AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
Executive Order on Modernizing
Sanctions to Combat Terrorism
Good, the EO I mean. State and Treasury ordered to work to the same end as DOD and just as assiduously. Exceedingly late but happily received news. That rationality can do wonders. Diplomacy, Finance, and War-Fighting are the three assets of statecraft.
(I know, some posit that Information is a fourth asset of statecraft, but information operations are integral with each of the three assets of statecraft, not a separate asset. Von Clausewitz’s Trinity is not superseded.)
All the names named are Moslem. So who is The World’s Jerk? But no Afghans are named . . . .
When he said at the chopper presser yesterday that they are dead, did he mean Taliban persons or talks with them? I took it as the former but see headline writers are taking it as the latter. They are dead is wise guy/mafia locution. And he repeated the phrase, with the native New York neighborhood intonation.
I have said US has had no strategic reason for fighting in Afghanistan since the successful punitive expedition of 2001-03. With their recent bombing stunt, I think there now is one: to wit, the world has been jerked around enough already by these Pashtun/Taliban/Haqqani drug-and sodomy-addled morons. Saddam Hussein was hung for less global jerking around.
Time to join with Russia and India not just to subside Pashtun/Taliban/Haqqani rampancy but to reverse it, to subdue it. Subduct their behinds into the infernal region.
Attack profiles of the last two days suggest things now going in that direction, we will see how assiduously and thoroughly. Key indicator that they are will be evidence of first-time-ever full-spectrum ops targeting Helmand Province north of the Helmand River, in the triangle it makes with the Kash River. That is the Pashtun/Taliban/Haqqani belly, for all these years a no-go zone for US/NATO forces. The right arrow there and they are headed into the infernal regions, rampancy reversed, not just sedated.
Probably even the Chinese would help to some extent, tangentially. Then colonize and exploit the place for tourism, trade, and minerals. And if necessary, pin republican government to their backs with a bayonet.
Oh, FWIW, and I am very please to see Bolton out the door. I had wished he never came in it. Neither Secretary evidenced remorse for his departure. I take it as good news.
OK, I accept the thesis (as if whether I do or not matters!). Still, I think this is small potatoes, so to speak. In the weeds, again so to speak.
Big picture: USA is ramping up to work directly with Russia across the globe, essentially scaling up the already excellent Russia-USA mil coordinations in Syria to a complete globe-wide architecture. With luck — and I think ultimately forced to it by geographies — India will be the third strut of that architecture, with, I think, Japan and Egypt forming the fourth and fifth struts. But the main/big three are Russia, India, and USA.
This is your architecture for economic, cultural, and political freedom guarantees for a long time hence. John Bolton, stuck in obsolete mentation, obstructed this development. Immediately and efficiently, his departure is about Russia, cf. necessary globe-wide cooperation with.
All five of those leadership nations maintain an air force enumerated among the ten strongest in the world.
The GOs failed to accomplish what they told PDJT they could/would accomplish with a surge in fires. Sutlers use perpetual war to line their pockets. The American foreign policy establishment use perpetual wars to acquire invitations to media, academic, and cocktail parties. The elites have been attending their own, not their country’s, interests.
After the success of the punitive expedition in 2001-03, there has been no strategic reason — i.e., maintaining US sovereign freedom against aggression on her persons or properties — for deploying US war-making assets in AFPAK. The GOs failed to argue three POTUSs to that fact. PDJT has the instincts, thankfully, to see and act on the fact, though cautiously, perhaps doubtfully. [Now see first foregoing comment, reversing this assessment on strategics.]
Benghazi model for NORK, Bolton argued. Clear from POTUS’ statement today. PDJT always says what he thinks unless he doesn’t want to say what he thinks, in which case he says that he won’t.
Benghazi model for NORK references Russia, who is supporting Haftar, and who no doubt would support NORK against ChiComs. Russia in fact wants basing in Benghazi/Sirta, even Tripoli if possible, not unreasonably from her perspective as an inter-national trader.
Bolton speaks for sutlers, both material and ideational, not for rational grand USA strategic goals. This is about Russia-USA convergence on grand strategics. Ineluctable, the geographies compel it. Bolton opposes. He’s out.
archer52
Trouble with Trump is nobody wants to work for him. Not because they hate him but because he is wanting to upset the apple cart. Why join something that will put you out of a job
He doesn’t know how to operate within DC.
David R. Graham to archer52
He knows what is right and what is wrong for USA citizens. That trumps knowing how to operate in D.C., where, in any case, everyone has to deal with the POTUS, willy-nilly, regardless of their (everyone’s) crotchets.
Afghanistan is a if not the perfect platform for cultivating and for subducting an hegemon ambitious to control global communications. Alexander thought so. Kandahar is named in his honor. The British Raj thought so. AQ thought so.
USA traditionally eschews territorial ambitions. I would commend none in the case of Afghanistan. However, a Three Brothers guarantee of free movement within and across Afghanistan is essential to the architecture of modern global comms itself.
Afghanistan is the Malacca Strait of the Middle East. She is to become a flute rather than an opium pipe.
Update 1: John J. Klein: Towards a Better U.S. Space Strategy: Addressing the Strategy Mismatch
Update 2: Grant Newsham: Trump’s Foreign Policy – Taking America To The Dentist
Update 3: Katie Pavlich: Israel Planning to Host a Jerusalem Summit With the U.S. and Russia on Iranian Aggression
Update 3: Conrad Black: The inconvenient truth about Trump — he’s doing what he said he would
Update 4: L. Tod Wood: Trump’s Realism Opens Up New Possibilities With Russia
Update 5: Glenn Reynolds: Me, then: I love lawyers. I am a lawyer. But there are plenty of places where the role of lawyers should be limited, and war is certainly one of them. Nothing has happened since to make me think I was wrong.
Update 6: Japan’s Military Rebuilding Rapidly
Update 7: Spengler: We Need Our Mojo Back Vis-à-Vis China
Spengler (David P. Goldman, Banker) is cogent as always. He vacillates between hand-wringing and triumphalism, through the years. This essay runs in the former type. Lots of China experience. Competent theologian. Strategic interests and wisdoms. Appreciates Augustine, as I Maimonides.
Eight things stand out to me in this essay of his:
1- Spengler says China’s interest is protecting her coast. If true, that means entrance by way of her back doors — India, Mongolia, Russia, Afghanistan — has strategic punch.
2- World domination of electronics/comms, which he says China intends, undercuts his argument that China entertains no ambition for world domination by the usual methods, namely, geographical. If you can control fires, you can control land. The fault is in thinking China can control fires enough to control land enough to dominate the world. If China thinks she can do that, let her to it, she heaps more water on Elijah’s altar of sacrifice.
3- There has to be truth to his observation that Chinese are Chinese — murderous — whether behind a Communist mask or not, ergo, one should not think Chinese would be different without wearing that mask. Yet, there has to be something, strategically and tactically, the Communist face specifically brings to the mixture that is China today. Were China China — murderous — even without Communism, there would be no accounting for the huge success Christian missionaries of many persuasions experienced in China prior to Communist rampancy there, and even still. Communism brings some what’s it to China. ChiComs are not merely Mandarins behind a different mask.
4- The POTUS Kennedy-launched moon landing/STEM boom was a civilian objective, not a military one, although indirectly it was, as are all governmental programs, ultimately, because government ipso facto is punitive authority. In addition, it was undertaken with Congressional, meaning popular, approval. Americans will not devote their totality to a military objective, especially a strategic one, unless they approve it Congressionally — and not by a Congress who overrides their wishes, as one did to impose ACA/Obamacare on Americans — or Presidentially with a supportive Congress. Inner meaning of sole Congressional power to declare war.
5- Unless she can occupy land — occupy it, not just own it — China’s aspirations for world domination are weaknesses, not strengths. She cannot occupy the amount of land needed to dominate the world. No one can. No one sane would even want to, much less try to. A lethal Chinese weakness: vanity insanity.
6- Wall Street would benefit — huge governmental redistribution of taxpayer wealth — from the crash tech program Spengler advocates. Everyone else? Well, they would pay for it, like it or not, to include with their lives.
7- I think an effective program, and far less costly in lives, money, and time — to terrify China in her corset and disabuse her of vain insane ambitions — would comprise forcing American GOs and FOs — and their pressed sycophants — to face strategic questions in classical terms — namely, GEOGRAPHY — report these straight-up to their Commander-in-Chief, and bear responsibility for not doing so or for larding their counsel with clichéd, obsolete, attenuated, and/or inaccurate descriptions of strategic — namely, GEOGRAPHICAL — conditions.
8- Electronics is fires. Teilhard’s Noosphere and a GO’s or FO’s hyper-range artillery. Nor China nor all the Mandarins in LA, Mombasa, and Gstaad can control that. Use it, yes, certainly do, you are meant to. Control it, no, never, impossible.
Update 8: Charles Sam Faddis: The enemy of my enemy is my friend — an alliance that may save the Middle East
Even more consequential, if it is happening, is apparent alliance between USA, Russia, and Israel to quieten MENA, at least around Israel herself.
Update 9: Kurt Schlichter: Get the Hell Out of Afghanistan Now
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