Wednesday, August 23, 2017

For later reading

StrategyPage has a long article on Pakistan and India.

read the whole thing. It is the background to Afghanistan, which is being destabilized because the Pakistani military is busy supporting the Taliban there (and the terrorists against India, for good measure).

but SP notes:

In an effort to persuade Pakistan to stop supporting violence in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) the Americans are withholding military aid more frequently. For example in 2016 the U.S. was willing to pay up to $900 million in reimbursements for Pakistani counter-terrorism efforts but threatened to withhold nearly half of that. Pakistan can retaliate by blocking road access to Afghanistan but this escalation ultimately fails for Pakistan because the only major ally they have is China and the Chinese have made it very clear that they will not join Pakistan in such an escalation.

SP also has an article on North Korea, where sanctions are being used to pressure it's supporters in China to pressure them into behaving better.

China in particular was tired of North Korean behavior and in 2017 told the North Koreans that Chinese support would not be provided if North Korea attacked the U.S. or South Korea. Meanwhile the U.S. refused to back down to the North Korea threat and made it clear there would be a violent and immediate response if North Korea even appeared ready to fire missiles towards Guam. This put North Korea in a bad position because the IRBMs aimed at Guam require a day or more of preparations that can be seen by satellite surveillance. So North Korea announced today it would pause its preparations to see what the United States would do.


The article notes NoKo are a major supplier of meth, but they have to buy their chemicals from China. Hmm...sounds familiar. And don't notice they are sending missiles and poison gas supplies to Syria.

a lot of stuff is being done with economic sanctions. This is not new, of course, and it is often overlooked (and rarely discussed in the press). However, it doesn't work with dictators, who just let their people starve while they continue doing their thing. and stay alive because others support them on the sly (or in the open) to diss the US and European Union.

For a summary of what is going on, the "Conservative teahouse" site explains how Trump is using sanction threats, not just to pressure dictators but to tell those supporting these dictators that they are the problem and better shape up if they don't want to be hurt.

See the pattern?  In each example President Trump assigns responsibility.  However, the important element is the underlying ownership must be based entirely on truth.  In each of the examples the truth was/is that Gulf States/Qatar, Assad/Russia, and China/Beijing were manipulating and enabling the problem behavior.  By calling out that truth, each enabler was forced to take ownership and corrective action.

In effect, like a businessman, he is  outsourcing to other companies (or here, he is pressuring other countries) to cooperate.

But that is not what I see in the US press: notice all the hysteria in the US press went from Russia Russia Russia to Nazi Nazi Nazi?

Maybe because the Nation noticed the DNC hack was an inside job, so their Russian talking points were blown.

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