Tag Archives: foreign policy

Some Folks Get It

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Whether or not the attack on Pearl Harbor was treachery or straight-up war, or whether our dropping nuclear bombs on Japan at the other end of that war was butchery or straight-up war, it’s more than three generations ago; the folks responsible are mostly gone.

No apology needed, said 96-year-old Alfred Rodrigues, a US Navy veteran who survived what President Franklin D Roosevelt called a “date which will live in infamy.”

“War is war,” Rodrigues said as he looked at old photos of his military service. “They were doing what they were supposed to do, and we were doing what we were supposed to do.”

This sailor who was there understands the thing.

It’s past time to move on, especially for the press, whose interns seem to have been having trouble—ever since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Pearl was set up—finding things for their scribes to write about.

Counting Coup

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China on Tuesday handed back to the United States an underwater drone whose seizure raised tensions in a relationship that has been tested by President-elect Donald Trump’s signals of a tougher policy toward Beijing.

And

The Chinese navy vessel that seized the drone returned it near where it had been taken, and it was received by the USS Mustin about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Subic Bay in the Philippines[.]

The PRC just did.

Embarrassments Coming Thick and Fast

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Now the People’s Republic of China is overtly rubbing President Barack Obama’s timidity in his face, and in the face of the United States.  The USNS Bowditch had been conducting ocean floor surveys in the South China Sea and was recovering the drones it used in conjunction with those surveys when a PRC vessel that had been stalking shadowing the Bowditch snatched one of the drones and made off with it.

This is, at best, an act of rank piracy and a theft of technology the PRC does not have.

The question then becomes: what is President Barack Obama (D) going to do about it—besides wagging his finger and trying to talk tough, I mean.  Here’s Peter Cook, Obama’s Pentagon spokesman:

We call upon China to return our [unmanned underwater vehicle] immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law[.]

Please.  We beg you to leave us alone.

State has lodged a formal protest with the PRC.  That’ll show them.

Apparently Obama is, once again, satisfying himself with trying to sound tough without actually doing anything.  He lacks the self-awareness even to be embarrassed by this face slap.

And now that the PRC has collected the drone’s intel value while rubbing Obama’s impotence in his face, they say they’ll return the drone.  Sometime.

Obama Has Threatened Russia

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Or so he says, while continuing his partisan and petty attacks on his opponents.

The US will “take action” against Russia for alleged cyberattacks on Democratic officials, President Obama warned Thursday, hours after his spokesman claimed that President-elect Donald Trump “obviously knew” about the breaches and leaks that critics say propelled him to victory in last month’s election.

President Barack Obama’s (D) tough talk about retaliatory action against Russia comes against the backdrop of his Vice President Joe Biden’s threat to retaliate against Russia for its cyber invasions and his own threat of retaliation regarding Syrian use of chemical weapons.

Obama’s tough talk about what Trump knew and when he knew it comes against the backdrop of his refusal to let his intelligence community Directors let Congress know the same things he claims Trump already knew.

Obama in his own words:

I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action.  And we will—at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.

Sure he will.

I’m reminded of what bully wannabes on the playgrounds where I grew up used to chant: “Boy, oh boy, when I get you.”

Permissions of the PRC

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Tom Shorrock, who touts himself as having been raised in Japan and South Korea during the Cold War, has an interesting, if incoherent, piece in his Wednesday TomDispatch article.  He opened with a repeat of President-Elect Donald Trump’s tweet in response to the faux outrage of the NLMSM and the People’s Republic of China over his brief telecon with Republic of China President Tsai Ing-wen, a tweet that was concerned with whether the PRC had asked permission before building “a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea.”

Shorrock then supplied a series of potential PRC President Xi Jinping tweets.

“Did America ask us if it was OK to…maintain a massive military complex of more than 100 bases in nearby Japan? I don’t think so!”

“Did America ask us if it was OK to…rent space at the massive U-Tapao military complex in nearby Thailand? I don’t think so!”

“Did America ask us if it was OK to…use portions of the military complexes at Antonio Bautista Air Base, Basa Air Base, Fort Magsaysay, Lumbia Air Base, and Mactan-Benito Ebuen Air Base in the nearby Philippines? I don’t think so!”

And on and on, ad ridiculum; you get the idea.

What’s missed here, or ignored, you pick ’em, is that the PRC seized and occupied islands that are either sovereign territory of other nations rimming the South China Sea or are well within those nations’ Exclusive Economic Zone, and so the PRC is present—vandalizing those islands with its construction—wholly illegally.  On the other hand, the US did, indeed, ask permission and conclude formal, freely negotiated treaties with the owning nations to allow our presence in the named locales.

The comparisons are so inapt as to be risible.  Which may well be why Xi didn’t make those tweets.  Or make those responses in any milieu.