Tag Archives: foreign policy

Richard Feynman on Theory

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Cross-posted from Ricochet. It’s behind the paywall, but Ricochet is well worth the subscription price; I heartily recommend it.

Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who taught at Cornell University, but he also was a just plain scientist.

He had a thought on theory.

You cannot prove a vague theory wrong. If the guess that you make is poorly expressed and the method you have for computing the consequences is a little vague then…you see that the theory is good as it can’t be proved wrong. If the process of computing the consequences is indefinite, then with a little skill any experimental result can be made to look like an expected consequence.

Now where have we seen this vague theory technique put into action lately? In politics, perhaps?

No Travel Ban?

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In a recent Fox News op-ed, Dr Tom Frieden, Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, argued against a “travel ban” covering the western African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the nations hardest hit by the Ebola epidemic.

I answered most of his objections here.

In his latest piece, though, he raised a new objection, and he sounded like he actually meant it.

When a wildfire breaks out we don’t fence it off. We go in to extinguish it before one of the random sparks sets off another outbreak somewhere else.

Well, yes “we” do. These are called “fire breaks.” The fire teams fighting the wildfires, and the forest fires, do their best to isolate the fires to keep them from spreading by clearing a ring around the fire of combustible material, trying to make the ring wide enough that “random sparks” can’t jump the ring and set off “another outbreak somewhere else.” Nor is this an either-or proposition. While some fire teams are working hard to create that isolation, others are entering the area, fighting the fire directly, and extinguishing it.

So it should be here. We need medical expertise, teams, and supplies going into the three nations to help the locals deal with, bring under control, extinguish the current epidemic. And we need the quarantine—a ban on travel out of those nations, with the travel exceptions outlined in my article at the above link.

Frieden also raised two new objections.

We don’t want to isolate parts of the world, or people who aren’t sick, because that’s going to drive patients with Ebola underground, making it infinitely more difficult to address the outbreak.

It could even cause these countries to stop working with the international community as they refuse to report cases because they fear the consequences of a border closing.

These also are nonsense. Many of these nations’ people already are going underground, and they’re often attacking personnel trying to deal with the dead bodies. That they’re doing both out of ignorance and lack of understanding of the situation doesn’t alter the fact that they’re already doing both. This puts a premium on quarantine, to keep those underground from leaving, anyway.

The need for a quarantine also was demonstrated by the unfortunate situation involving Thomas Edward Duncan, who died last week in Dallas after having travelled from Liberia. He was symptom-free when he arrived in the US. Only a quarantine could have prevented his travel with its potential for spreading the virus.

A quarantine would cause these three nations from cooperating with the “international community” in fighting this epidemic? They would simply be cutting off their own noses. A quarantine still would leave the epidemic isolated and greatly reduced in its ability to spread throughout the same international community.

Frieden is right about one thing.

There is no more effective way to protect the United States against additional Ebola cases than to address this outbreak at the source in West Africa. That’s what our international response…will do.

Indeed. Getting after the source, though, must include a quarantine, in order to keep the source area—already large—at a manageable size while continuing entry into the area and helping the locals.

Blame Game

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President Barack Obama has some skin in this one.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, on Wednesday continued to advance on the strategic city, despite intensifying if still limited American airstrikes. And if Kobani falls, the White House is already blaming “our partner and friend” Turkey.

A senior Obama Administration official headlined a leading story in Wednesday’s New York Times about American frustration with Turkish “inaction” in Syria. “There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” this anonymous official said. “This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border.”

Blaming others for the existence of problems is all that this President knows how to do. He has no concept of actually tackling those problems; he has no concept of responsibility beyond the premise that responsibility always is someone else’s.

(Never mind, too, that this isn’t a NATO fight, anyway, unless Obama or his carefully anonymous “official” can name a member that’s been attacked by ISIS. Turkey’s obligation flows from its moral obligation—as does ours—and Turkey’s proximity.)

If Obama and his cronies in State and Defense spent half as much energy on fighting ISIS as they spend blaming others for not, the US already would have crushed these terrorists.

On the other hand,

If Mr Obama wants Turkey to help avoid a massacre, he should get on the phone and press for a joint military operation, reassuring Mr Erdogan that the US military will back up Turkish forces against ISIS, even if it means ground forces. This is what real wartime leadership would look like.

But that would require Obama and his administration to be able to be trusted. It cannot be.

Another…Ally

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I wrote earlier about the behavior of one of our purported Middle East allies. This is another example of that one’s un-ally-like behavior.

Kurdish protesters in Turkey demanding a show of force against Islamic State instead felt their government’s heavy boot Tuesday, as rubber bullets and tear gas rained down and heavy trucks rolled in to major cities where people took to the streets to decry the fall of the Syrian border city of Kobani.

As many as 19 people were killed around the nation in clashes with police over the government’s unwillingness to aid Kurds trapped in Kobani, a Syrian city a stone’s throw from the border and under siege by Islamic State.

And

[W]hile US-led fighter planes have led a Western coalition in bombing runs in an effort to halt Islamic State’s advance, Turkish troops have remained massed on the border.

Turkey seems perfectly happy to let ISIS do its thing if it means the Turks get to burn, or see burned, the Kurds.

Born in Jerusalem Means Born in Israel?

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There is a case on the Supreme Court’s docket this session (which began Monday) that can be summarized thusly:

Born in Jerusalem: The case of an American born in Jerusalem who wants his passport to list his birthplace as Israel underlies a major dispute between Congress and the president, with Middle Eastern politics as the backdrop. The United States has never recognized any nation’s sovereignty over Jerusalem, believing the city’s status should be resolved in peace negotiations. The administration says a 2002 law passed by Congress allowing Israel to be listed as the birthplace of Jerusalem-born Americans would in essence be seen as a US endorsement of Israeli control of the city.

This should be a no-brainer, and it never should have reached this point.

“The Administration” signed the bill into law; it wasn’t merely “passed by Congress.” If the President didn’t like the way it would be perceived by foreign nations, he should have vetoed it, instead.

The courts cannot rule on American domestic law on the basis of how foreign nations might perceive the thing. The courts can only rule on what the law says, in its context—which is domestic. Even at that, what the law says must be primary.

Perceptions of the law by foreign nations are matters of politics not of law, as the separate existences of Articles I and III in our Constitution make clear. The courts have nothing to say on matters of politics.

Finally, if the present administration—or the present Congress, come to that—no longer believe this law to be appropriate in any way, including because of foreign nations’ perceptions, those two should work together on this purely political matter to alter or rescind it. Resorting to the courts is inappropriate and a waste of judicial (and Congressional and administration) resources.

(Aside: that neither Congress nor the President should worry overmuch about foreign opinion when considering American laws is a separate matter.)

Another summary of the case, which gives an outline of its legal history, is here. In my view, the district court, as summarized by this link, erred in both of its rulings. Having held originally, the matter was a non-justiciable political question, the judge should have required State to follow the law. The court was not equipped to rule otherwise, since it had not found the law “illegitimate,” which is to say unconstitutional.

The judge’s second error, when told (correctly) by the Supremes to quit waffling and make a decision, was to rule the relevant section of the law to be an unconstitutional interference with the President’s sole authority to recognize foreign states. Of course, the section does no such thing; it merely accepts that Jerusalem is a part of Israel. The President’s recognition power is unaffected.