Tag Archives: foreign policy

Bad Deal

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As I write on 12 December, Hamas appears to have agreed to a deal, put together by the Egyptians and supported by the Biden administration, that would see a 60-day cease-fire in Gaza, Israeli troops remain in Gaza “temporarily,” and that would release 30 hostages, including some Americans. In addition, Israel would release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners and allow greater humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza. Israel has not agreed, so far.

That last bit regarding humanitarian aid is a clear red flag regarding this…proposal. Any agreement by Israel to this condition would be an Israeli admission that they are the ones doing the restricting. Israel isn’t the one restricting aid flow, though; the terrorists are stealing the aid and deliberately endangering aid deliverers by using them as shields against IDF responses. Hamas is restricting aid flow.

There’s also this bit of Hamas disingenuosity:

Hostages could be freed shortly after signing the deal, and more time would be given to Hamas to establish the names of remaining hostages, their whereabouts, and their state of health[.]

The terrorists don’t need any time for that: they know full well where they’re holding all of the hostages and all of the murdered hostage bodies: the terrorists are the ones who grabbed them, and the terrorists are the ones who’ve been moving them around.

This is a bad deal. Any “cease-fire” must include Israeli forces remaining in Gaza for as long as the Israelis deem necessary along with the release of all of the hostages, including the bodies of the dead hostages. Anything less than all of the hostages, by itself, must be a deal breaker. Beyond that, while there might be a cease fire, the war Hamas has been inflicting on Israel cannot end short of the utter destruction of the terrorist entity. As long as Hamas exists, it will be a terrorist threat to Israel.

Yet Another Reason…

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…for moving our supply chains out of the People’s Republic of China, and for no longer doing economic business at all with the PRC. In response to the Biden administration’s lately decision to further restrict the export of advanced computer chips to the PRC, that nation has restricted the export of critical computer-related minerals to us.

China announced Tuesday the banning of exports to the United States of chemical elements and other essential high-tech materials, in apparent retaliation for the US limiting semiconductor-related exports.

Those elements include gallium, germanium, antimony and certain other extremely hard materials to the US. So far, that’s just the ordinary progress of war, including the economic war the PRC has been waging against us for years.

However.

We shouldn’t be dependent on an enemy nation for materials critical to our economic function or our national security. That we are was driven home by the supply chain disruptions caused by the Wuhan Virus Situation; that this administration has chosen to do nothing about it, that our private enterprises have chosen to do nothing about it—each is shameful in its own right. That continued dependency only facilitates the PRC’s war against us and our economy.

We have these elements, along with nearly all of the rare earth elements and other extremely hard materials, in the ground within the political boundaries of our nation as well as within the boundaries of friendly nations. If it costs more to supply from those sources—and it will cost a pretty penny at this stage to guts up the necessary mines—that’s the cost of national defense and of our status as a free and sovereign nation.

The Cynicism of Mistake

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Some folks are lobbying President-elect Donald Trump (R) to trade importing Venezuelan oil for getting fewer Venezuelan illegal aliens across our southern border.

American oil executives and bond investors are urging President-elect Donald Trump to abandon his first-term policy of maximum pressure on Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and instead strike a deal: more oil for fewer migrants.

Their rationalization:

They say making a deal with Maduro would cut migration and help temper US energy prices.

This isn’t naïve, nor is it ignorant. These folks know better than that. This is their cynicism.

The deal won’t cut the flow of illegal aliens from Venezuela; no deal made with Maduro can be trusted. He’s already demonstrated his level of integrity with his repeated welching on his promises to his own people.

Nor is it necessary to import Venezuelan oil to temper US energy prices. We have plenty of oil, and natural gas and coal, with which to do that, and Trump’s moves to cut the excess out of the regulations limiting our domestic production is all that’s necessary.

There is this:

An agreement would also help check adversaries such as China and Russia.

Dealing with Maduro isn’t necessary for that, either, though. A more active foreign and trade policy involving Latin America as a whole (and involving Africa) would do that. American administrations of both parties just need to stop taking those to large, resource-rich parts of the planet for granted. Our enemies do not take them for granted, to our detriment.

It’s Worse Than That

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Seth Jones, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department, is worried about our ability to deter war with the People’s Republic of China.

[M]y colleagues and I led members of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party in a simulation of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The goal was to understand how the US defense industrial base would perform in a protracted war with China and to assess the implications for deterrence. The results weren’t reassuring.
The simulation began with a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but the US defense industrial base was severely stressed. The US military spent its entire inventory of Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles by the end of the first week and ran out of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range missiles after a month.

Running out of critical ammunition in the middle of a war means we no longer even can fight that war. With the PRC well aware of that likelihood, Jones is correct that we’re losing our ability to deter the PRC.

It’s much worse than that, though, and it’s surprising that Jones didn’t take the next step in his analysis. Such a military strait means we’re losing our ability to defeat a PRC attack, and unlike Japan after its devastating attack on us at the outset of our participation in WWII, the PRC has the wherewithal and the will to follow up its initial attack(s), win outright the war—proximately over the Republic of China, but really a proxy war against us—and impose its will on us.

“Intractable Problem”

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That’s how the news writers at The Wall Street Journal characterized Mexico’s drug and illegal alien trafficking (and sex trafficking, I add) cartel problem. Their lede:

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries.

Set aside, for this post, the fact that it isn’t “illegal migration;” it’s illegal alien trafficking. Those folks ceased to be migrants the moment they entered Mexico illegally under Mexican law, and those who skipped Mexico enroute to illegally entering our nation ceased to be migrants at the moment of their illegal entry here.

The news writers added this:

Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the US.

This is just silly. Mexico’s greatest weakness has not been its historic inability to confront the drug cartels; the greatest weakness is its conscious decision to not confront the drug and trafficking cartels, it’s timidity in taking on the cartels and destroying them.

Then there’s the writers’ victim-blaming sewage: it’s the addict’s fault that he’s addicted. True, no one stuck a gun in any American’s ear and forced him to take the drugs. Too often, too, the addiction results from taking seemingly innocuous drugs that have been laced with the addictor for the explicit purpose of creating the addiction and so the market. But once addicted, the only truly effective way to break the addiction and bring it under that individual’s control is through withdrawal—and that is achieved by cutting off the supply.

That brings me back to the cartels and the Mexican government’s decision to accept them as a fact of Mexican life and of Mexican governance power. It’s straightforward enough, although difficult, to reverse that decision. Cut off the supply by sealing Mexico’s northern border against the cartels and by blocking the importation of drug precursors (vis., from the People’s Republic of China), and by destroying the cartels and their drug labs.

The problem is not intractable; that’s just a chicken’s copout. Hard, certainly, very much so. But hard means possible. All that’s necessary is for the men and women of the Mexican government to have the courage and the integrity to end their collaborationist relationships with the cartels and lead an effective, and necessarily deadly for cartel membership, campaign against them. And to seal their southern border and their ports against “migrants” along with sealing their northern border with us, instead of holding the doors open for the continued flow of drugs and illegal aliens into our nation—doors held open at the behest of those so-favored cartels.

Certainly that’ll be expensive for the Mexican government to do, but it’ll only become even more expensive for Mexican citizens as the government lets the nation continue to sag into a failed, gang-run geographical area. That’s a terrible price for a government to choose to inflict on its people.