International Affairs: April 2005 Archives
StrategyPage has an interesting post about the cost of stationing American troops overseas (dateline April 14, 2005).
Stationing American forces overseas has not always been as large a financial burden on the United States that it appeared to be. As the economies in West Germany and Japan recovered after World War II, they reached a point where the United States demanded, and got, payments from those countries to cover part of the expense of keeping American troops there. Since then, Japan and Germany have paid over a hundred billion dollars in such payments, and since 1991, even South Korea has made similar payments. South Korea’s payments are now $661 million a year, but are being cut 8.9 percent to reflect the withdrawal of some American troops.
They also point out that the biggest costs are travel and the economic loss of having the soldiers spend their pay in another country. Additionally, if Iraq decides to keep American troops around long-term, we should expect them to pick up part of the tab.
Here are a few critical chokepoints in the world's oil supply lines. Disruption of any one of these routes would immediately shock shipping costs worldwide and could lead to major economic disaster, or even spark a war. You may as well know where they are. Wretchard has a good explanation of why these chokepoints are really a choke-chain around China's neck, and the key to keeping that behemoth subdued.
Victor Davis Hanson has pretty much the best possible rebuttal to those on the left who despise America for our recent adventures in the Middle East: the policies they advocate got us where we are today. That's not news to anyone who's paying attention, but VDH does a good job of summarizing how the left has morphed into the philosophy of stability and tyranny while the right has abandoned "realism" now that it no longer appears necessary.
The real underlying current that must be understood is that the left cares more about wielding power than about doing good. In their minds -- and as laid out by Karl Marx -- the good that will ultimately be brought about by leftists when they take control is worth any and every amount of evil in the present. He wrote, "The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism." Replace "socialism" with "Islam" and perhaps it becomes clear why the formerly liberal left has been so quick to jump into bed with America's enemies.
(HT: Glenn Reynolds.)
TDS writes about her love and fear of Wal-Mart, and in the comments thread EdWonk lays out the real problem with buying cheap Chinese imports:
I believe in freedom of choice. Wal-Mart is capitalism in its purist form.When competition is allowed to thrive, the consumer wins.
I'm not at all concerned about Wal-Mart selling products made in Authoritarian China.
What I AM concerned about is the fact that no one in Washington seems willing to enforce the laws that are already on the books when it comes to our trade with China.
China continues to exclude our products, levies large tariffs, allows mass violations of our copyrights and permits the counterfeiting of American products.
Then they manipulate their currency in order to increase their already staggering advantages in labor costs.
The Chinese aren't our friends. Remember when the forced-down our military aircraft a few years ago?
They imprisoned the crew, stripped the plane of its electronics, took it apart, and then made the U.S. crate everything up and ship it home via ship.
And then they sent the federal government a bill.
I realize that China represents a huge economic force. (And an increasing military threat. They now have nuclear weapons pointed at our country.) So I'm not saying that we should ignore China.
But do we really have to continue kissing their collective behinds only to get gas blown in our faces?
Wealth flows downhill, and the theory is that by trading with our enemies we'll make them richer, more free, and thus less likely to endanger us. It didn't work with the Arabs, and now we're having to fight. It's sorta working with our old Cold War enemies, though the collapse of the USSR contributed a lot to our present relationship with her former satellites. We don't try it with Cuba because we're afraid it won't work. It may or may not work with China. The hope is that they become as dependent on the trade imbalance as we are on their cheap plastic crap. The downside is that if we ever have to fight them, they'll be using trillions of our own dollars to wage war against us.
The Senate has taken the unlikely step of passing a bill that would allow US foreign aid to be used to perform and advocate abortion.
(CNSNews.com) - In a blow to pro-life Americans, the U.S. Senate voted 52-46 on Tuesday to repeal a Reagan-era policy that blocks U.S. aid from flowing to foreign groups that perform or advocate abortion.The amendment that passed on Tuesday was attached to a State Department funding bill. It was sponsored by Democrat Barbara Boxer of California and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine.
Snowe said the policy "infringes on a woman's right to personal, private medical care. This is a question of making sensible medical care available to women."
This is a perfect example of why we still need to elect more Republicans to the Senate. The handful of lefty Republican senators continue to gnaw at important planks of the Republican platform, not to mention their obstruction on judicial nominations. Nevertheless, the article overreaches a bit -- this amendment is almost certain to be knocked down by the House in the conference committee and is very unlikely to ever become law.
Even those who advocate abortion should be opposed to our foreign aid being used in this way; once we write the check it's impossible to control how the money is used. Under President Clinton, some US money went to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) which funded forced abortions in China. The UN and many recipients of our foreign aid are just plain evil.
