Tag Archives: foreign policy

“About Time the US Made a Stand in South China Sea”

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That’s the headline of Joseph Bosco’s piece in Real Clear World, and he’s right.

However, we’ve no made such a stand, yet; all that’s happened is that a single destroyer was sailed “within 12 miles” of a Spratly island. What’s needed to truly take a stand is to sail an armed flotilla a closely as may be safely, from a navigability and maneuverability perspective, accompanied with low overflights by fighters.

This should be done with every Spratly island having PRC activity, it should be done with the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, and we should have flotillas cruising the Taiwan Strait.

As Bosco also noted, it would be beneficial if other nations—he suggested Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and ultimately all of ASEAN—participated in these sailings. However, the sailings are necessary, even if done unilaterally.

No more namby-pamby hemming and hawing.

South China Sea

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In a Wall Street Journal article opening with on the Republic of Korea’s Defense Minister Han Min-Koo remarks about the need for freedom of sea and air navigation in and over the South China Sea to be settled in accordance with international law, and Japan’s participation in trilateral talks with the RoK and the People’s Republic of China on a host of questions, the PRC’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi had this to say:

I wonder what Japan has to do with the South China Sea[.]

This deliberately disingenuous remark—the Sea “hosts” sea lanes that carry trade to Japan as well as the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and us—requires Wang to answer the question of what the PRC has to do with the South China Sea? Other than its naked grab for it, I mean.

What HRC Knew

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…about blaming the murders of our Ambassador in Libya and three of his security team on a video at the time she was busily blaming those murders on that video….

An email was sent from her Libyan Embassy to her State Department shortly after those murders. Of course, the email’s sender and recipient(s) have been carefully redacted by John Kerry’s State Department.

The film’s not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest, which escalated into violence.

It is our opinion that in our messaging, we want to distinguish, not conflate, the events in other countries with this well planned attack by militant extremists.

Two days later, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice did her trick on five Sunday news/talk shows claiming the video made the “protestors” do it.

Remember this duplicity in a year.

Snapback

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The nuclear weapons deal President Barack Obama signed with Iran provided for snapback of sanctions on Iran if Iran violated the terms of the agreement. One of those terms was to abide by UN requirements. One of those requirements was to accept the UN’s embargo on arms shipments by or for Iran.

Russia has helped Iran deliver weapons into Syria twice a day over the past 10 days, western intelligence sources tell Fox News.

Those sources say Russian cargo planes transported the weapons. The planes were spotted earlier this month on the tarmac at the Russian air base in Latakia, Syria’s primary port city.

The flights are not registered….

That last puts Russia in violation of the arms embargo, also.

Yet Obama—and his ex-Secretary of State and current Democratic Party Presidential candidate—support the nuclear weapons agreement, and they both trust Russia. What is it, exactly, that has or will be snapped back?

Hmm….

Sovereignty

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Regarding the People’s Republic of China’s attempted seizure of the East, and in particular, the South China Sea and the associated PRC seizure of seabed minerals, below the seabed oil and gas deposits, and surface fishing rights,

The US said it doesn’t take a position on sovereignty over the South China Sea but insists on freedom of navigation and overflight. About 30 percent of global trade passes through the South China Sea, which also has rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of undersea mineral deposits.

We need to take a position on sovereignty over the South China Sea, exactly for sovereignty, that international trade, those fishing rights, and those minerals and oil and gas deposits.

We say we’re for freedom of the seas, but that begins with recognition of what are international waters and what are not. The South China Sea, and the East China Sea, are international waters, not internal lakes of this or that country.

Various nations’ Exclusive Economic Zones extend far into the Seas. Various nations have far more legitimate territorial claims to a number of the islands in those Seas.

We should be working with those nations—Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, et al.—to help them resolve their disagreements over whose territory those islands are, we should be working with those nations to help them resolve their disputes over Economic Zone overlaps.

Given the PRC’s open lawlessness regarding those waters and those islands, we should be working these dispute resolutions with the explicit exclusion of the PRC in those talks.