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

[Aktungbby]

"Money is the sinews of war" and Canada has seen fit to
preempt the sino-lust for everyone else's mineral deposits https://www.marketscreener.com/quote...ctic-32070864/

Originally Posted by Vipal Monga WSJ

Canada blocked Chinese state-owned Shandong Gold Mining Co. from buying a gold mine in the Canadian Arctic as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faces growing pressure to curb Beijing's rising influence in the country and the polar region.
Monday's decision was the second time Mr. Trudeau has vetoed a China-led deal since coming to power in late 2015, backtracking in part on his Liberal administration's initial policy goal of developing closer economic ties with China.
The move could worsen relations between the two countries, which are already strained over Canada's role in the arrest of senior Huawei Technologies Co. executive Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei's founder, in Vancouver in 2018 over the company's alleged violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran.
China subsequently detained two Canadians for allegedly violating national-security laws, which Mr. Trudeau has described as retaliation for Ms. Meng's arrest.
Shandong, one of the world's largest gold miners, had proposed buying TMAC Resources Inc., which owns a mine almost 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle, for roughly $150 million.
But former Canadian national security and military officials came out against the deal. They argued that it would give China too much access to the Arctic, a sensitive region where China has been investing because of its growing importance as a shipping route and a source of valuable minerals.
Under Canadian law, the government must review any acquisition by a foreign state-owned enterprise and can block it to protect national security, a term that is left undefined in law to give officials some flexibility on how to use the veto.
Although it doesn't have any oversight authority on acquisitions in Canada, the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee also was tracking developments on the proposed TMAC deal.
TMAC said late Monday that the government had completed its review and blocked the deal from going ahead. "TMAC and Shandong are in discussions regarding termination of the transaction," the Canadian company said.
A spokesman for the Canadian minister in charge of investment policy confirmed the transaction was vetoed, but declined to comment further. Shandong didn't respond to an email seeking comment. A representative for the Chinese embassy in Ottawa didn't respond to a request for comment.
The first time Mr. Trudeau's government vetoed a Chinese deal was in 2018. Canada blocked the proposed acquisition of Toronto-based Aecon Group Inc. by CCCC International Holding Ltd., citing national security concerns.
Monday's decision reflects a quickening recalibration of the Trudeau administration's stance toward Beijing. Former diplomats and foreign-policy analysts have said it has focused for too long on protecting commercial interests -- from food exporters to miners and financial services -- and failed to take account of China's more aggressive global role under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
"Everyone needs to be a little wiser in understanding the tools that the Chinese government is willing to use that go outside the bounds of the normal rules that we are used to working amongst with like-minded allies, " Mr. Trudeau said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
His foreign minister, François-Philippe Champagne, has also promised a new policy on China but warned about adopting the more bellicose approach that some of Mr. Trudeau's political rivals seek. "Let's not fall into the temptation of tough and irresponsible rhetoric that will generate no tangible results," he said.
An end to the extradition case involving Ms. Meng, the Huawei executive, could provide Canada space to harden its approach to China.
Lawyers for Ms. Meng have spoken to U.S. Justice Department officials in recent weeks about an agreement in which she would be required to admit to some of the allegations against her, the Journal previously reported. In exchange, prosecutors would agree to potentially defer and later drop charges if she cooperated, according to people familiar with the matter.
A deal involving Ms. Meng could pave the way for China to return the two men, Michael Kovrig, Canadian diplomat who was on leave, and businessman Michael Spavor, who have been in custody for more than two years, and is said to be a factor motivating the U.S.-led talks. Mr. Trudeau has declined to comment on a possible deal.

China's' interest in the Artic Sea's minerals is hand-tipping. Right of ''innocent passage' ain't so innocent when it comes to Chinese global domination of the planet. They should be barred from the Artic in accordance with their own 'style' regarding their 'claimed' suizerainity South China Sea and we'll see if there one rule for China and another for the rest of the overpopulated planet. The real shooting will start when they invade Taiwan!

[Aktungbby]

in today's paper:

China pressured Ukraine into withdrawing its support for a call for more scrutiny of human rights in China's western region of Xinjiang by threatening to withhold Chinese-made Covid-19 ( recently considered only 50% effective, but 'better than nothing' when used in pandemi-ravaged Brazil) vaccines destined for Ukraine unless it did so, diplomats said Friday...

Now that's what I call... Diplomatic Immunity ! EDIT It is worth noting that Europe, India and Saudi Arabia have banned travelers innoculated with any of the five Chinese vaccines. Biden, having proferred 500+ million of vaccine doses to less 'privileged countries' could do well to enhance his "America is back!" stance and make up the deficit to Ukraine with a superior product... That would B diplomatic immunity on a higher plane!

[Aktungbby]

Case in point in today's WSJ: at least 10 of 26 doctors in Indonesia had recieved both doses of the vaccine in June from Sinovac Biotech Ltd. and died anyway. Over a 5 month period, at leas 20 doctors who were fully inoculated have also died, accounting for 20% of of total fatalities among doctors during that time span. Around 90% of Indonesia's 160,000 doctors are inoculated with Sinovac's shots so the overall % is actually small... In Brazil, the efficacy preventing infections was rated at 50% and reduces severe infections. In Chile, the vaccine was effective..two weeks after the second jab...Bottom line: the Sinovac jab does reduce mortality and on hard hit Java many health care workers who were inoculated developed mild cases and recovered quickly. 60 doctors had died in the surge of Dec-Jan when the vaccination was starting. Only 26 have died in June? As one health official put it: "It really can't be said that Sinovac isn't ideal. " Methinks that's putting it dramatically!

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Seth Cropsey: WSJ editorial

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has inaugurated a new era of political competition but not a new cold war. The American people and their leaders need to prepare for a new kind of geopolitical competition—more intense, more dangerous and more aggressive than anything since World War II. Bismarck, Metternich and Louis XIV’s world of unrestrained power to achieve national objectives is back. And while the immediate threat is Russia, the more formidable one is China.

Throughout the Cold War, the great powers employed direct forces in only a handful of instances. Korea was the only conventional engagement from either bloc. The Soviets conducted limited actions within the Eastern bloc, most notably in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. intervention in Vietnam were both distinctly unconventional wars. American operations in Grenada and Panama, like Soviet deployments throughout Africa and the Middle East, were limited in scope and intensity. By contrast, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a massive conventional offensive, with its military component supporting maximal political goals—the Ukrainian regime’s destruction and replacement with a puppet government and likely the annexation of southern Ukraine. Russia seems unlikely to achieve its maximalist political goals without an open-ended force commitment, one that could push Russian society to the breaking point. The Kremlin may shift tack, seeking a settlement that gives it preference in or control over southern Ukraine and some guarantee against Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Regardless of the outcome, Moscow’s actions demonstrate that force is the final arbiter between nations. Force is particularly viable in situations where states are beyond a clear security agreement. Taiwan is the clearest state in this circumstance. Like Ukraine, it is affiliated with American security structures but formally outside them. Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan has no strategic depth. Also unlike Ukraine, Taiwan is crucial to the global economic order—its semiconductor production sustains high-technology production internationally. That last consideration speaks directly to Taiwan’s defense: A ruinous war around the island would trigger economic effects that make the Ukraine crisis look like a daily stock-market dip. Nevertheless, with great-power force having been resurrected as a governing norm in international affairs, we should expect its increased use. This is particularly crucial when considering Beijing’s interests and actions. China, or more specifically Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, has made its long-term intentions toward Taiwan clear. Mr. Xi sees a reclaimed Taiwan as the crown jewel in his legacy, the best way to solidify his role as the man responsible for reviving China as a great power and setting it on the path to global dominance. Even if NATO proves diffident in Ukraine, we can expect a strong Western defense of Taiwan because of the latter’s economic importance and centrality in America’s Indo-Pacific defense posture. Even so, we can expect Mr. Xi’s China to modify its calculus, recognizing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine might have a desensitizing effect and make an attack on Taiwan less shocking than it would otherwise be.

The broader question is of the organization of Eurasian security. One would expect the Russian invasion to formalize the return to traditional great-power politics, what theorists of international relations call “multipolarity,” a system in which multiple political and military centers of gravity exist. Russia, China and the U.S.—and perhaps Europe, depending on the Ukraine question’s settlement—can be expected, so the argument goes, to secure their own “spheres of influence,” dominating specific regions of the world and ceding others. The world, we will hear, is returning to the 19th century, albeit absent that era’s overwhelmingly Eurocentric geostrategic rhythm. This prediction is alluring and wrong. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has little impact on Chinese incentives, and China remains the crucial actor. The Communist Party under Mr. Xi—and perhaps since Deng Xiaoping, depending on how politically sophisticated it is—drew a unique lesson from the Soviet collapse. The Soviets failed not because they didn’t integrate capitalist insights into their economy, but because they never went far enough in their external expansion.

Soviet Russia failed to grasp that it couldn’t coexist with any other power. The only way for an imperial dictatorship like the U.S.S.R. or Nazi Germany to survive is through absolute domination. Soviet leaders after Stalin progressively lost sight of this reality, and by Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982 they had become reactive to an increasingly assertive Western military-strategic approach.

The world has many dictatorships—the Kim family’s in North Korea, the increasingly kleptocratic Iranian theocracy and the Castro regime in Cuba, to cite obvious examples. But none of these are nearly big and powerful enough to be structurally disruptive in the way the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were—or China is today. Some sort of external economic dependence is inevitable, even if only on an autarkic bloc. And that bloc, Chinese leaders realized, is naturally brittle. Internal dissent can be managed only if the world at large is properly ordered. Hence the Communist Party’s drive for absolute dominance.

Assuming Russia’s collapse is not imminent, China will use Russia’s increasing isolation to transform Moscow into a petrochemical satellite, taking advantage of Western sanctions to secure Russian energy flows indefinitely. In turn, China hopes that Russia, humbled or emboldened by its Ukraine adventure—and with or without Mr. Putin at the helm—will occupy Western attention as Beijing gobbles up the choicest Pacific possessions and extends its economic and diplomatic tendrils into the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. Far from accepting independent Russian action, China is counting on Russian failure to accelerate the satisfaction of its boundless appetite.

That will create two blocs, not three. On the one side will stand the U.S. and its allies, on the other China and its affiliates and satellites. War between the two is all but inevitable. The U.S. must take note: Triangulation against China is impossible with Russia in an abject state of economic dependence. The large strategic issue in the Ukraine war is the possibility of China’s domination of Eurasia.

Mr. Cropsey is founder and president of the Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as a deputy undersecretary of the Navy.

Originally Posted by Me/Ukraine thread

If ever! We owe Vlad the Bastard one though; NATO's tepid act is swiftly unifying itself. Chairmman Xi is reconsidering his recently stated "friendship with no limits" relationship with Vlad the Bastard who obligingly held off the attack till after the Olymics were done!. In a speech on this date in 1983, President Reagan dubbed the Soviets the "evil empire" ... now proven beyond doubt.

If Ukraine is the left shoe; the right shoe Taiwan is bound to drop sooner or later...Both Putin and Xi are anxious to secure their respective legacies by destroying the old 'World order'. However, I note that even China is not immediately venturing into the "black hole of Kabul...vacated by both Russia and the United States.

[Aktungbby]

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/dipl...more-chaos-and Having failed to place a base in the Atlantic near our own Thule Base on Greenland(thankyou Denmark) the Chinkaderos are now sucking up to Germany in pursuit of global hegemony!!?? Chinese Premier Li Qiang arrived in Berlin on Sunday for a series of government and business talks aimed at “properly handling differences” and furthering ties with Germany, according to Chinese state media. The No 2 Chinese official will meet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and attend the China-Germany Economic and Technical Cooperation Forum in his first state visit since taking office in March, according to state news agency Xinhua. He will also meet German business leaders during the trip and visit companies in Bavaria – the largest state in Germany and home to global brands such as sportswear manufacturer Adidas, insurance giant Allianz and carmaker Audi Members of of Mountain Rifles fired a black-powder salute in Munich on Tuesday It being Tiu's day(the traditional German god of war)....couldn't they have been a little more...direct??!

[Aktungbby]

https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-new...rce-repayment/

Every country should pay its sovereign debt. Default, we are told, is not an option.

But has anyone told China?

The United States pays interest on approximately $850 billion in debt held by the People’s Republic of China. China, however, is currently in default on its sovereign debt held by American bondholders.

Successive U.S. administrations have chosen to sidestep this fact, allowing business and trade with China to proceed as normal. Now that the relationship with China has soured and the People’s Republic of China has become the greatest adversarial threat to the U.S. and Western security, policymakers should revisit this appalling failure of justice.

Some history is in order. Before 1949, the government of the Republic of China (ROC) issued a large volume of long-term sovereign gold-denominated bonds, secured by Chinese tax revenues, to private investors and governments for the construction of infrastructure and financing of governmental activities. Put simply, the China we know today would not have been possible absent these bond offerings.

In 1938, during its conflict with Japan, the ROC defaulted on its sovereign debt. After the military victory of the communists, the ROC government fled to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China was eventually recognized internationally as the successor government of China. Under well-established international law, the “successor government” doctrine holds that the current government of China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, is responsible for repayment of the defaulted bonds. The Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have a unique opportunity to enforce the well-established international rule that governments must honor their debts. Like the UK did in 1987, the U.S. must view the repayment of China’s sovereign debt as essential to its national security interests. In doing so, the U.S. government should undertake one or both of two actions currently being discussed by members of Congress.

The first would be to acquire the Chinese bonds held by the ABF and utilize them to offset (partially or in whole) the $850+ billion of U.S. Treasuries owned by China (reducing up to $95 million in daily interest paid to China). This would lower the national debt and put the U.S. in a better financial position globally.

BOTTOM LINE China wouldn;t dream of letting anyone else default on the debt owed to Beijing as is the current situation with the 'loans' owed under its Road and Belt by several bankrupt Third World nations. Time to turn the fiduciary tables on Asia's biggest 'paper dragon"!!?? Twixt our trillion dollar debt and the third world defaulters, China is in a $erious jam it can't get out of...
I'd rather wage fiduciary-sinews warfare on the enemy's checkbook than the shootingwar's battlefield! https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/21...e-development/

In the span of a decade, China has emerged as the developing world’s bank of choice, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars in loans into global infrastructure projects as part of its sprawling Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

But as its borrowers fail to pay up, China is finding that its newfound authority is coming at a price. Eager to recoup its money, Beijing is transitioning from generous investor to tough enforcer—and jeopardizing the very goodwill that it tried to build with initiatives such as the BRI. China has broken a few bones in Sri Lanka, whose financial turmoil allowed Beijing to seize control of a strategic port, and is hassling Pakistan, Zambia, and Suriname for repayment.

For two decades, countries “were getting to know China as the kind of benevolent financier of big-ticket infrastructure,” said Bradley Parks, the executive director of the AidData research group at William & Mary. Now, he said, “the developing world is getting to know China in a very new role—and that new role is as the world’s largest official debt collector.”

[Aktungbby]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...3e8ceb2a&ei=23 While I'm not exactly pro-Trump, I gotta go with this one!

While no mention was made of the ports deal, Beijing last week cast doubt on Hutchison's statement the acquisition was "purely commercial" and "unrelated to recent political news reports." "It is clear this deal is a hegemonic act by the U.S. to use its national power to embezzle the legitimate rights and interests of other countries through coercion, pressure, inducement, and other despicable means, and it is a power politics packaged as 'commercial behavior,'" wrote state mouthpiece Ta Kung Pao in a commentary shared by Beijing's liaison office in Hong Kong.
The article blasted CK Hutchison for "kneeling without a backbone"(they really meant 'kowtowing) and abandoning China's national interests in pursuit of profit.

BOTTOM LINE: apparantly the aggrandizing global Chinese empire can do it with their Road and Belt foreign aid program to impoverished nations greedy and dumb enough to fall under Peking's financial thumb

The Chinese embassy in Panama said during a March 7 press conference: "What people in LAC [Latin America and the Caribbean] countries want is to build their own home, not to become someone's backyard; what they aspire to is independence and self-decision, not the Monroe Doctrine.

"Cooperation between China and LAC countries has won popular support because it respects the will of the people, meets the needs of regional countries, and provides reliable options and broad prospects for the revitalization of the region."

....but apparently we can't no wonder we invoked the Monroe Doctrine in 1823...just not with China in mind at the time!!?? https://www.archives.gov/milestone-d...onroe-doctrine