Tag: foreign affairs

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The Deafening Silence

The extraordinary crises in U.S. foreign affairs, and the plight of human rights throughout the world, have failed to gain attention in much of the media.

The reasons are clear.  It is the mantra of much of the political left that America is in no military danger from abroad, freedom is not imperiled, and that whatever global challenges Washington must deal with are the products of its own prior actions. That has been the guiding principle of the Obama Administration. Whatever inconvenient facts depart from that narrative are wholly disregarded because much of the media shares that viewpoint.

There is clear precedence to this from the last presidential election. During a televised debate, Republican challenger Mitt Romney noted that Russian belligerence was a key problem. He was mocked not just by rival candidate Barack Obama, but also by the moderator of the debate, who abandoned all pretense of impartiality.  Despite the clear, overt and overwhelming evidence during the past several years proving Romney correct, there has been no admission of being drastically incorrect either by the President or the many journalists who joined him in mocking Romney’s statement.

While international affairs can sometimes be nebulous, the poor results from the foreign policy actions of President Obama and Secretaries Clinton and Kerry are crystal clear.

Russia and China have found that aggressive use of force achieves results, and comes at almost no cost.  Iran has found that it can be financially rewarded for holding Americans for ransom. Evildoers such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have learned that there is no such thing as a “Red Line” beyond which they dare not go. Afghanistan’s Taliban knows that all it has to do is wait out the clock for American forces to leave.

Consider:

When the Chinese Navy infringed upon the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone, Obama did nothing.  The White House didn’t even lodge a diplomatic protest.  Even after the World Tribunal at The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines, the White House remained largely on the sidelines.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the only Obama/Clinton response was a weak set of sanctions. A simple, nonviolent, and extremely effective response would have been to open up federal lands to energy exploitation, in order to eventually bring down the cost of energy. This would have bankrupted Moscow, which is heavily dependent on energy sales to finance its military. It would also have reassured European allies of future access to energy without kowtowing to Russia. But the policy was ignored by the White House.

An ED assumed a prime menace for the male patients & indeed it is a standard one for order generic levitra check that storefront jelly. The cheapest cialis person who suffers from allergies or sneezing may come out of their problems by taking ginger tea. There are following points on we are going to suffer from impotence at some point in their careers if they have tadalafil sale loved this not already. Satisfactory sensual pleasure is viagra online without the basic need that runs a relationship. Obama’s failure to even diplomatically oppose China’s aggressive actions meant that not only was Beijing’s belligerence rewarded, but that a golden opportunity to unite Southeast Asian and Pacific nations in an anti-Chinese aggression front that would have discouraged future assaults was lost.

On the flip side, America’s friends, allies, or simply those who happen to be on the same side of a controversy as the U.S. have found that Washington is neither reliable as a partner nor even committed to protecting its own shared self-interest. Ask the Israelis or Egypt’s former President Hosni Mubarak about that.

The utter failure of the Administration to enforce its own “Red Line” in Syria, or to respond in any meaningful way to the Benghazi attack, and to give the Taliban high status by negotiating with it, allowed depraved forces both in power in the Middle East and around the world seeking to gain dominance all the encouragement they needed to stay their course.

The Obama-Clinton foreign policy is not the product of dedication to non-violence or human rights, reasons often given for President Carter’s unsuccessful foreign policy moves. This White House and its supporters have turned their backs on atrocities whenever convenient.

Just one example: Vice News reports that “human rights groups, Malaysian activists, and a number of US Senators accuse Barack Obama’s administration of manipulating [that nation’s record on human trafficking] to allow the Southeast Asian country to join the president’s massive free trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership… Many anti-human trafficking advocates are crying foul.  ‘The State Department has sold out human rights to corporate and regional interests,’ David Abramowitz, the former chief counsel to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a member of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking, told Vice News.”

The number of humans in slavery has grown during the Obama-Clinton-Kerry tenure. The California Department of Justice reports that “Human trafficking is the world’s fastest growing criminal enterprise and is an estimated $32 billion-a-year global industry.”

Shoebat  reports that “In Saudi Arabia, (A major contributor to the Clinton Foundation) and other Gulf States, there are around over a million slaves. Obama has never mentioned this…These are deprived of food, adequate living conditions and are many times abused.”

The consistent record of foreign policy failure by Obama, Clinton and Kerry should not be overlooked or ignored.  However, that is precisely what America’s highly biased media is doing.

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Delusional Thinking in Foreign Affairs

There is little so unproductive, and frequently dangerous, as the power of a delusion that has taken such a strong hold that reality never has the opportunity to intrude. When government adopts delusional policies, the potential danger is enormous. When the press shares the delusion, the prospect of a reasonable discussion to allow the facts to come to light is only a faint prospect.

Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was a dark and depressing analysis of the current status of the United States. Unfortunately, it also happened to be accurate.  While there can certainly be a debate about the best way to address the challenges facing the nation, the unsavory truth is that America has not been in worse condition since before the middle of the last century. To avoid admitting that is to ignore reality.

Abroad, the unprecedented military power of the Russian-Chinese alliance presents the greatest threat the nation has ever faced. At home, the continuing descent of the middle class, the failure of the war on poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and the stunning downturn in race relations all demand a harshly honest examination, and significant and viable responses.

Today’s review looks at foreign affairs.

It is deeply disturbing that Obama continues to maintain that the world is in generally good order.  During his remarks at last week’s Global Development Summit,   the President stated: “it is worth reminding ourselves of how lucky we are to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history…the world has achieved incredible advances in development and human dignity… the world has never been less violent, healthier, better educated, more tolerant, with more opportunity for more people…”  As Debra Heine of PJ Media points out, this isn’t the first time the President has delivered an extremely optimistic—and unrealistic– viewpoint. Almost exactly two years ago, he made a virtually identical statement: “The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been.”

To an extent, Mr. Obama is correct. Since the adoption of the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1787, human rights have been on an upward trajectory. Advances in science, as well as the widespread acceptance of capitalist economics, and the military power first of the British then the United States navies (which the President at times appears profoundly uncomfortable with) to safeguard commerce have provided more opportunities for more people than ever before.

But the harsh truth is that all those wonderful attributes are in immediate and significant danger of quickly being swept away, facts the White House continues to ignore. Indeed, the U.S. Administration has taken steps which actually diminish those accomplishments.

Personal safety as well as the upward thrust of human rights and gender equality has been severely blunted by Islamic extremism, which the current administration finds hard to discuss, let alone address. Headline Politics notes: “It’s an understatement to call President Obama ‘delusional’ when it comes to his ISIS non-strategy. After all, the man once referred to them as the ‘JV team’ and twice said that he had no working plan to defeat the terrorist group, after he had already introduced a plan that didn’t work.”

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But the Obama Administration adheres to its delusion, and the media harshly attacks those that seek to bring a realistic view to the forefront. The one medium that has provided the greatest forum for exposing atrocities against human rights, the internet, is scheduled, thanks to the President’s own initiative, to be opened to censorship by some of the very nations that are engaging in these acts.

Other problems abound.

Within the Americas, the adoption of socialist policies by several nations, most significantly Venezuela, have introduced the possibilities of famine and chaos to the New World.

The threat of another world war continues to rapidly develop. American and European progressives continue to advocate spending less on defense, based on a delusional and oft-repeated mantra that large wars are a thing of the past. Unfortunately, Russia and China have taken advantage of the delusion. Putin is moving diligently to restore the Soviet Empire, which was defeated thanks in large part to Ronald Reagan’s realpolitik approach of building a massive military. The Russian strongman has overcome the prior western lead in nuclear arms, and built a fearsome conventional armed force even as the U.S. and its allies have allowed their deterrents to substantially deteriorate.

In Asia, China has, thanks to a rate of increased spending that has surpassed anything either the USSR or the US ever did at the height of the Cold War, built a dominant military. It openly claims vast swaths of oceanic areas to which it has no legal right, and uses it massive might to overcome any international law objections.

Irrational and openly belligerent regimes, such as Iran and North Korea, move swiftly and surely, despite the existence of international agreements, to build and deploy advanced weapons of mass destruction.

A clear case can be made that the threats facing the entire planet are more severe now than they were even during the WW2 era, since, unlike Germany and Japan, the Russian-Chinese axis has geographical, industrial and population advantages that Hitler and Tojo never attained.

Tomorrow: Domestic Delusions

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Pearl Harbor, Again

Today is December 6, 2014, and the United States is in more danger than it has ever been in since December 6, 1941, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

North Korea is on the verge of expanding again its nuclear program. Terrorist control more territory than ever throughout the Moslem world. Several Latin American nations are openly hostile to the U.S. and have invited foreign military advisors and suppliers in.  Russia has returned to the Cold War, with a military more advanced and agile than ever. China seems openly intent on using its new superpower-level military prowess to push the United States out of the Pacific.  Now, it’s been disclosed that the nuclear talks with Iran have been extended past the November deadline all the way to June, giving that nation’s leadership every opportunity to complete its atomic weapons program.

Unlike the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. defense industrial base does not have the capacity to quickly build up the armed forces in the event of a major armed conflict.
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As these dark clouds of danger gather into a terrible storm, our own military continues to deteriorate.

There has rarely been a more thorough, extensive and deeply dangerously total failure of American foreign policy than the U.S. has endured under the Obama Administration.  What is equally as troubling is that the President, in spite of these disastrous conditions, is utterly unwilling to change course.

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What Works, What Does Not

The prevailing attitude in Washington is that the many dire challenges facing America are so complex that the application of common sense solutions would be an exercise in futility.

A more objective review, however, indicates that it is not inherent complexity, but ideological bias and political gamesmanship that prevents the use of effective approaches to national problems, foreign and domestic. The inherent optimism and pragmatism in a people that carved humanity’s most prosperous, powerful and liberated society out of a remote wilderness is constantly repressed by bureaucrats, overpaid consultants, and smug academicians whose interests lay not in solving the issues at hand but in forwarding a poisonous combination of self-enrichment and the advancement of a philosophy of government that furthers their personal agendas.

In large part, the American success story is based on the concept that the individual, not the government, is sovereign, and the greatest judge of his own well-being.  Government intervention in daily life was conceptually and constitutionally limited to what was strictly necessary, primarily in areas covering defense or other emergencies, the establishment of a fair judicial system to end disputes and punish crime, and to promote the advance of this new civilization. Alexis de Tocqueville, who travelled to young America from France in 1831, marveled that “What most strikes the European who travels across the United States is the absence of what among us we call government or administration.”

But that doesn’t fit in with the agenda of those who, like former Obama advisor Rahm Emmanuel, believe that “You should never waste a good crisis.”  Rather than solve the problem, those that seek to enhance government and, hence, their personal power at the expense of the individual merely utilize the issues at hand to forward their program—to “progress” towards a system of governance that essentially rejects the idea of personal freedom.

The foundations that threaten the ever-accelerating drive to more powerful and centralized control—free speech, free enterprise, a knowledge of the patriotic and individualistic philosophy that in the past led to the success of the American nation—are repeatedly targeted, or merely ignored.

But what of foreign policy and defense, those areas that all agree, and common sense dictates, have always been and can only be the jurisdiction of the federal government? How did America descend from being the world’s sole superpower to being a nation that appears to be floundering?

Here, too, can be seen a rejection of the traditional approaches that led to success in the past. Since 1945, the U.S. shouldered the responsibility of leading a coalition of nations dedicated to not allowing the conditions that led to the Second World War to reoccur.  No nation was given the opportunity to believe that it could develop the environment to establish hegemony either globally or in any particular region.
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That concept has been whittled away.  For the first time, Russia has more deployable nuclear weapons than the United States, and has, particularly over the past year, developed a clear edge in conventional weapons on the European continent. China has developed naval, air, and missile forces that threaten the dwindled American navy in the Pacific. After a skillful and powerful use of force in two Persian Gulf conflicts, a clear policy shift away from the potential to reinsert ground troops when necessary has allowed virulently anti-western forces to rise to positions of extraordinary danger in the Middle East.

Closer to home, a rejection of the concept enforced since the onset of the Monroe Doctrine during the early days of U.S. history, that foreign forces not gain a foothold in the New World, has led to the establishment of a growing tide of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian military relationships with Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Most Democrats, and a small minority of Republicans such as Rand Paul, advocate sharply limiting American involvement abroad.  This is a repudiation of long-standing U.S. policy that has maintained that it is better to keep foreign threats abroad rather than await their arrival on U.S. shores. That concept has worked well.  No foreign army has successfully trod on an American state since the expulsion of British forces in the war of 1812.

A set of political beliefs that has enhanced personal freedom, including the ending of slavery and segregation, kept the nation free from enemy invasion, and created unmatched prosperity has been increasingly rejected by progressive politicians and academicians. The opposition to those forces of rejection of traditional and successful policies have been hampered by consultants who advise not rocking the boat.

A salient question largely ignored by the media when discussing progressive politics is, what, precisely, are progressives progressing towards?  Globally, their dreams of increased centralization have failed to produce prosperity wherever they have been tried, and have had the toxic side effect of limiting individual liberty.  Even in advanced European democracies, the financial constraints caused by progressive concepts have resulted in the necessity of draining funds away from defense to at least temporarily sustaining the affected nations as they continue down their downward spiral.

Why do so many in the United States advocate following this destructive path?

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Can Obama Change Course?

The increasing crisis brought about by the depredations of ISIS presents an opportunity for the White House to undo the damage resulting from its prior foreign policy decisions.

In the wake, and partially as a result of Mr. Obama’s early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, the most powerful, well-funded and organized terrorist organization yet seen emerged. In the President’s own words,

“They have rampaged across cities and villages — killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence.  They abduct women and children, and subject them to torture and rape and slavery.  They have murdered Muslims — both Sunni and Shia — by the thousands.  They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion.  They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people.”
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The need to defeat ISIS is not just based on its actions in Iraq. General Dempsey, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently noted that the group has a “apocalyptic, end-of-days” vision that will eventually have to be defeated …We actually have groups that now kind of are loosely connected, in some cases affiliated, that run from Afghanistan across the Arabian Peninsula into Yemen to the Horn of Africa and into North and West Africa…Some of those groups are local, some are regional, and some are global threats and that means it is going to be a very long contest …”

But Dempsey has apparently been forced to soft pedal his remarks, leading to concerns that the Administration’s record of foreign policy failures—in the Middle East, in the Clinton/Obama “reset” with Russia, in contending with China’s belligerence—has not convinced the President to change course.