Tag Archives: foreign policy

Is Sony Dissembling?

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President Barack Obama said Sony “made a mistake” when they decided not to release their movie in surrender to northern Korea’s hacker threats.

Sony had this in response to Obama’s recognition:

Let us be clear: the only decision that we have made with respect to release of the film was not to release it on Christmas Day in theaters, after the theater owners declined to show it. Without theaters, we could not release it in the theaters on Christmas Day. We had no choice.

Let me be clear: releasing the movie and theaters then showing it (or not) are two different things. Sony “leadership” knows this full well. Sony easily could have released the movie. Some theaters might have shown it, others might not (and several major ones had, in fact, chickened out and said they wouldn’t show it), but absent the release, no theater has the opportunity to show the movie.

Sony had a choice.

Update: Sony has backtracked its backtracking, and it has released its movie this Christmas to some 300 theaters in the US, and it’s streaming the movie online via Google Play, YouTube Movies, Microsoft’s Xbox Video and its own website, http://www.seetheinterview.com.

On Trade with Cuba

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Doug Erwin, an Economics Professor at Dartmouth, writing in The Wall Street Journal, had a thought.

Restoring trade ties and expanding commerce would revolutionize the Cuban economy and transform Cuban society. It would spur the growth of a business class, creating competing pockets of power and new, wealthy groups that would challenge the ruling Communist Party. It would give Cuban citizens access to more information, and information about the outside world destabilizes any repressive regime. What would happen if every Cuban citizen had access to a smartphone, could organize protests via Twitter, and spread the word about government outrages?

That may well be true. It certainly comports with my view that conservatism and free market philosophies have nothing to fear in the market competition of ideas, and there certainly needs to be such a free market in Cuba.

But there need be no normalization of relations with Cuba, which in the end would benefit only and exclusively the Castros and their successors in the regime, to achieve this. All that’s required is to allow—to legalize from our side of the strait—market interactions between Cuban citizens and American businesses. True enough, the Castro tyranny would object to such a move. However, a black market is the free market alternative to centrally planned economies and to the “economy” of despots.

It’s certainly true that black market pricing is higher than legal free market pricing, but they thrive in a despotic environment for two reasons. One is that those higher than legal free market prices still are lower than the government’s prices. The other is that the products being bought and sold are available at all, as they often are not (e.g., smartphones) in a despot’s economy.

Here is the interaction, and here is the ultimate downfall of the Castro régimes of the world. Then can occur normalization of government-government relations.

 

h/t Cafe Hayek

Obama’s Cuba Normalization Move

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It’s certainly true that 50 years of trade embargo and absence of formal—normalized—relations between the US and Cuba have not brought about increased freedom or prosperity for the Cuban people. Neither had 45 or more years of Cold War containment succeeded in giving the Russian people, or the other peoples trapped behind the USSR’s iron curtain, a chance at improving their lot. Until it did.

Normalization isn’t the necessary change in policy here.

Cuba’s economy, always on the verge of collapse, but always propped up by key supporters—Russia and Venezuela—no longer has those props to hold it up. Venezuela, due to government economic policy failure and the sharp fall in oil prices, is itself in dire economic straits. Russia, due to economic sanctions and the sharp fall in oil prices, also is in dire economic straits. Cuba, now, is in its deepest economic crisis since the Castros took power those 50 years ago.

Why normalize now, then, with economic leverage on the rise?

The US got nothing in return for this normalization. There is no easing of Internet access for the Cubans. There is no increase in freedom of speech for the Cubans. There is no easing of restrictions on public assemblies by the Cuban people. There is no move toward free elections from among freely competing political parties or independently running candidates for the Cuban people. There aren’t even any handshakes, nor promises of greater flexibility, nor winks and nods or quiet pats on the back implying such moves in a nebulous future. Indeed, it appears as though the normalization was a sweetener demanded by the Cuban government in return for bringing to fruition the 3 for 2 prisoner swap.

How does this help the Cuban people?

President Barack Obama’s signatures—Obamacare and Dodd-Frank—along with his economic deadweights of EPA regulation, labor interferences, constant demand for ever higher taxes and spending, combined with his unblemished record of foreign policy failures, form a legacy of shambles.

Could this move, then, just be a desperate attempt to retrieve something of a reputation for, and by, this President? Could it be smaller ball, a naked pandering to Americans of Cuban heritage for the 2016 elections?

Trust and the PRC

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Having finally, and successfully, crushed a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China has declared null and void its treaty with Great Britain, the Joint Declaration that turned Hong Kong over to PRC control.

China’s deputy ambassador to Britain, Ni Jian, told the committee’s chairman, Richard Ottaway, that the Joint Declaration “is now void and only covered the period from the signing in 1984 until the handover in 1997.”

Never mind that the treaty the PRC signed was agreed by the PRC to run for 50 years from 1997, the year of the turnover.

This follows the PRC’s naked aggression in the South and East China Seas, as it looks to occupy those seas under falsified legal pretenses.

This government cannot be trusted. We—and the Brits—must govern our interaction with it accordingly; we can never know when the PRC will decide that another of its agreements with one of us has become inconvenient to it and so will welch on it.

The PRC’s Territorial Aggrandizement

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This is an example of the People’s Republic of China’s practice of Rule by Law, rather than Rule of Law.

Among other moves and countermoves involving the PRC’s attempts to seize and annex the South China Sea, here at the expense of the Republic of the Philippines, the latter haled the former into arbitration under the UN’s Law of the Sea Convention. The proximate case was the PRC’s military aggression against the RP over Scarborough Shoal, a collection of islands and rich fishing waters well within the RP’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

After first denying the legitimacy of arbitration at all, now the PRC is arguing that the arbitration panel has no jurisdiction in the matter because the dispute involves the PRC’s “territorial sovereignty over several maritime features in the South China Sea, which is beyond the scope of the Convention.”

Sure. The PRC has claimed the Sea, therefore the Sea is the PRC’s. By law. Because the Law of the Sea Convention doesn’t interfere with sovereign territory.