Japan and India strengthened their military and economic ties Saturday, signing a high-speed-rail agreement and pledging joint exercises for their navies, as countries across Asia seek to counterbalance China’s growing assertiveness in the region.

Sreeram Chaulia, Dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs, made the thing explicit:

The message is: We don’t want Chinese hegemony in Asia and we’ll work together to create a multipolar Asia[.]

We should encourage this and more agreements like it in the region. More than that, we should work with those in such agreements rather than sitting back and letting them stand on their own.

The US-led coalition fighting the extremist group Islamic State denied Monday it carried out deadly airstrikes against a Syrian government military base.

The regime of President Bashar al-Assad said coalition warplanes carried out an air raid on Sunday in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour that killed three Syrian soldiers and wounded 13 others, and destroyed several combat vehicles and an arms depot.

Our special envoy to the coalition, Brett McGurk, was fast of the mark to deny the strike. He was desperate to insist that coalition strikes had occurred kilometers away, we couldn’t possibly have struck a Syrian military base.

Why? Hasn’t our President said the Syrian government must go? Haven’t he and our Secretary of State guy said al Assad must go? Given those demands, wouldn’t a strike on the Syrian government’s military bases—all of them, not just one—be an entirely appropriate activity by the coalition?

What, exactly, would have been the downside of such a strike, had it actually occurred?

John Kerry, the guy presently sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair, is in the Middle East, talking about speeding up the talking about what to do about al-Assad and the Daesh.

The goal is to accelerate everything.

Everything helps move everything else. If we can get a cease-fire, if we can get a political process, that greatly facilitates what we can then talk to Russians and others about in terms of coordination to go after Daesh[.]

An aside: why on earth would we want a cease fire with murderous thugs, whether Bashar al-Assad, as Kerry is going on about above, or with the Daesh?

Here’s the meat of the thing, though:

He said efforts to speed up the diplomacy and military action already were under way before coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday, claimed by Islamic State, killed 130 people.

“Are we all talking about things that might be able to augment it, move faster? You better believe it,” Mr Kerry said.

This is nonsense. The way to move things faster is to do the things promptly. We should talk to those we want to join us in the actions to destroy al-Assad and the Daesh and lay out what those actions need to be. We should give those we want to join us a reasonable, brief period of time to understand those actions and determine their capacity to take part—a capacity we already know because, of course, we have alert embassies in those nations.

And then we should act. Those others can join us or not, but it’s…suboptimal…to wait on those others and their dithering. Al-Assad and the Daesh only benefit from delay.

Again: the way to move things faster is to move them faster, and with less intervening talk. Full stop.