Tag Archives: foreign policy

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.

Another Reason

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…to not have these things in our homes.

According to internal documents seen Wednesday by local media, German interior ministers are considering a proposal that would allow data from speech assistants to be legally permissible as evidence for the prosecution of crimes.

“Speech assistants”—is that what the kids are calling these things?  The speech assistants to which those German interior ministers refer are “smart” home devices like Alexa, Siri, smart TVs, presumably Cortana, and on and on—any device we allow in our naivete into our homes—that listen to our every word, every sound we sigh, and records the most current of them.

Those interior ministers say those “digital data saved on devices” are there to be “collected and evaluated by authorities.”  Those data, those interior ministers piously claim, are “‘increasingly important’ for investigating capital crimes and preventing terrorist threats.”

All very high-minded and pure of intent.  There’s no need of any natural limiting principle to constrain this surveillance.  Because no government would ever grow…curious…of the doings inside a private home.  No government would ever get so protective of its own prerequisites that it would look preemptively for untoward, or rude, criticisms.  No government’s bureaucrat would ever eavesdrop on the sounds of pleasure flowing through a home for his own jollies.

No.

This is the People’s Republic of China’s overt, face-by-face surveillance of citizens in the public square brought into the privacy of a home. And, like the PRC’s surveillance, this one would be done solely with speculative intent.

So far, this effort is overt only in Germany, but we need to be vigilant against its spread and to ensure our own government doesn’t try to embrace such an invasion of our castles, our homes—our privacy.

Tariffs on Mexico

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There is some hue and cry over President Donald Trump’s threatened tariff on Mexico in an effort to get the Mexican government to take seriously its role in the crisis on our common border.

Critics of the tariffs, including those within the administration, have said the ratification of the pact would be threatened by the tariffs.

There’s no threat to ratification of the USMCA from these tariffs. There is a threat from the Progressive-Democrats who hate the treaty separately from this.  However, the lack of threat is illustrated by Mexico; since the tariff threat, that government has said it still intends to ratify the treaty.

On the other hand, critics of the present tariff threat are conflating the two purposes of tariffs. One is as protectionist devices; these are the tariffs that are targets of the USMCA, and they remain controlled by the agreement.

The other purpose is as a foreign policy tool used to induce another nation to do/not do the things identified by a particular tariff-as-foreign policy tool’s stated purpose.

The threatened tariff is not at all a protectionist tariff. On the contrary, it’s a foreign policy tool, a take-your-own-immigration-laws-seriously tariff.

Update: The foreign policy tool seems to have worked. Of course, we’ll have to see the realization over time, but that’s the case with all agreements.