Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Hack

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The Russians are alleged to be behind the hacks into the Democrats’ IT systems, and they’re alleged to have so engaged in order to sow distrust in our election system and procedures and especially to influence our just concluded election in favor of the ultimate winner, President-Elect Donald Trump.  Indeed, the CIA and other of our intelligence agencies have said that the hacks have all the earmarks of Russian hackers.

A couple things about that.  The NLMSM’s bold, declarative statements based on those intelligence agency statements that the Russians did it notwithstanding, “have all the earmarks” does not mean the Russians did it, only that it looks like they did it.  Of course getting actual proof in the intelligence or the hacking world is more difficult even than getting “proof”—sufficient reduction of reasonable doubt—in a criminal trial.  Nor does that difficulty, or the limitation of a statement of “all the earmarks,” mean the Russians didn’t do it, especially in the face of their history.

The other thing centers on the assumption that the Russians really did do the hacks and for the reasons named.  Now the NLMSM, whose favored Democrats were losers in the last election at all levels from the Presidential level on down, is pushing at the top of its collective lungs the idea that the Russians did it, and to favor Trump, as though these were facts.

So: assume the Russians really did do the hacks for the reasons named.  The NLMSM, in its temper tantrums over their loss and their having been ignored by American voters, is playing along with that Russian goal and with that serving, wittingly or not, to discredit Trump and the elections, and to sow doubt about the legitimacy of both.

Congress is pressing for bipartisan investigations into the matter, and it’s pushing for President Barack Obama to release all of the report that will result from the investigation he’s ordered into the matter.  He should, and so should President Trump if the Obama investigation isn’t complete before Trump takes office.

The question is valid, and it should be investigated and answered, but press hysteria contributes nothing to an objective resolution while sowing the doubts the press alleges the Russians want sown.

Republic of China and President-Elect Donald Trump

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It’s time to start correcting some errors of long standing, and it may be (it is too soon to be confident of this) that President-Elect Donald Trump is beginning to do that with his telecon with the President of the RoC.

“The one-China policy is the cornerstone of the healthy development of China-US relations and we hope this political foundation will not be interfered with or damaged,” [Chinese Foreign Minister Yi] Wang was quoted as saying.

This illustrates one of those errors.  The Republic of China is separate from the People’s Republic of China—that’s why Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang followers and lots of others left the mainland for the island of Taiwan.  They wanted no part of Mao Tse-tung’s butcherous communist state, including declining to be a part of that.

[RoC President Ing-wen] Tsai also told Trump that she hoped the US would support Taiwan in its participation in international affairs, the office said, in an apparent reference to China’s efforts to isolate Taiwan from global institutions such as the United Nations.

It said the two also discussed “promoting domestic economic development and strengthening national defense[.]”

Indeed.  We need to be plusing up the RoC’s ability to defend itself and loudly repeating our commitment to the nation’s defense, especially against the backdrop of the PRC’s naked aggression in the East and South China Seas and its occupation of the latter.

Of course, the Obama administration objects to this apparent show of non-timidity.  A carefully anonymous “senior Obama administration official,” who’s not supposed to be talking at all “because of the sensitive diplomatic relations involved” complained

The White House learned of the conversation after it had taken place

No hypocrisy here at all.  Its not at all like Congress learning of the White House’s immigration moves with “refugees” that Australia had rejected only after the fact.  Nossir.  Never mind that the President-Elect, nor does any American, have any obligation to seek the President’s permission to make or take a telephone call.

The administration isn’t the only gang with trouble with this call, though.  The whole of the Left is up in arms; their dismay is exemplified by this from Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

I think privately, they [the PRC] will definitely seek to educate this incoming president and ensure that he understands the sensitivity of Taiwan[.]

Because an American President should be taking guidance—education, even—from America’s enemies.  Glaser (and the PRC) are right, though, that matters relating to the RoC are sensitive–just not for her reasons.  The island nation’s freedom is hanging on a thread.

Along these same lines, I look forward to the new President Trump hosting the Dalai Lama at a State Dinner sometime this winter.

A couple of small nits from the article at the link, too: it’s the Republic of China; the island on which the nation sits is Taiwan.  Also, the citizens of the RoC have been increasing their push for independence from the People’s Republic of China over the last several years; Tsai Ing-wen was just elected President of the RoC in no small part because of her and her party’s long-standing push for independence.

In sum, we absolutely need to tighten and strengthen our relationship with the RoC, and that includes working closely with them politically, economically, and militarily.

I Disagree, Mildly

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…with Walter Russell Mead, who wrote of Fidel Castro’s death in American Interest.

In some ways, Fidel has to be accounted a success.  …  He wanted to assert Cuban independence of the United States; Cuba not only sided with the USSR in the Cold War, but it intervened against US interests in wars in Angola, Ethiopia and the Middle East.

That’s not independence, though.  Castro tied Cuba irrevocably to the US by basing his actions on their relation to the US’ activities, as those examples illustrate.  Indeed, by being a “symbol of resistance to US power and to capitalist order,” he cemented Cuba’s dependency: he did not create Cuba as a symbol of anything related to Cuban independent behavior—a Cuban model of socialism, for instance, or a Cuban font of socialist revolution support, as Che Guevara made himself (not his own movement) into.

On the contrary, Castro demonstrated his long-term failure, as Mead showed in the rest of his article.  Castro’s only success was in his ability to impose and then maintain his rank and rancorous dictatorship for as long as he did.  And even in this he had American aid at critical moments, from Jack Kennedy’s waffling over invading Cuba during a nascent Castro…administration…to Barack Obama’s open support for the Castro regime in the latter stages of both administrations.

Foolishness

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This time regarding the Iran nuclear weapons deal, exemplified by this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article concerning the Obama administration’s efforts to strengthen that deal during these last two months of overt lameduckness.

The picture they [Obama officials] plan to articulate for Mr Trump’s team is stark: if the agreement falls apart, and the US is blamed for its collapse, Iran would resume its nuclear program more aggressively. In that case, the US risks alienating Europe, as well as China and Russia, and limiting its ability to use sanctions again to contain Iran. Military action against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, these officials argue, could be the only alternative.

If the deal falls apart, Iran surely will accelerate its nuclear weapons development program.  But this is a program that Iran has never stopped, nor even held in abeyance, the deal notwithstanding.  Iran is aggressively pursuing development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads against Israel and Europe, and Iran already has been caught—twice—with more heavy water than the deal permits.  Honest mistakes, that water.  Sure.

The US risks alienating Russia and the PRC?  They already are alienated from us, and have been for some time: see Georgia, Ukraine, Kaliningrad, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the two nations’ cyber attacks against us, and on and on.

Limiting our ability to use sanctions again?  That was lost when the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John “Motorboat Skipper” Kerry, with President Barack Obama’s (D) backing, browbeat France into accepting a much weaker deal than even the French wanted.  It was lost, too, when the Obama administration lifted so many of our sanctions and agreed to the lifting of UN sanctions.

Military action is the only alternative left?  To the extent that’s true (and it isn’t; alternatives remain, even if many of them have been made harder to use by this administration), it is so strictly as the outcome of the Obama administration’s foolishness.

Free Trade

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Specific trade deals might be good or bad, but that’s specific to the deal; such efficacies don’t say much of anything about free trade or free trade deals in general.  There are, in fact, two primary reasons for encouraging free trade, zones of free trade, and the deals that enhance free trade and generate free trade zones.  One reason is the economic benefits for the partners of the free trade deals, including lower costs—and so downward pressure on price inflation—for the citizens of the nations involved, and net (if small) job creation, which stems from those lower costs and domestic companies benefiting from the increased demand that flows from those lower costs.  It’s true that particular jobs disappear as production moves to lower cost areas (and that’s true for entirely domestic regions, too), but other jobs get created as other businesses crop up to take advantage of production shifts.

The other reason, though, and the reason that’s the emphasis of this piece, is free trade and free trade zones as instruments of foreign policy.  There are lots of ways free trade operates here, ranging from enhancing relationships among the members of the free trade arrangement to demonstrating the economic benefits of free markets to potentiating the freedoms associated with free markets to countering the influence of our enemies.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership pending deal and the People’s Republic of China’s responses present an example of that last.  The TPP initially involved a dozen nations rimming the Pacific including the US, Canada, Chile, and Peru on the eastern side and, importantly, including Japan and many of the nations surrounding the South China Sea.  Recall that the PRC has seized and is actively occupying the South China Sea and is attempting to seize the East China Sea; these aggressions are at the direct expense of those South China Sea nations and of Japan.  Aside from the naked grab aspect, the PRC’s behavior is aimed at harming American interests in the Pacific through those harms to our friends, allies, and potential allies, the aggressions are aimed directly at those nations: to subordinate them economically, and then politically, to the PRC.  Keep in mind that 30% of the world’s seaborne trade goes through that South China Sea, including more than $1 trillion of trade bound for us, with the bulk of the rest not going to the PRC being critical to the economies of those rimming nations and Japan.

The TPP by design did not include the PRC.  The failure of the TPP is being filled by a PRC-led trade pact in the offing in conjunction with its in-progress Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.  But neither this new trade pact nor the RCEP are agreements among trade equals.  The members of these deals will be required to toe the PRC line regarding censorship, intellectual property rights, cyber security, so on.

And

In the next five years, China will import $8 trillion of goods and invest $750 billion abroad, [PRC President Xi Xinping] said.

Those are $8 trillion of goods—and services—that could be going to members of the TPP and to us rather than to the PRC.  Further, that trade imbalance—to the extent that President-elect is correct about trade imbalances—constitutes a lever that could be used to…encourage…the PRC to withdraw from its occupation and attempted occupation of those two Seas.  Frankly, I don’t think Trump is right on trade imbalances, per se, but the economic isolation of the PRC possible from those numbers, to the extent Xi believes it, still represents a long lever.

Japan has gone ahead and ratified the TPP, and other members of the pending pact should do so, as well.  This would not only work to the mutual prosperity of the ratifiying nations, it could serve as a strong economic check to an aggressively expansionist PRC.  The economic integration potentiated by the TPP would enhance the region’s own leverage against the acquisitiveness of the PRC by making them, as a group even without us, much closer to the PRC’s equal in economic power and leverage.  Details of the deal may well want improvement, but that should be for Round Two of the negotiations while the deal’s effectivity and weaknesses are observed empirically.

The containment of the PRC makes the deal as it stands worth it.  Especially with a Round Two.