Tag Archives: foreign policy

Of Course

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Iran has dismissed US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent talk of a “new arrangement” involving Tehran’s ballistic missiles, calling the idea “nonsense.”

Kerry said during a visit to the Gulf earlier this week that the US and its allies were “prepared to work on a new arrangement to find a peaceful solution” to the dispute over recent Iranian missile tests.

No need to take seriously these opening moves.  Iran knows they can just squeeze the shoes of this administration and get a much better set of concessions.

This Bears Close Watching

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Especially in light of this administration’s—and its hoped-for Progressive successor’s—penchant for surrendering apologetically our sovereignty to extra-national entities like the United Nations.

The United Nations has launched a far-reaching initiative that could give UN-sponsored authorities sway over the biological resources of the high seas—all the waters that lie outside national territories and economic zones.

The potential shift in power involves multi-trillion-dollar issues, such as whether large areas—conceivably, as much as 30%—of the world’s international waters should be designated as no-go areas to protect biological diversity….

Because national sovereignty is so 19th century.  And the UN does such a wonderful job managing its existing tasks.

We Are Concerned

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Or so they claim.

[T]he State Department admitted Tuesday the Obama administration has concerns about Tehran’s provocative ballistic missile program because of the possibility the long-range rockets could one day be used to carry a nuke….

So, what now?  President Barack Obama (D) will send his motorboat skipper cum State Department chair occupier out to shake his finger very firmly at the Ayatollahs?

A Conservative’s View of American National Policy

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My new book is out; see the links at the right to get it in Kindle format from amazon.com.  The book also is available here.

A Conservative’s View of American National Policy is the companion piece to A Conservative’s View of American Domestic Policy. Whereas Domestic Policy discussed internal affairs, National Policy is about our actions on the global stage.

My exposition centers on two things, the first of which is this: foreign and defense policy are more than closely related. They are not even mirror-images of each other; rather, they aren’t even tightly intertwined; they’re the same thing viewed from different perspectives. There are few, if any, aspects of foreign policy that do not inform defense policy, and there are even fewer aspects of defense policy that don’t affect foreign policy. We discuss these general policies and we have separate departmental heads representing them in the Executive Branch Cabinet only to facilitate our general understanding and the Cabinet Secretaries’ more efficient execution.

Accordingly, we need to understand the unity of foreign and defense policy as a single concept, not two related ones, then develop a unitary national policy that recognizes that necessary unity and that coordinates and maximizes the strengths of each, using each to compensate for the weaknesses of the other.

The other thing is this: after having made my case regarding the essential unity of foreign and defense policy, the rest of this effort will be concerned with what we should do with that unity, how we can put a national policy to use in a practical manner for our own betterment as a nation in a globally entangled world.

I propose an active policy of political engagement and military power projection. When and where we must act overtly militarily (rather than merely project our power to act), our objective must be victory. We should never engage in a fight with the purpose of a draw, as we did, for example, in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Political engagement (and economic engagement as a tool of national policy) must be based on active policies designed to expand the geographic and popular reach of liberal democracy and individual freedom and contract the sphere of tyranny and oppression. In a world of global competition for hearts and minds, the contest between free men and subjects is most definitely a zero-sum game. We win and they lose, else it’ll be the other way around.

 

American Exceptionalism

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…seen from the other side of the world.  Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has a perspective.

Every one of America’s important trading partners in Asia, he points out, now has China as its “biggest trading partner.”  These nations know they will have a freer and more open trading system if America, not China, is writing the rules.

And

What makes it all so twisted [the debate over the TPP], says Mr Lee, is that no one in Asia is rooting for an American retreat.  To the contrary, Asian leaders are eager to make America great again….

And

“Your role,” says Mr Lee, “remains indispensable, whether you are prepared to step up to it or whether you decide to chuck it.”

And one last bit, which might seem self-serving but, even were it so, is no less true for that:

…you are wealthy enough and resilient enough to be able to help those who are buffeted and to take advantage of the opportunities which are out there, rather than say “I don’t want the competition….”