Category: Foreign Relations
Yes, I Know that it’s Boris Johnson………
But when he says that, “The only continent with weaker economic growth than Europe is Antarctica,” he’s right.
Unfortunately, the Germans run the EU, and they are dead set on repeating the mistakes of the Reichsbank during the great depression, where mindless monetary tightening made the impact of the Depression unusually brutal, and led to the rise of the Nazis.
Now we have an EU dominated by the Germans and by their fetish for austerity continues, and the rise of the right wing throughout Europe.
If I were in Britain, I would vote to leave for two reasons:
- It would cripple the UK’s financial industry, which is a good thing.
- It would show the rest of the EU that there are alternatives to German hegemony.
About F%$#ing Time
After months of Terror Bombing by the House of Saud in Yemen, the White House has finally blocked the transfer of cluster bombs to their military:
Frustrated by a growing death toll, the White House has quietly placed a hold on the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia as the Sunni ally continues its bloody war on Shiite rebels in Yemen, U.S. officials tell Foreign Policy. It’s the first concrete step the United States has taken to demonstrate its unease with the Saudi bombing campaign that human rights activists say has killed and injured hundreds of Yemeni civilians, many of them children.
The move follows rising criticism by U.S. lawmakers of America’s support for the oil-rich monarchy in the year-long conflict. Washington has sold weapons and provided training, targeting information, and aerial refueling support to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen. It has also sold Riyadh millions of dollars’ worth of cluster bombs in recent years.
Asked about the hold on the shipments, a senior U.S. official cited reports that the Saudi-led coalition used cluster bombs “in areas in which civilians are alleged to have been present or in the vicinity.”
“We take such concerns seriously and are seeking additional information,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The US foreign policy establishment has viewed the House of Saud as a crucial ally in the region for longer than I have been alive, and I cannot imaging that this decision appears not to have come from there.
I am pretty sure that this came from the Oval Office, and cynic that I am, I am thinking that this decision was driven by electoral considerations, specifically that Trump would use our cozy relationship with Riyadh against Hillary Clinton in the upcoming election.
Too True
Over at The Nation, James Carden exhibits a shocking grasp of the obvious, and notes that Neocons are freaking out over Donald Trump because he represents a reduction in their influence, status, and paychecks, not because they are deeply concerned about the future of the nation:
The past year has been a difficult one for the leaders of the neocon right. First, their campaign to torpedo President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran came to naught. Then their preferred candidate for the Republican nomination, freshman Florida Senator Marco Rubio, ran a lazy and uninspiring campaign and was easily routed by Donald Trump. And now, with Trump about to be crowned king of the Republican castle in Cleveland, the neocons are experiencing something of an existential meltdown over the prospect of a future Trump administration.
Last week, a Politico piece surveyed the broken hearts among the neocon elite, in which they were described as being marooned on “The Lonely Island of Never Trump.” Just how lonely is that island, however, is open to question. If Politico is to be believed, nearly the entire GOP foreign-policy establishment is ready to bolt and join Team Hillary.
………
Kagan, Cohen and Boot quite rightly denounce Trump’s promise to ban Muslim immigrants. Yet their newfound concern for the well-being of Muslims is striking, given that they were among the most vocal supporters of the Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror” and the Iraq debacle which, according to the Nobel Prize–winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has “directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.”
………
Indeed. Are we really supposed to rue the possibility that the armchair warriors who’ve done the yeoman’s work of constructing an intellectual framework for endless foreign interventions and an overweening surveillance state might be excluded from the next administration?
It is hard to escape the conclusion that it isn’t Trump’s policies that are really bothering the neocons. Rather, it is the possibility that, come January 20, 2017, they could be frozen out of the corridors of power for the next four years. But what must really sting is this: Republican voters, given a choice between a neocon revival or Donald J. Trump went resoundingly for the latter. Deep down, I suspect, they know that they have no one to blame for Trump but themselves.
These guys have a hell of a racket: They are wrong about everything, and the profiteers who benefit from this evil incompetence get them gigs at think tanks, and pay to publish their books.
As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Trump is Right on This
For more the 20 years, we have had a problem with out negotiations with the DPRK (North Korea).
We haven’t even been able to end the Korean War.*
The problem is that one of the parties is not negotiations is not acting in good faith, and engages in meaningless posturing, threats of dire consequences, and a general lack of seriousness.
The other, of course, is the DPRK.
Since the Clinton administration stiffed the DPRK on formal diplomatic relations in 2004, the US has refused face to face negotiations, because ……… Hell, I don’t know why, but it appears that Donald Trump finds this similarly absurd:
Presumptive US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he is willing to meet North Korea’s leader to discuss its nuclear programme.
“I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him,” the businessman said of Kim Jong-un.
Such a meeting would mark a significant change of US policy towards the politically isolated regime.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton decried Mr Trump’s “bizarre fascination with foreign strongmen”.
The statement, delivered by one of her aides, added that Mr Trump’s foreign policy “made no sense”.
Because talking with people instead of threatening them works so well?
The DPRK has tested nukes, probably including a boosted fission device, and they have conducted launches of SLBMs in the 22 years since we promised to exchange ambassadors.
Talking to someone is not a reward. Rewarding someone is a reward.
In fact, talking to Donald Trump is one of my definitions of cruel and unusual punishment.
The Washington, DC consensus on the DPRK is nuts, and stupid, and nuts.
Trump is right here, a generation of US diplomats are wrong.
BTW, f%$# the Donald for being right, and f%$# the idiots at Foggy Bottom for making him right.
*Seriously. This is not a joke. Technically hostilities are still active, we are just in a temporary truce.
The Donald Calls Hillary a War Monger
It looks like Donald Trump is going to be the anti-war candidate this election:
Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.
Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger.
“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”
And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.
Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”
I think that Trump is an isolationist, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
When you look at the history of US military and diplomatic interventions over the past 60 years, overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran as well as any number of Latin American nations (Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc), and interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (1963, 1990, 2003), Lebanon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, Kuwait, Somalia, Libya, the Ukraine, and Syria, you have a poor record.
At best (Kuwait) you have us propping up a corrupt, reactionary, and totalitarian state.
At worst, you have the effective destruction of a country and its society, particularly in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and Cambodia, and the death toll is in the tens of millions.
The only post Korea success that I can think of is in the former Yugoslavia.
The world would be better off if we were more isolationist.
Here is a suggestion for Hillary: If you are making Donald Trump sound sane about anything, you are on the wrong side of history.
Yeah, This Really Inspires Support for the TTIP
The US ambassador to Italy, a political appointee by Obama, is saying that the US and Europe need to approve the trade deal in order to prevent prosecution of the banksters at the mega-banks:
On May 7th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or German Economic News, headlined, “USA planen mit TTIP Frontal-Angriff auf Gerichte in Europa” or “U.S. Plans Frontal Attack on Europe’s Courts via TTIP,” and reported that, “America’s urgency to sign TTIP with Europe has solid reason: Megabanks must protect themselves from claims by European investors who allege that they were cheated during the debt crisis. … The U.S. Ambassador to Italy has now let the cat out of the bag on this — probably unintentionally.”
In this particular case, the megabank that’s being sued isn’t American but German, Deutsche Bank, which the U.S. Ambassador to Italy has cited as his example to defend, perhaps so as to appeal to Germans to protect their megabanks against lawsuits from foreign investors (such as Italians) who complain. In that case it was investors in the Italian city of Trani, population 53,000. The smallness of the city was an issue the Ambassador raised against the suit’s having been brought there.
Reuters headlined on May 6th, “Italian prosecutor investigates Deutsche Bank over 2011 bond sale”, and reported that, “An Italian prosecutor is investigating Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) over its sale of 7 billion euros ($8 billion) of Italian government bonds five years ago, an investigative source told Reuters. A prosecutor in Trani, a town in southern Italy, is investigating because Deutsche Bank allegedly told clients in a research note in early 2011 that Italy’s public debt was no cause for concern, and then sold almost 90 percent of its own holding of the country’s bonds.” The U.S. bond-rating agencies are also subjects in this suit, because Trani had relied upon their ratings of those bonds.
The Obama Administration (through its Italian Ambassador) seems thus to be saying, in effect, that unless TTIP is passed into law, Europe’s megabanks (and the U.S. bond-rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s and Fitch) will be able successfully to be sued by cheated investors, just as has been happening with such American banks as JPMorgan/Chase and Goldman Sachs in the United States, which — since TTIP hasn’t yet been in force anywhere, including in the U.S. — were forced to pay billions to cheated investors. Apparently, Obama would be happier if those suits had been impossible in the U.S. The argument here, though only implicitly, seems to be that TTIP is the way to protect megabanks and the bond-rating firms. It concerns specifically the selling of sophisticated derivative investments.
I didn’t think that there was any bit of news that would make me more opposed to the TTIP or TPP.
I was misinformed.
Donald Trump at Least Recognizes That Our Nomenklatura Is Incompetent
Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he recognizes that our foreign policy establishment is incompetent and corrupt: (And Yes, the source is suspect, but it’s a “Stopped Clock Being Right Twice a Day” thing.)
The National Interest, which is a (Possibly THE) seriously Neocon organization, is trying to explain why it hosted a Trump foreign policy speech, and is not endorsing Trump’s analysis:
………
As the hosts, we are ill suited to evaluate Mr. Trump’s speech; some may find criticism ungracious or, conversely, see praise as unpersuasive. That said, we heard enough from Mr. Trump to feel that while his approach to foreign and security policy is not yet fully developed and remains a work in progress, it is quite different from the existing semi-consensus among America’s foreign-policy elites. His remarks outlined a fundamental break with post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy and offered an alternative vision with considerable appeal to a frustrated public, if less to the elites who have defined, articulated and implemented policy through three administrations run by both major political parties.
I, however, do agree with Trump’s assessment regarding the general uselessness of our foreign establishment, even while eschewing his nonsensical solutions
………
For much of the post–Cold War era, experts both inside and outside the government have faced informal but powerful pressure to share in existing interventionist orthodoxies if they seek top positions requiring Senate confirmation or even regular appearances in mainstream media. From this perspective, it is predictable that an avowedly antiestablishment candidate should provoke ferocious rhetoric from not only the political establishment, but also the foreign-policy establishment (perhaps even more bitterly).
Pledging that he would not surround himself “with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war” has surely fueled establishment fear of Mr. Trump. This statement—the functional equivalent of his signature line “you’re fired” directed at a number of former senior and mid-level officials—ensured that not only many Democrats, but also a number of Republicans in Washington’s foreign-policy community would race to the barricades. Some self-serving Trump-haters may well see this as the greatest danger he poses; ending the dominance of today’s foreign policy nomenklatura could directly threaten their careers. He provokes similar reactions among the transnational Davos elites by insisting “the nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.”
In America, this Soviet-style foreign-policy nomenklatura system has helped the post–Cold War foreign-policy elites in the Republican and Democratic parties to develop a sense of entitlement wholly disproportionate to their accomplishments. How difficult was it to run America’s foreign policy during an era of virtually unquestioned dominance? Why—with so many advantages—have our elites produced so many failed policies? And why do they feel no shame? No matter how many individual positions he changes, Mr. Trump will never satisfy the architects of these massive mistakes or, for that matter, their ardent supporters on editorial boards and television screens. To be clear, it is entirely appropriate to criticize Mr. Trump’s views or, for that matter, his temper. Both have long been important components in our electoral politics. What is not appropriate is to attempt to shut down public discussion of critical national issues.
Our current foreign policy establishment, what I refer to as the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, has squandered blood and treasure, all while making us less secure and insuring that our influence will be diminished in the future.
Heck of a job, Brownie.
And Hillary Clinton Acolytes Continue to Ruin the World
In this case, it’s Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland, who is attempting to coerce the government of Cyprus to cut ties with Russia and accept the continuing occupation of the northern portion of the island nation by the Turks:
The US is intensifying the pressure on Cyprus to accept a secret NATO plan to keep Turkish forces on the island.
Victoria Nuland, the State Department official in charge of regime change in Russia and Ukraine, met for talks last week with the President of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, and with Turkish Cypriot figures. The State Department and US Embassy in Nicosia have kept silent on what was said. A well-informed Cypriot source reports Nuland “was in Cyprus to pre-empt any likelihood of future deepening in relations with Russia. Anastasiades may not want to, but he may have no other option.” A second Cypriot political source said: “[Nuland] will try to blackmail him. I’m not sure how he will react.”
Andros Kyprianou, head of AKEL, the Cyprus Communist Party running strongly against Anastasiades’s party in next month’s parliamentary election, issued an unusual warning against the Nuland plan. “For us”, Kyprianou (right) said, there is only one acceptable outcome to negotiations between the Greek and Turkish communities for the reunification of the island. This is a “solution that ends the occupation and colonization, restoring the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and unity of the Republic, based on UN resolutions, the High Level Agreements, International and European Law. The solution is to demilitarize Cyprus and excludes any guarantee and intervention rights in the internal affairs of the country by foreign forces.”
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US military commanders and political leaders have never advocated Turkish withdrawal from the island, or compliance with the UN resolutions. Instead, they have recommended incorporating both parts of Cyprus into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The political and military commands in Ankara have been reluctant to accept a NATO solution for Cyprus because they object to what they regard as “dilution” of their army on the island. The Nuland plan is the latest attempt to give Ankara what it wants, and override Greek Cypriot objections. Nuland has also told Anastasiades she wants to accelerate agreement on the terms of settlement before the US presidential election in November.
Anastasiades has already declared himself in favour of joining NATO by signing the preliminary Partnership for Peace programme, but AKEL has been able to block it. For the time being, Cyprus is not a NATO member, and cannot accept another NATO base on its territory. “How can Nuland now push through a Turkish base on the island”, a well-known Cypriot strategist asks – “that isn’t a Turkish base and isn’t a NATO base either, but meets Ankara’s demand for a military ‘guarantee’, and will be accepted by Anastasiades?”
………
For weeks now in Moscow, there have been public hints that Nuland has resuscitated the scheme for withdrawing Turkish forces under the Turkish flag, then returning them under a NATO flag. In Nicosia in December, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that such a scheme would be unacceptable to Russia. “The sides should reach agreements that would provide these security guarantees on a fundamentally new basis,” Lavrov said, “which will be acceptable to both Cypriot communities…This role should be primarily played by the UN Security Council.” For more details, read this.
In February, Lavrov’s spokesman at the ministry in Moscow attacked statements by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his “calls on the Cypriot Turks to take a tough, uncompromising stance in the ongoing intercommunal talks in Cyprus, including on territorial delimitation, a very sensitive issue. This is in stark contrast to Ankara’s statements on its commitment to facilitating a peaceful settlement on the island in the near future. It is obvious that by addressing such calls to one of the parties to the inter-Cypriot dialogue, Turkey’s leaders are rudely interfering in the negotiation process with a view of promoting their own interests.”
This Neocon bullsh%$ is getting really old.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
I Know That It’s Not Good to See the Sausage Made, but We Should Know When It Is a Sh%$ Sandwich
Greenpeace has published leaked documents detailing the negotiations between the US and EU over the TTIP, and it is worse than previously thought:
Bernd Lange, the chairman of the European Parliament’s important trade committee, has indicated that he now expects the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations will probably fail, following a major leak of confidential documents from the talks.
Greenpeace Netherlands has released half of the entire TTIP draft text as of April 2016, prior to the start of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US, which reveal US demands in detail for the first time.
Although the EU has improved transparency recently, and routinely publishes its offers for each TTIP chapter, the US has consistently refused to do so. Even MEPs and MPs have faced extreme restrictions on what they are allowed to look at, copy, or even say when it comes to the US position. The new leak by an unknown whistleblower represents a major blow to US attempts to keep its negotiating demands confidential, and provides important information to the both the EU and US public for the first time.
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As Ars noted last September, in the face of massive public concerns about ISDS, the European Commission is proposing a modified approach, the Investment Court System (ICS), which it claims addresses the problems of ISDS. However, even though the ICS idea was formally presented to the US last year, one of the TTIP leaks shows that it was not even discussed during the 12th round, something that the European Commission’s public report on the negotiations omitted to mention. This confirms earlier indications that the US is not interested in ICS, and will insist on including standard ISDS in TTIP, regardless of EU worries.
A leaked chapter on “Regulatory coherence, transparency and other good regulatory practices” indicates that the US wants all regulations, even those concerning health and safety or environmental issues, to be judged by the yardstick of their effects on trade: “When developing a regulation, a regulatory authority of a Party shall evaluate any information provided in comments by the other Party or a person of the other Party regarding the potential trade effects of the regulation that it receives during the comment period.”
n practice, this means that companies will be able to challenge any new EU and US regulations that might have an adverse effect on their profits, as is often the case when new environment regulations are brought in. It is likely to make it much harder to strengthen laws that might disadvantage business but protect public health and safety.
………
The key sentence comes in the particularly sensitive document entitled “Tactical State of Play of the TTIP Negotiations.” This is essentially the European Commision’s frank evaluation of where things stand in the TTIP talks. Here’s what it has to say on the US demand: “progress on motor vehicle-related parts would only be possible if the EU showed progress in the discussion on agricultural tariffs.” In other words, if the EU doesn’t open up its markets to agricultural products from the US—which means things like beef treated with hormones, and maybe even chlorine chickens—there will be no improved access for EU car manufacturers.
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It is also concerned that the EU’s “precautionary principle,” which requires that products should be shown to be safe before they can be put on the market is being replaced by the US “risk-based” approach, which allows products to be sold until it is proved that they are dangerous.
………
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, public support for TTIP was already plummeting, even before this leak appeared. It seems unlikely that the information it reveals about US demands will assuage any European fears.
Looking at the positions that have been taken by the US in these negotiations, I can only say that, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The worst parts of the trade deals that the US have negotiated over the past few decades is not that reality, and our partners, require compromises.
The worst parts of the trade deals that the US have negotiated over the past few decades come from a foreign trade establishment who follows the most extreme and destructive philosophy.
Here is hoping that the free market market mousketeers who have been driving foreign trade deals get a job flipping burgers, because their death toll is beginning to rival that of Josef Stalin.
If These Guys Hate Him, Trump Might Be Right
Over at FT, Edward Luce makes the obvious observation, that the foreign policy establishment who is having the vapors of Trump’s foreign policy, Luce ironically calls them the. “best and brightest, have been wrong about everything all the time for decades:
Intellectuals crave doctrines. The tidier the formula, the easier it is to make sense of that messy world out there.
In the view of the US’s strategic elites, Donald Trump’s mind is recklessly untidy. Last week they poured scorn on his much-awaited foreign policy speech. Not only was it self-negating — Mr Trump vowed both to be predictable and unpredictable — but he has yet to hire an intellectually respected adviser. It is doubtful he has read a book on foreign policy. Is further proof needed? Mr Trump is not only a loose cannon. He is also ignorant of the canon. The man could not even pronounce Tanzania (his version rhymed with Romania).
All of which is true. But the critique suffers from two weaknesses. First, the people making it, which includes almost everyone, are throwing stones from glass houses. These include former Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and their galaxy of advisers — 121 of whom signed a letter condemning Mr Trump’s platform. It also includes the Democratic elites led by Hillary Clinton. They may differ in degree but they share a basic worldview. The US must uphold universal values with force if necessary. That is how things are done. In the words of Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, the US sees further than other nations because “it stands taller”.
All of which adds up. Yet, with one or two exceptions, these were the same people who brought you the US-led invasion of Iraq. Mr Trump plays loose with detail when he claims to have opposed the 2003 war (he said very little until the scale of the disaster had become obvious). But few outside Washington bother with such timelines. What they grasp is that Mr Trump has united the same elites against him who were so collectively wrong on Iraq. This is no minor detail. Washington’s biggest brains have a record of miscuing in unison on the biggest questions.
Think of the Vietnam war, which competes with Iraq as the largest foreign policy disaster in US history. That was famously orchestrated by “the best and the brightest”. Their doctrine was the domino theory — if one state fell to communism, its neighbours would follow. It was simple, logical and disastrous. George W Bush’s doctrine was that pre-emptive war would stave off bigger threats down the line. It was also easy to grasp and catastrophic. The Iraq war spawned the monster child of Isis. On a smaller scale, the same could be said of the 2011 US-backed overthrow of Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi. Libya is now a second base for Isis. Given the chance, might these same elites drag the US into a Syrian quagmire, or a military clash with Russian president Vladimir Putin over Ukraine? Could we rule out a conflict with China in the South China Sea?
I think that it is highly likely that Trump’s foreign policy will batsh%$ insane.
It will be completely nuts.
That being said, there is a substantial possibility that this foreign policy will be saner and less destructive than the Council on Foreign Relations/Washington foreign policy consensus.
F%$# Me, I Agree with Michael F%$#ing Kinsley
Michael Kinsley is the epitome of a mindless contrarian.
I refer to this mindset as “Michael Kinsley Disease”.
And after nearly 4 decades of being shallow, and facile, and wrong, he finally gets one right when he calls out the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC as immoral and incompetent:
Can our nation survive without taking advantage of the wisdom of self-described “foreign policy elites”? That is the question posed on Page 1 of The Post’s print edition on Saturday, under the headline “Foreign policy elites indecisive on Trump.” The Post’s Karen DeYoung reports that 121 Republican national security experts have signed a petition saying they would not serve in a Donald Trump administration, should democracy serve them up such an opportunity. Actually, in their eyes, it is less an opportunity than a possible obligation. We all have to decide whether to vote for Trump, which is a pretty easy decision for most people I know. But “foreign policy elites” have the further obligation of deciding whether to work in a Trump administration. This, apparently, is not an easy decision at all.
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If you ask me (which no one is doing), I think our country might survive quite well without the advice of “foreign policy elites” — or without the guidance of retired generals such as David Petraeus. A Post columnist last week recommended retired generals in general, and Petraeus in particular, as a good source of presidents. This is a brilliant idea. Petraeus had to resign as director of the CIA after he got caught in a scandal involving both sex and classified information, so he covers all the bases in competing with the Clinton machine. And he certainly qualifies as a member of the foreign policy elite.
What, after all, have foreign policy elites of either party done for us lately? Paying attention to “foreign policy elites” has given us nothing but heartbreak in the past three and a half decades. That’s right, three and a half decades, or a third of a century if you prefer. That’s how long we’ve been mired in the Middle East. At first it was considered gauche and naïve to use the Vietnam-era term “quagmire” to describe the United States’ situation in the Middle East. No one objects to calling it a quagmire anymore.
………
Perhaps what’s so remarkable about this terrible recent history is how many countries we have managed to screw up without affecting our own very much. That’s what allows us to give ourselves credit for good intentions, without the need for any beneficial result. Or perhaps what’s so remarkable is that we’re still paying the slightest attention to foreign policy elites.
I will put this down to a stopped clock being right twice a day.
Oh Snap!
The Parliament for the Belgian province of Wallonia and Romania will not approve the EU-Canada trade deal.
The government of the French-speaking Belgian region of Wallonia has refused to ratify the EU-Canada free trade agreement approved by the Belgian cabinet, the region’s minister-president said.
“As long as we do not have all the guarantees…. it will be impossible for us to ratify such a text [the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)], and it is not possible to give full powers to the Minister of Foreign Affairs to sign it either,” Paul Magnette was quoted by the RBTF broadcaster as saying late on Wednesday.
The opponents draw a parallel between CETA and the US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which has been criticized for the lack of transparency in the negotiations and the power it would give to international corporations at the expense of small and medium-sized businesses.
The guarantees appear to deal primarily with the Investor State Dispute Settlement system, while Romania is upset that it does not have visa free travel to Canada, and the lack of support on this matter from its EU partners:
Romania will not ratify the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada which was concluded in 2014, as an angry reaction to the refusal by Ottawa to lift the visa requirement of its nationals, but also for the lack of EU solidarity for solving the issue.
The Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published a position regarding Canada maintaining the visa requirement for Romanian citizens, expressing disappointment that Ottawa had not delivered on its promise to solve the issue, contained in the Statement of the 2014 EU-Canada summit.
Canada has a visa-free regime with all EU countries except Romania and Bulgaria.
These deals no longer being a sure thing is good.
Tariff barriers are minimal now, and these deals are really about giving rent seekers like Pharma, Music, Film, and Finance an opportunity for increased profits.
The secondary goal is to create a regime where profit trumps government power and the will of the people.
Shutting this down shutting this down is a very good thing.
Thanks Hillary
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton aggressively supported the coup in Honduras.
Now that government has brought back death squads:
Three weeks ago, Honduran activist Gaspar Sanchez spoke at a briefing on Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to support an impartial investigation into the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres.
Cáceres had mobilized native communities to speak out against the Agua Zarca Dam, a hydroelectric project backed by European and Chinese corporations, before being killed by two unknown gunmen last month.
Last week, back in Honduras at a protest outside the Honduran Public Ministry in Tegulcigalpa, Sanchez unfurled a banner demanding justice for Cáceres’s murder.
When nearby soldiers saw him, they dragged him away from the crowd and brutally beat him, stopping only after the crowd of protestors came to his defense.
………
Victor Fernandez, a prominent human rights attorney and lawyer representing the Cáceres family, insisted that her assassination was carried out by either the Honduran government or by “the paramilitary structure of companies.”
“Honduras is the victim of international theft due to its national resources,” said Fernandez, speaking through a translator. “What we have now is our natural resources — minerals, rivers, forest. Cáceres was killed because she was confronting the extractive model.”
Bertha Oliva compared the current situation to the early 1980s, when the CIA funded, armed, and trained Honduran government death squads that murdered hundreds of opposition activists.
………In 2009, a coup toppled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who had long been seen as a leftist threat to the interests of international corporations. In 2008, Zelaya blocked a series of hydroelectric dam projects, citing concerns raised by native Hondurans. Less than a year after he was deposed, the new government had already approved 40 dam contracts. When the current President Juan Orlando Hernández came to power in 2013, his slogan was “Honduras is open for business.”
The coup was accompanied by a huge rise in political violence. By 2012, state security forces had assassinated more than 300 people, and 34 members of the opposition and 13 journalists had disappeared, according to data compiled by Honduran human rights organizations. The political assassinations added to the emboldened violence from gangs and drug traffickers, making Honduras one of the most dangerous countries in the world. In 2012, Reuters reported that it had the highest murder rate of any country.
I know that Clinton claims that she has the experience to be President, to paraphrase the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:
Give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Hillary Clinton.
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely f%$#ed up during the execution.
Yes, I am comparing her to the Bush administration.
Notice How They are Not Discussing This on the Merits
In discussing the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, supporter have have stopped talking about the merits of the deal, and instead are suggesting that its defeat would be a blow for American prestige:
“Failure to move forward … would be a profound setback for American interests in the region,” Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said Tuesday of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. “It would be a signal that we do not have staying power and cause countries to hedge on their alignment with the United States.”
The administration is running out of time to get the accord ratified by Congress and faces an uphill slog to win approval with the leading presidential candidates in both parties opposed to the deal. Republican front-runner Donald Trump has denounced free trade deals as harmful to American workers and a drag on the U.S. economy. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, who supported the TPP as secretary of state under Obama, has come out against the TPP under pressure from the left, including labor unions and her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who also opposes it.
But in a conference call with reporters, administration officials warned that China is poised to step into an economic and leadership void if the U.S. falters in the pact with 11 other nations, including Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia. While Trump and Sanders have called outsourcing and trade imbalances with China detrimental to the United States, White House allies said that the economic competition from China, which is not included in the TPP, is a reason to endorse the deal.
So apparently it’s not a trade deal, and it won’t provide meaningful benefits, it’s a political and diplomatic ploy to be used in a war against China.
Do you want to lose your job just to f%$# with China?
Well, I don’t either.
Getting the Story Wrong
It appears that back in 2012, the CIA proposed yet another of its regime change ideas to the President, and he decided not to proceed with these plans.
Given our record on deliberate regime change, our best “success” led to the Mullas in Iran, this is a good thing, but this hasn’t stopped the CIA from claiming that Obama stopped a program that could have prevented the rise of ISIS:
The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.
It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.
In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says.
Laux, an Indiana native who joined the CIA in 2005 at age 23, says he wrote an “ops plan” that included all the elements he believed were necessary to remove Assad. He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he writes that his program “had gained traction” in Washington. His boss, the head of the Syria task force, regularly briefed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on what Laux was seeing, hearing and suggesting.
A former senior intelligence official said Laux’s ideas—many of them shared by other members of the CIA’s Syrian task force–were heavily represented in the plan that was ultimately presented to Obama.
But the president, who must approve all covert action, never gave the green light. The White House and the CIA declined to comment.
You may have noticed over the past few years that there are no “Moderate Syrian Rebels”, and there never have been.
Also, we know what happens when our quest for regime change hits reality, clusterf%$#s like Libya,
Also, when see that the plan was backed by David Petraeus, who turned the CIA into a drone based Murder, Inc., which served to generate more terrorists than it killed, the fact that Obama did not authorize this is a good thing.
Our moves toward regime change have never turned out well for us, or the citizenry of the nations where they are directed.
No.
Rob Slane asks, “Is Putin Weaponising Stupidity?“
Putin isn’t taking weaponizing stupidity, as Mr. Slane notes, “It could just be a case that we really are run by ignorant buffoons who never learn, and even if Mr Putin were inclined to develop a way of Weaponising Stupidity, he’d actually be wasting his time.”
Still, it’s a nice theory.
How Lovely!
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had her State Department aggressively push fracking across the world:
One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.
Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people.” But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania’s parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Department’s lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania’s parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria’s eased its moratorium.
The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton’s diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe—part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamination and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmental regulation. And according to interviews, diplomatic cables, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones, American officials—some with deep ties to industry—also helped US firms clinch potentially lucrative shale concessions overseas, raising troubling questions about whose interests the program actually serves.
………
Clinton, who was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, believed that shale gas could help rewrite global energy politics. “This is a moment of profound change,” she later told a crowd at Georgetown University. “Countries that used to depend on others for their energy are now producers. How will this shape world events? Who will benefit, and who will not?…The answers to these questions are being written right now, and we intend to play a major role.” Clinton tapped a lawyer named David Goldwyn as her special envoy for international energy affairs; his charge was “to elevate energy diplomacy as a key function of US foreign policy.”
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Goldwyn had a long history of promoting drilling overseas—both as a Department of Energy official under Bill Clinton and as a representative of the oil industry. From 2005 to 2009 he directed the US-Libya Business Association, an organization funded primarily by US oil companies—including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Marathon—clamoring to tap Libya’s abundant supply. Goldwyn lobbied Congress for pro-Libyan policies and even battled legislation that would have allowed families of the Lockerbie bombing victims to sue the Libyan government for its alleged role in the attack.
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But environmental groups were barely consulted, while industry played a crucial role. When Goldwyn unveiled the initiative in April 2010, it was at a meeting of the United States Energy Association, a trade organization representing Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips, all of which were pursuing fracking overseas. Among their top targets was Poland, which preliminary studies suggested had abundant shale gas. The day after Goldwyn’s announcement, the US Embassy in Warsaw helped organize a shale gas conference, underwritten by these same companies (plus the oil field services company Halliburton) and attended by officials from the departments of State and Energy.
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Around the time of his departure, WikiLeaks released a slew of diplomatic cables, including one describing a 2009 meeting during which Goldwyn and Canadian officials discussed development of the Alberta oil sands—a project benefiting some of the same firms behind the US-Libya Business Association. The cable said that Goldwyn had coached his Canadian counterparts on improving “oil sands messaging” and helped alleviate their concerns about getting oil sands crude to US markets. This embarrassed the State Department, which is reviewing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline proposal to transport crude oil from Canada and is under fire from environmentalists.
After leaving State, Goldwyn took a job with Sutherland, a law and lobbying firm that touts his “deep understanding” of pipeline issues, and launched his own company, Goldwyn Global Strategies.
In late 2011, Clinton finally unveiled the new Bureau of Energy Resources, with 63 employees and a multimillion-dollar budget. She also promised to instruct US embassies around the globe to step up their work on energy issues and “pursue more outreach to private-sector energy” firms, some of which had generously supported both her and President Barack Obama’s political campaigns. (One Chevron executive bundled large sums for Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, for example.)
So Clinton, who at the Flint debates was using double-talk about common sense regulations, employed a energy industry lobbyist to run her policy of aggressively pushing fracking to the world.
Later in the article, they talk about how her pet lobbyist lobbied aggressively for Canadian tar sands at State.
Yes, she sure sounds like someone who is serious about the dangers of fracking and Canadian bitumen, and the associated problems with global warming, doesn’t she?
Vatican Cans Nuncio Who Set Up the Pope
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who set up a meeting between anti-gay (and non-Catholic) town clerk Kim Davis without informing the Pope of the context is being removed as the Vatican’s diplomatic representative to the United States:
The Vatican is replacing its controversial ambassador to the U.S., who arranged the meeting between Pope Francis and antigay Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis last fall.
Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò will leave the position of apostolic nuncio, the equivalent of an ambassador, and will be replaced by Archbishop Christophe Pierre, a French-born clergyman who is currently the nuncio to Mexico, Catholic magazine America reports, citing Sandro Magister, a blogger who covers the Vatican.
The Vatican is not expected to confirm the news until the Obama administration has agreed to the new nuncio’s appointment, the magazine notes, but it adds that “reliable sources” expect an official announcement before Easter, which falls on March 27 this year. Because of his experience in Mexico, Pierre may well emphasize immigration issues, The Washington Post reports.………
During the pope’s visit to the U.S. last year, Viganò arranged for him to meet with Davis, the Rowan County clerk, who shut down all marriage operations in her office to avoid serving same-sex couples after the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. After she was sued and disobeyed a federal judge’s order to resume marriage operations, she went to jail for contempt of court before agreeing that her office would serve all eligible couples.
There are any number of player in and around the Vatican who have been trying to Ratf%$# pope Francis, and this is a brush back pitch.
There are a lot of rocks to be turned over in the Vatican, and I really hope that the Pope is around long enough to clean house.
Russia Begins Pullout, Declares Syrian Goals Achieved
When was the last time that the US military declared a victory that actually involved removing troops from a theater>
I’m thinking that it was 1918, because, we are still in Germany, Japan, Korea, etc.
The only place where we’ve actually gotten all the way out in my lifetime is Southeast Asia, and that weren’t no victory.
The Russians had limited goals in Syrian, and the announcement of this move appears to be a part of achieving its goals, maintaining a stable ally in the region, and preventing the return of South Caucuses Jihadis to Russia:
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday ordered the withdrawal of the “main part” of Russian forces in Syria, a surprise move that reflected what he called the Kremlin’s achievement of nearly all its objectives in the war-torn country.
The news upended expectations in Western capitals and among ordinary Syrians, setting off fevered speculation about Russia’s intentions, much as Mr. Putin’s unexpected military plunge into the Syrian battlefield five months ago changed the course of the war.
Perhaps the most urgent questions were how the move would affect the war’s outcome and what it meant for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose rule had been increasingly threatened by a string of military losses before Russian forces backed him up.
The Russian decision could signal a new confidence in Mr. Assad’s stability or an effort to pressure him to negotiate with his political adversaries — or both.
Mr. Putin has made his move at a particularly critical moment, as the upheaval in Syria enters its sixth year and a United Nations mediator in Geneva tries to revive peace talks to stop the war, which has displaced millions and created a humanitarian catastrophe.
A Russian military pullback will not leave Mr. Assad’s forces completely alone, because he also has support from Iran and from Hezbollah in Lebanon. And the Kremlin made clear it was keeping its new air base in the coastal Mediterranean province of Latakia, in addition to the naval refueling station it has kept nearby in Tartus since Soviet times.
And we are still hip deep in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and creating more terrorists around the world by our aggressive, and not particularly discriminant, drone war.