Category: international affairs

Play with Fire?

Weeks ago, the U.S. military confirmed that China tested a hypersonic missile last summer capable of speeding around the globe with a nuclear payload.

Top generals called it “a Sputnik moment.”

Speaking of Sputnik, on Monday the Russians blew up one of their own orbiting satellites with a missile test that reportedly sprayed dangerous debris into the orbital path of the international space station.

On Monday evening, President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held an hours-long virtual summit to discuss issues between the two countries.

“Their relationship had become so toxic and so dysfunctional,” BBC’s China correspondent Stephen McDonnell wrote, “that these video discussions have been, in part, an attempt to ensure that competition between China and the US didn’t drift into armed conflict due to a misunderstanding at a global hotspot.”

“Competition”?

“Drift” into a shooting war?

Caused by “misunderstanding”?

Stop the silly pretense. China’s building and militarizing islands in the South China Sea, its bullying of numerous neighboring countries, its threats of a military invasion against free, democratic Taiwan and its genocidal oppression of the Uighurs, etc., have nothing to do with drifting, are not a big misunderstanding, nor the result of normal economic competition.

The Chinazis are dangerous.

Most endangered?

Taiwan — which, in contorted diplomatic double-speak, the U.S. has sorta pledged to defend.

“President Xi warned President Biden,” CBS News explained, that “U.S. support for Taiwan would be like playing with fire.”

Let’s not “play” with fire. Sure. But while Biden’s response that Taiwan is “independent” and “makes its own decisions” is right and true, it is still hardly above the level of smoke signal.

More’s needed.

Like what?

Actual defense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

Taiwan in Two Words

“Two words from Taiwan’s leader threaten to upend U.S.-China ties,” headlined The Japan Times’ story.

Weeks ago, China’s totalitarian leader Xi Jinping mentioned his itch for peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan.* Or else. No pause in his warplanes crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, nor withdrawal of the continual threat of military invasion.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen offered that the two countries were “not subordinate” to each other — which deeply hurt Xi’s feelings because … well, his Chinazis have their hearts set on subordinating Taiwan. In fact, the only thing preventing that deadly, freedom-suffocating Sino-subordination is the united weight — military and economic — of allied countries.

Japan, for instance. And the European Union, too — which just voted to deepen ties to Taiwan, ignoring Beijing’s demand to shun the island nation.

At a CNN “town hall” last week, President Joe Biden vowed the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Diplomatic folk tried to walk that back to “strategic ambiguity,” but billions of Asians heard him say it.

“To whom does Taiwan belong?” asked Pat Buchanan earlier this year, in a column trudging through 70 years of weaselly-worded communiqués and diplomatic understandings.

But comedian John Oliver counters that “people who aren’t Taiwanese making decisions for Taiwan is a bit f***ing played out, historically.”

“So maybe the best thing we can do is move past talking about Taiwan like it’s some kind of poker chip in a never-ending game of us versus them,” he concluded on his HBO show Last Week Tonight. “Because the fact is Taiwan is not a plucky bulwark against the Red Menace, nor is it some island-sized Viagra to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. Taiwan is 23 million people who, in the face of considerable odds, have built a free democratic society and very much deserve the right to decide their own future in any way that they deem fit.”

Let’s call it: Not subordinate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Since Taiwan has never been a part of the People’s Republic of China, there can be no prefix “re” in the threatened unification — by missiles and machine guns.

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international affairs social media

China Cord Not Quite Cut

Is it good news?

LinkedIn recently announced that it’s ending the current form of its service in China, citing the “challenging” environment.

“While we’ve found success in helping Chinese members find jobs . . . we have not found [the same] success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed. We’re also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment . . .”

Part of the problem has been China’s unremitting censorship. Which was not openly discussed in the LinkedIn post, of course.

Another part has been the Microsoft-owned firm’s willingness, as the price of doing business in China, to do the Chinazi government’s bidding in censoring dictatorship-disfavored posts. Also not openly discussed.

So now LinkedIn will replace the full LinkedIn experience with an app for China-based users that is a “standalone jobs application.”

Whether this means that LinkedIn will no longer censor Chinese LinkedIn users remains to be seen. For example, China is likely to demand censorship of a user if it sees a disapproved organization mentioned in a job posting.

At that point, will LinkedIn leave China entirely?

Given the Chinese government’s history, why wait?

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to operate in China and to censor results at the behest of the Chinese government.

That public opinion has swayed Microsoft and LinkedIn to the extent that they will no longer abet China’s censorship of social media is good. But still doing business with CCP-controlled China is fraught with danger. Why? Because China is fraught with tyranny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs

Strait Democracy

“China vows ‘peaceful reunification’ with Taiwan,” was The New York Post’s takeaway from Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing over the weekend.

What fantabulous news! Peace for our time … in Asia.

That same message was echoed by The Washington Post, which also noted that Xi’s statement comes “days after sending a surge of warplanes near the island.”

With China’s massive military build-up, ongoing threats to attack, invasion drills around Taiwan, not to mention flying squadrons of warplanes across the Taiwan Strait and into the island nation’s air defense identification zone — 150 such incursions last week — tensions have escalated to a fever pitch.

“We are very concerned,” warned Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, “that China is going to launch a war against Taiwan at some point.”

Thank goodness, then, that at this scary moment, our Fourth Estate can herald Xi’s promise of peace!

The only problem?

The Chinese dictator gave no such assurance.

Xi merely stated a preference for Taiwan’s peaceful surrender to his one-country, one-system totalitarianism — over having to snuff out Taiwan’s freedom by missile attack and invasion, murdering millions. Which the genocidal autocrat is still threatening to do whenever the opportunity presents.

Cancel the parade.

Still, if Xi’s rhetoric constitutes “a more conciliatory approach” from Beijing, chock it up to free countries finally waking up and pushing back against the Chinazis.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, noting her nation’s position “on the front lines of democracy and freedom,” focused on the fight against Chinese “coercion.” As she eloquently wrote in Foreign Affairs: “[T]he future of Taiwan is to be decided by the Taiwanese through democratic means.”

Provided there is the military might to deter Chinese aggression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs responsibility

The War Presidents’ Debacle

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 1, 2021
2 Comments on The War Presidents’ Debacle

Afghanistan, president, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden

President Biden yesterday called the now somewhat* completed withdrawal of U.S., Afghan and coalition soldiers and civilians an “extraordinary success,” arguing that “no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.”

There were a reported 120,000 people airlifted out, but with 13 U.S. soldiers killed in last week’s suicide attack at the Kabul airport, along with three British nationals and more than 160 Afghans — let’s cancel any victory lap.

Still, I’m more with Mr. Biden than with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who made the case on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace that the occupation of Afghanistan was a complete success, making the pull-out (now over) a horrendous policy mistake.

McConnell’s case for a never-ending “Mission Accomplished” understates the costs in blood and treasure — by trillions of dollars, in part. Just like you would expect of a deficit-and-debt plotter.

“America’s longest war has been by any measure a costly failure,” argues David Rothkopf in The Atlantic, adding that “Joe Biden doesn’t ‘own’ the mayhem on the ground right now.” Instead, Rothkopf blames “20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders.”

Rothkopf errs in letting Joe “The Buck Stops Here” Biden and the generals off the hook for the withdrawal. And gifting the enemy with a vast and sophisticated arsenal.

All four Afghanistan War presidents deserve blame, along with the war establishment, in government and out.

Remember: wars that cannot be won even with military victory on the battlefield should not be fought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The Biden Administration continues to pledge they’ll work to get Americans left in Afghanistan out. However, in an ABC News interview a little more than a week ago, Biden had committed that, “If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out.”

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folly international affairs

Done to the Dogs

It shouldn’t have happened.

Shire councils should not be killing dogs “to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals.”

But that’s what happened. The Bourke Shire Council in the New South Wales region of Australia shot and killed several dogs, including a new mother, that were about to be picked up and taken to an animal shelter.

An Office of Local Government reported that the council did this “to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”

We all know that shelters sometimes put down animals when the shelter cannot find a home for them.

This wasn’t that. The council’s action wasn’t a reluctant last resort. It was a first resort.

It was, the argument runs, about preventing volunteers from going from here to there in the ordinary course of their work, work that has not been discontinued for the duration of the pandemic.

The council’s action is an example of what happens when fear displaces common sense. The thwarted shelter volunteers, who love animals and volunteer precisely to prevent needless killing, are distressed. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that they had safety measures in place to deal with the pandemic while getting the dogs.

This isn’t the worst kind of thing going on in this world, obviously.

But you don’t have to be an animal rights activist to be appalled by the viciousness of the conduct.

And it does serve as a marker for the callousness and crazed panic of politicians in the current crisis. What else might they do?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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shelter dog

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