Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Misunderstanding

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…between the roles of State and Defense and how those roles should be carried out.  The misunderstanding is illustrated in (though it’s not the primary subject of) a Friday Wall Street Journal piece by Dion Nissenbaum and Maria Abi-Habib.

President Donald Trump is (very properly) backing away from a Lyndon Johnson- or Barack Obama-esque micromanagement of what the military is permitted to do, including target selection, timing of engagement, and weapons permitted to be used on those targets.  Instead, he’s encouraging DoD to have its commanders on-scene to exercise more initiative, with less mother-may-I delay waiting for permission from the White House (and notice that use of the chain of command from the top down, too).   From that, as illustrated by General John Nicholson’s decision to drop a MOAB on his own initiative on a Daesh network of tunnels and caves in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, we’re seeing a more aggressive military with more timely activities.

This has led to the misunderstanding.

The firmer military stance has fueled growing concerns among State Department officials working on Middle East policy that the Trump administration is giving short shrift to the diplomatic tools the Obama administration favored. Removing the carrot from the traditional carrot-and-stick approach, some State Department officials warn, could hamper the pursuit of long-term strategies needed to prevent volatile conflicts from reigniting once the shooting stops.

No, he’s not.  What’s being given short shrift is diplomatic dithering.  There’s not just a new sheriff in town, there’s a new pace in town, too: State Department officials working on Middle East policy—along with the rest of State below Secretary Rex Tillerson’s immediate staff—need to push their own pace, too.  A faster diplomatic pace isn’t just a matter of keeping up with the military; State still should lead, for the most part, and the military still should follow State’s lead, for the most part.  There is, though, no need for the slow pace they’ve been accepting.  Our diplomats need to push the pace—they always have needed to do so, even if they’ve not—and put the onus on other nations to respond, to keep up.  Especially regarding our enemies and those nations that support our enemies or host nodes of terrorist network entities like the Daesh or al Qaeda.

Nor has any carrot been removed from the traditional, yet useful, carrot-and-stick technique of pushing, prodding, cajoling, pressuring.  The carrots have merely been pushed farther forward in time: no more slowness.

Contra those State officials, all that has changed are two items: on-scene commanders are being restored to their jobs and initiative (which is not a matter about which State need concern itself), and the pace of development is being accelerated.  The speed of diplomacy should no longer be a good approximation of glacial.

Potemkin Missiles?

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The Yonhap News/Zuma Press image, below, appears to be a new ICBM, and apparently a transportable one, shown in a military parade in Pyongyang, northern Korea, last Saturday.

Also paraded were missile launchers with “never-before-seen missile canisters” (imagery not provided in the Wall Street Journal article at the link).

“Never before seen” and “new.”  Are these truly so, or are they only new to the NLMSM and haven’t actually been successfully concealed from the world’s intelligence services?

Or: are these real weapons, or are they just shams, empty containers?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Hot Air and a Strong United States

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Recall the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was going to heavily reinforce “all ocean features controlled by Manila” and plant the Philippine flag on them.

Now, it turns out that the People’s Republic of China has instructed its newest client state not to do so, and Duterte has obeyed.  He’s withdrawn his “threat”

because he values Chinese friendship.

PRC Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang:

Beijing is “happy to see the Philippine side working more closely with the Chinese side.”

Duterte’s strong words having been exposed as so much hot air clearly demonstrates the need for a revitalized and strong American presence everywhere in the South—and East—China Seas.

False Premise

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University of Alberta Political Science Professor Wenran Jiang had a piece in The Globe and Mail claiming that the road to peace on the Korean peninsula lay exclusively through diplomacy.  In attempting to downplay the degree of influence the People’s Republic of China has over northern Korea and the boss of its gang, Baby Kim, Professor Jiang made this claim:

Beijing has to walk a fine line between persuading the North not to pursue nuclear weapons and not being seen as colluding with the United States and Japan to undermine its security.

Be seen by whom as colluding?  The only ones who both care and are in a position have their concern cared about are the PRC, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Russia, and us.  Four of those aren’t going to worry about collusion, nor would we read cooperation as collusion: there are too many points of disagreement between the PRC (one of those four) and the other three to read collusion.  Russia has little interest in the matter one way or the other, save whether any disagreement might spill over onto Vladivostok, Nakhodka, and points north in that barren bit of land.

There is, in fact, little reason for the PRC to be as inactive as it has been—for years—from any appearance concerns.  There is much reason for the PRC to be as inactive as it has been, though, since that dovetails so nicely with its efforts in the South and East China Seas: to poke sticks in the eye of America, to humiliate us in our impotence in supporting our friends and allies around the Seas, and then to pry those friends and allies away from us while rendering us impotent in fact as well as in reputation.

The time has come to move on without the PRC and by eliminating the northern Korean threat (by diplomacy and/or economic means preferably, including economic steps against the PRC government and businesses doing business in or with northern Korea, by other means if necessary), and thereby take the first step to demonstrating the PRC’s irrelevance.

Syrian Refugees

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One Syrian, Kassem Eid an erstwhile media activist in Syria, and a victim of the gas attack that was Bashar al-Assad’s calling of then-President Barack Obama’s (D) bluff of a “red” line and that exposed Obama has being too timid to back his words, had a thought about aid and support to Syria’s refugees in a recent Wall Street Journal.  Here’s the money quote.

America, if you really care about refugees, then take to the streets, call your representatives, and ask for even further action against the murderer who displaced us. President Trump could order strikes to fully ground Assad’s air force, whose bombing forces civilians to flee. The Assad regime still has more than a dozen operational military airports from which to continue its attacks. Help civilians by creating safe zones and no-fly zones.

If you really care about human rights, work to remove Assad, the tyrant who has killed, raped, gassed, burned, tortured and displaced millions of civilians. If you really care about eliminating Islamic State, oust the dictator who for years has supported extremist terrorist groups like al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah and who buys oil from ISIS.

Because, as Eid emphasized at the start of his piece,

Syrians—like the people in the other Arab Spring countries—didn’t rebel against the dictatorship as a way to gain entry to the US as refugees. We rebelled because we wanted to live for the first time as equal citizens in our own nation. We wanted to stay home and make Syria a better place.

What he said.