Tag Archives: foreign policy

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.

Cold War Mentality and Objectivity

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As Australia and Papua New Guinea work together to reconstitute a WWII naval base on the island, a People’s Republic of China official objected to those two nations moving to improve their ability to defend themselves.  Lu Kang, the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of Information Director-General, said

We hope the relevant countries, and relevant people, can discard the Cold War mentality…and view China’s relations with Pacific islands in an objective way.

In light of the PRC’s occupation of other nations’ islands in the South China Sea, its installation of military bases and equipment on those islands, its claim of the entirety of the Sea as its private lake, and its constant threatening of other nations’ shipping for sailing in those international waters, it would be good, indeed, if the relevant PRC discarded its Cold War mentality.

The other nations rimming the South China Sea and those whose shipping transits the area already view the PRC and its “relations” with Pacific islands—and with those nations—in an objective way.

Trade and the People’s Republic of China

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The Wall Street Journal wrote in its Thursday edition that the US was “refusing” to resume trade negotiations with the PRC until the latter made a formal offer to us.  That’s a bit of a misnomer, though, since there’s nothing about which to negotiate until the PRC makes an offer.  Absent that, any discussion about trade would be just idle musings over an afternoon tea, a whiling away of some time between more important things.

A couple of other things jumped out at me in that article, too.

For Beijing, making a formal offer presents a number of risks, according to individuals briefed by the Chinese. First, it would reveal their negotiating position. Second, Beijing fears that Mr Trump could make any offer public in a tweet or statement as a way to lock in any concessions by China.

First, honest negotiating requires positions being known to both participants.  If the PRC wants to keep its position hidden, it could only be to keep moving its demands, keep adjusting its goals as we make offers more and more in its direction.

Second, if the PRC doesn’t want to commit to this or that concession—or to any other aspect of its negotiating position—it doesn’t matter whether any of that is public.  The nation wants to be able to walk away from any of its negotiating commitments at its convenience, and that makes the PRC untrustworthy.

As the WSJ noted,

There is history behind Beijing’s concerns. During negotiations over China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in 1999, President Clinton turned down an offer by China’s premier at the time, Zhu Rongji, that included deep concessions and a reorganization of the Chinese economy. The Clinton administration made Mr Zhu’s offer public, hoping to prevent the Chinese from backsliding. Instead, Mr Zhu was pilloried at home by hard-liners, and it took months of negotiations to finally convince China to accept a deal similar to the one it initially offered.

There are two lessons from this bit of history that we still need to learn.  The first is that the PRC’s intent of walking away from its commitments even as they’re made—that hardliner pillorying—is a long-standing policy of dishonesty.  The second lesson is that, in the realization, the PRC walked away from that “similar deal;” it has no concessions from the deal extant and no serious reorganization of its economy even tried.

The Trump administration is wise to waste no time on empty negotiations over a chimera.  It’s chancy enough to negotiate a hard proposal with them, but that’s still infinitely preferable to negotiating PRC fog.

Leaving the INF Treaty

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The treaty that purported to limit the intermediate range nuclear forces possessed by the USSR (at the time of its agreement) and the US has long been violated by Russia, as the Obama administration acknowledged some years ago.  Now President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw from the treaty if both Russia and the People’s Republic of China (which is not a signatory to this Euro-centric treaty) don’t come to the table with meaningful steps to measurably and verifiably limit/eliminate such weapons.

This remark, cited by Deutsche Welle at the link above, illustrates a major misunderstanding of the withdrawal.  Steven Pifer, a former top State Department official and US ambassador to Ukraine who was part of the team from Washington that negotiated the INF treaty (no vested interest here in preserving the thing…):

President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the INF treaty now is a mistake. It will cause division within NATO—senior German, French and Italian officials have already questioned it—and the United States will be blamed for the treaty’s demise, despite the Russian violation.

There are a number of things wrong here.  For one thing, the attitude completely ignores the fact of Russian violation—which is a first step to Russian breakout in INF technology as well as in operational forces in being—even as it ignores, also, the Russian deployment of INF missiles in Kaliningrad, from which most of western Europe can be targeted and held hostage.  An American decision to let Russia get away with this unanswered is a serious threat not only to Europe, but to our own independence of action.

This bit from the same man:

Once the treaty lapses, Russia will be free to deploy land-based intermediate-range missiles for which the United States currently has no counterpart.

They already are, and we already don’t.  It’s time to redress that before it gets too far out of hand.

For another thing, it ignores the fact that NATO already stands a treaty divided.  Europe is upset with the US over our insistence that they actually honor their own promise, voluntarily made, to commit 2% of their national GDPs to NATO forces.  Eastern Europe, especially the NATO member nations of the region, already are upset with the NATO members in western Europe over the latter’s evident reluctance to give practical, physical force to words of defending eastern Europe from Russian aggression.  This division, especially, has urgency generated by Russia’s having partitioned and occupied parts of Georgia and Ukraine, Russia’s having moved forces, including tactical nuclear weapons permitted under existing treaties closer to its borders with those eastern European nations, and the presence of those Russian INF forces in Kaliningrad.  And the fact that those eastern European nations still remember what it was like to exist with Soviet boots on their necks.

This gives much of the game away:

I oppose Trump’s plan as much for how it’s being done as the substance.  Trump has set the US up to take the political heat in the international community and particularly in Western Europe for its failure even though it’s primarily Russia’s fault.

Because form is far more important than actual, physical threat demanding actual physical response.  It’s a bit of European arrogance and of the American Left’s submissiveness to expect the US to submit itself to popular opinion—we’ll be blamed for the treaty’s demise and so we should not walk?—when such timidity is so much a threat to our national security.

Never mind that there’s not a treaty to leave, except in the narrowest, most legalist sense, since Russia destroyed it with their weapons development and deployment in careful violation of it.