Tag Archives: foreign policy

The Diplomacy of John Kerry

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A statement Secretary of State John Kerry made while talking to reporters in Beijing last week caught my eye.

If Kim Jong Un decides to launch a missile, whether it’s across the Sea of Japan or some other direction, he will be choosing willfully to ignore the entire international community.  And it will be a provocation and unwanted act that will raise people’s temperatures.

Yeah?  And?  Northern Korea isn’t part of the international community; why would Kerry think Littlest Kim cares about ignoring it?  What is Kerry thinking about when he makes statements like this?

In fact, northern Korea was decidedly unimpressed:

North Korea has dismissed the South’s proposal to resolve tensions through dialogue, describing it as “a crafty trick” to disguise Seoul’s hostility.

The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said it would not talk unless Seoul abandoned its confrontational posture….

Unfortunately, it’s of a piece with how this administration, and its predecessors, have been dealing with another of our enemies: Iran.  They think that the governments of both places think like we do, that the men of these governments share our values, share our goals.

This naive, if not outright ignorant.  The failure of this assumption, though, has been manifest for a very long time.

Hmm….

Maybe We Should Take Instruction from Europe

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Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew’s trip to Europe demonstrates that this might be useful, given the apparent role-reversal between the US and the EU on matters related to economics.

Lew spent his time there lecturing his European counterparts on the “need” for further government stimulus, further government spending, the irrelevance of national debt, especially concerning the southern European nations—those who are bankrupt in all but name and needing…bailouts.

It was those European counterparts, though, who were holding out for spending and borrowing (and taxing) discipline on the part of those bankrupt nations.  European Council President Herman Van Rompuy had this to say:

The European economies face a high level of debt, deep structural medium-term challenges and short-term economic headwinds that we need to confront.  There is no room for complacency.

I’ve long decried the EU’s methods in addressing its problem, but they’re learning the need for fiscal discipline.  It would be good if the other side of the Atlantic followed that example.

The Mouse that Roared?

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With The People’s Republic of China confirming the northern Korea has been conducting live-fire drills near its border with the PRC, and with northern Korea having closed the Kaesong factory complex jointly run by northern Korea and the Republic of Korea—the last formal tie between nK and the RoK—a rude thought occurs to me.

Is Kim the Youngest smarter, more Machiavellian, than we give him credit for?

He has to know, after vacationingschooling in Switzerland as a younger youth just how badly off the northern Korean people are.  He might even consider them “his” people.  If he does, and if he’s of a mind to do anything about it, he also has to know that proposing reunification talks—a lá occupied Germany and the FRG—both is a death sentence for him and will blow up the government.  After all, the PRC has not fallen, and so it can still prop up a follow-on nK government, even if like the failed Soviet Union, it has no interest in bettering the lives of commoners.  The blowup, then, would have no effect vis-à-vis the outside world; although it would make things even worse internally, especially during the turmoil.

So, what’s a boy to do?  Start a fight he knows he can’t win, lose the fight, and get occupied.  If he burns a few (tens of thousands of) innocent bodies in the process, well, he is the product of three-plus generations of give-a-s*t about human life.

About all of his bluster and buildup: it might be of a piece with prior blusters, now getting out of control in the hands of a tyro.  But his actions sure are guaranteeing that the ones he’s going to attack are very well prepared for that attack.

The rat that roared?

Nah.  Probably not.

This is Foolish

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A regularly scheduled ICBM test at Vandenberg AFB that had been planned for this week has been delayed by DoD, ostensibly in an effort to lower the tension on the Korean peninsula.  This delay comes as northern Korea has moved ballistic missiles to its east coast.  At least one of those missiles has the range (if not known to have the accuracy) to hit sites in Guam, Japan, Alaska, and Hawaii.  It’s also important to note that the move is more an effort to conceal the missiles’ locations than an effort to get closer to any targets—the distance gained is trivial compared to the distances to be covered.

If this is the reason—tension management—it’s hard to see how it works.  Coming on the heels of last week’s decision by the Obama administration to reduce overflights of the Republic of Korea with nuclear-capable aircraft and to stop moving combat ships into nearby waters, also supposedly to lower tensions, this seems more likely to encourage Kim the Youngest by seeming to display timidity and weakness on our part.

Is the delay in order to arm and retarget what was a test article at Vandenberg?  This seems unlikely (and it would suggest ugly things about the flexibility of our missile force), as northern Korea wouldn’t seem worth the trouble or expense of using an increasingly scarce warhead, when that part of the peninsula has so little of targeting value beyond its army and missile launchers—and these are more promptly, efficiently, and cheaply destroyed with more conventional systems already in place or nearby.

Or is President Barack Obama setting us up for making another round of concessions, of paying another installment of tribute, to another generation of Mad Kims, as past administrations have done in response to other outbursts of verbose threats?

The dog is barking.  There’s no need to take it seriously.

It Appears to be Time

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…to walk away from Afghanistan commercially, if not militarily.  Our commercial presence flows from the mission creep that has long infested our war there—a creep from the Bush doctrine of going anywhere there are terrorists and burning them, which in the Afghan implementation meant burning al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Period.  Full stop.  That mission, following the destruction of those two terrorist organizations as viable entities in Afghanistan, unfortunately quickly morphed into nation-building, an attempt to meld widely and wildly disparate tribes and clans into an actual, unified country.

Here is an example of the failure of that mission creep and of the foolishness of allowing it.  Tamerlane Global Services, Inc, provides contracting services for the US government and is exempt from Afghan taxation.  At the time of this incident, Tamerlane was in the middle of a legal dispute in a US Federal court with an Afghan firm, Global Hub Logistics, over mutual allegations of breach of contract.  Whether impatient with the proceedings or disinterested in an anticipated outcome, or some other reason, Global Hub complained to the Afghan government, and the latter manufactured a tax dispute against Tamerlane.

And then they snatched a Tamerlane employee off the street and threw him into jail.

Tamerlane and its employee are not alone in this abuse.

Afghan companies have begun turning to the Attorney General’s Office to resolve business quarrels through criminal investigations and arrests, rather than going to arbitration, mediation or commercial courts, attorneys here said.

It took the involvement of American Congressmen to get the Tamerlane employee released from gaol, and the employee never has been charged with any crime.  His employer and attorney, Kimberley Motley, said afterward,

There’s no legal basis for this at all.

The US has over 33,000 American contractors in Afghanistan at risk of this treatment: with the employer having a dispute with an Afghan company, and the dispute not going in a direction that suits the Afghan company, the latter bellyaches and the Afghan government grabs a likely looking employee and jails him.

Ward Scott, an American commercial lawyer in Kabul:

Our firm is increasingly getting calls from Western executives fearing, with good cause, the imminent arrest of their managers in Afghanistan over commercial disputes[.]

This misbehavior has to stop, and unfortunately, the most effective way to stop it seems to be to stop dealing with Afghanistan commercially in the first place.