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Foreign Affairs To Protect Ukraine, Keep It out of NATO The security guarantees now under discussion are unrealistic.  Credit: Ministry of Defense Ukraine The war in Ukraine is heading to its inevitable conclusion. It may still take many months, but Russia will win the war on the battlefield, and Ukraine will be without some of its territory and without NATO membership. In such a situation, Kiev has every incentive to make a deal rather than wait for crushing defeat. There is no doubt that Ukraine will require reliable security guarantees, as even Russia now accepts. But there is an important historical context to that requirement that needs to be considered when satisfying it. Ukraine must have security guarantees to be sure Russia won’t invade again. But Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had the U.S. and NATO been willing to negotiate the security proposals that Russia presented to them in December 2021. A key demand was that NATO guarantee that Ukraine would not become a member. Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has conceded that the security proposal laid down the denial of Ukrainian membership as the “pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine.” When the U.S. and NATO “rejected that,” Russia made the decision to invade. Had NATO closed the door to Ukrainian membership, Russia likely would not have invaded. Once again, after the war had started, Russia was prepared to call it off if Ukraine agreed not to join NATO. The head of Ukraine’s negotiating team at the talks in Istanbul in the first weeks of the war says that the “key point” Russia demanded to end the war was a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO: “They were prepared to end the war if we… committed that we would not join NATO.” Had the U.S. and Britain not encouraged Kiev to abandon diplomacy in favor of fighting Russia, Moscow would likely have quickly concluded its war. While Kiev would like its security guarantee to come in the form of NATO membership, the most important guarantee of its future security is the opposite: a credible commitment from Kiev and from NATO that Ukraine will remain neutral and never join the Western alliance. The historical record suggests that the growing Ukraine–NATO partnership is the main reason that Russia invaded. If the war concludes with a legally binding promise that NATO will not be in Ukraine and Ukraine will not be in NATO, then the cause will have been removed, the problem will have been solved, and Ukraine will have its strongest security assurance. It has been argued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by European leaders, and by the Western media, though, that Russian assurances are not to be trusted. Entered as evidence is Russia’s supposed betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum. Signed in December 1994, Kiev agreed to give up Ukraine’s nuclear weapons in exchange for security commitments. The argument is that when Russia invaded Ukraine, it violated that agreement. But there are two weaknesses in that argument. The first is that, whereas the current war would have to end with security guarantees, the Budapest memorandum offered only assurances. While the distinction may sound pedantic, Glenn Diesen says that former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, who was part of the Budapest negotiating team, has explained that the U.S. was explicit in not allowing assurances to be confused with guarantees, among other reasons, to avoid a “legally-binding commitment.” In 2013, when Washington imposed sanctions on Belarus—another nation protected by the Budapest Memorandum—the U.S. embassy in Belarus justified the move by saying, as Diesen reports, that “the Memorandum is not legally binding.” The second is that, by the time of Russia’s invasion in 2022, things had changed since 1994, and the Memorandum had already been broken and rendered obsolete. The NATO military alliance was marching toward Russia’s borders, Ukraine was becoming a heavily Western-weaponized anti-Russian bridgehead, the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine were under threat, and Ukraine was militarily threatening Donbas. Russia now saw itself as the party with its own security needs that had to be met. The essential change in the situation began when America—not Russia—first violated the Budapest Memorandum. The Memorandum states that Ukraine’s sovereignty cannot be violated by a signatory nation subordinating it to its own interests. But in 2014, the U.S. did just that when it supported a coup in Ukraine. Diesen cites former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock as pointing out that Russia “strictly observed its obligations in the Budapest Memorandum” but that the 2014 coup created “a radically different international situation” and that Russia was now “entitled to ignore” the agreement. That does not legitimize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it weakens the argument against not trusting Russia, and it strengthens the argument for legally binding security guarantees this time around, rather than mere assurances. Reality has started to dawn on Kiev that it won’t be joining NATO anytime soon, but there are challenges to the security guarantees that it and its Western backers are now pushing. The security guarantee being discussed by Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. seems to involve three facets. 1) Eastern Ukraine becomes a demilitarized zone manned by neutral peacekeepers from a country agreed upon by Ukraine and Russia. 2) The Ukrainian armed forces remain armed and trained by NATO countries. 3) European nations station troops in western Ukraine. There are three problems with that last facet—all potentially fatal to peace talks.  The first is that, as European leaders have consistently pointed out, it does not work without a U.S. commitment to militarily back the European forces if they come under attack. But the Trump administration has specifically and repeatedly ruled out American boots on the ground. While President Donald Trump has suggested that Washington could supply air support of some kind, Europe may lack the troops and finances to keep their promise without more extensive U.S. involvement. Europe’s most powerful economies—France, Germany, and Britain—are all facing financial crises. France and Britain, among the most willing nations in Europe to contribute troops in some capacity, combined can only come up with a peacekeeping force of 6,000-10,000 troops. Europe had talked of a peacekeeping mission of 30,000 troops, and estimates of what is necessary are closer to 50,000-100,000. Without the American “backstop,” as European leaders have consistently admitted, the security guarantee won’t work. The second problem is that the security plan is a nonstarter because Russia will not allow it. The key motivation for Russia’s invasion was to keep Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine. The European arrangement specifically places NATO troops in Ukraine. Russia is not going to agree to stop a war it is winning only to see the outcome it went to war to prevent. Lastly, it is not just Russia that opposes European troops in Ukraine; it is also Europeans. The Wall Street Journal reports that opposition to the scheme is high in Eastern Europe, where the public is wary of diverting forces from their own borders, and in Italy and Germany. Support in Britain and France is contingent and unstable. Poland has made it clear that they will not send troops: 87 percent of Poles say their country should definitely not or probably not send troops to Ukraine. A successful diplomatic end to the war will require a security architecture that addresses the historical and contemporary realities. Such a security architecture should embrace not just Ukraine, but all of Europe, including Russia, perhaps finally putting in place the foundation for peace that was passed up by the missed opportunity at the end of the Cold War. The post To Protect Ukraine, Keep It out of NATO appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Pro-Israel Palantir Endangers Our Liberties The firm’s executives mislead the public as they create a mass surveillance system. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) Despite over a decade of leaks and exposures, the U.S. security state and its private contractors still pretend that mass surveillance of the American people is a conspiracy theory. At the All-In Summit this past week, Palantir CEO Alex Karp insisted his company has never spied on Americans, even claiming Palantir was turned away by the FBI and NSA because it “defends privacy and civil liberties” too strongly. That narrative—of Palantir as a quirky, libertarian outfit that checks government power—has always been part of the company’s branding and has always been a ruse designed only to trick the most gullible people. As disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden proved in 2017, Palantir’s Gotham operating system filtered the National Security Agency’s XKEYSCORE data, vacuuming up the private communications of millions of Americans into the ultimate system for turnkey tyranny. Those embarrassing revelations did not help the public image of a company whose reputation had already tanked in 2011 after reports of their corporate conspiracy to surveil and disrupt the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. While Americans remain deeply skeptical of the federal government’s surveillance powers, Palantir has nonetheless become one of the country’s most profitable firms, winning billion-dollar contracts off its supposedly “unmatched” technology and collecting endorsements from self-styled anti-establishment pundits like Bari Weiss.  Weiss’s outlet The Free Press—and even her non-accredited “University” in Austin—count Palantir executives as founding donors. He is “one of the most important builders in America and in the West,” Weiss gushed in a glowing interview with Karp, adding that Palantir’s central mission is “stopping terror attacks around the world.”  But far from being a “counter-elite” defending freedom against the establishment, Alex Karp and Palantir embody the establishment itself, having built its ultimate apparatus for surveillance and control. Palantir is merely the resurrection of Total Information Awareness, the deep-state project conceived by disgraced national security adviser and Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter in 2002—a program Congress deemed too authoritarian to exist. Poindexter, like his Iran-Contra co-conspirator Oliver North, was a lifelong operative of the U.S. security state; both believed that the greatest threats to American hegemony abroad came not from foreign enemies but from antiwar activists at home. As North bluntly explained to the Iran-Contra Select Committee: “We didn’t lose the war in Vietnam, we lost the war right here” in America.  Their worldview did not die with the Cold War; it merely migrated into Silicon Valley, where executives like Karp disguise it in pseudo-libertarian branding but repeat the same security-state dogmas, receiving millions from the CIA’s arm In-Q-Tel to accomplish the deep state’s goals. Alex Karp is a natural successor to deep state bureaucrats like North and Pointdexter, adopting their skepticism toward democratic forces and believing that the “central danger,” to national security “comes from universities,” and students “who are not believers in our principles as a nation,” i.e., students who oppose unconditional support for Israel’s wars. Palantir, which has the ability to monitor and make “dossiers,” on those activists, is the wet dream of any deep state official looking to control and police the first-amendment-protected activities of American citizens, a Constitutional safeguard which has always been a nuisance for foreign policy hawks. If it were just that, Palantir’s vast spying power would already be concerning. But Palantir is not merely another U.S.-based contractor; it is fused with the priorities of Israel’s own security state and functions as part of the Israel lobby inside the United States. Its chief executives—Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and former Rep. Mike Gallagher—have more than just an affinity for Israel. They are ideological fanatics who openly conflate Israel’s enemies with our own. To that effect, Karp—who, like this author, was inculcated since birth to support the foreign government of Israel—has described college protesters on U.S. campuses as an “infection inside society.” Given the vast surveillance powers Palantir now wields, Americans should be asking how Karp and his colleagues plan to “cure” the supposed “infection” of young people using too much free speech to criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Palantir, which supplies Israel with AI targeting tools to mass murder Palestinian women, children, and even some Americans in Gaza, has demonstrated near total deference to their Israeli clients. When asked about Israel’s use of Palantir’s products to target innocents in Gaza (which includes American citizens), Palantir executive Peter Thiel explained that his preference is to “defer to Israel.” Palantir’s troubling loyalty to Israel is not an isolated case but part of a broader pattern linking Silicon Valley’s surveillance infrastructure to the Israeli state. Another behemoth of the surveillance industry is Oracle, led by the world’s richest man and a major donor to pro-Israel causes, Larry Ellison. The Ellisons—who own their own island in Hawaii to ensure the ultimate form of privacy—are among the NSA’s largest mass surveillance contractors. In a 2013 CBS interview, Ellison scoffed, “Who’s ever heard of this information being misused by the government,” calling the agency’s unconstitutional mass data collection programs “essential.” He added that he would oppose them only “if the government used it to do political targeting. If the Democrats used it to go after Republicans. If the Republicans used it to go after Democrats. In other words, if we stop looking for terrorists and we started looking for people, on the other side of the aisle,” precisely what happened under President Joe Biden. Yet Oracle has not hesitated to keep cashing in on lucrative surveillance contracts. Oracle, like Palantir, aligns itself outright with the priorities of the Israeli government. Its Israeli-born CEO Safra Catz even told employees, “if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.” But America and Israel do not always share the same interests. Sometimes they overlap, like during the Cold War, but often and increasingly, they do not, illustrated by Israel’s recent bombing of U.S. ally and host of the largest U.S. forward base in the Middle East, Qatar. Oracle erases that difference and pretends American and Israeli interests are one and the same. The Ellisons have not been shy about their plans to harness their vast wealth and technological empire toward advancing the interests of a foreign government. As researcher Jack Poulson revealed just yesterday, the Ellisons helped coordinate an Israeli cybersabotage campaign and fund anti-BDS blacklists that target American activists, working closely with Israeli intelligence officials and private intelligence firms like Black Cube—the same Israeli company used to harass Harvey Weinstein’s accusers and critics of Israel—to do it. Meanwhile, the family has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an overt effort to bend American mass media into a more reliably pro-Israel posture. Despite their denials and deceptions, Palantir and Oracle form the backbone of an unconstitutional mass surveillance regime that collapses the line between American and Israeli power. The danger of dual loyalty would only be hypothetical if their executives did not openly profess fealty to a foreign government. That Alex Karp and Larry Ellison are now embedded in the American security state should raise the question of why the public tolerates big tech elites, arguably as loyal to Israel as to the United States, holding the keys to the most powerful spying systems ever built. The post Pro-Israel Palantir Endangers Our Liberties appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics On Immigration, Trump Is Just Enforcing the Law America’s lax immigration enforcement has been unparalleled in the world—until now. The millions of illegal aliens resident in the United States got here primarily through two avenues of neglect, exacerbated by a lack of internal immigration enforcement. Here’s how the system works, and what has changed under Trump. Many aliens simply walked in across the wide-open southern border. The others, perhaps the majority over the years, were issued legitimate tourist or student visas abroad by a Department of State more concerned with facilitating travel than protecting America. Those illegals simply stayed in America as they pleased, as long as they pleased, doing whatever they pleased, whether that be working out-of-status or, in the extreme case, going to flight school and conducting the attacks of September 11. There was no one to interfere with their plans once a visa was issued and they were admitted to the U.S., because America for decades lacked any form of internal immigration enforcement. Until now, and now everything has finally begun to change. The system works like this. A Department of State employee abroad at one of our embassies or consulates issues tourist, student, and temporary worker visas. While the terms of those visas are set by law, the standards of adjudication (i.e., who actually gets a visa under a part of the law called 214(b)) are largely determined by mid-level officials at each overseas post. Once issued, the visa is valid, in the case of most tourist visas, for 10 years. That means the person issued that visa can use it to enter the U.S. once or as many times as they like during a 10-year period. There is no further review of circumstances that may change in the person’s life or their home country during those 10 years. There are an estimated 55 million such valid non-immigrant visas in existence in the hands of travelers from Niger to Iran, from China to Russia. In FY 2023, the State Department issued over 10.4 million non-immigrant visas, any holder of which could apply to enter the U.S. As the numbers keep growing exponentially as staffing stays the same, scrutiny inevitably must drop. The mantra during the 1990s, when I was a visa officer as a young State Department employee, was to issue visas, lots of visas, as conveniently as possible. We were told by our bosses we were not law enforcement and our duty was to facilitate travel. As policy we took full advantage of the ability to waive personal interviews for as much as 40 percent of our clientele. We were trained to overlook certain overstays in the U.S., and to not question or review decisions made by others. This mania for issuance reached its peak with the Visa Express program. Visa Express was a Washington-sanctioned State Department program in Saudi Arabia that allowed most Saudi nationals to apply for U.S. visas without going in person to a U.S. embassy or consulate for an interview. The idea was to streamline visa processing, since Saudi Arabia generated huge numbers of applications, and in-person interviews were seen as burdensome. Three of the 19 9/11 hijackers got their U.S. visas through Visa Express. Others had gotten their multi-year tourist visas long before. But Visa Express was not an anomaly; most posts overseas had something similar in place. It happened to be Visa Express in Saudi that made 9/11 possible, but it could have been any of us, whispered visa officers globally. It was policy. Programs like Visa Express were done away with in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, only to creep back a few years later. The Trump administration has now mandated near-100 percent personal interviews once again. Other changes were imposed on a recalcitrant State Department, including a requirement to fingerprint all visa applicants, extensive use of facial recognition technology, and closer liaison with the intelligence agencies. But the prime directive of facilitating travel still remains. It is part of the culture and demands some sort of backup, some sort of internal enforcement. Once handed his visa, the traveler applies to enter the U.S. at one of hundreds of ports of entry, run until 2001 by the predecessor to Homeland Security, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The visa holder is stamped in for a period of time, typically six months for tourists. A side system exists where people from 41 certain “vetted” countries need no visa at all. In FY 2023, the United States welcomed approximately 18 million visitors to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program. Once any of these people left the airport, up to now, almost none had any contact with any form of immigration enforcement, a massive weak spot involving everyone looking the other way as the number of illegal aliens in America grew. I handled the case of a Syrian man. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa years earlier, and no one cared that he was obviously not a tourist. He attended community college without a student visa because no one at the college cared, received food stamps for a while, got a driver’s license, upgraded that so he could drive a taxi and work full-time, and eventually bought a house. He even became a notary public in pursuit of his real estate license. At each instance the government officials he encountered did not care that he was an illegal alien, if they even knew. He learned he could do what he wanted in America, that the law meant very little. When I was able to deny him his new visa, he asked me a question that has haunted me ever since: Of all the people, why do you care? (For whatever it’s worth, he married a Syrian-American and got a waiver for his ineligibility.) One extreme example of time allowed in the U.S. is student visas. Most international students are admitted for “duration of study.” That means as long as they stay in full-time status, as determined by the school or university mind you, not ICE, they can live and work part-time in America. And weep not; many of these “colleges” are run by fellow nationals out of store fronts, offer no classes, but for a fee validate student status. Some students live in the U.S. in “soft” status for a decade or more. (This will soon change to a set, limited time frame under new DHS guidelines.) Other aliens benefit greatly from bogus asylum claims. They are allowed to live and work in the U.S. while the claim grinds through the courts, something a clever lawyer can drag out for years. Then, finally given an order of deportation, under the policy of no internal enforcement, they simply leave the courtroom and resume their illegal life. At one point the number of illegals grew so high that an amnesty was granted to, for a moment, reset the number to zero. This immigration amnesty was enacted in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, through the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This law offered a pathway to legal permanent residency (and eventually citizenship) for most illegal immigrants who had entered the U.S. before January 1, 1982 and had lived continuously in the country. It also provided legal status to seasonal agricultural workers who had worked a minimum number of days as illegals in America. It had the foreseeable but unexpected consequence of reshaping Latino communities, especially in California, Texas, and the Southwest, with long-lasting political and social effects. But employer sanctions in the IRCA were weakly enforced under the no internal enforcement policy, and unauthorized hiring continued. Border enforcement ramped up somewhat, but without creating new legal entry channels for low-wage workers, and without any internal enforcement of immigration law against the new batch of illegal entrants who snuck through, undocumented migration resumed as usual. Under Trump, things have changed. One of the most significant backstops to so many visas being issued abroad and then promptly forgotten about is a new plan to review the more than 55 million people who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation. The State Department said all U.S. visa-holders, to include tourists and students, are now subject to “continuous vetting,” with an eye toward any indication they could be ineligible for permission to enter or stay in the United States. If such information is found, the visa will be revoked, and if the visa-holder is in the United States, he would be subject to deportation. The pre-Trump eras reflect how U.S. immigration law was often little more than symbolic. Before Trump, the United States pursued immigration enforcement policies concentrating on border security while neglecting the nation’s interior. Both Democrats and Republicans tolerated the presence of millions of illegal aliens, balancing weak enforcement with political and economic considerations.  Since Trump’s second administration came into power, the most obvious change in immigration policy is the current campaign by ICE to locate and deport aliens in the United States illegally. This summer storm has been a long time coming. This is a step that the flaccid immigration system demanded for decades, as local, state, and Federal authorities turned a blind eye toward illegals walking free out of court rooms, walking free from prisons, and living any life they chose, good or bad, in America. There is no other country in the world so lax on internal immigration enforcement, and the time has come to play catch-up on the millions of cases allowed by so many officials to be in America. It isn’t authoritarianism or fascism; it is enforcing laws on the books for decades for the first time. The post On Immigration, Trump Is Just Enforcing the Law appeared first on The American Conservative.

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