Tag Archives: foreign policy

Russia and Ukraine

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Over the weekend, Russia has decided to block Ukraine’s access to the Sea of Azov from the Black Sea; it’s placed a cargo ship under the Kerch Strait Bridge, which Russia completed earlier this year to give it direct land access from Russia to Russian-occupied Crimea, and Russia has military helicopters orbiting above the bridge.  The Kerch Strait is a bit under 2,000 feet wide where the bridge sits.

This followed the Russian Black Sea Navy’s aggression against a Ukrainian flotilla of no military significance—a Ukrainian Navy tugboat and two Ukrainian Navy artillery ships—that was transferring from Odessa on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast to Mariupol on the Ukrainian Sea of Azov coast. The Russian ships deliberately rammed the Ukrainian tugboat, damaging the latter’s hull and engines, and then the Russians seized the three Ukrainian ships.

The question arises concerning why Russian President Vladimir Putin has chosen this naked escalation.  A number of possible answers arise, also.

One is to serve as a military demonstration of force for Ukraine’s benefit, executed to enforce Russia’s illegal “elections” in its eastern occupied Ukraine.

Another is to distract from his doings in the north: his meddling in Baltic State elections, his cyber aggressions against them, his movement of tactical nuclear weapons closer to his borders with them.

Another is to distract from renewed troubles with his second natural gas pipeline, currently under construction, that would connect Russia with Germany under the Baltic Sea.

Another is for the aggression against Ukraine to serve as a demonstration for the attention of Germany regarding that pipeline and for the attention of Moldova as the latter works to tighten its ties with NATO Europe and to resist Russia’s attempt at Ukraine-style occupation.

Another is as a domestic distraction.  Russia also is currently is deeply into a demographic crisis.   Nearly 30% of the Russian population is 55 years old or older, and that per centage is growing.  Russia’s current fertility rate—births per woman—is 1.61 against a necessary 2.01 rate just to maintain a given population level.  Russia’s current birth rate of 10.7 births/1,000 population compares badly with its current death rate of 13.4 deaths/1,000 population.  With an in-migration rate of 1.7 migrant(s)/1,000 population, that still leaves Russians dying faster than they’re being born and gaining immigrants combined.  Consistent with that, Russia’s population is shrinking—by 0.11% this year.

Russia’s per capita GDP has fallen by 3% since its nearby peak in 2013: Russians are individually poorer than they were, even with a slight increase in the current year, even as Putin spends Russian treasure on all of his foreign adventures.  Note that this shrinkage in individual prosperity is mitigated by that shrinking population—were it growing, instead, the increasing poverty would be much worse.

Or some combination of all of those distractions.

Note, though, that as of Monday, Russia seems to have lifted its Sea of Azov blockade, but it continues to hold the Ukrainian ships and crews.

Asylum

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Folks from the “caravan” have begun arriving in the Mexican border town of Tijuana preparatory to their effort to enter the US and ask for asylum.

These folks, claiming to flee government persecution and/or criminal assaults (which isn’t an asylum criterion, anyway), in their home countries, succeeded in escaping those things when they succeeded in entering Mexico—especially with Mexico having offered them asylum (and job opportunities) after that entry.

Now they need to say what they fear about their Mexican hosts that drives their need to flee Mexico and get asylum in the US. Since they haven’t experienced any of that in Mexico, and they have rejected Mexican asylum from their home countries, they should be denied entry into the US and those that do make it in need to be denied asylum here—their requests can only be shams.

No Nation is an Island

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That’s the concern of The Wall Street Journal in one of its Thursday editorials.

President Trump’s biggest achievement has been the revival of faster US economic growth, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. The White House should be worried about growing economic strains in the rest of the world, and policy makers need to prepare. The US is not an island.

The WSJ went on to note that the Germany economy shrank 0.2% in the last quarter, the Japanese economy shrank by 0.3% in the same quarter, and the PRC’s economy “only” grew by 6.5% year-on-year in the same quarter.  The WSJ particularly worried about the German auto industry.

However.

It’s true enough that the US is not an economic island, but there are many, and serious, factors that are beyond our control and that the WSJ chose to be silent about.

Take Germany, for instance. Its labor laws are almost as draconian as the French and, together with German regulations, leave that economy much less nimble in changing conditions than it needs to be.  And even though the German auto industry wants a zero-tariff trading regime, at least with its products, the German government has shown its disinterest with its lack of action at the EU level.

The Japanese economy also is heavily regulated and inflexible, for all that it’s not a centrally planned one.  There’s no economic flexibility there.

That’s especially true with the especially heavily regulated and overtly, deliberately centrally planned economy of the PRC.

Our other trading partners? The EU as a whole has rejected any concept of a tariff-free environment with the US, it routinely attacks our companies’ competitive success across Europe, it constantly seeks to raise taxes on our companies rather than lowering their own to competitive levels, and on and on.

There’s only so much we can do with trading partners whose government denizens are more interested in their personal political and fiscal powers than they are in the welfare of their citizens.

A European Army

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There’s a nascent move afoot to create a European army to which, presumably, all the member nations of the EU would contribute men, equipment, and money.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested to the European Parliament last Tuesday that such a force

would complement NATO.

I’ll leave aside the question of how the EU’s member nations would pay for such an establishment when they’re having so much trouble finding ways—or reasons—to pay for their commitment (of all of 2% of their respective GDPs) to NATO.

There’s another question that badly wants answers.  While the US—and the free individual nations of Europe and of Asia—have benefitted from the existence of their standing armies, our own Founders had misgivings about such an establishment, to the point that for some years after our own birth, we had neither standing army nor standing navy.  Such a thing was, they feared, the stuff of tyranny.  Even though the formal raison d’etre of a standing army was, and is, outward-looking and for defense of the nation against foreign threat, a standing, professional military facility (they feared) ultimately would become a domestic threat: Government would come to use the thing to suppress and then to oppress the people over whom such a well-equipped Government ruled.

So far, those fears have not been realized in those nations where the people remain free enough to choose at more or less regular intervals the persons they will have as members of their governments.  Such free peoples have checked the power of their governments.

But what of the European Union?  That organization does not have a universally freely elected governing body.  The European Parliament, to be sure, is elected by the citizens of the member nations.  However, that body has no governing authority; it can only make recommendations.  The real power of the EU’s Government is shared among the European Council, which consists of the heads of state of the EU’s member nations; the President of that Council; and the President of the European Commission, whose members are European Council appointees.  That’s a lot of power concentrated away from the will and the choices of the citizens of the member nations.

It’s a power that gets freely and broadly exercised, too, as illustrated by the EU’s Government presuming to reach inside a member nation—Italy—and dictate to that nation what its domestic budget must be.  Were [Italy] to remain intransigent, and were the EU to have its own standing army, what might be an outcome of a future dispute between [Italy] and the EU?

The peoples of Europe, the citizens of the individual member nations, need to think very carefully whether they want to arm so well a system of governance over which they have so little say.

Brexit Talks

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In a Wall Street Journal article about the general government paralysis in Great Britain as the Brexit question is allowed to consume all of Parliament’s energy, one statement jumped out at me.

Instead, her [Theresa May’s] premiership is being defined by the Brexit negotiation itself.

What negotiations? Brussels is dictating punitive terms, and May and her team are meekly rolling over and accepting them. They’re even agreeing to discuss an effective partition of Great Britain rather than rejecting the question out of hand and walking out of all of the “negotiations” over the calculated insult and attempt to dismantle Great Britain.