A new slant on RIMPAC Naval politics/The Fight To Control The South China Sea

[ikalugin]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Well, let us hope the outcome is never put to the test....the current POTUS is yet to be fully understood/predictable on the worlds stage and the potential consequences could be very alarming.

With the deterioration of the power of nuclear deterence I don't think that the next large war is really avoidable.

[Mr Quatro]

Originally Posted by ikalugin

With the deterioration of the power of nuclear deterence I don't think that the next large war is really avoidable.

I doubt if there will be a really big war before there is a small war ...

It is written that there will be wars and rumors of war, but the end is not yet in sight and then later on it is written, "People will say peace, peace and then sudden destruction will come on them"

[Aktungbby]

The murderer of his own half-brother and uncle, ol' Kim Jong-Un is feeling the noose tighten....??!! In addition he is a thief.

Originally Posted by WSJ

SEOUL—North Korea slammed China’s “insincerity and betrayal” in a commentary published late Wednesday, calling statements in the official Chinese media “an undisguised threat” to Pyongyang, as it sought to stave off pressure from Beijing on its nuclear and missile programs.
“China should no longer try to test the limits of the DPRK’s patience,” North Korea said in the commentary published by the official Korean Central News Agency, using the acronym for its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “China had better ponder over the grave consequences to be entailed by its reckless act of chopping down the pillar of the DPRK-China relations.”
The commentary, which was attributed to a person identified only as Kim Chol, comes as China seeks to get North Korea to curb its weapons programs, amid pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump and other United Nations members. North Korea’s latest statements referred to recent articles in two official Chinese publications, the People’s Daily and the Global Times, that apparently alluded to the possibility of Beijing confronting North Korea militarily, or ending friendly ties between the two neighbors and Cold War allies, if it didn’t halt its weapons programs.
The commentary also referred to Chinese press statements about North Korea’s weapons programs threatening China’s northeast, which borders North Korea, and about how Pyongyang’s actions were giving the U.S. an excuse to deploy more strategic assets to the region. The article said that the U.S. military buildup in Asia was aimed at China, not North Korea.
China’s hardening line on North Korea, the commentary said, showed that Beijing was “dancing to the tune of the U.S.,” and that China was exercising “big-power chauvinism” that meant “the dignity and vital rights of the DPRK should be sacrificed for the interests of China.”
Last month, Mr. Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where Mr. Trump says that he offered China more favorable trade terms in exchange for help on confronting the threat from North Korea.
In February, China said that it would suspend coal imports from North Korea until the end of the year, potentially depriving Pyongyang of a key source of revenue, a move that Mr. Trump has pointed to as a sign of China’s willingness to turn the screws on North Korea.
Mr. Trump has said that China holds the key to halting the North Korean weapons programs, citing the two countries’ close economic and historical ties.
Beijing in return has said its leverage is limited and has pressed the U.S. to enter into unconditional talks with Pyongyang.
China and North Korea have enjoyed friendly ties since the years immediately following World War II, when Communist parties in both countries took power and fought in one another’s wars. The two countries have described their ties as being as close as that of “lips and teeth.”
In recent decades, however, bilateral ties have become increasingly strained, as China opened its economy while North Korea grew more isolated and pursued a nuclear-weapons program that antagonized the region.
Wednesday’s article wasn’t the first time North Korea took rhetorical aim at China. In February, North Korea published a similar broadside, though in that case the commentary took a softer tone and didn’t call out Beijing by name, referring to China only as “a neighboring country, which often claims itself to be a ‘friendly neighbor.’ ”

Money is the 'sinews of war' and an economic attack is always preliminary: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/world/asia/treasury-imposes-sanctions-on-north-korea.html?_r=0

With private cybersecurity firms linking North Korea to recent computer attacks that absconded with at least $81 million, the Treasury Department moved on Wednesday to choke off Pyongyang’s remaining access to the global financial system, designating the country a “primary” money launderer.
The Treasury, employing sanctions techniques that helped pressure Iran to give up much of its nuclear program, said it would seek to impose what are known as secondary sanctions against the reclusive communist country. That means that it could cut off from the American financial system any bank or company that conducts banking transactions with Pyongyang.
As a practical matter, that would largely affect Chinese banks, which facilitate North Korea’s financial transactions with Beijing, its largest trading partner. It could also affect some institutions in the nominally autonomous Chinese regions of Macau and Hong Kong, as well as in Singapore, where Pyongyang has often gone to hide the true nature of its banking activities, and to pay for missiles, nuclear fuel and the huge infrastructure it has built around those programs.
The designation, officials said, was in the works long before evidence emerged linking the country’s aggressive hackers to the bank thefts, which involved stealing the credentials that banks use to access theSwift system, a global network that thousands of financial firms use to authorize payments from one account to another.
In interviews, administration officials said they were still sorting through the evidence that North Korea was involved, and left open the possibility that the thieves deliberately left evidence implicating the country to throw investigators off their trail. It could be months, the officials said, before they reach any conclusions, and in the end the perpetrators of the attack may not be definitively known...

[Mr Quatro]

^Did you put that in the wrong thread, Aktungbby ?

It is your thread, right? What about that little Chinese man made island in the South Pacific? How about a whole port now?

https://www.ft.com/content/e150ef0c-...4-0a1e63a52f9c

Sri Lanka has formally handed over its southern port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease, which government critics have denounced as an erosion of the country’s sovereignty.

The $1.3bn port was opened seven years ago using debt from Chinese state-controlled entities. But it has since struggled under heavy losses, making it impossible for Colombo to repay its debts.

[Aktungbby]

But Michael Fabey’s disturbing new book makes plain that China is now a muscular presence in its part of the world, and with clear ambitions to expand its role.
Mr. Fabey, a veteran defense writer, maintains thatChina and the U.S. are engaged in a “warm war” for naval dominance in the Pacific that we have “been losing.
The crux of the crisis is China’s claim of territorial sea rights far beyond those set by international conventions. The issue is complex. For centuries most maritime powers accepted that sovereign territory extended three nautical miles off the shoreline — the range of cannon shot.
After several changes, in 1982 the United Nations formalized “Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which give coastal nations control over sea resources up to 200 nautical miles from its shores. (The U.S. did not sign the treaty, but recognizes EEZs in practice.)
Ignoring the international protocol,China has claimed expanded sea areas by constructing artificial islands as far as 600 miles from its own shores.
The work is centered around the Spratly Islands, 14 sandy outcrops ranging in area from one to 100 acres, spreading the South China Sea.
With Spratly ownership claimed by half a dozen other nations — all closer than China — Peking simply “built” its own island on an outcropping of coral, 14 miles long and four wide, almost completely submerged at high tide.
Chinese engineers dredged up coral and sand to create 86,000 square feet of dry land — enough to accommodate a military airstrip, rocket launchers and support troops. Other such “faux islands” are rising from the sea in the area. Adm. Harry Harris, U.S. naval commander in the Pacific, calls the islands the “Great Wall of Sand.”
Fishing and oil exploration by outsiders are forbidden within EEZs, but the treaty gives the “right of free passage” to all nations during peace. The Chinese, however, claim the rules forbid passage to “military operations,” which includes electronic signals gathering and reconnaissance — which the U.S. has long considered essential to prevent surprise attacks.
The Navy routinely ignores such warnings and insists on asserting its “right of passage” through contested areas. In 2003, the USS Cowpens, a cruiser, was forced to stop dead in the water to avoid ramming an harassing Chinese vessel. (The Navy calls such a stop a “crashback.” Hence Mr. Fabey’s title.)
Perhaps more dangerous is Chinese harassment of U.S. reconnaissance flights, its planes routinely coming within yards of contact. In 2001 a Chinese pilot collided with a U.S. reconnaissance plane. He crashed and died; the American craft made an emergency landing.
But the Chinese are buttressing their navy, building an aircraft carrier (replacing an obsolete ship the Soviets donated years ago) and developing dozens of vessels equipped with missiles.
Fortunately, the U.S. Navy is countering China’s ambitions with new technologies that modernize the missiles that are our dominant sea weapons. And despite the Chinese encroachments, Mr. Fabey’s description of the new weaponry — active and under development — warrants optimism. Some items:
• The electromagnetic rail gun, which uses electricity rather than gunpowder. Magnetic fields created by high electrical currents accelerate a sliding metal conductor between two to launch projectiles at speeds of up to 5,600 mph. The range is over 100 miles. The non-explosive solid projectile, essentially a chunk of steel, has such kinetic energy that “getting hit by one is like being hit by a small asteroid.”
• High-energy laser beams that counter incoming missiles by burning holes in their skins and causing thermal damage to their interiors. Another more powerful laser (30 kilowatts of power, versus 10) “can bore a hole through two inches of steel.” An even more powerful version should disable a battle ship or carrier.
• The Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LFASM) has an electro-optical terminal seeker which can match a ship’s imagery to a target database. Thus the missile can sort out a target vessel within a well-defended group of enemy vessels. Modifications in the works can propel a thousand pound warhead against a moving vessel at a range of 1,000 miles.
There is much more. Consider the Zumwalt-class destroyer, whose slope-sided superstructure bears close resemblance to the old Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia. Its profile makes the Zumwalt the naval equivalent of a stealth aircraft.
But the ever-present danger: a young pilot, whether American or Chinese, panics during a close-by flight and fires the shot that starts a war.
China’s “wall of sand” is a danger that must not be taken lightly...

As I pointed out earlier in this thread

Originally Posted by me

Not going to happen unfortunately...China is using a tried and true format as when they invaded the sovereign nation of Tibet; claiming territory once held in antiquity (Quing Dynasty?!!!). No one responded then and they're counting on the same here. Think marching into the Rhineland as A. Hitler did to reclaim Alsace/Lorraine-post Versailles, and kick it up to 1,401,586,609 Chinese people from a resource poor nation, 1/7 of the worlds population (7,324,782,225 =-), all looking for China's "place in the sun" as the Kaiser put it prior to WWI....Personally at this point the Chinese delegation to the UN should be removed from the Security Council and forced to do the 'Perp walk' in handcuffs; they hate a 'loss of face' worst of all. Basically "first Tibert and then the world"; Time to boot up and stop it in it's tracks

IN SHORT: We made mistake one over 50 years ago by not responding to China's eastward land expansion for Tibet's raw materials, probably in a racist fog over not caring about little brown people which afflicts American thinking and are now challenged at sea by China's westward expansion into international waters even as they use the 'little fat man' and his nuclear threat in N. Korea to their political advantage to divert attention. I seriously doubt if the US under worthless "Let's maka deal" Trump and America's SEATO allies are going to put a stop to this.

[Aktungbby]

The ' Yellow peril' is more perilous! Not content with their single birth doctrine, taking over the Spratley Islands of the South China Sea and general global domination....it seem that expectant Sino-mamas can visit Saipan in the Marianas Islands visa free for 45 days and are doing so to confer right of U.S. birth citizenship on their offspring. Talk about 'voting with your feet here'!

The United States is putting the word out to Chinese travel agencies: Stop allowing pregnant Chinese woman to visit the Northern Mariana Islands to give birth.
Why would the USA care? Because any child born in this string of 15 islands between the Philippines and Hawaii is eligible for U.S. citizenship, and in the past two years, the number of women delivering babies here has jumped dramatically.
Eloy Inos, the islands' governor, told the Saipan Tribune that immigration agents had sent home about 20 "birth tourists" in the past three to four months because of "documentation problems. Chinese tourist traffic to the islands in the first seven months of this year already matched arrivals for all of 2012, with the figure for July alone rising 49% to 11,177. Overall births in the Northern Marianas have been falling, but the Marianas Variety newspaper reports that births to ethnic Chinese rose 175% between 2010 and 2012 and last year outnumbered those of any other ethnicity. That means that 71 percent of babies born in Saipan are American-born Chinese, known in China as ABCs.
Many of the pregnant women arrive to avoid China's retribution, fines or worse that come with the Communist country's one-child policy. The Northern Marianas are a convenient refuge because Chinese can visit the islands for up to 45 days without a visa under an exemption to U.S. immigration rules intended to foster tourism.
And because it is one of a handful of official U.S. territories (Puerto Rico is another), children born in the Northern Marianas (a US territory since WWII) are eligible for U.S. citizenship.
Chinese tourist traffic of all kinds is now big business for the Northern Marianas. Northern Marianas officials are eager to head off the birth tourism problem to make sure it does not prompt the USA to revoke the visa waiver for Chinese tourists, something no competing U.S. destination can offer. Nearby Guam is seeking a similar waiver to compete.
Today, Saipan, the largest island, receives about eight charter flights a week from the Chinese cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing with Wuhan and other cities set for connections too. And many businesses cater specifically to the maternity traffic.
The operator of one Saipan guesthouse told Radio Free Asia that she hosted 50 Chinese mothers last year, charging them $11,000 for accommodations, travel, translation help and some medical care, though most also incurred around $10,000 in other medical bills.
Birth tourism causes other problems too.
Inos said the Commonwealth Health Center, the only hospital on Saipan, may require tourists to provide a security deposit to combat the problem of bills left unpaid. Another proposal would raise the price of issuing birth certificates to certain types of visitors to as much as $50,000 from $20."

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/843799.shtml

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by me

even as they use the 'little fat man' and his nuclear threat in N. Korea to their political advantage to divert attention. I seriously doubt if the US under worthless "Let's maka deal" Trump and America's SEATO allies are going to put a stop to this.

U.S. officials identified and gathered information about the movement of the cargo ships, which are owned or managed by Chinese companies, using satellite imagery and other intelligence means. The evidence was presented to a United Nations sanctions committee, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

After the U.S. presented the information to the U.N., it asked the body to formally declare a total of 10 cargo ships as sanctions violators. China pushed back on the request, but it did permit the U.N. to blacklist four ships, excluding the six vessels tracked by the U.S., that don’t have connections to Chinese companies.
According to declassified intelligence reports, photos and maps given to the U.N. and reviewed by the Journal, the ships picked up illegal cargo, primarily coal, in North Korea and either transported it to Russia and Vietnam, or transferred it to other ships while at sea.
Some of the vessels disguised their locations by turning off their Automatic Identification Systems, which show a ship’s location...Corporate records and shipping databases were used to determine the six ships are owned by Chinese companies registered in Hong Kong. Chinese nationals invest in the companies, and they have used addresses in China. The Chinese government has investigated at least four of the six cargo ships and officials have questioned several of their owners and managers. At least one of the vessel’s managers has been arrested, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The 'great game' is well underway and China flouts the embargo sanctions in support of its criminal puppet regime. WSJ: The effort identified the ships by name and tracked their movements. The ships either entered ports in North Korea and transported what U.S. officials concluded was illicit cargo to Russia and Vietnam or made ship-to-ship transfers at sea.
According to the U.S., which presented the information to a U.N. sanctions committee, the ships also made extensive maneuvers designed to disguise their violations of the U.N. sanctions. In August, the Security Council banned North Korean exports of coal, iron ore, lead and seafood, which have generated an estimated $1 billion a year in hard currency for North Korea.
Just as switching off the AIS beacon can disguise a ship’s movements, a vessel can advertise its location by switching on the transmission device, much like turning on a flashlight in a darkened room. Both techniques were essential for the Glory Hope 1 as it carried out its mission, according to the analysis submitted by the U.S. to the U.N. sanctions committee.
The ship’s crew activated the AIS tracking device as the Glory Hope 1 approached the Chinese port of Lianyungang on Aug. 15. Instead of entering the port, the vessel “loitered” offshore, information provided to the U.N. shows.
The U.S. suggested the stop was meant to make it look as if the Glory Hope 1 had gone there to take on Chinese cargo. For more than a week, the ship hugged the Chinese coast until it approached Cam Pha, Vietnam, where its tracker was turned off again.
A U.S. satellite photo provided to the U.N. sanctions committee shows the ship anchored and being unloaded Aug. 26 near the Vietnamese port.
The U.S. said the Chinese-owned Glory Hope 1 was violating the U.N.’s complete ban on North Korean coal exports within days after it was passed in August. (Note: Coal from N. Korea is the backbone of the regimes hard- currency source when not conducting international banktheft, incl Bitcoin transfers by wire. 2 B used for nuclear weapon development.....)
The vessel crossed the Yellow Sea near North Korea under a Panamanian flag, entered North Korea’s Taedong River and then turned into the North Korean port of Songnim, according to the information presented to the U.N <satellite pics or it didn't happen?!!) China’s foreign ministry said Beijing abides fully with Security Council resolutions and deals with violations in accordance with the law. “Any measure taken by the Security Council should be based upon conclusive evidence and facts,” the ministry told the Journal in a written statement.
RIGHT