FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'

Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

A Promise Kept, A Message Delivered: President Trump delivers a much-needed reality check on Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel re their longstanding failure to honor their NATO pledge. Trump bluntly says what Americans have wanted to hear: It's time for Germany to pay what they owe and live up to their promise. No more excuses!; Anne Applebaum continues to disappoint me

Screenshot of The Drudge Report of March 18, 2017: U Owe Us





Last Friday during her visit to the White House, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received a strong dose of unfiltered President Donald J. Trump, who delivered the reality check he promised to deliver to NATO allies during the 2016 election campaign regarding their longstanding failure to live up to their own past pledges to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their own defense spending. 

 Instead of doing what the U.S. foreign policy elites in Washington wanted him to do, which was to allow this unproductive behavior of Germany -and so many other NATO members- to continue, or, if brought up at all, to talk about it away from the prying eyes of cameras of the U.S. news media and the American people, President Trump delivered on yet another important campaign promise, and did so in an honest away that neither Presidents Obama, Bush or Clinton ever did, that left no room for any misunderstanding.
We are talking about you, Germany.











Spiegel
FEBRUARY 21, 2017
Germany’s Self-Imposed Obstacles to Increasing Defense Spending
Washington is threatening consequences if NATO member states don't increase their defense spending. Germany is the primary focus of the demand. But the Defense Ministry in Berlin is already having trouble spending the money it currently has at its disposal.


By Konstantin von Hammerstein and Peter Müller
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/germany-s-self-imposed-obstacles-to-increasing-defense-spending
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pressure-on-germany-to-increase-defense-spending-for-nato-a-1135192.html























Message to Brussels: People on the Left in the U.S. and Europe who think that Germany is right on this issue, and that a government foolishly spending money on #ClimateChange but NOT honoring its pledge to its own allies regarding the amount of money it will spend on its own self-defense, are dreaming if they think Americans will support defending any nation that consciously chooses NOT to defend itself.
They won't. Period!




Both before and after I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area and was very much involved with then-current passing developments and perspectives from people involved with foreign policy and defense policy in DC, whether at the myriad Think Tanks and non-profits, Left and Right, or at the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was an admirer of Anne Applebaum, @anneapplebaum, and a longtime reader of her outstanding foreign policy/defense columns in the Washington Post.

 More times than I can count, Applebaum's column was the best thing in the entire newspaper that day, combining genuine insight, forthright candor and an original POV, relative to the stuffy/fussy and self-reverential nature of much of what passes for insight in 99% of the American Foreign Policy establishment, whose journals I subscribed to for years, with walls of past issues that lined my Arlington County garage in banker boxes.

For many years I was, in the abstract, Anne Applebaum's ideal reader: someone who not only devoured her Washington Post columns and shared them with friends around who were very involved in a direct way with foreign policy, but also someone who actually purchased multiple copies of her books with my own money as gifts for friends and colleagues, as opposed to people who bought them on a corporate account.
I even bought copies of the decidedly non-holiday-friendly books, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe and Gulag: a History.

 (As many of you longtime readers of this blog know, I have a longtime interest in Eastern European history and politics, especially Poland. My maternal ancestors fled Prussian-controlled Silesia and arrived in Texas right before Christmas of 1854, after a three-month boat trip from Bremen, eventually setting in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas and becoming Bandera County Pioneers.)

So, it's with all of that history in mind that I tell you now that it's been VERY disappointing to me the past few years that despite lots of opportunities for her to use her very important and very visible perch at the Washington Post to push for more honest and resolute critical thinking and reporting about the issue of NATO members finally delivering on their promises to pay 2% of their respective GDP for their own defense, she's punted.
Specifically, she's been far too quiet and NOT been publicly critical about Germany's failure.
Not that Gemany is alone, because only 5 of the 18 NATO members hit their marks.



Even worse in my mind, if possible, Applebaum has held her tongue about Germany's incredibly feeble response to the rise of ISIS (ISIL, IS) which I have talked to many of the people reading this blog post about over the years, as well as tweeted about when German-friendly individuals and groups seemed to be trying to give them a pass nd make excuses for them.

Instead of Applebaum being a leader for actively confronting manageable issues that a clear majority of Americans are quite justified in wanting to see FINALLY resolved, she has continued to champion the POV of the Foreign Policy elites in the U.S. and Europe, who are owners of so many broken Conventional Wisdom crystal balls that have not worked properly in many years. 
As Brexit proved to a fare thee well, as I predicted months before last year's June vote in the UK.

 She's exactly the sort of person who ought to be championing Trump on this issue because he happens to be right on the facts and right on the public's perceptions of it being an issue where supposed allies have failed to deliver.

 Plus, Applebaum's too smart to think that Trump and his supporters will simply allow the issue to evaporate. Trust me, Trump supporters like me will tell him that if Germany does not change course in tangible ways in the near-future that Americans can see with their own eyes, he will need to do something publicly to show his displeasure in a way that will leave no room for misunderstanding.

 Is that really what the folks at the German Embassy up on Reservoir Road NW, a place where I spent so much time in the late 1980's and the '90's, and the place that now continues to do such a consistently piss-poor job of public outreach to the U.S. public at large and Congress in particular, wants?
Because the truth is, that day where Trump is pushed into doing something is much closer than they think.
Every day Germany continues status quo brings it closer...

 I continue to be surprised at the large number of usually well-informed people who do NOT know that Germany's response to ISIS has been to dispatch, after more than a year's worth of debate in the Bundestag, 100 UNARMED men in non-combat positions located far from the fighting. 
That's the response of Europe's largest and most economically powerful country?
To place one-hundred unarmed men far from where the fighting against ISIS is? 
Really?

For many well-informed Americans who care about U.S. foreign policy and defense issues, regardless of their party preference, Germany's efforts of late, esp. vs. ISIS, seem incredibly underwhelming and not cause for thinking that cooler heads in Berlin are prevailing.
Just the opposite. :-(

In its own way, this Le Nouvel Observateur article makes the point.





 To which I replied with cool hard facts:

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

For months I've closely followed the glacial pace of things in Germany largely via DW,
Deutsche Welle, both on TV and in print, since the U.S. news media has seemed to decide to give Germany and their current Ambassador to the U.S., Peter Wittig, a 'hall pass' on all controversial topics, like #Ukraine #Russia #sanctions #ISIS. 
Any one of which, Once Upon a Time in the '70's, '80's or '90's, would have gotten him an invite he could not really turn down.

If you didn't know it, even for something as insignificant as sending 100 German military 
"advisors" to Iraq who would never be put in a position to actually face the enemy, there
was months and months of Sturm und Drang in the Bundestag, in the country 
where Sturm und Drang was born.

As someone who spent LOTS of time over at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. pre and post Fall of the Berlin Wall, on trade and economic issues, and who made enough 
friends there to attend the party at the Embassy celebrating the unification in 1991 -even bringing a German chocolate cake with the German flag's colors on it that I ordered at the #1 German bakery in greater DC, not far from my house in Arlington County- I was especially aghast last year that Germany's policy was, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to be firmly against arming Ukraine so that it could better defend itself.

Which is how it came to be that back on February 8th, before Chancellor Merkel's visit to DC, I asked the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, @SenBobCorker - 
How is #Merkel #Germany an ally vs. Isis if sending 100 Bundeswehr 2 TRAIN Iraqis is political crisis? 

Condescending, patronizing pols in Germany acted like their troops were almost too important to actually deploy them to the Mid-East to accomplish something tangiblethat was in the West's best interests. But did you see anything about this in the newspaper or on network TV at the time?

And not once in all the many long months since the shoot down of the Malaysian flight 
MH17 over Ukraine last August by Russian-armed and trained separatists has the Ambassador Wittig gone on a single American Sunday morning TV chat show to lay out the position of Germany to the American people, whose own sons and daughters, husbands and wives continue to be stationed in Germany in the tens of thousands to defend Germany against the existential threat that President Obama claimed in one of his 2012
debates with Mitt Romney did NOT exist -Putin's Russia.

Well, history has shown us who was right about that question, haven't they?
And the Russia reset, too.

No, these days, the Foreign Ministry geniuses at the German Embassy on Reservoir Road prefer to employ their old standby, checkbook foreign policy, and simply pay for ads on Foreign Policy magazine's email newsletters, like this one I received, below, so they aren't forced to explain or defend their policies in-person to people who know the facts and could pin them down.
Yes, it sort of explains a lot about the current Foreign Policy Establishment and what it just winks at:

And paying for ads also means they don't have to deal with curious ethical issues like this:
#Germany hires ex #Stasi to check #Facebook for critics of #immigration policy. 

So, to sum it up, Peter Wittig, the German Amb. to the U.S. has not appeared on one of the most guest-friendly forums he could possibly appear on in all of DC, esp. for an important ally like Germany, Sunday morning chat shows, and been forced to defend Germany's feckless position on all these important matters, even while smaller countries with much less resources are continuing to punch above their weight.

Meanwhile, Germany, the European economic giant opts largely to stay on the sidelines as a spectator in the fight against ISIS, preferring to play the role of pit-crew grease monkey,
and not be one of the actual participants.
How much longer is this kind of unhelpful behavior going to be allowed to continue -and continue to be unremarked upon by the American press?




















Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, September 5, 2013

More on President Obama's historic trip to Sweden, and sharing some cold hard facts, anecdotes and lessons learned re Sverige; #obamainsweden, @Swedense, @CBildt, @AnnelieGregor, @hannawagenius, @davidlinden1


















Joint statement by Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and President Barack Obama: http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/16999/a/222806

 More official photos! http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/17736

 SVT's photo gallery of Wednesday's events: 
http://www.svt.se/nyheter/varlden/bildextra-obama-i-sverige

 SvD's account of Thursday morning's events so far:
http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/live-obama-i-sverige-del-3_8488844.svd









Nima Sanandaji is spot-on in highlighting what so many others ignore, whether consciously or accidentally. There were unique factors present in Sweden that allowed a certain sort of culture and ethos to develop and flourish that were NOT possible in countries where transportation and social mobility was far better and where larger centers of industrialization could lure larger numbers of rural residents.

 In rural areas, especially during the many months of very cold weather, you absolutely needed to be able to trust and depend upon your neighbor, even if they were located quite a distance from you. Self-reliance and the bond of community, things so very much absent in current South Florida, with the predictable results we can see all around us:  
Sweden’s phenomenal growth can, besides business friendly policies, has much to do with the country’s unique history. Nordic countries were for a long period dominated by independent farmers who had great incentives to work hard in order to survive in the harsh and cold climate. The populations in these homogenous countries not only adapted very strong ethics relating to work and responsibility, but their culture also became characterized by social cohesion and high levels of trust.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/003909-swedish-lessons-obama

 Similarly...



Joel Kotkin correctly identifies another central aspect of what has made Sweden what it is and has made the areas of the U.S. that Swedish emigrants settled in more successful than others: 
Scandinavia's greatest strength may lie in its least political correct asset: its Nordic culture. Scandinavians' traditional interest in education, hard work and good governance serves them well both at home and abroad. It's not socialism that is primarily responsible.
After all, America's Scandinavians, although largely the descendents of poor immigrants also are pretty successful, earning more on average than their counterparts back home. 



----



-----



One of the differences I've observed first-hand between American and Swedish women who are interested in politics and foreign policy is that smart, funny and attractive women in Sweden who are interested in those areas aren't as snobbish or smugly elitist as Americans, like to talk more frequently and passionately about big ideas like freedom and liberty and NOT about how they became vegans, don't seek to win arguments based on painting themselves as victims of "society," don't talk incessantly about yoga, pilates or their career, but have no problem in making public their love for the occasional fast food snacks. 
Par exemple, Hanna Wagenius. http://missbesserwisser.blogspot.com/

 Nothing to do with Obama visit but I find this CUF video of hers droll and amusing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x5qvssI-IQ&feature=share&list=TLp16zPHqyoo0

 Puss och kram på dig!


-----



-----




 http://anneliegregor.wordpress.com/
-----


-----





For someone like me who is a longtime recycling enthusiast, one of the best things about Sweden is the average person's commitment to keeping the city and nature free of debris. 
You pay a few SEK for products packaged in recyclable plastic or aluminum, like sodas, at both stores and from vendors, but get your money back via self-serve machines when you recycle at stores. 
All of this gives people a real  financial incentive to return items to stores, as well as for others to pick-up any you see lying on roads or in parks and get that money, which is one of the reasons that Stockholm is SO CLEAN!
Though I'm a committed meat-eater, especially when it comes to pizza, this actually looks good enough to try next time I'm in Stockholm, at Kungstensgatan 62.
-----
Anyone wanting an accurate account of the problem in Sweden of the lack of successful Muslim assimilation in Europe ought to read my post of September 17, 2012 titled, re Fouad Ajami's Washington Post essay: Why is the Muslim world so easily offended?; What Muslim "moderates"?; Målmo as the European canary-in-the-coal-mine doesn't auger well for the success of Muslim "moderates" or assimilation efforts; #MUSLIMRAGE
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/re-fouad-ajamis-washington-post-essay.html

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)