Tag Archives: foreign policy

Afghanistan and A World’s Policeman

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The US currently supplies 14,000 of the 16,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan trying to shore up the government and rid the nation of Taliban, al Qaeda, and Daesh terrorists.  President Donald Trump is thinking about cutting our contingent in half over the coming year.  Trump’s rationale is that we shouldn’t continue to be the world’s policeman—unless and until other nations start picking up some of the costs of that role (or, in Trump’s terms, pay us something).

Germany objects.

I disagree with Trump on the world’s cop bit; there is a great deal of national security flowing from our being the cop on the beat rather than one or more of our enemies (as Russia already is demonstrating in Europe, the People’s Republic of China throughout Asia and associated Seas, Iran in the Middle East), regardless of the cost, even if all of that is borne by us.

Germany’s hypocrisy is instructive.  As is Deutsche Welle‘s careful omission of that “unless and until” continuation of Trump’s statement on being world policeman.

Germany has a contingent in Afghanistan, too—in a support role.  It’s a highly useful support role, but Germany demands its soldiers—soldiers!—be protected from risk by our soldiers.  Consequently, if we reduce our presence, Germany may well withdraw altogether.

And:

Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign policy committee, expressed his concern at the development on Thursday. The US was “irreplaceable” as power for maintaining world order, he told public broadcaster ARD.
By withdrawing from this role, the US would make the world “less safe, more unstable, and more egotistical,” he added, before dismissing the term “world policeman” as outdated. “This is much more about world order, stability, balance, and diplomacy[.]”

Yet Germany declined to play any serious role in an order and stability exercise in Iraq.  Germany demands to play only that minor role in the order and stability exercise in Afghanistan.  Germany and most of the rest of European NATO, for decades, has been freeloading off American weal and soldiers for protection from Russia, not even keeping their own voluntarily entered into promise to commit 2% of their national GDPs to supporting NATO with soldiers and equipment—until publicly shamed into it over the last couple of years.  And even now, the majority of those nations continue to refuse even to try to honor their word.

The US [is] “irreplaceable” as power for maintaining world order[.]

But expose their troops to actual danger, even only in support?  Nah—you Americans do that.  We’ll hold your coats.

This Sallah-ian attitude—this timidity—makes it difficult, indeed, to sell the need for us to continue as world policeman (because I choose not to hide behind Röttgen’s meekly wordy euphemism) to our domestic audience—the very folks who are abandoned left to pay the cost in blood and treasure.

What We Can Look Forward To

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Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan called out California’s sanctuary laws after the murder of a Newman police officer by a suspect who is in the US illegally.

That murdered cop, by the way, was himself an immigrant—a legal one from Fiji.

I’ve mentioned before that House Speaker-to-Be Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) refuse at all to negotiate.

Here’s another example.  Congressman Jim McGovern (D, MA), rather than making a reasoned argument for his claimed bipartisan proposal, rather than offering a rational explanation for President Donald Trump’s rejection of it (if McGovern’s proposal existed), simply said that Trump had gone off his meds.  Not only do Progressive-Democrats refuse to negotiate the wall, they refuse any sort of serious discourse about it—preferring, instead, their tactic of ad hominem smear.

Are they incapable of forming coherent arguments on the matter, or are they simply refusing to do so?  Your call.

Here’s another example.  Trump, apart from a trip to visit the troops in Iraq, has been in DC all along.  The Progressive-Democrats, though, went home to enjoy their Christmas vacation.  They’re home enjoying their vacation instead of staying in DC to negotiate a deal.  They’re home enjoying their vacation even as they shed copious crocodile tears over the Federal workers whose paychecks will be delayed as a result of this Schumer Shutdown Redux.

In any event, increasing violence and murders by illegal aliens can only be an inevitable outcome of the Progressive-Democrats’ no border barriers, no open borders, disband ICE and curtail CBP position.

It’s absolutely true, as the Progressive-Democrats constantly assert, that only a small minority of aliens who enter our country illegally are violent and will continue their violence.

But what those Progressive-Democrats also know full well but carefully, deliberately omit as they wail and rip their bodices is that that small minority is capable of massive destruction.  Just look at the butchery inflicted by MS-13 and M-18—who represent only a small number of the aliens who entered our country illegally.  Individual examples abound, too, from Kate Steinle’s murder by an illegal alien to that just committed murder of a northern California cop by an illegal alien and gang member.

Too Much Retrenchment

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Christian Whiton, in an op-ed for Fox News‘ online outlet, espoused a large retrenchment and withdrawal of the US (he couched it in terms of withdrawal of our troops only) from Europe and the Middle East.  In one region, though, he’s badly mistaken and goes much too far (he’s mistaken in the other areas, too, but this really stands out).

The president should turn our military bases in Europe over to our NATO allies and withdraw most US troops.
We have kept troops in Europe since World War II, and that war ended 73 years ago. Our European bases have been obsolete since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and they’ve been of no use to us in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Why should US troops defend Germany, for example, where polls show only 30% of Germans have a favorable view of America? On top of that, Germany treats us unfairly on trade, fabricates anti-American news, and is rich enough to defend itself.

No, we should not withdraw most of our troops from Europe.

It’s certainly true that many of those bases have been useless to our efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, but the claim ignores two simple facts: NATO never was designed—or repurposed—to support anything other than a Warsaw Pact (actually, a Soviet Union) invasion of Western Europe.  Secondly the purpose mismatch would disappear if Whiton got his wish and we withdrew our troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

However, it’s also true (though elided in the op-ed) that many of those bases have been used as staging areas for operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, many of our NATO allies have, and are, participating in those efforts—including a NATO contingent in Afghanistan—and several of those bases have been critical in dealing with combat casualties on their evacuations from the combat zones (Landstuhl comes to mind).

To an extent, though, the bases have become obsolete, although not necessarily in the Trumpian economic sense (and the NATO allies are moving more effectively to redress that than they did with the prior administration’s efforts).  No, with modern war capabilities, especially including missile and cyber war, the bases have become targets—as have the (too few) locations for forward basing of replacement equipment and ammunition.

The premise that Germany treats us unfairly in trade is arguably true (though we would do well to get rid of LBJ’s chicken war tariff on German light trucks), but it’s irrelevant.  Defense isn’t about international trade; it’s about a nation’s or a region’s physical security.  That Germany engages in anti-American fake news also is irrelevant: all journalist industries have their liars and fakers; this, too, has nothing to do with defense.

Germany, and several of the other countries in European NATO, certainly are rich enough to contribute more to their own and to the common effort (on which, see above), but as the last centuries’ wars demonstrated, Germany is not ” rich enough to defend itself.”  They don’t have the population to man the numbers of equipment—tanks, heavy guns, infantry—to face down the currently resurgent Russian threat—which is actively tactical, nuclear, and cyber.  To face that down requires a coalition effort.

It’s also true, though, as Whiton pointed out, that Germans don’t want us there anymore.  Absent hard data, I speculate that several of the other NATO member nations think we’ve outstayed our welcome, also.

Works for me.

But rather than withdrawing from Europe altogether, we should reallocate.

Keep in mind that at violently acquisitive and heavily armed Russia is actively threatening non-Russian Europe: it already has partitioned and occupied Georgia, and it’s in the process of doing the same with Ukraine (it has occupied Crimea, and it’s moving actively to consolidate its occupation of eastern Ukraine and to expand those holdings).  It has engaged in cyber war with each of the Baltic State nations, and it is stirring up the Russian populations in those nations, potentially prelude to a modern-day Anschluss.  It has abrogated the Intermediate Range Missile Treaty, an action that led President Donald Trump to formally withdraw us from it, and it as moved other tactical nuclear weapons close to its western border and into Kaliningrad, from which it can strike with nuclear strength most of western Europe.  It is in late-stage development of hypersonic nuclear weapons as it moves to vastly upgrade all of its nuclear forces.  It has begun harassing and interfering with civilian shipment into the Sea of Azov and the Baltic Sea (and with Ukrainian military shipments into the former).  And on and on.

Reallocation.

Reallocate our politics as well as our defense forces.  Eastern European nations are only newly freed from the Soviet Union’s yoke, and they remember well the nature of Soviet boots on their necks.  They do clearly understand the threat actively presented by Russia today as it seeks—in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own words—to restore the old Soviet Union empire.

Without walking away from NATO—it still has its uses—we should form a new mutual defense alliance with those eastern European nations: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Moldova.  It would be useful to see if Finland, Sweden, and Norway would be interested, along with Denmark and Great Britain.  Then we should withdraw most of our troops from European NATO—which is, generally, western Europe, and which nations have forgotten what it’s like to live under rapacious tyranny—and shift them to those eastern European nations.  And base them in a much more dispersed manner, as well as thoroughly dispersing the forward based resupply facilities.

Threats

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General Anthony Tata (former Deputy Commanding General of US forces in Afghanistan) laid out his concerns regarding America’s helplessness in a determined enemy’s cyber war inflicted on us, particularly the threat from the People’s Republic of China.

In the cyber warfare domain, many experts believe America faces a “Sputnik moment” as China plans to exceed US artificial intelligence capabilities by 2030.
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China’s deliberate plan to accelerate artificial intelligence capabilities by 2020, catch up to the US by 2025, and surpass the US by 2030 is disconcerting in its forthrightness. China seems to have had its own “Sputnik” moment and has now developed its own project to become the world leader in artificial intelligence.

A critical difference between the Soviet Union’s “Sputnik moment” in near-earth orbit and the PRC’s “Sputnik moment” in artificial intelligence (and in cyber war capabilities generally), though, is that the Soviets’ moment heralded weapons to come, whereas the PRC’s moment will represent a weapon in being.

Beyond that, the pace of development and the pace of action once deployed are such that there is little time to catch up with the PRC (I think our lead is much smaller, if it exists at all today, than Tata does).  The pace of action in the long runup to cyber war is not a matter of building out systems and deploying them, we race to build out and deploy our systems, and everybody yells, “King’s X.”  Software doesn’t take weeks or months or years to deploy—it takes seconds.  And we know that the PRC (and Russia) have been deploying malware in our systems against a future use; we keep finding such.

Nor is use a matter of launching missiles and several minutes later we respond with our counter-missile missiles and our own offensive launches.  The launch of cyber weapons results in instantaneous paralysis of our detection systems, our weapons systems—both physical and cyber—our communications systems, our life-maintaining infrastructure systems.

Keep in mind, too, that this is an area where Alphabet and its Google subordinate entity have refused absolutely to help our own DoD work to develop capabilities, even purely defensive ones, in this area—at the same time that it’s actively helping the PRC to develop AI capabilities along with citizen-monitoring capabilities (which extends in a moment to monitoring foreign soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines wherever they may be).

President Xi Jinping’s Warring State won’t hesitate once he has the weapons.

Cyber—in all its forms, recognized today and unrecognized before tomorrow—is an area of national security in which we cannot afford to lag, ever.  This is an area of national security in which we can’t even afford to have a small lead, ever.

Half Measures

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President Donald Trump has decided to bring our troops home from Syria, asserting that the Daesh has been defeated.  It is, after all a season of homecomings and military families across America are being reunited for the holidays.  With this…victory…our troops can come home with their heads held high.

Never mind that the Daesh still have a presence on the Syria-Iraq border.

It’s another half-measure withdrawal, and aside from many in Congress who recognize this, so do some of our putative allies.  But they expose their own half-measure goal in the matter.  Here’s France’s Defense Minister Florence Parly, for example:

…acknowledged that the group had been significantly weakened, she said the battle was not over.
“Islamic State has not been wiped from the map, nor have its roots elsewhere. The last pockets of this terrorist organization must be defeated militarily once and for all,” Parly said on Twitter.

But this also is a half measure.  It’s not enough to defeat the Daesh militarily. It must be crushed politically and psychologically, also.

And that requires, as Trump did correctly assert, those putative allies’ more active participation in the problem.  But it also, unfortunately, requires our own continued participation.