Tag Archives: foreign policy

What’s Wrong with This Statement?

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In a discussion about the Navy’s latest carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford (still under construction), and the usefulness of carriers generally, Anthony Cordesman, currently sitter in the Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and ex-State and Defense consultant, had this to say:

We aren’t using a land base for a lot of our sorties in Afghanistan; they’re being flown via Pakistan by a carrier.  We need to be sure we can operate without being dependent on allies.

Hmm….

A Thought on Syria

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Brigadier General Salim Idriss, Chief of Staff of Free Syria’s Supreme Military Council, has a question that pretty much says all there is to say:

I don’t understand the West.  Why are all of them just looking on?

There were related questions and answers in the SOI interview:

SPIEGEL: But no one plans to deliver [anti-aircraft missiles] to you out of fear that they could fall into terrorist hands.

Idriss: Terrorists?  We experience terror every day.  A short while ago, I spoke with one of our commanders in the east.  The air force had just bombarded the Euphrates dam again.  If it breaks, billions of cubic meters of water will destroy everything.  Is that not terror?

And

SPIEGEL: One of the West’s fears is that the jihadists could take power if Assad falls.

Idriss: Do you know who vacated their positions in Idlib and Aleppo when a US attack seemed imminent?  The radicals from the “Islamic State.”  Since they have absolutely no interest in the fall of the regime, they thrive in war and profit from our weakness.

But with the West—at least that portion of it represented by the US, the only nation in the West with the physical, if not the moral, capacity to act—having ceded policy vis-à-vis Syria to the Russians, there’s little the West can do other than stand on the sidelines, looking on.

Foreign Policy

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From a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

For days before the UN conclave, White House aides had broadcast the President’s desire to shake Mr Rouhani’s hand.  By Monday, the press was overflowing with leaked accounts of where and how it would happen.  Having thus turned down the lights and turned up the mood music, it made the snub that followed especially potent.

It would be amateur hour, if it weren’t so utterly incompetent.

Responsibility

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President Barack Obama says that now that Russia has agreed to the removal and destruction of Syria’s chemical weapon arsenal, it’s on the Russians to follow through.

Which raises a question: if the Russians use the “agreement” to stall and delay, or even openly refuse to carry through the removal and destruction, what are you going to do about it, Ace?  Shake your finger very firmly at the Russians?  Like you’ve done all along vis-à-vis Syria, Iran, and northern Korea?  Or will you respond like you did over missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, instead?

To Whom Was Putin Speaking

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…in his recent New York Times op-ed?  Peggy Noonan has an answer.

Why would Vladimir Putin take such an aggressive tone in parts of a piece supposedly addressed to Americans and supposedly explaining his views on Syria and, more largely, US foreign policy?  …he’s not really writing to America.  He chose as a venue a major American newspaper, but he’s writing to the world.  He is telling the world he knows how to correct America, tell it off, criticize it for its conceit.  And he does it right to their faces, not in a Moscow interview or a St Petersburg speech.  He is rubbing America’s nose in it for the delectation of its friends, occasional friends, foes, and occasional foes.  He wasn’t writing to us at all.  He’s attempting to show the world he’s its reliable voice, its real leader, not those other guys.

Indeed.  Congratulations, President Obama.  You’ve achieved your 2008 campaign goal of fundamentally changing America.  We’ll be years undoing your damage.