Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Bit on India, Bhutan, and the PRC

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Little covered in the NLMSM is a growing dispute among Bhutan, the People’s Republic of China, and India over a region of Bhutan called Doklam.  Bhutan is a landlocked, high altitude nation in the eastern Himalayas.  Who cares?  Bhutan and India do.  And the US should.

Doklam is a region of Bhutan that abuts PRC-occupied Tibet, and by seizing Doklam the PRC would be able to further isolate TIbet, the better to deal with its impertinence.  Doklam also sits along a narrow stretch of India that lies among Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh; occupying of Doklam would position the PRC to choke off a large region of India that lies beyond it: six states, three of which border on India’s Arunachal Pradesh—a state that the PRC claims for itself under the fiction that it’s a part of its occupied Tibet.

The proximate problem is a PRC effort to build a road into and through Doklam, the better (say most observers) to allow the PLA to enter and spread out into the region, sealing its occupation.  Naturally, Bhutan demurred from this, and it asked for Indian assistance in stopping the PRC.  India answered, sent troops into the region, and forced a halt to the construction.  The PRC is objecting to this “interference.”

Now the PRC, through its press organ in the region, the South China Morning Post, is insisting that the situation is none of India’s business, and India should butt out—leaving the behemoth to partition the tiny.

The PRC, through this organ, even is making the cynical claim that Bhutan can’t possibly be sovereign over a “patch of territory which [it] does not effectively control.”  Never mind that the reason Bhutan doesn’t control this patch of its territory is because the PRC is occupying it, and Bhutan alone is too small to dislodge it.  Here is the extent of the cynicism:

New Delhi must push Thimpu [the Bhutan capital] to take the lead in engaging Beijing and devise a mutually acceptable boundary protocol that acknowledges China’s effective jurisdiction of the area….

Bhutan, and India along with it, must abjectly surrender.

We should become active in supporting India and Bhutan against this further example of PRC aggression, especially as it threatens not just Bhutan, but India as well—a potentially powerful ally in southern Asia.

This also would have implications for us far beyond aiding a little guy and a potential ally.  Coming in bluntly on the side of India and Bhutan and opposing PRC aggression in southern Asia would be a clear signal (certainly, concrete action would need to follow) to other Asian nations—rimming the East and South China Seas, for instance—that pivot or no, we are moving to protect our and our friends’ and allies’ interests throughout Asia and the seas adjoining it.

International Censorship

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France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance.  Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.

The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….

It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.

It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.

The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.

The Fruits of Timidity

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Rebel forces in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday announced that they plan to hold a referendum calling for the creation of a new state known as Malorossiya, which translates as “Little Russia.”

In a statement published on the rebel-aligned Donetsk News Agency, rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko said that the new state would aspire to include not only the areas under insurgent control, but also the rest of Ukraine.

This wouldn’t be occurring now, had our government and those of Europe hadn’t been so meek in the face of Russian aggression in the two eastern oblasts and then without a whimper accepting Russian partition of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea.

Maybe now, the lot of us will stop bleating about the Minsk accord and remind Russia of its obligations under the Budapest Memorandum.  Maybe now the lot of us will start selling/leasing/granting Ukraine the weapons and supplies it needs to defend itself and to take back from Russia the three oblasts.

The PRC and Northern Korea

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The People’s Republic of China trade relations with northern Korea appear to be robust and growing, despite efforts by President Donald Trump to get PRC President Xi Jinping to do more to curb his dog.  Imports from northern Korea have actually fallen 13.2% in the first six months of this year compared to the first six months of last year, but exports have risen 29.1%, for a net increase in trade over 10%.

Huang Songping, representing the PRC’s customs agency, said

As neighbors, China and North Korea maintain normal business and trade exchanges[.]

That’s a pretty clear statement of how interested the PRC is in helping put an end to northern Korea’s nuclear weapons program, contra PRC chit chat and Trump’s efforts to use diplomatic measures involving the PRC to end to it.

Now it’s time to move on without the PRC’s involvement—other than expanded sanctions on PRC companies and persons who do business with the gangland.  Other measures, both diplomatic and military, do not need to include the PRC.