Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Misunderstanding

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In an article centered on reports that President Donald Trump is planning to withdraw 9,500 troops from Germany—relocating at least some of them to Poland—Bernd Riegert had the following:

[T]he US personnel [to be removed from Germany] essentially work within the framework of NATO for the Pentagon’s European and Africa Commands. They operate the Ramstein airbase, a military hospital and a military training facility. They are important pillars of NATO infrastructure, but they do not, strictly speaking, contribute much to Germany’s national defense.

Wow.

At least some of those reassigned soldiers would be sent to Poland. Shoring up Polish defenses, militarily and politically (as that reallocation also would signal), against Russian aggressions doesn’t contribute to Germany’s defense? Again, wow.

If the troops allegedly to be removed work in important pillars of NATO infrastructure, but they’re not supporting Germany’s national defense, if those important pillars—Ramstein AB, European Command, Africa Command, training, hospitals—don’t contribute to Germany’s national defense, then in what way does NATO contribute to Germany’s national defense?

It’s already clear that Germany has chosen to not fulfill its obligations to NATO and therewith to not support the (mutual) defense of the other member nations. If Germany does not believe that NATO contributes to Germany’s defense, then what’s the point of any NATO forces in Germany?

It’s Time

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The People’s Republic of China has begun welching on its trade agreement with the US. Government-controlled companies buying American farm products have begun canceling their orders to American farmers, orders made under that agreement. So far, the canceled orders amount to chump change.

However.

“A handful of shipments of livestock feed, corn, pork, cotton and some meat imports are pushed back,” said a senior Chinese shipping executive involved in China farm imports who asked not to be identified and who has been briefed on Beijing’s move.
“Private Chinese exporters are not part of this, but it could escalate, depending on how the relationship between the US and China goes forward,” this executive said.

The threat is clear.

It’s time to find, and redirect our farm products to, other markets and stop selling them to the PRC. The PRC is simply too unreliable a trading partner—which should be expected, given that the nation has placed itself as an enemy of us rather than as a competitor.

Who’s Insulting Whom?

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As most of you are aware, the government men of Hong Kong, on instruction from their masters in the People’s Republic of China government, has imposed on the people of Hong Kong a law criminalizing “disrespect” for the PRC national anthem.

Holden Chow, Vice-Chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, a staunchly pro-PRC member of Hong Kong’s “legislature,” strongly supports this law.

This is simply about protecting the dignity of the national anthem and deterring people from insulting it[.]

Far from it. A national anthem symbolizes its nation. A government that is so terrified of dissent that it outlaws that dissent, that makes speaking against an anthem that symbolizes that fear a crime, isn’t the one being insulted, and such an anthem has no dignity.

Making such dissent criminal is the insult, and this government has gravely insulted both the good people of Hong Kong and the good people of the PRC.

Works for Me

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The baby sister and de facto chief of staff to northern Korea’s MFWIC, Baby Kim, Kim Yo Jong doesn’t like that citizens of the Republic of Korea keep sending anti-northern Korea missives into the DMZ and on across into the gangland.

[Kim Yo Jong] warned that it would end a 2018 inter-Korean military agreement if the South fails to stop defectors and activists from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two countries.
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Kim Yo Jong also said the North could permanently shut a liaison office with the South and an inter-Korean industrial park in the border town of Kaesong….

She also says that the agreement was hardly of any value.

She’s right on that last. It is a useless, virtue-signaling setup that the RoK, in retrospect mistakenly, agreed.

The dissolution of the agreement would create no loss at all for the people of the RoK; Baby Kim’s Baby Sister ought not let the door hit her in the fannie on the way out.

America’s Problem

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…according to Walter Russell Mead, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed. He suggested that the world will only wait out the Trump administration, and that the next administration, Trump’s or Biden’s, will face a world grown unresponsive to American leadership, not believing that American society is capable of the role any further.

He closed his piece with this:

Whatever happens in the election, the US administration next year will face a problem even more daunting than the intellectual challenge of crafting a national strategy for an increasingly dangerous time. It will have to convince the world that this time, America really means what its president says.

This overstates the case, and it perpetuates a myth that has suffused too many administrations for far too long.

We don’t have to convince the world of anything, nor should we be defining ourselves in terms of other nations’ approval/disapproval of us. We have only to do what’s best for the United States—which will include ad hoc purpose-designed coalitions, but very few hard treaties.

Putting our nation first—which is not putting our nation alone, as a mendacious press and today’s crop of Progressive-Democrats claim—simplifies Mr Mead’s problem.