Tag Archives: foreign policy

Threat

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Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan is telling us and Europe to sit down and shut up about his invasion of Kurdish Syria, or he’ll loose millions of Syrian refugees on Europe. He especially objects to the way the EU is characterization his invasion:

Hey EU, get your act together. If you try to describe our current operation as an occupation, our task will be simple. We will open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way.

The irony here is simple. If Europe actually respected Union and national borders, this would be a toothless threat.

Of course, the irony will be lost on our Progressive-Democrats.

Courage Under Fire

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Republic of China’s President Tsai Ing-wen, against the background of the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s abuse of Hong Kong citizens through his Hong Kong police, his functional abrogation of the solemnly agreed treaty with Great Britain governing the handover of Hong Kong to the PRC, and his parallel functional reneging on his government’s “one country, two systems” pretense vis-à-vis that city, has spoken against the PRC’s pretense of that toward her nation.

That framework, she noted, has brought Hong Kong to the brink of disorder.

Speaking from the presidential office building in the center of Taipei, Tsai accused China of using that same program to threaten Taiwan’s “regional peace and stability.”

Tsai went on:

We must stand up in defense. Rejection of “one country, two systems” is the biggest consensus among Taiwan’s 23 million people across parties and positions.
Over 70 years, we’ve endured all sorts of severe challenges, and not only do none of these challenges knock us down, they make us stronger and more resolute. One offensive after another, they’ve not made Taiwanese people yield.

This comes in the face of increasing international isolation inflicted on the RoC by the PRC.

Would that some American athletes and athletic associations had the same courage, especially given their far greater relative power and their complete safety from PRC actions.

“Rioting”

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Recall the teenage protestor in the Hong Kong protests earlier this week, the one who was shot in the chest at point blank range by a Hong Kong cop who thought he was being threatened by the boy.

A Hong Kong court charged 18-year-old student, Tsang (Tony) Chi-Kin, with rioting, a charge carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Tsang was among seven people charged with rioting on Thursday.
The secondary school student also faces two additional counts of attacking two police officers, punishable by up to six months in prison.

Riotous bastard dared to interfere with the cop’s bullet.  Nor were the cops in any great hurry to get the boy treatment or to let any protestors help him.  Despite that, he’s in stable condition in a Hong Kong hospital.

This is the kind of despotic tyranny that People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping intends to impose on Hong Kong.  And on the Republic of China later.

A Price for Stability

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Global tax reform is a path to a stable international economic regime??

[T]he potential global tax overhaul would force many companies to pay more to governments, not less. But this may be a small price to pay for a stable international framework.

After all,

Existing global tax rules allow companies to transfer those profits, often to a low-tax jurisdiction.

Never mind that an even smaller price—indeed, a net positive gain in prosperity—would be lowering national taxes to the level of the lowest rates imposed by any nation. This would eliminate tax competition, reduce compliance costs as multinational companies no longer had to maneuver the way they realize their incomes and taxes owed, lead to lower end-user prices by reducing taxes as a multinational’s cost center to be covered by the price of its goods.

But no—the globalists want to raise the tax rates to a common high level. They don’t seem to care about actual global prosperity—just getting more of our money for the sake of the chimera of…stability.

I’m minded of Benjamin Franklin in a slightly different milieu:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Aid for Ukraine

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One of the topics discussed by President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskiy in “that telecon,” was the degree of aid Germany has provided Ukraine in the latter’s on-going struggle against Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.  Neither considered Germany’s actions anywhere near adequate.

Deutsche Welle demurs from that position.

[A]ccording to the latest OECD figures, Germany is the third largest donor to Ukraine after the European Union as a whole and the US.

Those amounts?

[F]igures provided to DW by the German Foreign Ministry indicate that since 2014, the country has pumped almost €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) of bilateral financial aid into Ukraine. This total includes some €544 million of official development cooperation, €110 million in humanitarian aid, a financial loan of €500 million, and some €25 million for stabilization measures, such as conflict monitoring and the promotion of the rule of law.
Germany has paid another €200 million to Ukraine via EU aid contributions.

That works out to all of €240 million ($260 million) per year.  And none of it actual material assistance: no money at all for defensive weapons systems or even individual protective equipment, much less systems that would help Ukraine drive the invader back out.  And money for “conflict monitoring?”  Ukraine is already fully capable of watching the Russians in their nation.  The other aid, in other circumstances, would be very useful, but with Ukraine in the military and political straits in which it exists today, the results of that aid are very much in doubt in the face of that Russian occupation and the continued Russian effort to drag the nation back under the Russian yoke.

Third largest amount of aid behind the EU and the US: what a statement of the paltry level of aid that is—especially considering that, during the Obama years, the US also refused to provide any serious aid at all to Ukraine, limiting our “largesse” to blankets and medicines, but not a single bullet or other self-defense capability.

Returning to Germany’s alleged contributions: far from helping Ukraine, Germany has utterly betrayed the nation, functionally repudiating the Budapest Memorandum as it has.  Instead, Germany has pushed for the quickly-failed Minsk Protocol, and continues pushing for Minsk II.  Both of these codify the dismantling of Ukraine that the Memorandum was supposed to prevent—hence the betrayal.