Category Archives: foreign policy

A PRC Takeover

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Examiner.com has the tale.

Taiwan’s most popular and independent media organization, Next Media, is about to be sold to China-based tycoon Tsai Eng-Meng, in a deal which would give him and his company (Want Want China Times Group) control of 50% of Taiwan’s entire print news industry.

This would be an ordinary monopolist action by a Republic of China citizen, whose outcome would be subject to RoC law.

However.

The $600 million takeover is not so much a business deal as it is a proxy invasion of Taiwan’s independent press by the Chinese Communist Party.  Eng-Meng, who is Taiwanese himself and holds large financial stakes in China, has been a vocal supporter of unification between communist China and democratic Taiwan.  He is also an ally of Beijing’s communist government.

Objections are flowing, and they center on

the fact that Eng-Meng already has a record of using his existing media empire to promote pro-Beijing bias and censorship in [the RoC].

And

The free people of [the RoC] may be about to lose control over their own press to the Chinese Communist Party, without a shot even being fired.

If that sounds apocryphal, consider that the PRC has had a primary goal of conquering the island nation ever since the Communists won their civil war and the losing side escaped to Taiwan.  This is another step in reaching that goal.

Some Thoughts on Negotiating with Terrorists

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Rick Richman, writing in Commentary Magazine, has some.  He outlines some of the outcomes of such…negotiations:

  1. the barbaric terror war against Israeli civilians, commenced after the first Israeli offer of a state;
  2. the Palestinian rejection of the Clinton Parameters, after Israel formally accepted them;
  3. the Palestinian failure to carry out even Phase I of the three-phase Roadmap;
  4. the transformation of Gaza into Hamastan after Israel withdrew every settler and soldier
  5. the election of Hamas in 2006 and the Hamas coup in 2007;
  6. two rocket wars from Judenrein Gaza, and the continuing prospect of more;
  7. the year-long negotiation in the Annapolis Process that produced still another offer of a state, from which Abbas walked away;
  8. Abbas’s announcement in 2009 that he would do nothing without a construction freeze, followed by his doing nothing after he got one;
  9. the continual “reconciliation” attempts by Abbas with the terrorist group he promised to dismantle;…
  10. the violation of their express Oslo commitments[.]

Richman summarizes the futility of negotiating with terrorists at the outset of his piece:

…four years of the “Palestinian Terror War (mistakenly called the second intifada),”…disabused Israelis of the idea that the Palestinian leadership wanted a deal, and the fact that Arabs have become ever more candid about their ultimate goal, with Mahmoud Abbas telling Egyptian TV “he would never, in a thousand years, recognize a Jewish state.”

Negotiating with terrorists just gets more innocents killed.  Yet our SecDef nominee wants to “engage” with them, saying that Palestinian terrorists are misguided victims.  Our SecState nominee has said folks like al-Assad and the mullahs of Iran can be negotiated with.

On the other hand, there’s this:

A mouse is trying to argue with owls.  The mouse thinks their ways are wrong.  They think the mouse is dinner.

 

h/t Power Line

China’s Aggressiveness, America’s Response

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China recently announced guidelines, effective January 1, for its maritime “police” to board and seize foreign vessels in waters around the Paracel Islands, which are also claimed by Vietnam.

And

Chinese fishing boats ha[ve] cut the cables of [Vietnam’s] seismic survey ship last week.

And

Philippines Foreign Minister Albert del Rosario revealed…that China had communicated its intention to station ships permanently at the Scarborough Shoal….

Never mind that the Republic of the Philippines, with the support of international law, claims this area.

Indeed, the PRC claims, with a straight face, fully two-thirds of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory.

And

Beijing also continues to challenge Japan’s control over the Senkaku Islands….  Chinese maritime surveillance and fisheries vessels loiter outside the 12-mile territorial limit, occasionally crossing inside to force the Japanese coast guard to respond.

The PRC also objects to the US’ rotating token units of Marines through a basing facility in Darwin, Australia.  Such a move is an affront to Chinese sovereignty, you see.

Yet President Barack Obama is bent on gutting American defense capability by $500 billion, beginning next month, despite his own Defense Secretary’s warnings of the consequences.  Which gives new meaning to the phrase “leading from behind.”

Another Demonstration of Leading from Behind

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…and of its…effectiveness.

Thomas Donnelly of The Weekly Standard wrote that

President Obama said at an August 20 news conference that it was a “red line for us [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”  That would “change my calculus,” he declared.

But then came the weasel words.

But what has changed is the definition of “move.”  Apparently, it doesn’t mean the Syrian Army moving chemical rounds in order to use them on rebel forces or mixing the “precursor” elements that give a chemical warhead its lethality, but, in the clarifying words of National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, “ ’moving around’ means proliferation,” as in transferring them to Hezbollah.

Anything to avoid making a hard decision.  Please.

As long as the Obama administration continues to allow itself to be held hostage to such (imaginary) foreign threats—if that’s what the administration is doing—it will continue to be a helpless laughingstock in the eyes of our enemies.

Or, as William Kristol writes,

Obama’s inaction in Syria now is of a piece with his inaction in Iran in 2009, that the abandonment of Iraq in 2011 prefigured the prospective abandonment of Afghanistan over the next couple of years, and that defense cuts at home go hand in hand with an oh-so-light footprint abroad. The Obama administration has chosen a course of American retrenchment and retreat.

In which case, it’s not timidity but a deliberate retrograde advancement.  Which doesn’t change in any material way our enemies’ perception of us.

This is where trailing along behind events while yelling, “I’m going there, too” has gotten us.

YGTBSM

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In another demonstration of the Obama administration’s support for our Middle East allies, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy last Friday that Israel is suspicious of Palestinians and doesn’t care enough about their plight.

Passing up no opportunity to demonstrate the administration’s support, Clinton added

I’m not making excuses for the missed opportunities of the Israelis, or the lack of generosity, the lack of empathy that I think goes hand-in-hand with the suspicion….  So, yes, there is more that the Israelis need to do to really demonstrate that they do understand the pain of an oppressed people in their minds, and they want to figure out, within the bounds of security and a Jewish democratic state, what can be accomplished[.]

Not a word about the “lack of generosity, the lack of empathy” from the terrorists whose only goal is to butcher Israelis and their children.  Not a word about there being “more that the [Palestinians] need to do to really demonstrate that they do understand the pain of a people [who are the objects of their terrorism] in their minds.”

And this Progressive administration insists, with a straight face, that they fully support Israel.  And they cynically elide the fact that with the UN’s recent vote, the Oslo accords have been abrogated, and so there is no one with whom to negotiate for the Israelis.