Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Trade War

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Russia has announced that it won’t buy certain goods from certain of the nations that are sanctioning Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and its fomenting of rebellion in eastern Ukraine. This is a trade war that Russia shouldn’t be expected to win.

For one thing, Russia’s economy is the size of Italy’s and more moribund, so any trade war can only hurt Russia relatively more than it can hurt the far larger economies of the US, the EU, Australia, Canada, even Norway, who are the targets of the Russian boycott.

For another thing, here are some facts related to this boycott.

[Russia has] banned imports of meat, fish, milk and milk products, and fruit and vegetables….  The ban has been introduced for one year

[Russia] may also introduce restrictions regarding imports of planes, navy vessels, and cars…

And

Russia depends heavily on imported foodstuffs—most of it from the West—particularly in the largest and most prosperous cities such as Moscow, where imported food fills an estimated 60-70% of the market. Food and agricultural imports from the US amounted to $1.3 billion last year, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and in 2013 the EU’s agricultural exports to Russia totaled €11.8 billion ($15.8 billion). [This is against GDPs of $17.3 trillion and €13.1 trillion for the US and the EU and ₱75.8 trillion ($2.1 trillion) for Russia.]

A year, though, is plenty of time for the banned sellers to find new markets, which reduces the long-term need to sell to Russia at all. This, in turn, produces a capacity functionally to embargo Russia with respect to those goods—not by explicitly and legally refusing to sell to Russia, but by voluntarily and economically selling elsewhere instead.

A year also is plenty of time for Russia to find other sellers: Latin America, Turkey, other ex-Soviet nations, and so on. Russians won’t starve. However, the reason these other sources aren’t current suppliers is because the boycotted nations can sell into Russia at lower prices than those alternatives. These alternative sellers will, almost necessarily then, cause higher prices in Russian stores.

Ukraine, Russia, and the US

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Matthew Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, had some thoughts on this during a live interview on Fox News, and repeated in Fox’ online feed. These remarks were made in the context of a warning that Russia will use the Russian surrogates’/Ukrainian separatists’ situation as a pretext to invade Ukraine to resolve a cynically made-up “humanitarian crisis.”

We don’t want a war. We cannot win a war against Russia. You know, this is not Al Qaeda. This is not the government of Saddam Hussein. This is the Russian Federation, the inheritors of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. We cannot get dragged into this war. But by the same token, the Ukrainians can’t win it by themselves.

If we keep going with sanctions, it’s a dead-end process. We can continue to do it for moral reasons to show that we’re doing something, but we’ve also got to have an endgame negotiation that the Russians are part of.

He’s right, and he’s wrong. He’s right that we don’t want war; no sane nation does. He’s right that Ukraine can’t win their current war by themselves.

But he’s terribly wrong where it counts. Of course, we can win a war against Russia. Indeed, he implies that Ukraine can win such a war, if only they’re not alone. No, the only way we could not win would be for us to give it up before it starts—”we can’t win” is just a dangerously defeatist mindset.

It’s that mindset, too, that is contributing so heavily to Ukraine’s current strait. Russian President Vladimir Putin has the measure of President Barack Obama and of Obama’s key cabinet players, and Putin is confident he can act as he pleases and the US will make no meaningful response. Putin is confident that we’ll do something “for moral reasons to show that we’re doing something” but that something will be confined to more wrist-slap sanctions. Putin most carefully has observed the American administration’s penchant for “leading from behind,” which many people more accurately identify as leading the retreat.

Rojansky also is wrong that the endgame negotiation must be something of which the Russians are part. Certainly, it would be nice if the Russians were part, but they really have very little useful to say in the matter until they stand down from Ukraine’s eastern border; until they stop shooting at the Ukrainian army from within Russia; until they stop supplying the…separatists…with arms, artillery, SAMs, ammunition, and so on; until they withdraw from their occupation of Crimea.

No, the right answer is to ratchet up the economic pressure on Russia with real sanctions and openly and effectively helping Ukraine (and Europe) find non-Russian sources of oil, gas, and other goods, and to ratchet up the pressure on Russia by supplying Ukraine with arms and ammunition.

And to openly and publicly recognize that the Russian nuclear threat has only the credence we choose to give it. If we’re not threatened by it, it is no threat. It is no threat because Russia does not want a war with us, either, and especially, Russia will not go nuclear over eastern Ukraine.

Update: Corrected the second paragraph, beginning “If we keep going with sanctions…,” to indicate it was part of Rojansky’s remarks, and not part of my writing.  I apologize for the error.

Laughingstock, Part 2

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I’ve written before about this matter. This week, Spiegel Online International, not a fortress of Conservatism, brought it up again.

John Kerry has spent months rushing from one conflict to the next, but has little show for it. His failures are symptomatic of an America that lacks a foreign policy identity—and of a country that seems uncomfortable with its role as a superpower.

And

In recent days, global diplomacy has seemed like an absurd form of theater, with John Kerry in the role of the tragic hero. He doesn’t look like the secretary of state from a world power, Haaretz jeered, but like “an alien who just disembarked his spaceship in the Mideast.”
…

The helplessness of the world’s most important foreign minister shows just how little influence the US still has in the Middle East. And with each failure, Washington’s influence in the rest of the world erodes as well. A civil war is raging in eastern Ukraine, an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program is still a long way off, Islamist terrorists now control large swaths of Iraq—and the US doesn’t appear to be in a position to do anything about it.

And

Kerry has an “incomprehensible obsession and a sense of messianism,” Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon spat at the beginning of this year. “The only thing that might save us is if John Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us be.”

Daniel Hamilton of Johns Hopkins University [said,] “What he is lacking is a strategic vision. And he is working with a president who is primarily concerned with domestic issues.”

Sadly, it just doesn’t get any better than this. Unless we take appropriate action this fall. And again in 2016. And again in 2018. And again in….

An Attack on the UNRWA School in Rafah

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…for which the US—President Barack Obama and his mouthpiece, Valerie Jarrett and Samantha Power, and his State Department’s mouthpiece, Jen Psaki, have roundly condemned Israel. A typical Obama administration rush to judgment without tarrying for such trivia as facts.

Lenny Ben-David, Managing Director of the Israel Consult, Inc, and erstwhile Israeli Deputy Chief of Mission in DC, has put together some imagery that sheds light on the…incident…with the school. I’ve reproduced them below, together with Ben-David’s twitter captions of them.

Propagan Scandal at Rafah UN school 1. #Israeli attack took place OUTSIDE school, vics dragged inside. see drag marks pic.twitter.com/s48UVUciG5Rafah_1Propag Scandal at Rafah UN school 2. Pic of vics arranged inside school. All 4 men of military age. See drag marks pic.twitter.com/1ZsDtPkJ5yRafah_2Propag Scandal at Rafah UN school 3. Need a child in pic. Striped shirt man brings her. #Israel claimed hit PIJ men pic.twitter.com/hWWBZdSyIC [To which I add: compare the background of this image with the background of the first image: the child, here, clearly is being carried into the school from the outside.]Rafah_3Propag Scandal at Rafah UN school 4. Striped shirt arranges her pathetic body next to PIJ men. Photogs ate it up pic.twitter.com/KTEgM3qgAdRafah_4Prop Scandal at Rafah UN school 5. Poor girl’s final act. Run w her for cameras. Note water to wash away drag marks pic.twitter.com/5f5k6D602oRafah_5These “casualties” obviously were generated well outside the school and carried in for a cynical arrangement. Which our administration, among others, fell for.

That the school wasn’t even hit, much less the target, is shown here.

Will we see soon (or at any time) an apology to Israel by Obama or any of his minions? Maybe not.

 

h/t Power Line

What about a Palestinian’s right to freedom?

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This is the headline of a FoxNews op-ed by Faheem Younus, President of the Baltimore branch of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and a senior fellow at the University of Baltimore’s Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics. It’s a fair question.

Younus asks us to

think of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of the movie “Shawshank Redemption,” which shows the quest for freedom of an innocent banker serving two life sentences under hopeless circumstances. The cast goes like this: the criminals are Hamas, the warden is Netanyahu, Andy—the banker convicted of murder—is your average Palestinian, and Shawshank is Gaza.

His strawman includes his claim that ordinary Palestinians—Gazans, actually—are prisoners of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then Younus expands his claim:

But lately, the Palestinian’s moral right to exist has become a political wrong to list.

Recently, it has become evident that millions of innocent Palestinians will serve life sentences in this Shawshank, that there is no two-state solution, that their yearning for freedom is being swallowed by the biblical dream of a Greater Israel, stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Of course, Israel has made no such claim. Israel favors a two-state solution (which, of necessity, includes the Palestinians’ “moral right to exist”), having learned from the West’s colonial days, followed by general colonial independence and trade, that the path to prosperity, for Israelis and for Palestinians, including Gazans, is through states freely trading with each other.

While purporting to decry Hamas’ behavior, though, what Younus does not discuss is that when Hamas and Fatah merged under the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership, the PA became a terrorist state. Younus denies this (without substantiation), and the PA’s initial rhetoric also denied it. The ensuing empirical facts, though, prove the terrorist nature of the unity government, this new PA. The PA launched their latest terror war just weeks after the unity government’s formation; it has pursued its terrorism with rocket attacks against Israel’s nuclear facility; it has pursued its terrorism with endless rocket firings into Israel with the sole purpose of killing as many civilians and children it can; it has pursued its terrorism by storing its rockets in hospitals, UN facilities (it’s impossible to believe the UN had no complicity in this), and private homes; it has pursued its terrorism through firing from these same homes and hospitals; it has pursued its terrorism by using Gazan civilians and children as personal shields in engagements with the IDF; the list goes on and on and on.

The ensuing empirical facts also include these two: the Fatah part of the PA has been utterly silent on this terrorism. Fatah’s silence is a deafening roar of approval of the PA’s terrorism. Also, Abbas has openly stated he agrees with the attacks.

Gazans—ordinary Palestinians—are not at all prisoners of Netanyahu or of Israel generally. They’re hostages of the terrorist PA, and badly abused by it.

As to that rejection of a two-state solution and a favoring of Younus’ mythical Greater Israel, this is what Netanyahu has said:

“If we were to pull out of Judea and Samaria, like they tell us to…there’d be a possibility of thousands of tunnels” being dug by terrorists to attack Israel, [Netanyahu] said. There were 1,200 tunnels dug in the 14-kilometer border strip between Egypt and Gaza alone…. “At present we have a problem with the territory called Gaza,” the Prime Minister said. But the West Bank is 20 times the size of Gaza. Israel, he said flatly, was not prepared “to create another 20 Gazas” in the West Bank.

The Palestinians do, indeed, have their own right to freedom. And to the prosperity that goes with freedom. The path to that, though, demands that the PA release these innocents from their bondage. The path to that demands an end of terrorist wars against Israel. The path to that demands a verifiable—and verified—removal of the PA from its avowed goal of the utter destruction of Israel.