Category Archives: Foreign Policy

American Leaders, Political and Corporate, Outsourced Life To China

China, Donald Trump, Economy, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Labor, libertarianism, Outsourcing, Trade

Unless major shifts are taken by the West to stop outsourcing life to China—it is Western leaders who must be considered traitors to their people. China is just being China. Ultimate retributive action against China must come from our leaders. Ire must be directed at our leaders if they continue to outsource life to China, which includes manufacturing as well as energetically replacing American workers with Chinese workers.

It’s not enough to agonize “aloud, about how [the West] found [itself] so dependent on a country like China.

Via The Economist’s Chaguan column:

“On March 29th the Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, quoted government ministers blaming Chinese secrecy over covid-19 for ruining the world economy. How could Britain [and the U.S.] not now review Sino-British [and Sino-American] ties?”

Easily, unless the people hold their leaders responsible for reckless endangerment …

European and American elites “were [so] confident of ‘change through trade’; that commerce with China will nudge that country towards openness and democracy.”

a propaganda campaign [is] under way inside China to stress that most new infections involve cases imported from abroad. Though almost all of these involve Chinese nationals, curbs on foreigners are tightening. The border has been shut to most of them. On March 27th the government shocked embassies in Beijing by declaring a halt to the issuing of new identity cards for most grades of diplomat. This was apparently in response to the flouting of virus controls by a Western envoy. Embassies, in effect, face a ban on staff rotations until at least mid-May.

…during this pandemic, POTUS seems strikingly unmoved by ethical questions about China’s conduct. Asked about Chinese propaganda accusing America of infecting China with covid-19, which his own aides have angrily denounced, Mr Trump shrugged. “Hey, every country does it,” he told Fox News

On April 19, Trump suggested that Chinese culpability for mass murder would depend on the presence of intent: “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they deliberately carried responsibility for it, that’s what I mean, then there must be consequences.”

I agree with President Trump that the “autocracy called China” is characterized by “ruthless self-interest” that is praise-worthy. More so than America is China likely to act in the interest of its own people.

UPDATED (2/26): Corona Virus: When In Doubt Just How Remiss YOUR Government Is, See What Israel Is Doing

China, Economy, Foreign Policy, Government, Healthcare, Israel, Nationhood

“Israel is among the countries that responded most dramatically to the Corona Virus outbreak; many others—the USA, for example—found mainly travel warnings to be sufficient.

When in doubt about just how remiss YOUR government is, see what Israel is doing—despite China being Israel’s second-largest trading partner, and despite its liberal “think tanks” advising otherwise.

Jerusalem Post:

… In recent weeks, Israel has closed its doors to more and more of eastern Asia, starting with China, continuing to Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Thailand, and as of Sunday, South Korea and Japan, in response to the coronavirus’s spread through the continent and beyond. … “These countries have to understand our motivations. At this time, we have to take steps to defend Israel against the coronavirus, because public health is most important.”

Israeli non-thinking thank tank:

Jerusalem Institute for Security Studies researcher Alex Pevzner explained that “the government and people of China are very sensitive to their image and standing in the world. If Chinese citizens read that Israel closed off its borders to the Chinese, it reflects negatively on the [Israeli] government.” …

* Image courtesy Al Jazeera. “Corona Virus outbreak: Israel blocks arrivals from Seoul.”

UPDATE (2/26):

Israel has done the smartest thing re Corona: total ban on incoming travelers … “and blocked foreign travelers from ALL affected regions from entering. Here in the U.S., #CDC officials dodged questions on expanding travel restrictions and screening.” Israel is also ” … conducting boot camps to train hospital personnel in more rigorous infection control.”

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NEW COLUMN: No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes (Part 2)

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iraq, Just War, Morality, Neoconservatism, The State, War

NEW COLUMN, “No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes” (Part 2), is on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

“HOW does America change if our intelligence agencies were more accurate in their assessment of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs?”

The question was posed, just the other day, in “Make America Competent Again,” by David French, at the Dispatch, a neoconservative website. The tract is an agony aunt’s meander that calls on shoring-up competency in state and civil society.

But first: Dissecting, deconstructing and exposing the neoconservative mindset and machinations matters. The reason is this:

Thanks to President Trump, neoconservatives are not exactly having a moment—they’re down in the doldrums. But they’ll be back. For neoconservatives and liberal interventionists make up the Permanent State. The ideology the likes of David French, formerly of National Review, and his ilk promote—foreign-policy bellicosity, endless immigration, mindless consumerism, racial shaming, “canceling” of deviationists and conformity to an American identity that’s been melted away in vats of multiculturalism—is in our country’s bone marrow, by now.

Therefore, the fighting words in response to French’s framing of the invasion of Iraq as a mere glitch in intelligence are these:

Oh no you don’t, you so-and-so!!

No creedal neoconservative should be able to get away with the claim that a problem of criminality is really just a problem of competency.

You’d think that a military man like Mr. French would know that fixing problems rests on defining them with precision. Recasting state corruption and war crimes as incompetence cures neither state crimes nor incompetence.

America’s war on Iraq was a war crime, plain and simple. It was a reflexive collaboration between elements in a vast, by now familiar, intelligence bureaucracy, comprised of neoconservative and liberal interventionists, whose aim was to help The Powers that Be pulverize a country, Iraq, for the purpose of making it over in the image of America.

Contra Mr. French, the war on Iraq cannot be reduced to systemic incompetence. Anyone who doggedly tracked and documented the ramp up to war, as this column did, can attest that the United States bullied its way to war, monomaniacally. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes” (Part 2), is on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

UPDATED (1/16): NEW COLUMN: Should The U.S. Be The Globe’s Judge, Jury & Executioner?

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Ron Paul, War

NEW COLUMN is: “Should The U.S. Be The Globe’s Judge, Jury & Executioner?” It’s currently on The Unz Review, WND and “The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom.”

An excerpt:

Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general, was assassinated by a U.S. drone air strike, at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). Soleimani was traveling with one Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Al-Muhandis was an Iraqi, born and bred. He was even elected to the Iraqi Parliament, in 2005, until the U.S. intervened. (Yes, we intervene in other nations’ elections.)

Iraq’s caretaker prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, was furious, denouncing “What happened [as] a political assassination.” Unanimously, Iraqi lawmakers “responded to the Soleimani assassination by passing a nonbinding resolution calling on the government to end foreign-troop presence in Iraq.”

Yes, it’s a complicated region. And America, sad to say, still doesn’t know Shia from Shinola.

The consensus in our country is that “Soleimani deserved to die.” That’s the party-line on Fox News—and beyond. It’s how assorted commentators on all networks prefaced their “positions” on the Jan. 3 killing of this Iraqi-born, Iranian general.

Even Tucker Carlson—the only mainstream hope for Old Right, anti-war, America-First columns like this one—framed the taking out of Soleimani as the killing of a bad guy by good guys:

“There are an awful lot of bad people in this world. We can’t kill them all, it’s not our job.”

However you finesse it, the premise of Tucker’s assertion is that the American government, and the smart set who live in symbiosis with it, gets to adjudicate who’s bad and who’s good in the world.

The debate is only ever over whether the U.S. government should or shouldn’t act on its divine rights as transnational judge, jury and executioner, never over what’s right and what’s wrong.

Stateside, the only inquiry permissible is a cost-benefit calculus. Will the assassination of Soleimani, a military official of a sovereign state, and an avid and effective slayer of Islamic State terrorists—pay strategic dividends for America in the long run?

This is crass pragmatism bereft of principle. It’s currently on display everywhere, even surfacing on BBC News, where a female analyst, an American, was deploying the childish “bad man” meme to outline America’s Disneyfied foreign policy.

This angels-and-demons production always starts with the prototypical evil dictator who was alleged to be messing with his noble people, until the avenging, angelic empire sent a drone to the rescue.

Again, even Tucker, whose antiwar credentials in recent years have been impeccable, conceded that this Soleimani guy probably needed killing, which is the same thing Iraqis old enough to remember America’s destruction of Iraq, circa 2003, would say about President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice.

So, who’s right? Or, is blind patriotism predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world? …

… READ The Rest. The complete column, “Should The U.S. Be The Globe’s Judge, Jury & Executioner?“, is currently on The Unz Review, WND and “The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom.”

UPDATED I (1/16): “Mercer has written one of her best and most well balanced …” on Soleimani and US foreign policy.”

UPDATE II: 

“The reverend name is Ibrahim Naseir. His church in Aleppo was destroyed by NATO-sponsored fundamental Jihadists. The same terrorists who almost ethnically cleansed Syrian Christians from their towns and cities. General Soleimani crushed those Jihadists.”

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