Tag Archives: foreign policy

Trade and the Rule of Law

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Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has asked for President Donald Trump’s help, at the G-20 meeting in Japan, to get the People’s Republic of China to release the Canadian hostages that the PRC kidnapped in retaliation for Canada’s detaining a PRC company executive for criminal investigation.  Trump has agreed.

Gerard Gayou suggested in his piece at the link,

Mr Trump may worry that challenging Mr Xi on political prisoners would jeopardize a trade deal, but pressing China on the rule of law should be a priority.

Indeed. Rule of law—as opposed to the PRC’s rule by law—is critical to many of the sorts of things Trump is looking for in a trade deal with the PRC: things like intellectual property protection, an end to the extortion the PRC applies to obtain proprietary technologies from foreign companies wishing to do business in the PRC, an end to the PRC’s demands for back doors into companies’ software, etc.

Absent rule of law, as the PRC demonstrated as recently as some few weeks ago when it walked away from commitments it had made during the then-trade negotiations, the PRC’s word on any trade deal will be largely worthless.

I’m Not Talking to You

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Like an angry wife of a bygone era, the Iranian government is having a hissy fit over the latest round of sanctions, these applied directly to the likes of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s MFWIC; Foreign Minister Javad Zarif; and three military leaders:

Ali Reza Tangsiri, who was responsible for the Iranian regime’s forces threatening to close the straits of Hormuz; Amirali Hajizadeh, who was commander of the air force and responsible for downing the US unmanned aircraft in international airspace; and Mohammad Pakpour, who is responsible for IRGC’s ground forces.

Iran’s government isn’t happy.

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a tweet Tuesday that the new US sanctions that target Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials permanently end any chance of diplomacy between countries.

This, though, is just another example of the Iranian government’s dissembling. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe visited Khamenei, Khamenei refused to receive a message from President Donald Trump that Abe was bearing, and Khamenei said that he’d never talk to Trump.

All channels of diplomacy and any chance of future diplomacy have been closed off by Iran for some weeks.

Khamenei, Abbas Mousavi (Spokesman and Head of the Center for Public and Media Diplomacy), Hassan Rouhani (Iranian President), et al., are just acting out the temper tantrums of those angry wives.

Russia Gets Nervous?

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That’s the thesis of James Marson and Thomas Grove in their recent Wall Street Journal article.  It seems the US and allies have been running a number of training exercises in the Baltic Sea and in eastern Europe, and we’ve agreed to plus up (trivially) the number of soldiers we station in Poland—at Poland’s request.  This is making Russia nervous.

Mikhail Barabanov, of the Moscow-based Center for the Analysis of Systems and Technologies:

Russia sees the exercise as a preparation to deploy large NATO forces across the Baltic region[.]

Given Russian acquisitive aggressions in Georgia and Ukraine, its cyber attacks against each of the Baltic States, and its movement of tactical nuclear weapons close to its western border and into Kaliningrad, among other threatening moves, such a defensive redeployment seems only reasonable.

Now Moscow is complaining that such defensive moves and such training for defense is “destabilizing the region.”

This is nonsense.  It’s also dishonest.  It’s Russia projecting, assuming that because it has nefarious intentions, those preparing against those intentions must have their own.

Of course, if Russia has no aggressive intensions toward other nations, including those on its border, Russia has nothing about which to worry from those other nations—including those on its border.

It’s a Start

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Germany has shown, with its welching on its commitment to spend 2% of its GDP on bolstering NATO, that it has no interest in Europe’s mutual defense.  That, though, does not alter the threat to European security represented by Russia other than to increase it.

I’m reminded of a remark President Abraham Lincoln made about General George McClellan and the army the latter commanded: If McClellan does not want to use the army, I should like to borrow it a while.  Since Germany isn’t interested in Europe’s defense, isn’t even interested in getting up a serious defense establishment of any sort (McClellan was strongly interested in this much), our forces are better placed elsewhere.

Enter Poland, which sits on the front line of the threat and has only just gotten out from under the Russian jackboot.

President Trump signed an agreement to send 1,000 additional US troops to Poland while treating his visiting Polish counterpart to a military flyover at the White House as thanks for a commitment to buy F-35 jet fighters.

Trump also suggested that those soldiers could come from the contingent—52,000 of them—currently based in Germany.  After all, Germany isn’t using them.

This should only be a start, though.  We need to be working toward a NATO-like mutual defense treaty that involves the eastern European nations, Great Britain, and us to work in parallel with, and perhaps eventually to supplant, NATO.

A Misunderstanding

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…and why a Labour Party government would be a disaster for Great Britain (and not just because of Jeremy Corbyn’s blatant socialism bent).  In a Deutsche Welle piece about Boris Johnson’s move to replace Theresa May as party head (and presumably as Prime Minister, at least until the next general election), the news outlet quoted Labour Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer:

The debate on Brexit in the Tory leadership contest…[n]one of the likely candidates for the top job has a credible plan for how to break the deadlock before the end of October.

Therein lies Labour’s lack of understanding of the situation. The deadlock is Brussels’ manufacture, not Great Britain’s, and certainly not that of their combined effort. It’s on Brussels to offer solutions to its deadlock.

The clearer understanding is illustrated by Johnson.  He’s

not aiming for a no-deal outcome but it is only responsible to prepare vigorously and seriously for no-deal. Indeed, it is astonishing that anyone could suggest dispensing with that vital tool in the negotiation.

Great Britain needs to leave the EU with no further delay.  Delay only increases uncertainty, and uncertainty damages the British economy and harms the British people and their enterprises who must operate within it.  A smoothly done departure would be optimal, but given what the EU has on offer, a no-deal departure is better.

Keep in mind: for all the argument over border control and immigration and the force of European Union regulations within Great Britain, what’s at the core is that the Brits voted for their own economy and their sovereignty, not the continent’s.