Tag Archives: foreign policy

The US Navy under this Commander-in-Chief

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Iran has seized another oil tanker, this on in the Strait of Hormuz, less than a week after the pirates seized another oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just outside the Strait.

A dozen small Iranian naval boats swarmed the 360-yard-long Niovi after it left Dubai en route to the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah early Wednesday morning, the navy said. The Iranian boats forced the [Panama-flagged] Niovi to reverse course and head toward Iran’s coast.
The seizure came six days after Iranian forces in the Gulf of Oman used a helicopter and boats to seize the Advantage Sweet, a Greek-owned, Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker bound for Texas.

There’s this, too, for background:

The US Navy said Iran has “harassed, attacked, or interfered” with 15 commercial ships over the past two years.

And all along, the Biden-hobbled Navy stood by and carefully watched.

Apparently President Joe Biden (D) does not agree with former President Thomas Jefferson that pirates must be dealt with…firmly.

Yet More Reasons

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American and other businesses foreign to the People’s Republic of China really need to stop doing business in the PRC or with businesses domiciled in the PRC. That nation is making it increasingly dangerous—physically and legally—for foreign business’ employees even to be present there.

Hiroshi Nishiyama, a veteran Japanese executive at Astellas Pharma Inc and a prominent member of his country’s business circle in China, spent late March wrapping up his assignment there and preparing to head home.
He never made it. Mr Nishiyama disappeared on what was supposed to be his last day in China. A few days later, China’s Foreign Ministry said he had been accused of espionage and detained.

No warning. No heads up to Astellas. Not even a prompt notice to Astellas as soon as Nishiyama had been “detained.”

Nishiyama’s fate is all too typical of what might befall foreign businessmen.

In recent weeks Chinese authorities have questioned staff at US consulting firm Bain & Co and raided the office of American due diligence firm Mintz Group and detained all five of its employees in mainland China.

The PRC also is moving to expand—and attempt justification for—its reach regarding these employees of foreign businesses.

China also passed an expansive update of an anti-espionage law that will tighten state control over a wider swath of data and digital activities, raising the risks that ordinary business behavior could be misconstrued or misrepresented as spycraft.

Rule by law rather than rule of law: the PRC government passed this law explicitly so it could coerce foreign businesses—and the governments of the nations where those businesses are domiciled—into expensive, and dangerous, concessions, particularly concerning technology transfers.

These moves provide yet further reasons for all foreign businesses to simply walk away from the People’s Republic of China; do no further business there at all.

Sustainability

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In commenting on the strongly negative impact that the Environmental, Social, and Governance mentality is having on European and European Union investment in national and EU defense, Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe Secretary General Jan Pie offered this warning:

European banks and investors have picked up the signal that Europe would be about to say defense is not a sustainable activity.

In one respect, that signal is correct. A defense establishment that is not adequately sized, armed, and trained will be unsustainable, as nations possessing such an inadequacy will be overwhelmed and conquered by nations that believe the best defense is a good offense, or that merely have better sized, armed, and trained military establishments.

“Finish the Job”

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President Joe Biden (D) announced his decision to run for four more years as President last Tuesday in a three-minute Hollywood-esque video. A video, no press, no citizen, present, and especially, no questions, no spontaneity, nothing extemporaneous or free-flowing.

Just: “Let’s finish the job,” his new slogan.

Here’s one aspect of the job he wants to finish, in the foreign relations environment. American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow specializing in Iran, Turkey, and the broader Middle East, Michael Rubin:

He entered office speaking about human rights…. First, it was tens of thousands of Afghans who put their faith in and service with us but for whom Secretary of State Antony Blinken couldn’t be bothered to expedite visas. Then there were the millions of Afghan women. The cost for Climate Envoy John Kerry’s pursuit of China’s signature of virtue-signaling climate change declarations is turning a blind eye to Uyghur genocide.

And Israeli Maj Gen (res) Gershon Hacohen, former Israel Defense Forces Northern Corps Commander:

All the players in the Middle East recognize the weakness of the American presence in the region. The American strategy, as expressed in the National Security Strategy document of the White House, established a new order of priorities. In the first place, dealing with the competition with China in the Far East and across the Pacific Ocean….
…
The bottom line is that the state of Israel finds itself isolated like it has not been for decades, and this in itself accelerates the processes of joining regional alliances against Israel.

This is Biden’s continued disdain for Israel layered on top of all the failures vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China noted earlier.

Finishing jobs like that in the way that he’s begun them would be damaging to our nation in the extreme.

Funding PRC Research

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Senator and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Roger Marshall (R, KS) and his staff have released their Muddy Waters report concerning the origin of the Wuhan Virus—which he concludes happened via two likely leaks from the PRC’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab not equipped to do virus research at the depth to which it was handling the Wuhan Virus. One of the conclusions of his report is that the US government was funding gain-of-function research in that lab.

I have a couple of thoughts.

Marshall said about the PRC research,

That’s why we’ve been calling for a halt in all viral gain-of-function research until we get the guardrails around it.

I disagree with that. We should do viral gain-of-function research on a variety of viruses, but we should do it in our labs, where we have absolute control over the research and its findings as well as the quality and ability of the labs in which the research is done. We should be doing the research for a couple of reasons: one is that our enemies—vis., the PRC—are doing it, and we need to understand the altered viruses and how to counter them when those enemy nations use them against us. The other reason is that these viruses do cross-over from animals to humans sometimes, and whether they do this naturally—which is quite rare—or altered viruses accidentally leak from a lab, we need to understand them and how to counter them.

My other thought concerns this remark by Marshall, regarding American funding for PRC virus research:

If we’re funding it, then they need to conform to our rules, and we need American boots on the ground[.]

Certainly. However, aside from the fact that the PRC won’t agree to American presence in their labs in any useful way, we shouldn’t be funding PRC research on viruses at all. We shouldn’t be funding PRC research on any biological research. We shouldn’t be funding any PRC research, of any kind, at all.