Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Timid Administration

Posted on by
Reply

Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

And in response, President Barack Obama (D) once again bowed to Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, who personally delivered the threat, and virtually to King Salman bin Abdulaziz.  Obama then responded to the Saudi threat, meekly.  He

has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties….

This timidity is a part of what Democratic Party Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) insist they will perpetuate, should they be elected.

Elections have consequences.

Of Course

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.