Free Republic

When a head of state – such as the President of the United States, for example – wants to encourage certain behaviors in a foreign government, the toolbox is limited. There’s diplomacy, of course, but without something backing it up, diplomacy doesn’t mean much. So what are the tools that the diplomats have at their disposal? There’s war, of course, which can mean the threat of war, or the promise of defense, or an alliance in case of mutual concerns about a common enemy. There’s world opinion, and invitations to the right cocktail parties. And there’s trade – either a...

The United States and Russia exchanged prisoners in Abu Dhabi on Thursday, as Washington and Moscow edge toward a diplomatic rapprochement. Russia released Ksenia Karelina, a U.S.-Russian dual national, who was found guilty in Russia for donating a small sum to a U.S.-based Ukrainian charity and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Karelina, a former ballet dancer, became a U.S. citizen in 2021 after marrying an American and moving to Los Angeles. In exchange, the U.S. freed Artur Petrov, a German-Russian dual citizen who was arrested in 2023 in Cyprus at the request of U.S. authorities for allegedly exporting...

Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina was released from Kremlin custody in a prisoner swap with the United States on Thursday morning. Karelina was freed in exchange for German-Russian Arthur Petrov at a swap in Abu Dhabi, the Wall Street Journal reported. “American Ksenia Karelina is on a plane back home to the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “She was wrongfully detained by Russia for over a year and President Trump secured her release. @POTUS will continue to work for the release of ALL Americans,” he added. The dual-citizen spa worker was accused of treason against the Russian government...

An FBI investigation is underway after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's email was hacked into by Chinese cyberspies. U.S. officials say that Raimondo is the only Cabinet-level official whose account was compromised in the attack, according to The Washington Post – but a congressional staffer, human rights advocate and think tank were also targeted. The State Department discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft's cloud last month. The only two executive branch agencies known to have emails breached are the Commerce and State Departments. The targeted cyber espionage campaign has been mitigated. But not before the hackers had access to the email accounts...

Korbein Schultz, a U.S. Army soldier and intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty today to all charges against him in the indictment returned by a federal grand jury in March 2024 charging him with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, exporting technical data related to defense articles without a license, conspiracy to export defense articles without a license, and bribery of a public official. “The defendant abused his access to restricted government systems to sell sensitive military information to a person he knew to be a foreign national,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National...

“Money is Fungible.” We may disagree about all sorts of things in economics, but not this one. It’s one of the fundamentals. If you have a thousand dollars, you can buy something that costs $1000, or you can buy a hundred things that cost $10 each, or a thousand things that cost $1 each — or you can put your $1000 together with other money you already have, to buy something that costs more. This is so obvious it doesn’t seem worth bothering to mention, right? But it is necessary to delve into this issue, much more seriously than we...

Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, there is full-scale war in Europe. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and possibly also Moldova are fully engaged, with other nearby countries on alert, involving themselves in a way that sometimes appears to push the envelope of neutrality. We all know what this means in terms of the human cost to people and geography. Shelling, bombing, firing on individuals, businesses, population centers, industrial centers, and other targets, both military and civilian. Thousands of people have already been killed, and many thousands more, most likely, will die in the weeks and months ahead. That is of course...

During the July 2018 NATO summit, elements of the USA newsmedia focused on President Trump’s accurate attacks on Western Europe’s contradictory actions and positions in the arenas of defense and commerce. What the USA newsmedia covered much less was how welcome those points were to NATO members from Eastern Europe, whose memories of Russian aggression are much more recent, perhaps, than those of Western Europe, making them as wary of these issues as Mr. Trump is. Delegates from Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, for example, appeared just as happy about Mr. Trump’s comments as delegates from England, France and especially Germany...

President Barack H. Obama has announced his administration's commitment to advancing American exports -- to double America's exports by 2014. Now, there's a daring position to take: advocating a goal easily supported by the entire country, regardless of politics or demographics. The question is how to advance exports. The United States is already a huge exporter; ships and planes depart daily, fully laden with millions of dollars' worth of export cargo. There could be more -- there can always be more -- but it's not like we're embarking on some great trip to the unknown. When John F. Kennedy called...

U.S. defense analysts now consider the Chinese air defense network to be the most dangerous system in the world. The Chinese system is considered more dangerous than the formidable Russian system. The reason for China's great leap forward into first place is due to the wholesale use of U.S. commercial products that make the Chinese air defense network flexible, easy to upgrade, and though to exploit. The Chinese investment into its air defense network is calculated to be one-tenth the cost of the U.S. expenditures. The low cost is attributed to what one analyst described as "Cisco in Chinese." Chinese...

You'd think that with all the talk lately from Washington about axes of evil, rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, and missile defense, the U.S. government would make sure that its export control system is state of the art. And you'd be flat wrong. Denying enemies the means to produce nukes, bugs, missiles, et al. clearly is America's first line of defense in the post-9/11 world. Yet U.S. export controls are in the process of breaking down completely. Anyone doubting this charge should look at the General Accounting Office's recent study on U.S. policy toward sending advanced computer chip-making capabilities...