Freedom Line Blog

Question: What happens when a majority of countries at the United Nations support a treaty, but delegations representing half the world’s population do not?

Answer: An agreement that won’t be enforced fairly across the globe.

It gets worse.  The dissenting half is made up of the governments most likely to violate the treaty.

The document in question is the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the vehicle of international gun control advocates to monitor and limit weapons transfers between countries.  But while the United States, considered the country with the best such system in place, is now a signatory, serial violators such as Syria, North Korea, and Iran, as well as major arms dealing countries such as Russia and China, are not.

So, what we have here is a treaty that will bind only the governments that already take arms transfer seriously, while having no effect on the governments most likely to violate its terms.

As an added bonus, there’s enough loose language in the treaty to leave room for an enterprising UN bureaucrat or two to create a global firearms registry applicable to every signatory, potentially putting American gun owners’ Second Amendment rights at the mercy of foreign gun control interests.

Not a banner week for the U.S. diplomatic mission to the U.N.

As a supplement to my column this week criticizing John Kerry’s $250 million in economic aid to Egypt, Charles Krauthammer dings the Secretary of State for apparently sleeping through Foreign Aid 101:

We have no particular stake in Egypt’s economy. Our stake is in its politics. Yes, we would like to see a strong economy. But in a country ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood?

Our interest is in a non-Islamist, nonrepressive, nonsectarian Egypt, ruled as democratically as possible. Why should we want a vibrant economy that maintains the Brotherhood in power? Our concern is Egypt’s policies, foreign and domestic.

If we’re going to give foreign aid, it should be for political concessions — on unfettered speech, on an opposition free of repression, on alterations to the Islamist constitution, on open and fair elections.

With Egypt’s newest strongman following the same script as his predecessors by taking money and failing to reform, the only thing missing here is to remind America’s chief diplomat that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.

Thank goodness WikiLeaks founder and diplomatic saboteur Julian Assange is getting a taste of his own medicine.  In his first interview since being “confined” to a nine-bedroom English mansion while he awaits an extradition hearing to Sweden on sex assault charges, the man who wants more transparency from governments and businesses is less inclined to turn the spotlight on himself.

Speaking from the English mansion where he is confined on bail, the 39-year-old Australian said that the decision to publish incriminating police files about him was “disgusting”. The Guardian had previously used him as its source for hundreds of leaked US embassy cables.

Mr Assange is understood to be particularly angry with a senior reporter at the paper and former friend for “selectively publishing” incriminating sections of the police report, although The Guardian made clear that the WikiLeaks founder was given several days to respond.

Mr Assange claimed the newspaper received leaked documents from Swedish authorities or “other intelligence agencies” intent on jeopardising his defence.

“The leak was clearly designed to undermine my bail application,” he said. “Someone in authority clearly intended to keep Julian in prison.”

How amusing it is to see Assange angered by others’ “selectively publishing” a “leak…clearly designed to undermine (his) bail application…”  I’ll bet there are hundreds of career diplomats similarly peeved at the well-connected Casanova’s preoccupation with his comparatively minor legal problems while they labor to repair his inestimable damage to world order.

You know that obnoxious college undergrad who tries to prove his worldliness by being overly deferential to any foreign culture he comes across? He won the electoral college.

Buried deep in a report by ABC News’ Christiane Amanpour on the White House’s diplomatic engagement with Iran comes this little nugget:

A senior U.S. official said the administration is waiting to see if Iran comes back to the negotiating table after Ramadan as it has publicly indicated in the past, but there have been no direct contacts with Iran about engagement.

In politics, as in romance, deadlines mean something. And apparently Iran is busy washing its hair on Ramadan.

Let’s be clear: Iran blows us off when we ignore them and blows us off when we try to engage them. They’re irascibale when there are sanctions in place and irascible when there are none. They hate us on Ramadan and they’re not wild about us on Hanukkah.

Mr. President: They’re just not that into you.