Tag: foreign policy

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international affairs

Lack of Intelligence?

Afghanistan, US, United States, nation building

The quick collapse of the Afghan government and the takeover of the entire country by the vicious and barbaric Taliban was no intelligence failure, as Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) ridiculously charged Sunday.

U.S. intelligence officials had informed the Biden Administration, as well as previous ones, of the inevitable consequences.

Nor is this mess in any way a failure of the US military.

It is a political failure, through-and-through. 

While the withdrawal* could have been handled far better, the big mistake was thinking — for even a nanosecond — that we could remake Afghanistan into a pillar of freedom and democracy. 

Or anything remotely close.

The U.S. has been there for two decades, our longest war, and could have stayed another hundred years . . . and still, when we left, this would be the result. 

As this commentary warned repeatedly.**

I have come to support U.S. alliances with free peoples, within limits . . . the key limit being the American people’s degree of commitment. Such alliances would be more sustainable than our current role as world policeman, better protecting freedom from the admittedly serious danger presented by China and Russia, two exceedingly bad actors. 

We can occupy unfree peoples — for example, the Afghans — perhaps forever if we are willing to expend the blood (our sons and daughters) and treasure, but neither the U.S. nor any other country has shown the capability to remake peoples or nations. 

Liberation is beautiful. But if forced, it won’t take. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The U.S. Government bears some responsibility not to get people who work with it killed. We all seem to agree on that, even if we don’t agree on other issues regarding such interventions. So why does our government facilitate the placing of a price on many people’s heads and then cut and run without taking care to protect them? This is not a demand for perfection. But how about some quick visa paperwork and the offer of flights out of Afghanistan? In fact, fill out the stupid paperwork on the flight over here. 

** In 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, etc.

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Afghan Angst

Afghanistan, war, foreign policy, US

Declaring a coming end to “the forever war,” President Joe Biden announced last week that U.S. military forces will be leaving Afghanistan by September 11th* — a four-month-and-ten-day delay from the May 1 deadline that was set for troop withdrawal by the Trump Administration last year.

“Apparently, we’re to help our adversaries ring in the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them,” chided Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from the Senate floor.

But wait a second . . . McConnell knows that negotiating for the enemy Taliban, the horrific human rights violator and sponsor of terrorism, to put down arms and join the government to share power has been the U.S. policy objective from the Obama Administration’s embrace in 2013 to the Trump Administration actually inking the agreement. 

Dealing the Taliban back into the political mix, after having gone to war to dislodge them, never made sense. But neither does an ad infinitum military occupation seem rational . . . chewing up generations of soldiers until Afghanistan miraculously metamorphoses into a sustainable democracy. Two decades of U.S. nation-building offer no serious promise that the mission could be accomplished in another decade. 

Or two. 

Or ever.

Plus, plugging the problem in Afghanistan has not worked more broadly. “The terrorist threat has changed dramatically since we went to war in Afghanistan 20 years ago,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained. “Al-Qaeda is in Yemen and Syria and Somalia. ISIS is across that border region in Iraq and Syria and in multiple countries in Africa.”

Policy futility is a bad thing. Recognizing it is good. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Continuity Against the Chinazis?

Taiwan, China

With Joe Biden now in the White House, will the U.S. continue former President Trump’s hardline toward China?

Especially regarding Taiwan, regularly threatened with invasion by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Or will President Joe Biden — dubbed “Beijing Biden” by some Trump supporters during the campaign — return to the softer approach of previous administrations toward the Chinazis?*

Mr. Trump “approved weapons sales to Taiwan totaling more than $15 billion,” reported The Washington Post last October, “including coveted F-16 jets that frustrated Taiwanese hawks say Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush withheld.”

In that same article, a Taiwanese foreign policy scholar voiced alarm that Biden’s advisors, including Antony Blinken, now Biden’s pick to be Secretary of State, “still view Taiwan as a problem that needs to be handled within the greater U.S.-China relationship. . . . The lack of deeper understanding on the issue of Taiwan . . . is something that causes a lot of concern here.”

When then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the removal of all “self-imposed restrictions” on contact between the U.S. and Taiwanese governments, weeks ago, a Washington Post headline declared: “Trump upsets decades of U.S. policy on Taiwan, leaving thorny questions for Biden.” 

Perhaps not so prickly, however: Taiwan’s representative to the U.S. was soon invited to Biden’s inauguration . . . the first official invitation since the 1979 severing of diplomatic ties.

Not only that, “President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” Secretary of State nominee Blinken told The Epoch Times. 

“Nuclear-capable Chinese bombers and fighter jets,” Reuters informed on Saturday, “entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.”

Unified, bi-partisan opposition to the genocidal ‘Butchers of Beijing’ remains more critical than ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The term “Chinazi” springs from 2019 Hong Kong protesters. It seems the most accurate label for the totalitarian state inflicted on the Chinese people for the last 70 years by the Chinese Communist Party, especially in more recent times.

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The Return of the Imperialists

Joe Biden, war, foreign policy

We don’t live in a Star Wars universe. Not yet. But certain themes crop up: republic gives way to empire, and elite corps of . . . magic fighters? . . . seek to run a technocratic state. 

Donald Trump was cast by Democrats as an evil emperor sort of figure, but he didn’t quite fit that script — being the only president in two decades not to engage in a regime-change war.

So, with President-not-quite-Elect Joe Biden publicly announcing his new cabinet heads, we can see the old script followed closely, with the imperial guard piling up outside the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania, panting for power.

Though there are reams of news stories about this to pore over — the picks are big news — I’ll focus on Reason’s round-up. Of course, Biden is offering up Big Spenders (for whom deficits and debts just don’t matter*) as well as gung-ho interventionists. Take the Secretary of State candidate, Antony Blinken, profiled by Bonnie Kristian. While the proposed Secretary pro forma admitted that America cannot “solve all the world’s problems alone,” he then suggested that “our government can solve all the world’s problems if only it partners with other governments,” Ms. Kristian relates. She notes that Blinken has supported “U.S. military action in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. 

“And though he has since regretted the Yemen call, he believes the mistake in Syria was a failure to escalate.”

President Donald John Trump has followed the bomber love of his advisors, but has never quite bought into the need to escalate every conflict. And for that audacity, the foreign policy establishment has loathed him.

When Biden does hobble into the White House, we can unfortunately expect fewer ‘failures to escalate.’

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* While Republicans do almost nothing to hold back deficit spending, and consequent debt accumulation, Democrats increasingly demonstrate a special zealotry in confessing their lack of concern.

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In Deep with Biden

Joe Biden, war, deep state

On Election Day, “the Empire hopes to strike back,” writes Daniel McCarthy for The Spectator. “Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016.”

McCarthy argues that “Biden’s overall record is one of foreign policy interventionism,” but Biden’s Senate voting record is iffy-fifty: Biden “voted for the Iraq War, but he also voted against the 2007 surge.” He voted for the 1999 Serbian war, which destabilized relations with Russia, allowing the rise of Putin. But Biden voted against 1991’s Persian Gulf adventure which set the stage for post-Cold War American megalomania.

Nevertheless, McCarthy argues that “Joe Biden is an archetypal liberal interventionist of the post-Cold War variety. He understands war in the same terms as domestic policy: as an occasion to expand the power wielded by experts in Washington, whose moral and rational qualifications are beyond question — no matter how disastrous the consequences of their policies.”

Such a plausible case. War is certainly government “activism.”

McCarthy has spotted a real problem in “progressive liberalism,” and understands the “peer pressure” that so oppressively rules in the corridors of power. But he misses — perhaps merely for reasons of space — the sheer institutional power of the Deep State. It holds the secrets, it controls vast amounts of money, its immensity overpowers rational thought.

It is the government we cannot get to; it is the government that tried to “get” Trump.

Perhaps our “right to petition the government” can skip Congress and go right to the source, the Deep State.

Which really wants Biden to win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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America Safe for Quagmires?

quagmire, war, foreign policy, Iraq, Iran,

It happened: “The measure asking all foreign troops to leave . . . passed.”

We are talking about Iraq . . . and the U.S. military. 

So, not much else has happened.

After that parliamentary vote, Ron Paul explains, “when the Iraqi prime minister called up Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to request a timetable for a US withdrawal, Pompeo laughed in his face.”

I am with Dr. Paul on this one. The U.S. should take this opportunity to get out . . . “before more US troops die for nothing in Iraq.”

But is it for nothing?

Once upon a time, Americans were afraid of military “quagmires.” Now somehow we’ve come to accept permanent quagmire status in multiple theaters. 

Could it be that when President George Herbert Walker Bush said, following the First Persian Gulf War, that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” he was speaking of its psy-op effect on the American electorate?

Pushing us into World War I,  President Wilson claimed to be “making the world safe for democracy.” Perhaps Papa Bush made America safe for never-ending “regime-change wars.”

Before becoming vice president and then president, and going on to claim victory over  “Vietnam Syndrome,” Bush headed the Central Intelligence Agency, the original regime modification professionals. And certainly endless, pointless foreign warfare has been the health of . . . the Deep State.

“The pressure for the U.S. to leave Iraq has been building within the country,” argues former Rep. Paul, “but the U.S. government and mainstream media is completely — and dangerously — ignoring this sentiment.”

Put American soldiers — not some secret or not-so-secret Deep State agenda — first. Bring them home.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The New Arms Race

Space Force, war, foreign policy,

We who grew up in the time of the Apollo missions are more than aware of the arms-race angle to the Soviet and American forays into Earth orbit and beyond. 

Now, we must recognize that the space race is no longer mere ornamentation over earthly military competition.

“The United States and China are rapidly building space warfare capabilities,” writes Bill Gertz in the Washington Examiner, “as part of a race to dominate the zone outside Earth’s atmosphere.”

Of course, much of this remains ground support. WHNT News 19 in Alabama quotes the Commander of the U.S. Space and Missile Defense Command at Redstone Arsenal — a Lieutenant General who “will soon become Deputy Commander of the U.S. Space Command in Colorado” — explaining that current space resources must be ever-ready in support of “the war fighter, the soldier on the ground.”

But the “satellites in space” he refers to, the ones with “very unique capabilities,” are not just about ground support. For when Donald Trump proposed a new Space Force military division last year, he wasn’t blowing smoke.

Billions of future dollars, maybe, but not smoke. 

In the works?

  • “AI for space war to stop anti-satellite weapons”;
  • Capabilities to treat “Space [a]s a warfighting domain similar to air, land and sea”;
  • Space planes, such as the in-dev X-37B;

and much more.

The Chinese are looking for “space superiority,” says American intelligence, and of course “you know what this means,” as Bugs Bunny liked to say.

War?

At least war profits.

Even France is talking about militarizing space.

Brave new world? Or more of the same, just higher up?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Beacon of Liberty

handshake, China, US, foreign policy, China, Hong Kong,

What part should we play in terror, torture, oppression?

Asking for a friend. 

Well, friends . . . some three-hundred-and-thirty million of them.

Egypt. The government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi just stormed the newsroom of one of Egypt’s few remaining independent media outlets, Mada Masr. 

“Mada has shown nothing but courage in reporting the news against all odds,” a representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) offered bitterly, “and in the face of brutal repression.” 

According to the CPJ, Egypt is the world’s top jailer of journalists. And that repression is not just well-documented, it is also well-funded. By . . . well . . . Sisi’s state receives roughly $1.5 billion in annual U.S. military and economic assistance, while Egyptians must “forgo democratic liberties” as “authorities” maintain “a constant crackdown . . . encompassing anyone criticizing the government,” informs a Congressional Research Service report updated last week. 

Iraq. Anti-government protests are in full swing, with Iraqis “demanding an end to corruption, more jobs and better public services,” the BBC informs. More than 300 people have been killed by the government the American military set up, and nearly 15,000 injured as Iraqi Security forces have used tear gas and live bullets against protesters.

Hong Kong. The smashing victory for pro-democracy candidates in the former British colony, who “won almost 90 percent of the seats” in local elections, was the weekend’s bright spot. Voters sent an unequivocal message.

Now on President Trump’s desk is the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (H.R.3289), which puts the territory’s special trading status at risk should China impinge on its autonomy.

Will our president sign the legislation or exchange it with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a better trade deal?

Funding, facilitating oppression is no way to serve as a beacon of liberty to the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo: Studio Incendo / Photo: Flazingo Photos

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The Draft

Attendant Loss of Life

war, the draft, slavery, foreign policy, lottery

Is there an easy way to avoid the insanity of what author and decorated Marine vet Elliot Ackerman calls America’s “two-decade military quagmire”?

Yesterday, I took issue with Ackerman’s idea of a “reverse-engineered draft,” whereby each year about 65,000 young men and women — but only those with parents in the highest federal tax bracket* — would be forced into the military for two years of “service.” 

“A draft places militarism on a leash,” he argues. But in reality, select young people lose their freedom and politicians don’t relinquish any powers.

Still, Ackerman maintains that 

  1. “with a draft the barrier to entering new wars would be significantly higher” 
  2. placing these “kids” in jeopardy via military conscription would activate their wealthy and influential parents to lobby Congress and the White House 
  3. “could create greater accountability” 

ultimately resulting in a saner military posture around the globe, hopefully allowing us to “avoid . . . a major theater war, the continuance of our ‘terror wars,’ the attendant loss of life.”

Threatening to draft their kids would raise the eyebrows of parents. That’s why when Congress last voted on legislation mandating a draft, even the bill’s author voted NO.

But would having a small drafted force somehow actually save lives?

Let’s look at combat deaths when the United States used a military draft, post-World War II, and compare that to the time-period since 1973, when the draft ended and the All-Volunteer Force began. Those numbers are not close: 

  • Between 1946 and 1973, with the draft in place, nearly 100,000 American soldiers were killed overseas. 
  • Over the more than four decades since the draft ended, fatalities remain under 10,000.

That’s a heap-big correlation between the military draft and “attendant loss of life.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As I noted yesterday, targeting the draft to apply only to top income earners clearly violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

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