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Posts Tagged foreign policy
Biden Admin Sends More Arms To Ukraine, Depleting Domestic Stock
From Guns.com:
“This announcement is the Biden Administration’s 44th tranche of equipment to be provided from DoD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021,” noted the Pentagon in a simple release. Besides “over 12 million rounds of small arms ammunition,” the withdrawal includes additional 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds, 120mm tank ammunition, as well as additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems and HIMARS rocket systems.
The running tally sheet of the more than $43 billion in American equipment transferred to Ukraine by the Biden administration since February 2022 includes “more than 300,000,000 rounds of small arms ammunition,” a figure first broached in June.
The US Should Sell Weapons To Any Country For Defense
From The Federalist:
For the record, I have consistently warned against American interventions and nation-building for more than 30 years. I agree with John Quincy Adams that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
National Review: US Should Defend Taiwan
From National Review:
The fundamental reason is, counterintuitively, China’s awesome power, and the very real danger that this power, if allowed to expand too far, will pose to Americans’ prosperity and freedom. The United States should defend Taiwan because it is important to deny China hegemony over Asia, by far the world’s largest market area. If China could dominate Asia, as it has made increasingly clear it seeks to do, Beijing would determine the terms, tempo, and distribution of global economic power. This would have the most profound and direct implications for Americans’ economic fortunes and, because our economic security is tightly linked to our freedom, it would ultimately endanger our liberties. A China dominant over Asia would have the power and wealth to dictate to Americans, fundamentally altering — and undermining — our national life.
The Politicians Continue To Play Checkers In Foreign Policy
From SOFREP:
Incredibly, Secretary of State Blinken said that Chinese influence in Afghanistan could be a positive thing if China sought a “peaceful resolution of the conflict,†and a “truly representative and inclusive†government. Yet, China doesn’t have a government that could be called “representative and inclusive†by anyone. So, why would they work towards one in Afghanistan?
Yet, it’s not unlikely that the Taliban held meetings with the Chinese intelligence service that could have aided in Taliban planning and operations.
Anyone who understands diplomacy and espionage can do the math and see that the Taliban are solidly backed by China. This could have emboldened them to take back Afghanistan in true blitzkrieg style as they did.
The World After Afghanistan
From Spiked Online:
While a new regime in Afghanistan offers opportunities, this is still the Taliban we’re talking about. It is still a brutal Islamist movement, committed to the rule of Sharia law. And, insofar as it backs and inspires other Islamists, the Taliban still poses a significant security threat to all those regional powers hoping to take advantage of its retaking of power.
Chaos In Afghanistan Could Be A Positive For Gun Rights At Home
From The Truth About Guns:
Alan M. Gottlieb, the Second Amendment Foundation’s founder and executive vice president, says that out of the swirling chaos may come a silver lining for American gun owners.
“The silver lining might be that there’s such a mess going on, they won’t have time to put through their anti-gun agenda, because right now they have so much other stuff on their plate,†Gottlieb said Sunday night on Armed American Radio.
Allies Question US Resolve After Afghanistan
From The Washington Post:
The Taliban’s stunningly swift advances across Afghanistan have sparked global alarm, reviving doubts about the credibility of U.S. foreign policy promises and drawing harsh criticisms even from some of the United States’ closest allies.
The China/Taiwan Problem
From War on the Rocks:
Changing circumstances merit fresh thinking about how to ensure peace between China and Taiwan going forward, but a decades-old policy framework restrains American flexibility in reacting to those changes. The result is a Taiwan Strait that edges ever closer to crisis while Washington tinkers with policies that may no longer be sufficient to avert catastrophe.
US Increases Arms Sales To Republic of China (Taiwan)
From The Federalist:
“If concluded, this proposed sale will contribute to the modernization of Taiwan’s howitzer fleet, strengthening its self-defense capabilities to meet current and future threats,†a State Department official told CNN.
Taiwan’s foreign ministry welcomed the deal, saying the proposed sale would help the island nation “maintain a rock-solid self-defense†and “regional peace and stability.â€
Silicon Valley and China
From Foreign Policy:
In the U.S. system, laws are legitimate insofar as they are conceived by what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called “the general will†of the people, expressed through the workings of a democratic political system. Laws that are arbitrary or imposed by the will of a single person of authority are illegitimate. Yet the Chinese system rests on the idea that the sole source of legitimacy is the CCP, which represents—it claims—the will of the Chinese nation in its entirety and violently suppresses challenges to its authority. This sharp tension between the political value systems that prevail in the two countries is a primary cause of the spiraling bilateral competition. Tech companies confront this tension when they are tasked to comply with Chinese laws, by enabling the arrest of dissidents for “subversion of state power†or the mass surveillance of Uighurs, which are rightly viewed by most Americans as immoral and illegitimate.
Tensions Increase Between China and Taiwan
From Al-Jazeera:
China has stepped up military activity around the island, where the losing nationalists set up their government at the end of the civil war in 1949, sending fighter jets and warships on exercises close to Taiwan. Communist-ruled China claims the island as its own and has not ruled out the use of force to assert its control.
Taiwan’s defence ministry, in a statement late on Thursday to accompany a video showing Taiwanese forces taking part in drills, said it was “expressing its stern attitude about recent Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army military pressure acts”.
What Is America’s Role?
From The Washington Examiner:
So how do we advance freedom and our other global interests if not through empire building or global policing? We do it through alliances.
Our most advantageous alliances are often the oldest. The “Five Eyes†intelligence cooperation between us and Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand began in 1956. But even 63 years later, it continues to deliver the crown jewels of global counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, and counter-hostile state intelligence. We should never forget that the most important ingredient of intelligence is not the tools, or even the people; it is the trust and shared values between those people. That is why the alliance sustains and why it continues to deliver.
Is The Gun Culture To Blame For America’s Foreign Policy?
Tyler Cowen seems to think so:
Gun possession breeds a certain kind of kick-ass mentality—”martial culture”—that doesn’t stop at the border’s edge, but spills “over there.” Therefore, if libertarians want to restrain America’s adventurism abroad, they will have to stop looking at guns from a narrow rights-based perspective, as is their wont, and start looking at them from the standpoint of the undesirable foreign policy consequences they produce—and so accept some gun regulation.
Reason’s reply:
As a naturalized American from India, I have always been both amused and bemused by the American romance with guns. I have also observed firsthand the destabilizing effect of America’s post-9/11 “martial interventions” near my native country. Thus, if there were a serious chance that restrictions on gun rights would help reduce Uncle Sam’s war mongering, I would consider it. But color me dubious.
Cowen’s argument is intriguing and original—not to mention refreshing in that it doesn’t put the religious faith that liberals do in gun control diminshing violence. It also has a certain intuitive plausibility. But does support for private gun rights actually generate a spirit of martial interventionism? Actually, as far as libertarians are concerned, the connection runs in the other direction.