Tag Archives: foreign policy

Listen to Those Who’ve Been There

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Escapees—those whom some call defectors—from northern Korea are starting to take an active role in Republic of Korea politics.

…former North Koreans are throwing their hats into the ring to push South Korea to take a harder stand against the latest Kim to rule the North, Kim Jong Un. Among them is a one-time North Korean diplomat, Thae Yong-ho, who is running with Mr. Ji [Seong-ho] for South Korea’s conservative opposition party.

In particular,

Mr Ji will now campaign across South Korea, laying out his objections to the Moon administration, which he says has made too many concessions to North Korea and doesn’t take a strong enough stand on the Kim regime’s human rights abuses.

The rest should listen to those who’ve been there, suffered that, know first-hand what it is that sits just north of the DMZ.

Maybe It’s Time

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The just-concluded Munich Security Conference has illustrated the growing disconnect between the US and central and western Europe regarding European security.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened the conference—one of the largest annual gatherings of political leaders, military chiefs and top diplomats from around the world—by accusing the Trump administration of “rejecting the idea of the international community.”
“Every country should fend for itself and put its own interests over all others … ‘Great again’—even at the expense of neighbors and partners,” Steinmeier said….

That’s a cynical distortion of our position, coming as it does on the strenuous efforts the Trump administration has made to get these nations to increase their commitment to NATO, and coming as it does on the heels of Germany’s naked duplicity in promising—on its own initiative, mind you—to increase its spending on NATO to 2% of its GDP, and then welching on that commitment.

And this:

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking at the forum for the first time, echoed Steinmeier the next day, noting that “what Europe wants is not quite the same as the US.”

That’s certainly true, with France—and Germany—toadying up to Russia as enthusiastically as they are. But Macron, at bottom, is as duplicitous as Steinmeier. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, all NATO members, and Ukraine, are much more closely aligned with the US on matters of their (and our) national security. Macron, for all his ego, does not speak for “what Europe wants,” only for what Germany and France want. To claim they are Europe is not hubris, it’s just dishonest.

Maybe it’s time to move decisively toward a mutual defense treaty among the US, the eastern European nations fronting Russia, and the UK, and let central and western Europe do what they’re so evidently desperate to do: to go their own way.

After all, at least the former, in evident contrast with the latter, care about their security.

Telecommunications and Backdoors

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It turns out that Huawei has been able to use legislatively mandated backdoors into telecommunications software—backdoors ostensibly for the sole benefit of law enforcement, and then only usable within judicially allowed limits, search warrants duly sworn, in the US, for instance—for years.

But we would never do that, says Huawei in its wide-eyed innocence.

“The use of the lawful interception interface is strictly regulated and can only be accessed by certified personnel of the network operators. No Huawei employee is allowed to access the network without an explicit approval from the network operator,” the [senior Huawei] official said.

The existence of the interface is the access pathway. The bar to its use is wholly a matter of the integrity of the humans involved. This is not a hard concept to understand; Huawei’s management is being disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Further, PRC law requires PRC companies to cooperate with the government on the government’s demand.

Huawei “has never and will never do anything that would compromise or endanger the security of networks and data of its clients,” the company said.

Huawei’s CEO Ren has also made that preposterous claim. He and his management team insult our intelligence, assuming as they do that we would believe that Huawei would actually defy the PRC government.

“I Have Seen Dictatorships”

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Ex-US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, says so. And she insisted, in her op-ed, that she and her colleagues had no obligations to her bosses:

When civil servants in the current administration saw senior officials taking actions they considered deeply wrong in regard to the nation of Ukraine, they refused to take part.

They, and she, also refused to resign. All of them simply presumed to disobedience and to a veto authority over their bosses’ instructions.

She went on:

We need to stand up for our values, defend our institutions, participate in civil society and support a free press.

Indeed. But in order for Yovanovitch and her fellows to do so, they need to consider the Progressive-Democrat mirror into which they stare, and to think about the Progressive-Democratic Party’s communications arm, our NLMSM masquerading itself as an independent press, for which Yovanovitch is writing her… apologia pro vita sua.

And this cri de coeur:

I have seen dictatorships around the world….

I suppose that, for a woman so timid she’s intimidated by an unfavorable job performance review, any government might look like a dictatorship.

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.