Solving Foreign Policy by Ian Bruene

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Solving Foreign Policy by Ian Bruene

With a new administration, there are always questions and speculation about the details of its policies. Additionally there is maneuvering by various factions attempting to influence and/or gain position in the incoming administration.

In that spirit, as well as the spirit of the long history of independent proposals for solving weighty political issues (ref. Swift, et all), I wish to propose a solution to the foreign policy difficulties which now plague America, in a way which I believe will satisfy the stated concerns of all sides.

The Unified Weapons Proliferation Treaty.

* Signatories to this treaty shall be required to liberalize their weapons laws to at minimum the level required by the Second Amendment. Loosening them beyond that is certainly encouraged, but not required.

* Signatories shall be required to contribute to the enforcement efforts detailed later.

* Signatories which fail to abide by their treaty obligations shall be subject to an escalating series of penalties, the exact sequence to be determined, culminating in invasion and replacement of the signatory government.

* The Signatory Nations shall execute a continuous smuggling operation to distribute small arms as widely as possible in all non-Signatory nations.

* Signatory Nations which are in possession of military air transport shall additionally be tasked with air-dropping caches of small arms geographically evenly across all non-Signatory Nations.

* Any attack on the transport aircraft shall be considered an act of war by the attacking nation.

This treaty will solve nearly all geopolitical problems. First of all, it will dramatically increase the difficulty of an attempted invasion of any nation by any other, due to having an armed population. But the effects don’t stop there. Nations ruled by autocrats or dictators will have far less ability to play the game of a Short Victorious War to fix their internal problems by spilling over their neighbors, and will be facing an armed populace in any sort of crackdown.

Nations which try to play at faux-civilization on the other hand will be forced to step away from the overt tyranny which they have been dabbling in in recent years.

But the benefits don’t stop even there: nations which have internal issues distinct from normal politics can gain peace: in situations where a violent minority oppresses the general populace, that minority will quickly be brought to good behavior. Simultaneous with this, nations which have disfavored minorities benefit, as armed minorities don’t get genocided.

Admittedly there are some tragic situations which cannot be made peaceable. Some cultures are simply incapable of behaving in a civilized manner after all. In those cases ideally the culture turns in on itself with enough violence that it either disappears, or rapidly evolves towards more civilized behavior. Failing that if it tries to attack its neighbors, the difficulty of invasion applies.

As far as practically implementing this goes, the first step would be to bring all parts of the American polity in line with The Second, as they are supposed to be anyway. After that it is simply a matter of allowing the rest of the world to either choose to join voluntarily, or wait until the choice is made for them. The airdrops are meant to prevent issues of interception or uneven penetration of small arms into the non-signatory nation.

62 thoughts on “Solving Foreign Policy by Ian Bruene”

    1. Yes. Works for me too.

      Starting with Canada, Israel, Australia, and Scotland/England/Ireland. Secondary priority, Mexico and countries to the south extracting small arms from the cartels.

      Like

      1. No thanks as an Australian, I believe there is a strong relationship between the number of guns in people hands and the number of people that die to guns. I believe in your right to carry guns as per 2nd amendment but that is not something the Australian people voted for.

        The odds of being killed by someone with a gun in Australia is about 1 in a million.

        Australia is not part of the American polity.

        Like

        1. There is indeed a strong relationship between the number of guns in people’s hands and the number of people who are killed by gunshot. It’s actually a tautology.

          What you really need to look at is the rate of violent crime — and then the rate at which ordinary people *defend* themselves from violent crime. Not all “gun deaths” are the same; murder and self-defense are moral opposites. And then there’s the fact that demonstrating the clear ability to resist can stop an attempt at violence with nobody getting hurt at all.

          We’ve all spent a lifetime being hammered over the head with the costs of an armed populace, and the same people (the press and progressives, birm) who obsessively hammer us with that message absolutely refuse to admit that there might be two sides to this coin. When you weigh the benefits — not just theoretical, either, as they’re borne out daily here in the USA, there are numbers to back it up — an armed populace starts looking like a very good deal.

          But nobody *has* to sign the treaty, after all. If you all like your societal cost/benefit balance the way it is, you can keep it.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. The odds of being killed by someone with a gun in Australia is about 1 in a million.

            Why does it always sound like “being killed with a gun” is the Very Worst Way To Die? How about being killed by a sharp-, blunt-, or musical instrument? Fear the Didgeri-doom!

            In the Obama years I went a-searching for stats on the before-and-after of Australia’s mandatory Gun Buyback. Yep, it only took a few seconds for Teh Goog to confirm it: Australian “Gun Deaths” dropped hard after the government took its subjects’ guns.

            But I wanted the method-agnostic Homicide Rate By Year. It took hours and hours to find that in the google-chaff. (“Are you sure you don’t mean gun deaths? You’re probably looking for gun deaths, right? Here, check out these pages on gun deaths.”) It was almost as if somebody didn’t want the plain vanilla Homicide Rate to be found!

            Eventually I found the Australian Institute of Criminology site at www(dot)aic(dot)gov(dot)au/dataTools/facts/vicViolentRate(dot)html

            Set the Wayback Machine to July 31, 2017–the last save before the data got memoryholed. See if you can spot the buyback in that data. There is a slight, gradual drop in Total Homicides over the following years, though eyeballing the graphed data doesn’t reveal when the buyback itself happened.

            OTOH, the *immediate* increase in Sexual Assaults and Total Robberies (per 100K) jumps right out at you.

            It’s as if people who favor disarming citizens (or “subjects”) prefer being raped or robbed–and stabbed or beaten or poisoned or drowned or burned to death. As long as it isn’t Gun Death, they’re cool with it.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. I remember a quote, “God created all men, but Samuel Colt made them equal.” Applies to all women, but even more so.

                Like

            2. At some point in any debate about this, some anti-gun person will always say “if it saves one life it’s worthwhile.” But is it? How many preventable rapes, robberies, and murders are you allowing in return for that one life?

              Like

              1. And what about the quality of life? ‘Saved’ one, only for everybody to live in terror of violent criminals armed with everything but guns?

                Murder, and crime in general, predates guns by several hundred thousand years. Blaming it all on guns is idiotic.

                Liked by 1 person

                2. In reality, the criminals will always have guns; they can’t be un-invented. It’s only thee law-abiding who obey victim disarmament lwas.

                  Liked by 1 person

                    1. My beloved’s late high school buddy was a narcotics cop in DC before he retired. He said he could get any gun you could ask for in 11 hours by putting the word out…and it wou,d only take that long because he was a cop.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    2. I’ve heard the same from quite a few other LEOs. Most street cops, as contrasted with the political wings of the various police organizations, understand reality, and support possession (and frequently, carry) of firearms by honest civilians, especially if those civilians have at least some training.

                      Like

                    3. Yep. If you don’t care about the law you can get a gun from Pedro the Pusher down on the street corner. Pedro peddles drugs that are completely illegal; you think he can’t get black-market or gray-market guns?

                      Like

        3. I utterly reject the premise that the number of deaths should be zero.

          I also reject the premise that the number of deaths using guns should be zero.

          The correct moral response to a rape is that the woman in question draws on her attacker, and then he either has a very fast Come To Jesus moment, or she blows his head off.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. The number of deaths can never be zero. More than 7,800 people die every day in the U.S.

            52 are murdered, about 1/3 with guns. That’s not counting the ‘gun deaths’ that are criminals killed by police, criminals killed by other criminals, and criminals killed when they tried to victimize the wrong person. Like the 4 that tried to kill Kyle Rittenhouse when he was openly carrying an AR-15. (One of them ran away and K.R. didn’t shoot) Talk about Darwin Award-winning stupid.

            More than 100 traffic-related deaths occur every day.

            300+ die of fentanyl overdoses now that the border has been open for 3 1/2 years.

            More than 500 die from medical mistakes. Botched surgeries, wrong drugs administered, or simply from treatment being delayed or denied by bureaucracy. “The doctor is not allowed to prescribe that treatment.”

            Liked by 1 person

        4. “I believe in your right to carry guns as per 2nd amendment but that is not something the Australian people voted for.”

          This sentence shows that you have not understood the 2nd Amendment. The right to be armed is not a right granted by the Constitution. It’s a natural right that the U.S. government is forbidden to take away. It’s a right that Australians have, too; voting is irrelevant to whether you have the right to be armed. (Of course, it’s completely relevant to whether your government is going to punish people for exercising their rights.)

          Liked by 2 people

          2. This.

            The American Bill of Rights does not grant rights. Rather, it is a list of rights that people have the moment they are born. The Bill of Rights restricts the government from taking those rights away.

            The moment you are born, you can stand on a street corner and speak to whomever will listen. You can pick up a sword and attempt to defend yourself against any who would do you harm. You can follow your conscience or whatever higher voice you believe in whenever you are confronted with difficult questions of ethics or morals.

            The government does not grant you the right to do so. It can only attempt to take those rights away from you.

            Liked by 3 people

          3. Not an expert on American law and don’t pretend to be.

            After more research you had an American constitution and immediately added 10 amendments, effectively on the same day in 1791 since then you have over time added additional amendments, My false assumption was that there was a period of time before the 2nd amendment.

            hmm according to the cdc slightly more die from guns then cars but meh stats say whatever message the statistician want to say.

            https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm

            Ultimately if people can’t use guns they use knives, cars or mass transport. Its just delays things until people are a bit older and they may have learnt that is a bad idea or authorities have caught up to them.

            While I would be happy if every person who intended to assault and rape was shot by the intended victim, that does not take into account the modern leftest viewpoint that anytime they can’t remember the night before and had sex its rape.

            Like

        5. If you’re not a violent criminal, and you don’t live in a bad part of a Democrat-ruled big city, your odds of being killed by somebody with a gun in the U.S. is also about 1 in a million.

          Why do the cities with the most ‘gun control’ have the most violent crime? They blame it on guns brought in from those ‘Eeevul right-wing towns’ nearby, but why don’t those towns have the same problems? Could it be that guns are not the cause?

          Liked by 2 people

          1. I once posed the Chicago question (as of the year 2015, IN-PERSON) to a gungrabber and got the most insane reply ever. The initial answer was “Chicago is surrounded by states with LAX gun laws and so guns come in from there.”

            I pursued this line of logic, asking why, in that case, did the FBI stats not show surrounding states with high murder rates like Chicago?  I did my imitation of guppy fish at feeding time while the gungrabber explained: “The red states do have high murder rates, there’s just a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy to conceal the murders and hide the bodies so the FBI statistics don’t reflect reality.” 

            I think I managed a ‘…huh?’ at this point while the nutbar went on to claim that “roving Alt-Right Posses” were killing POC pretty much at will and…hiding the bodies.  I walked away shaking my head and talking to myself…

            Like

  5. So, this would mean we’re not getting rid of the ATF, but rather legalizing Operation Fast and Furious?

    —

    MAGrA – make Americans Gun-runners again

    Don’t forget to contribute to your IRA!

    Like

    1. Naw. Still getting rid of the ATF. Just replacing it with something else, new label, new focus outside the US. Like the CIA is suppose to be.

      Liked by 2 people

          2. Boring through the old SF magazine collection on archive.org, I found there are several different versions of that story, of considerably different lengths.

            Like much of van Vogt’s work, his grand ideas exceeded his ability to make a coherent story. He could really have used a good editor or three.

            Like

      2. Can’t think of a better place to jump in so I’ll jump here. A friend has returned from Mexico. The government is concerned about cartels. So they have passed a law that people can have only one gun per household. In the words of the Mexican people WT actual F?! Because what can you do with one gun if the cartels come? I’m not going to say that people are hiding their guns because “that would be wrong”.

        Anyway Lord help the people in Mexico.

        Liked by 1 person

  7. I have questions. How many of the newly dropped weapons will immediately be scooped up by the local bullies/cartels/police etc.? How many of the weapons will instead find their way into the hands of people with enough courage to confront those local bullies? How many individual weapons would be required to supply the entire human population? How would one convince the current powers that be to sign the enabling treaty in the first place?

    This seems like the exact opposite of the UN Small Arms Treaty that I hear about occasionally. Transforming the culture of the whole world to one of American style self reliance and self defense is an attractive goal, but I suspect the cultural shift needs to be at least partly in place for access to arms to have the desired effect.

    Like

    1. Not wrong.

      Also not wrong to dream about a world where, like sections of the US invasion, is inadvisable. Dreams do not have to be achievable.

      Even with the 2nd amendment we know that there are areas within the US where arm resistance won’t happen. Look at 2020 mostly peaceful riots in Chicago, etc., even DC. Yet other locations where the peaceful rioters showed up, looked at those gathered, and went “nope”, and left. Even Springfield Oregon …. key is Oregon. Protestors marched, but they stayed peaceful (too many “roof top Koreans”, even if none were Koreans. By the time the protestors gathered for Eugene to march downtown, there were only two. Few more showed up at Jefferson/Willamette and 6th or 7th (not like I checked), but they did stay peaceful, no fires, no bangs, no nothing. Springfield, with the mills, and outlying farms, at least has a reputation of being rural gun owning. While Eugene is known for the Ducks and not rural gun owning; they’d be wrong.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. You’ve hit on one of my questions. I’m 100% on board with this idea, but I wonder what’s going to make countries want to sign up. What’s the carrot? Or the stick?

      Do they do it in return for favored trade status? This is where tariffs might come in handy. If you want to do unfettered business with the biggest consumer economy and manufacturing base in the world, partner with us in Operation Gundrop, and we’ll go in with you on making sure that literally everyone in your country who wants a gun has one.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. What’s the carrot? Or the stick?

        The carrot is that you have territorial sovereignty, and a reducing defense and policing budget.

        The stick is that your population becomes armed against your will.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Aha, clearly I missed the part where we’re not asking. The whole thing makes much more sense now.

          I am intrigued by this modest proposal, Mr. Swift, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. :D

          Liked by 2 people

  9. Just a small proposed addition to the policy — a firearm with broken bits or no ammo is just a poorly designed club. So any delivered boom-stick should have a plastic bag attached with the needed ‘extra bits’. Of course, there’s a small bit of room for discussion about how many cartridges are ‘the required minimum’, but that can be sorted out just before the policy wonks start working on which crew-served weapon systems need to be added to the terms of the treaty…..

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Way back in WW2, there was the “Liberator” pistol – a cheap stamped out 45 caliber single shot pistol (cartridge extraction was done with a provided dowel) airdropped by the thousands. The first purpose was to ambush an occupying soldier and obtain a decent weapon. The second was to fall apart soon after so as not leaving them laying around after the war.

    Like

    1. The Guide Lamp Division of GM got the cost under $2.00 for a little cardboard box containing a Liberator, 5 .45ACP cartridges, a picture instruction sheet, and the extractor dowel. They were shoveled out of C-47s by the gross over occupied France.

      It’s unclear how effective the program was, but they sure pissed off the Nazis. :-D

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Nowadays, its blueprints for 3D printers. Even if your printer is crap, and the result isn’t very good, you’ll still get a few rounds out of it before it quits working.

      Liked by 1 person

  11. * Signatories to this treaty shall be required to liberalize their weapons laws to at minimum the level required by the Second Amendment. Loosening them beyond that is certainly encouraged, but not required.

    Several of the Colonies had charters that required each citizen to acquire and maintain a rifle and a specified quantity of powder and balls. The Constitution of 1789 recognized “keep and bear arms” as a right, but no longer made it mandatory.

    Like

  12. Heck of a lot cheaper than sending a UN committee to figure out a solution every time. And presumably far more entertaining on the six-o’clock news.

    It occurs to me, however, that those seeking *Causus Bellae* will under such a system brawl for prime flyover routes, or schedules, or sponsoring nations (because US arms are preferred to French, perhaps), or on the other side, for flight privileges to drop over the people they like, whether someone else made the delivery this quarter or not.

    Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.