Tag Archives: foreign policy

Progress

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Even in the midst of the US government’s partial shutdown imbroglio and Great Britain’s Brexit fiasco, the two found time and energy to conduct joint operations training in the South China Sea.

Even though this only involved two ships—the Arleigh-Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS McCampbell and Royal Navy Type 23 frigate HMS Argyll—it’s a critical beginning (not really a resumption; the last such joint exercise was eight years ago).

We need to expand on this, though.  We need, also, to run joint flotilla- and fleet-level exercises in the South China Sea, and then we need to involve Vietnam, the Republic of Korea, and Japan in this sort of joint exercise.  In their aggregate, they need to occur a couple of times per year—and they need to include island assault exercises.

It’s true that we also run RIMPAC exercises that involve US and Pacific Rim nations (excluding People’s Republic of China observers as of last year), and while these are advertised as warfare exercises, they’re only biennial, and they serve different warfare purposes: political, to promote stability in broader venues among the participating nations’ interactions, and occasionally to experiment with new weapons and new systems.

What I’m proposing has a more straight up military practicality: joint offensive training of actual assault operations against the sort of target we’re likely to face if the PRC decides to get overt in its occupation of the South China Sea, trying to enforce its seizure at gunpoint.

As an aside, it also would be useful to get the Republic of China started thinking about REFORGER-type exercises.

Hysteria

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Some Congressmen are working on bills that, in their aggregate, would bar sales of critical computer components to the People’s Republic of China’s communications companies Huawei, ZTE, and other PRC companies caught violating our export laws or sanctions on those companies or companies with which these do business.

The PRC is upset.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said it was all “hysteria,” and

I believe the action of these few representatives are an expression of extreme arrogance and an extreme lack of self-confidence[.]

The PRC’s insults and hysterical response, whether individual or taken together, are sufficient evidence that we’re on the right track.

We cannot allow PRC insults to influence our domestic matters (or our international matters, come to that), particularly including moves to hold those doing business in our nation accountable for their illegal activities.

PRC hysteria should simply be disregarded where it’s not ridiculed.

A Telling Interview

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Progressive-Democrat from Texas, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke gave a wide-ranging, disjointed, somewhat confused interview to The Washington Post.  Here are some highlights.

Beto on the wall:

[It would] cut off access to the river, shrink the size of the United States and force the seizure of privately-held land.
[He] noted that most undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States in the past decade came not over the border but on visas that then expired.
WAPO: So what should be done to address visa overstays?
Beto: I don’t know[.]

What cut-off?  What river?  Walls aren’t contemplated, anymore, for the Rio Grande, just stepped up patrols and tech detection means.

Shrink the size of the US!?  Huh?

Seizure of privately-held land?  Has ol’ Beto read the Constitution?  The 5th Amendment has something to say about that.

Illegals come in via overstaying visas, so nothing should be done about curtailing their illegal entry across our border?  Apparently.  Because if a water pipe leaks over there, also, there’s no point in fixing it here and reducing the leaks’ flow.  All because he doesn’t know how to fix the leak over there.

O’Rourke insists the thorny immigration answers will come from everyday Americans. It’s an approach that puts off specifics that might define him or narrow his appeal in a presidential race….

Or, it’s an approach that allows Beto to virtue signal on the subject without offering anything concrete—or without exposing his ignorance on the matter, as his overstayed visa and his property seizure bits expose.

And this, larger, question:

Can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships…and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?

Aside from our obvious lack of an empire—we don’t occupy anyone anywhere, we have no colonies, we have nothing of the trappings of empire—he’s badly mistaken about all of that.

This Progressive-Democrat is saying that the principles of limited government, individual liberty and responsibility, of morality are not universal, nor are they timeless.  He’s saying they’re matters of convenience and political expediency, and that convenience and expedience have evolved.

Watch out, and hold on to far more than your wallets when individual rights and obligations become what the men of government say they are and not what is permanently endowed in us by our Creator.

Russian Acquisitiveness

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is insisting that Japan accept the outcome of WWII as a necessary pre-condition to a peace agreement between Japan and Russia and “improved relations,” including trade, between the two.

That outcome includes Russian occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, islands in the Kurile chain immediately north of the main body of Japan.  Russia, which joined the war against Japan only in the waning months after Japan’s war effort was in full collapse, seized those islands and now claims them as “rightful spoils.”

Lavrov has already warned the Japanese not to engage in “unilateral rhetoric.” Those islands are Russia’s; it stole them fair and square and has occupied them ever since.

Japan should accept the ceding of its Northern Territories to conquering Russia and be quiet.

Right.  Sort of like Russia is demanding in Europe.

In Which the NLMSM and Politicians

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…of both parties jumped the gun in their blind panic to disparage an actual attempt to end a war.  Recall the hooraw over President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw our forces from Syria and from a war with no coherent plan or victory conditions.

Now the facts of the withdrawal start to come out.  National Security Adviser John Bolton made these points in Jerusalem while on a diplomatic trip:

  • the safety of Kurdish allies is being considered as part of its pending withdrawal plan
  • [t]imetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see. It’s not the establishment of an arbitrary point for the withdrawal
  • Trump has told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that withdrawal is pending assurances that Turkey will protect Kurdish fighters who have long provided the US with solid support in the campaign against Islamic State militants
  • [a]ny use of chemical weapons will be met by very strong response, as we have done twice before
  • [t]he US could leave some troops at a key military outpost in southern Syria

Patience, Grasshoppers.