Tag Archives: foreign policy

Paper Tiger

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There has been a disturbing development in the South China Sea, an area of the world toward which Our government claims it’s pivoting as central to American security.

Scarborough Shoal is a dinky little set of islands lying 140 miles west of Luzon Island, Republic of the Philippines, and 750 miles south of the People’s Republic of China.  This is a wholly unremarkable set of islands, except for the rich fishing and the equally rich oil deposits below the bottom of the region there.  And it’s entirely within the Philippine 200 mile Economic Exclusion Zone.

Because of its wealth, the PRC sent its fishing vessels and its armed patrol boats to the area in a naked attempt to occupy it.  The Philippine navy responded with two of its coast guard cutters, and the face-off lasted until a typhoon forced everyone to leave.

President Obama’s response?  Against the backdrop of a 1951 treaty that binds us to the defense of the Republic of the Philippines and that’s still, nominally, in force, Obama did nothing.  Nada.  Just meekly watched from the sidelines (if he was paying even that much attention).  He did not execute his favored tactic of getting a coterie of nations together to cry out and shake their collective finger very firmly at the Chinese.  He sent no USN destroyer to the area.  He raised no objection at all.  He left our ally to twist in the wind.

While this was going on, the PRC also sent a fishing boat into the territorial waters of the Republic of Palau, another dinky little island—population 21,000—way on the other side of the Philippines.  Palau objected, and when the Chinese vessel refused to leave, they fired on it, captured it, and forced the Chinese to pay a fine for their trespass.

As the WSJ (not quite) put it, it’s a sad day when the government of a tiny speck of an island shows more courage in standing up to an enemy than does our own President.

Walking Small

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With apologies to Sheriff Pusser; but the disrespect comes from the administration.  Why are we so timid in front of the People’s Republic of China?  Where did that timidity get us vis-à-vis the Soviet Union prior to President Reagan?

At the Shangri-La Dialogue conference, a gathering of the Asia-Pacific region’s national defense officials to discuss regional security questions, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ought to reassure the PRC that the new US military strategy focusing on Asia was not designed to contain them, saying

Some view the increased emphasis by the United States on Asia-Pacific as a challenge to China; I reject that view entirely.

Never mind that the PRC is an aggressive and growing threat to the US and to our friends and allies.

A PLA representative asked Panetta

My question is, sir, could you enlighten me a little more how the US plans to develop military-to-military relations with China?

Panetta responded with a list of American planned initiatives: plans to cooperate on cyber and space, creating teams to work on these difficult issues, exchanges between military commanders, and a visit to China later this summer by the secretary himself.  (And I thought President Obama had all the self-importance in the administration.  [/snark])  Notice that, though: the PRC asks what are we going to do to please them; they have no plans at all to approach us.

As Senator John McCain (R, AZ) noted after the conference,

Realities are we are retiring ships.  We are having the smallest navy since World War II.

There is great reluctance on the part of this administration to confront China’s aggressiveness toward us and our friends and allies, and shrinking capability being left to subsequent administrations who might have a greater interest in the region’s security.

Yet this timidity is part and parcel with our government’s performance in another part of the world.  While thousands of Syrians die at the hands of the Assad regime, our government sits around clucking its collective tongue and shaking its finger very firmly at Assad—and does nothing of substance.

Senator Joe Lieberman (I, CT) notes that while he thinks the administration is making progress toward a halt in the bloodshed in Syria, it “is moving too slowly.”

Lieberman went on, saying that Panetta had assured him that DoD has a series of plans that they can implement, yet:

I don’t think anybody expects that [Panetta’s claimed plans] would include American troops on the ground in Syria nor will they require the US to take on the fight against Assad alone.

So even those little vaunted and lightly touted “plans” involve nothing more substantive than continued Obamatalk—idle chit-chat and finger waving, with no intension of doing anything serious.

Then Lieberman summed up this administration’s behavior:

If we to continue to say that we won’t do anything to help the Syrian people unless there is UN Security Council authorization, that is essentially saying to the Russians, ‘you can block the world from coming to the aid of these people in Syria against your ally Assad,’ and that is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Senator McCain got right to the point:

I can’t think of a time in the many years that I have served this country in many ways that I have been more embarrassed about my country and their failure to carry out our fundamental principles.  It is shameful because the countries in the region say that they need American leadership, not American unilateral action….  It is patently obvious that this president does not believe that America leads.

And Iran.  After three years of Obamatalk, Iran now is just months away from obtaining nuclear weapons.  Even today, the administration is just sitting around talking with the Iranian “negotiators.”

We’re not even carrying Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick—nor are we prepared to use one, should one magically appear, like that McNairy County sheriff was.

China Trade Wars and the US

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The US recently imposed a 31% antidumping tariff on Chinese solar-panel makers (“green” energy devotees object to the tariff’s impact on American “green” energy prices, but those objections are irrelevant here), and of course the Chinese demur.

But we have to keep in mind the context within which the People’s Republic of China is engaging in the behaviors that required the tariff imposition, a context in which the PRC is moving aggressively and deliberately against American interests and security concerns.

The PRC already is actively prosecuting a cyberwar against us, routinely attempting to penetrate (and succeeding at an alarming rate) American companies’ information networks to gain access to and to steal those companies’ proprietary engineering data and, especially within our financial industry, to steal our companies’ fiscal data.  Even more threateningly, the PRC routinely attacks, and too often penetrates, our Defense and State information networks, obtaining critical defense and political information.  In conjunction with these cyber-attacks, the PRC, the primary global producer of rare-earth minerals, has implemented export quotas on those minerals—minerals that are at the heart of the computing and memory chips that our companies and our government use in their information networks, and on which our weapon systems depend.

Additionally, the PRC is actively looking to block efforts to inhibit Iran’s access to nuclear weapons—weapons which the Iranians will use against Israel and us, and which they will pass on to terrorist groups for use against Europe and us.  Where impediments are implemented, anyway, the PRC actively sabotages them.  This is what is behind their continued purchase of Iranian oil, rather than satisfying their needs elsewhere in the global market, and their purchase of Iranian minerals and organic chemicals.  This is what is behind the PRC’s steady shipment of nuclear reactor parts to Iran.  This also is what is behind their decision to inhibit efforts to curb northern Korea’s expansion of its own nuclear weapon establishment.

Moreover, the PRC is actively moving against American security and economic interests in the South China Sea, claiming that body for its own right up to the border waters of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of the Philippines, and the other nations that border on the Sea.  This is where the PRC militarily engages the Philippine Navy as the latter moves to protect its own interests, and where the PRC militarily threatens Vietnam for objecting to Chinese grasping.  Yet these moves are not aimed at those nations, but at the US, whose interest in open seas in that body (which contains a significant fraction of the world’s commercial shipping lanes) is made manifest by our global trade imperatives (and by those of all of our allies), and so must respond or see our influence shrink further.

Against this backdrop, the PRC is threatening a trade war if we don’t withdraw our newly implemented tariff.

We fear that if these tariffs are levied in full, Chinese companies may have no choice but to exit the US market[.]

We are “urged” to

…review the facts and make the right decision without being influenced by U.S. elections….

And:

This action by the US has hurt cooperation between China and the US in the renewable energy sector, and hurt the US itself.  We hope the US will appropriately resolve this issue.

The tariff must be an opening move, and the US must respond more aggressively and with greater initiative to the Chinese conflict.

“Tin Cups,” Is It?

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An AP article certainly makes one attitude plain.

In a piece otherwise about US efforts to get other nations to help pay for the costs of developing, training, and equipping an indigenous Afghan army, the AP’s anonymous writer says,

U.S. officials have had their tin cups out for months.  Marc Grossman, the top State Department official for Afghanistan, recently hit up European nations….

While there is an element of begging in the manner of President Obama’s entreaties to other nations that they honor their obligations; it’s hardly a matter of tin cup-holding to insist that those nations do, in fact, honor their obligations.

The writer also notes that

…someone has to pay for that army in an era of austerity budgets and defense cutbacks.

It’s true enough that times are tough for everyone.  They’re tough not only for the nations that have to be begged to honor their commitments, though; they’re also tough for the women and children—and men—of Afghanistan, and they’ll be especially so after the US, NATO, and other participating nations leave.

It’s also true enough, moreover, that these straits, while not the result of the original purpose of the US’ invasion of Afghanistan, have become obligations due to the mission creep in our involvement.

A lesson here, aside from the unseemly need to press NATO and others in the present involvement to satisfy their obligations—which shame is on those who must be pressed—is to not allow such coarse mission creep the next time.  And there will be a next time, since the terrorists don’t agree that the war is over, or there will be a new Dark Age descended.

Defense and the Russians

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The Russian government has shown their fundamental view of the United States and of their relationship with us.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said last year that Russia will retaliate militarily if it does not reach an agreement with the United States and NATO on our missile defense shield.

At a daylong Missile Defense Conference that took place in Moscow last week, the Russians made explicit their threat against us.  General Nikolai Makarov, the Russian armed forces chief of staff said, referring to missile defense installations currently contemplated by us in eastern Europe,

A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens[.]

Makarov extended the scope of Russia’s intended actions.  He displayed on a large-screen video system for the benefit of conference delegates from 50 countries, including the US and NATO, computer-generated imagery depicting the reach of the American radar and missile systems that are components of our missile defense shield.  Russian missiles were shown streaking toward the US before being intercepted.

But this overt aggressiveness is not a new position for the Russians.  They threatened nuclear attacks against Poland four years ago if we deployed components of a then current missile defense shield there and in the Czech Republic.  We quietly canceled those plans.  The Russians invaded Georgia over a manufactured pique and perpetrated a Sudetenland-like partition of that country while we stood meekly by.

A couple of questions arise.

Why would Russia be thinking about a nuclear attack against the US?

Why would Russia casually threaten us in front of the world?

Perhaps they sense timidity on the part of the US administration.  Certainly, in the face of these public threats against both our allies and our homeland, our own State Department Special Envoy for Strategic Stability and Missile Defense, Ellen Tauscher could only say that it was

pretty clear that this is a year in which we’re probably not going to achieve any sort of a breakthrough.

But this was the point President Obama was making a couple of weeks ago to Medvedev when Obama pleaded for more time on the defense question—he’d have more flexibility to give the Russians what they want after he’s no longer accountable to the American people.

So much for Reset.  In the face of such naked threats of war—of preemptive war—how can the US do anything at all other than to press ahead with the deployment of a missile defense shield, now including defense against the long-range ICBMs that Russia has shown with their little demonstration that they fully intend to use against us?  On what basis can the Obama administration seriously be talking about disarming us in the face of these overt threats?