously. It would be better if People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping could take her seriously. Sadly, Harris didn’t even indicate that the PRC needed to stop its moves to coerce, to intimidate or to withdraw its claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea. All she had was her empty description of the PRC’s attitude.

It would be useful if the Biden/Harris administration backed up its pretty words with hard action. Do what, exactly, in our stand[ing] united with our allies and our partners?

A Reading List

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Much has been made of the reading lists promoted by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and JCS Chairman General Mark Milley over the perceived woke and communism-promoting contents of their lists. Few, however, have offered their alternative lists. Herewith, the core (not the totality) of mine. It’s not segregated into suitability for junior, field grade, and flag officers; this is for all.

First:

  • Our Declaration of Independence
  • Our Constitution
  • Your Officer’s Commission as promulgated by the Secretary of [the Air Force in my case]
  • Your Oath of Office

These should be reviewed frequently.

Then, in no particular order:

  • The Federalist Papers
  • The Anti-Federalist Papers
  • Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, Sean McMeekin
  • The Art of War, Sun Tzu
  • Art of War, Niccolò Machiavelli
  • The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  • Discourses, Niccolo Machiavelli
  • On War, Carl von Clausewitz
  • Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  • King Lear, William Shakespeare
  • The Republic and the Laws, Cicero
  • Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
  • The Republic, Plato
  • The Allegory of the Cave, Plato
  • The Persians, Aeschylus
  • The Seven against Thebes, Aeschylus
  • Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
  • Republic, Aristotle
  • Apologia, Socrates
  • The Hundred-Year Marathon, Michael Pillsbury
  • Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky
  • Just War Against Terror, Jean Bethke Elshtain
  • Just War Theory, Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed.
  • Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer
  • Rethinking the Just War Tradition, Michael Brough, John Lango, Henry van der Linden, eds.
  • The Art of War, Antoine-Henri, Baron Jomini
  • Unrestricted Warfare, Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui
  • The Fall of Carthage, Adrian Goldsworthy
  • Rethinking the Principles of War, Anthony McIvor, ed.
  • Introduction to Strategy, André Beaufre

At the risk of self-promotion:

  • A Conservative’s View of American National Policy, Eric Hines
  • A Conservative’s Treatise on American Government, Eric Hines
  • A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law, Eric Hines
  • A Conservative’s View of the Conduct of Just Wars, Eric Hines

There are many more that would add effectively to an American officer’s library, but these, I claim, make a good start. Others will have other ideas, and I’m all ears, and all eyes on the Comments.