Tag Archives: foreign policy

Is It 20 January Yet?

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It’s always someone else’s fault with these Democrats.

At a final press conference in Washington, DC Thursday….

Kerry disagreed with the narrative that Obama failed to enforce the red line, however, saying the president did intend to act—but was steered off course after the British Parliament narrowly voted against bombing Syria in August 2013.

The motorboat skipper said this:

The president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, did decide to use force. And he announced his decision publicly and said we’re going to act, we’re going to do what we need to do to respond to this blatant violation of international law and of warnings and of the red line he had chosen[.]

Now, we were marching towards that time when, lo and behold…before the Friday decision, Prime Minister David Cameron went to Parliament…and he sought a vote of approval for him to join in the action that we were going to engage in. And guess what? The Parliament voted no. They shot him down.

They shot him down.  !?  It’s the Brits’ fault?  No, not a bit of it.  President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama (D) and his motorboat pilot were too timid to act on their own.  Obama and Kerry were so used to popping off that they never thought they’d actually be expected to honor their commitment, and so when al Assad called their bluff, they cut and ran for their desk bottoms.  (Would it have helped if James Taylor had sung, in the Rose Garden, about having a friend?)

Say, though, arguendo, that the Parliament vote was somehow legitimately influential in getting Obama to walk away from his proudly announced red line.  The outcome remains: Obama failed to enforce the red line.  Full stop.

Nile Gardiner, Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom Director, had this:

[Kerry’s remarks are] a reflection of a broader disdain for Britain that runs through the Obama presidency[.]

No, it’s much worse and much broader than that.  How despicable can one administration be?

A Bogus Beef

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President-Elect Donald Trump sent notice last Friday that all US ambassadors must leave their posts—stop being ambassadors—by Inauguration Day.  Naturally some folks have their panties in a twist over this, it being unpresidential, and all.  For instance,

An individual with knowledge of the foreign service told FoxNews.com that Trump’s “unwillingness to consider individual cases or exigencies” appears to represent a break with protocol.

And as FoxNews put it,

past administrations have offered a grace period in certain cases.

Leave aside the fact that past presidents have, in fact, ordered US ambassadors to absent themselves by Inauguration Day: newly elected President-Elect Barack Obama (D), for instance, terminated President Bush the Younger’s ambassadors as of that future Inauguration Day.

Trump—and Obama—both gave a grace period, and they did it for all cases.  In Trump’s case, that grace period runs some 14 days—the standard two weeks’ notice.

Some folks are just born to bellyache.

Obama’s Asia Pivot

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On top of President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama’s (D) acquiescence to the People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea and his timid response to the PRC’s aggression against Japan in the East China Sea—hallmarks of his “pivot to Asia,” we get the following pivot outcomes.

A Chinese attack submarine made an unprecedented stopover in Malaysia this week in a rare public display of China’s expanding undersea force and a further sign of power realignment in Southeast Asia.

And

The visit came as two Russian warships docked in the Philippines—a US treaty ally—and Moscow offered to sell Manila advanced weaponry in another challenge to longstanding U.S. military relations in the region.

Wonderful job on the pivot by our On-The-Way-Out Commander in Chief.

Sort of makes one wonder which way he was pivoting in Asia.

A Thought on Edward Snowden

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This one is prompted by a Letter to the Editor published in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.  The relevant part of the letter is this:

If we start at the beginning, it was the US government, including the National Security Agency, that stole information that belonged to me—my phone and internet metadata. Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the government’s thieving. Now Mr Snowden is considered the thief.

Now Mr Snowden is considered the thief.  He is, and worse. That the NSA screwed up/stole private data/abused its role/what-have-you doesn’t alter that simple fact.

Were Snowden a whistleblower, he wouldn’t have run to the PRC’s Hong Kong and then proceeded to Russia where he’s continuing to give up American secrets.

Were Snowden engaged in civil disobedience, he would have returned long before now—indeed, would never have left—stood trial, making his case before the American people and a jury of his peers, and with his arrest and trial, emphasized the absurdity of the law that facilitated the NSA’s behavior.

But he did the one and didn’t do the other.

The US Nuclear Force

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Steven Pifer, a Brookings Institute denizen, wrote some thoughts for Politico in response to a President-Elect Donald Trump tweet about our need to “expand [our] nuclear capability.”  Typical of his piece is this bit:

[O]ne should keep perspective. The North Koreans are building their small nuclear arsenal, and no one knows for certain whether they have miniaturized a weapon that could fit atop a ballistic missile. But nothing North Korea does could stop the US military—with its current nuclear capability—from obliterating the small country.

One should, indeed, keep perspective.  The perspective that Pifer has omitted to notice is that when northern Korea gets an ICBM with a warhead on it that’s capable of reaching American (or Republic of Korean, or Japanese, or Australian) cities, it will be too late to develop upgraded nuclear weapons with which to deal with the barbarians of the north.  Once northern Korea’s nuclear weapons are destroying American (or RoK, Japanese, or Australian) cities, certainly we can obliterate the small country, but our cities or those of our friends and allies, and all the millions of people in them, will already be dead.

Russia and the People’s Republic of China are modernizing and expanding their nuclear weapons suite, also.  Against these two, the US has fewer than 1,500 nuclear warheads.  Despite their power, that’s not enough to fight a war with (especially not a two-front war), even one that starts out as, and stays focused on, conventional arms.  Russia and the PRC know that; that’s one of the motivations for their upgrades.  What we have doesn’t deter those who are deterrable very much anymore.

Our nuclear weapons, including the warheads sitting on them, also are old, and untested for some time other than via computer simulations. (Scary thought: given the Russians’ and PRC’s penchant for attacking and penetrating our government computer systems, what if they are altering or have altered those simulation databases so they don’t give accurate results?  Frankly, that’s not likely at all, but “not likely” is not “impossible.”)

Pifer made this claim, too:

There is no need…for a new US nuclear weapon in Europe.

Except for those Russian nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, and those Russian tactical nuclear missiles moved to forward deployment locations in western Russia, from where they can reach not just cities and military forces in the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine, but well into Germany.  Would US nuclear weapons in Europe counter those Russian nukes?  No, and yes.  They wouldn’t be used to attack the Russian nukes; they’d be used to deter Russia’s use of those nukes by holding at risk Russian targets.

And one last thought in favor of expanding our nuclear capability, including numerically.  We, strapped as we are, can afford an arms race and the technological race associated with one; Russia and the PRC cannot.  We should welcome an arms and technology race enthusiastically—one might say with open arms.  An arms and technology race is how we buried the USSR.