Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Good Start

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But it’s only a start. The Trump administration is working with companies including Microsoft, Dell, and AT&T to develop 5G software in an attempt to break Huawei’s current dominance of the 5G market and to supplant it.

The plan would build on efforts by some US telecom and technology companies to agree on common engineering standards that would allow 5G software developers to run code atop machines that come from nearly any hardware manufacturer.

Software isn’t the only source or solution, though; we need to push hardware development, too. It’s too easy to bury malware in hardware’s ROM/PROM/EPROM chips; Huawei’s hardware will need to be excised as well.

Overcomplexifying

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European pundits are doing that vis-à-vis US-Ukraine relations, if Deutsche Welle is any example.  SecState Mike Pompeo is headed to Ukraine to discuss a number of items centered on how we can extend our support for and of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and this is supposed to be an especially complicated visit.

Analysts say Ukraine has become “toxic” for the US [based on the current impeachment/trial process of President Donald Trump], and that contacts at various levels have become more difficult and more restrained.

Leave aside the question of what analysts—these are carefully unnamed—and the question of who in either administration are saying contacts are more difficult and restrained, and there’s nothing left in this claim. There’s only the fact that our head diplomat after the President is headed there, just a few short months after the last contact between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that it extends beyond just government officials. Two former prosecutor generals in Ukraine, Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko, both discussed the Biden case with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani….

Not further complicated at all by this. This bit is wholly irrelevant to Pompeo’s trip; the complication exists only in the minds of those anonymous analysts.

The posts of Special Envoy to Ukraine and Ambassador to Ukraine remaining vacant is hardly a complication, either. The Special Envoy isn’t required (and never was), and the embassy is ably handled by the deputy ambassador and the ambassadorial staff in Kyev. Sure, it would be useful to fill the Ambassador slot, but nothing is held up by its being empty.

Even the disagreement between Pompeo and a newsperson is being held up by these pundits as a complicating factor. Never mind that that is a purely domestic matter or that members of this administration—and prior ones—are involved in disagreements with our press as a matter of routine.

There’s this, too:

The Minsk peace accords are bound to be one of the central issues during Pompeo’s visit to Kyiv. At a summit in Paris in December 2019, Washington praised Zelenskiy’s efforts to restart the faltering peace process. In the coming weeks, Ukraine will implement political agreements concerning the special status of the separatist areas around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, and prepare for local elections scheduled for the fall. In the past, people took to the streets to protest the agreements, calling the accord a “surrender” to Russia.

Minsk is, indeed, Merkel’s betrayal of Ukraine and at best a partial surrender by Ukraine to Russia.  What should govern the situation is the prior Budapest Memorandum, a collection of three agreements in which the US, Russia, and the UK guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity if the latter gave up the nuclear weapons the Soviet Union had stationed there prior to its collapse and disappearance. Ukraine did, bringing the guarantee into effect. That Germany was not a signatory does not make Merkel’s betrayal any less; that only made it easier.

Russia subsequently welched and invaded Ukraine, partitioning and occupying Crimea and two eastern oblasts.  The Obama administration then betrayed Ukraine by refusing to answer Russia’s invasion and further by refusing to give/lease/sell/transfer in any way the weaponry Ukraine needed to resist the Russian invasion and defeat it.

This is the situation Trump and Pompeo are trying to repair.  None of those pseudo-complications have anything to do with any of this.

Foolish Risks

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Great Britain has decided to let the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei—which by PRC law must cooperate with the PRC government whenever that government requires it—to play a role in Britain’s development and deployment of its 5G telecommunications network.

Great Britain says Huawei role will be limited, but in a computer network, such limits lie somewhere between chimera and pipe dream.

The Brits say that Huawei, and “high risk vendors” generally, would be excluded from the network “core.”

The Brits say they are

taking steps that would allow it “to mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat the range of threats, whether cybercriminals, or state-sponsored attacks.”

And that

high-risk vendors would be subject to a 35% cap on access to even non-sensitive parts of the network.

Thirty-five per cent. That’s a broad penetration of a network’s “non-sensitive parts,” a network’s periphery.

This is foolish.

Mitigating risks is not the same as preventing them. This isn’t a matter of the Internet going down for a bit, and our not being able to post our blog articles or do a Bing search for this or that. It’s not a matter of losing a cable connection so we can’t watch TV for a few minutes or an hour, nor is it a matter of a temporary drop of cell phone access.  This is a matter of national security, and the difference between mitigation and prevention is critical.

It takes only a single opening in a network’s outlying accesses to enable a nefarious entity to insert malware into the network. Once inserted, that malware can proliferate on its own, even penetrate the core, and then that malware is positioned to allow the entity to engage in cybercrime, cyberespionage, cyber-triggered sabotage of other infrastructure.

Even were the core adequately protected, malware in the periphery still can render the core impotent by isolating it from the periphery—much as biological damage can isolate a body’s core, its brain, from the body.

“Credible Military Capabilities”

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The European Union needs some, says Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President.

In order to respond to crises, the EU needs “credible military capabilities,” the leader of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.
The bloc has already “set up the building blocks of a European defense union,” the former German defense minister said in her speech.
“It is complementary to NATO and it is different,” she added. “There is a European way to foreign policy and foreign security policy where hard power is an important tool […] but it is never the only one.”

Well, NSS.

This is much of what President Donald Trump has been saying since he began campaigning for office in 2015. It’s part of his long push (which is beginning to have some success) for NATO’s European member nations to quit freeloading off our treasure and blood and actually honor their NATO commitments with more of their own money and blood.

It’s also a clear indication that those nations, whose prosperity appeared and grew under American protection, can—and have been able to for a long time—do more for NATO than they have been. After all, it will cost much more to develop an additional defense establishment with the building blocks of a European defense union that is complementary to NATO and…is different.”

Von der Leyen says the EU can afford both.

Trade Dispute

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Deutsche Welle is worried about President Donald Trump reignit[ing a] trade battle with Europe.

US President Donald Trump vowed on Wednesday to make good on threats to impose high tariffs on European cars if the bloc doesn’t agree to a long-delayed trade deal with Washington.
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The US leader said that the tariffs, which would Germany’s car industry especially hard, could amount to 25%.

This is a misplaced emphasis. The EU has been dealing in bad faith with us, if not openly prosecuting its trade war against us, for some time. The latest example is the EU’s plan to impose a “digital tax” on our tech companies. The EU claims that its new tax would be imposed globally, on all international tech companies, but the largest are American, and the EU tax is explicitly structured to go after ours.

The longer-standing bad faith includes the question of automobile tariffs.  Trump, years ago, offered a no-tariff on cars trade regime as part of a no tariffs at all trade regime between the EU and the US. The German auto industry immediately agreed with the no auto tariffs offer and tried to get the German government to go along with it and work to get EU agreement.  Then-EU President Jean-Claude Juncker agreed to take discuss the no auto tariff question, but then…silence.

The EU (and Germany) have completely ignored the offer of eliminating tariffs on some or all of EU-US trade.

Trump isn’t reigniting anything; he’s just responding to the EU’s trade war.