Tag Archives: foreign policy

Europe Objects

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The US will allow to expire/revoke sanction waivers associated with the failed Iran nuclear weapons development Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the nations whose businesses will be most affected, are unhappy. The projects in which these nations’ companies are engaged, they claim,

serve the nonproliferation interests of all and provide the international community with assurances of the exclusively peaceful and safe nature of Iranian nuclear activities[.]

What these nations must answer, though, which they’ve been at pains to not answer since the 2015 agreement’s inception, is the manner in which Iran’s nuclear “activities” are peaceful and safe when the Iranian government has said all along that Israel must be destroyed—and its nuclear weapons program would provide significant weaponry for that goal.

What these nations must answer, and which they’ve also been at pains to avoid, is how peaceful and safe Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be after the JCPOA expires in a few short years, and all fetters disappear.

Long Overdue

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The People’s Republic of China has been able to raise billions of dollars for its various business outlets by listing them on American stock exchanges—all while being exempt from the same public visibility and auditing requirements that other nations’ companies and our domestic ones must satisfy on our exchanges.

Maybe that’s changing.

Legislation passed by the Senate—and now introduced in the House—would kick Chinese companies off US stock exchanges unless their audits are inspected by US regulators.

And

The Senate legislation requires the Chinese companies with shares traded here to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission whether they are owned or controlled by state authorities.

This, though, would mean that all of them would have to admit disclose that they are controlled by state authorities. A 2017 intelligence law enacted by the PRC government requires all PRC companies to “cooperate” with intelligence requests of agencies of that government.

Now we have:

China says sharing audit work papers would violate its sovereignty and risk leaking state secrets.

There’s an effect of that 2017 law.

Michaels and Otani, at the first link, think that

economic tension between the two global superpowers, amplified by political outrage in the US over China’s role in the spread of the new coronavirus

are pushing this new emphasis. Emphasis maybe, but neither the economic war (now relabeled Cold War by the PRC) that the PRC has been inflicting on us for years nor the current Wuhan Virus situation and the PRC’s perfidy in the virus’ spread have anything to do with the substance of this. The secretiveness of the PRC’s outlets listed on our exchanges has been extant since they first were listed, and that’s what needs correction.

It’s enough that we gave the PRC Most Favored Nation status (mistakenly, in 20-20 hindsight). There’s nothing that warrants PRC companies on our exchanges being treated any differently than any other company—domestic or foreign—on our exchanges.

PRC companies need, badly, to be audited, and tossed from our exchanges at the slightest hesitation to be audited and for the same violations, should they be audited and any violations found, as any other company whose violations warrant expulsion.

This is especially important given that the PRC isn’t just any foreign nation; it’s an enemy of the United States. American dollars shouldn’t be involved in funding PRC companies.

Fly-Over Country

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is being picked over by Progressive-Democrats because he recommended the firing of a misbehaving Department Inspector General. On that excuse, Pompeo’s private dinners are being looked into, in particular, one in which he hosted a collection of Kansas folks, including the retiring Kansas Senator Pat Roberts (R) and a few other State dignitaries.

Senator Bob Menendez (D, NJ), in particular, has taken notice.

What type of foreign-affairs work goes on in Kansas?

There’s that utter contempt for middle-America citizens that Progressive-Democrats have.

Is this dismissal of millions of Americans as beneath notice what we need running our nation?

Limit FISA Surveillance?

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Certainly, the process is beset with vast, and serious, problems.

Mr [DoJ Inspector General] Horowitz’s staff reviewed a sample from a recent five-year period, October 2014 to September 2019, during which the eight FBI field offices applied for more than 700 surveillance warrants on US persons. Each of the reviewed files contained errors, inconsistencies and omissions. After reviewing the report, the FISA court’s Chief Judge James E Boasberg issued a rare public order. He told the government to undertake steps to ensure the accuracy of FISA applications. Yet inaccuracy isn’t the only problem. The use of FISA against a US citizen presents a fundamental threat to civil liberties. It essentially suspends the Constitution.

The problems, though, aren’t limited to FBI misbehaviors, the FBI being the proximate target of Boasberg’s order. The existence of these errors and the long-time existence of this sort of error each and together demonstrate that men of government, when able to exercise their power in the darkness of secrecy, cannot be trusted to stay true to the straight and narrow, to the strictures of integrity.

After FISA was enacted in 1978, FBI Director William Webster set the standards for its use.

And those standards have been violated.

Over the years FISA has been amended to allow for the surveillance of Americans. But there were safeguards.

Even with that legislative drift, the evolving safeguards have been violated.

It’s enough.

Limiting FISA surveillance must begin with eliminating the Star Chamber that is the FISA Court. That court is lawless enough already, as its ready and unquestioning acceptance of false warrant applications demonstrates. Its secret proceedings, along with that history, lend no credibility to the premise that, were its approvals limited by statute to foreign nationals, that it would honor those limits any more than have the men coming before it with applications to spy on American citizens foreign nationals who happen to be corresponding with American citizens.

Nor has that secret court ever been necessary, even did it behave properly. It exists to facilitate secret surveillances supported by secret warrants. Our Article III courts, and our State courts, have long been checked out on sealing—keeping secret—warrants, and subpoenas, until it comes time actually to serve them. Our courts, and our States’ state-level and local police departments, have long been checked out on conducting quiet surveillance—while under the careful eye of our public courts and of us citizens of the United States and of the State wherein [we] reside.

The existence of this Star Chamber is at the heart of the suspension of our Constitution about which Baker wrote at the link.

An Expansionist Germany

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Not military expansion, but a more insidious one: legal expansion.

The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country’s highest court [Federal Constitutional Court] ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications.

And:

The key legal question was whether foreign nationals in other countries were covered by Germany’s constitution….

Why, yes, yes they are. Because German sovereignty reaches deep inside other nations’ borders, other nations’ legal and political jurisdictions, overrides those nations’ own sovereignty. Germany’s laws not only apply outside German borders, they apply inside other nations’ borders.

The Court’s judges’ hearts may have been in the right place, but this sets an ugly precedent regarding the allegedly inherent superiority of German sovereignty.