The PLA Navy committed a rather saucy piece of theft against the US Navy in the South China Sea this week. According to the Pentagon, the USNS Bowditch was in the process of recovering an underwater drone when a PLAN vessel, the Nanjiu 510, lowered a boat and scooped up the device, reportedly a “Slocum Glider.” The US media leapt to the conclusion that this was the much-anticipated PRC test of incoming US President Donald Trump’s resolve. The PRC is notorious...
Another day, another Trump outrage Tweetstorm. After the Sunday talk shows, the sensation du jour was Trump’s statement that he didn’t “necessarily” feel bound by the One China policy. Beyond the simple fact that Trump is not yet President, there are other reasons not to give too much weight to Trump’s current statements. First of all, Trump is engaged in a fierce public relations war with the Democrats. The Democrats would like to delegitimize Trump, cripple his presidency, define it as a failure in...
There was one word missing from Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani’s speech at the “Heart of Asia” conference at Amritsar concerning Afghan security and Pakistan. So let me say it: ChinaChinaChinaChinaChinaChinaChinaChinaChinaChinaChinaChina The last few months have seen Ghani and the US government working assiduously to construct a “light at the end of the tunnel” narrative foretelling the decline of the Taliban, one that pushes Pakistan and China to the sidelines while elevating India. The US obligingly assassinated the leader of the Taliban, Mullah...
News of the Trump/Tsai Ing-wen phone convo exploded into the mediasphere on Friday night and learned and unlearned predictions of dire consequences raged for a good four hours until the PRC government issued an anodyne statement that characterized the phone call as “a petty trick” by Taiwan. By placing the onus on Taiwan, the PRC was indulging Trump’s tweeted version of events, which is that Tsai had called him, not the other way around. Awkwardly, original reports out of Taiwan...
The Obama administration, supposedly representing the pinnacle of responsible elite forethought and expert decision-making, is about to handle the cowboys of the Trump administration a gosh-awful mess: North Korea. For most of the Obama administration, it pursued a North Korea policy of “strategic patience” i.e. ostentatious neglect. Cynics are welcome to regard North Korea as “America’s ISIS in North Asia,” a threat that was supremely useful as a justification for pumping more forces in the region to confront the genuine adversary...
It is not yet clear what havoc President-Elect Trump will or will not wreak on the US economy, society, and foreign relations. Liberal internationalist self-esteem apparently remains intact despite the awkwardness of having to explain to authoritarian nationalist regimes that they lectured on their moral, political, and economic shortcomings for decades why the United States itself elected an authoritarian nationalist. The narrative that Trump, who garnered about 2 million fewer votes than his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, won thanks only to...
Christmas came early for Shinzo Abe. Maybe 10 years early. With the election of Donald Trump, the stage is set for Japan to assume a leadership role in the bloc of Asian states confronting but not quite containing the People’s Republic of China. Trump has declared himself no friend of China, or for that matter Japan. He’s an America-first unilateralist, which translates into a preference for bilateral engagements, and a disdain for overarching multilateral legal and security regimes that require the...
Donald Trump probably won’t try to kill the pivot, but he’s killing it anyway. So why not speed up and control the process? My previous piece, Hillary is Gone; Will the Pivot Live On? proposes that Trump could extract the United States from two pivot-spawned cul-de-sacs in Asia, the faltering UNCLOS gambit in the South China Sea and the North Korea denuclearization dead end. But I'm not optimistic. Trump appears pretty unprepared to take on the myriad responsibilities of governing the...
Hillary Clinton was an architect of the US pivot to Asia. In a Clinton presidency, it could be safely assumed, the pivot would chug along its China-containment track: establishing a clear, bright line between the norm-violating behavior of the People’s Republic of China and the liberal international order led by the United States and supported by Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the other East Asian democracies, exemplified by the united front of states indignant at the PRC’s defiance of...
The United States—diplomats, military, think tanks, and media—are infatuated with the idea that Philippine foreign policy is a zero sum game: China vs. America. And China shouldn’t be allowed to win. When Philippine fishermen were finally able to fish the outside of the Scarborough Shoal (not the area inside the atoll but in conformity with the UNCLOS arbitration settlement), I sensed some sour grapes from the pivoteer commentariat at the Philippines yielding so abjectly to the PRC’s concession. I have been unable...
If your response is “Mamawhat?”, chances are you have not been following the parallel track of US-Philippine relations, the counterinsurgency cooperation that clearly interests President Duterte more than the international commentariat’s abiding preoccupation with the South China Sea. With the United States expressing regret and concern and issuing oblique threats (well, expressing anxiety that “foreign investors” will shy away from the Philippines as a result of Duterte’s announced pro-China tilt) that invite Duterte’s domestic opponents to mobilize against him, Duterte...
There has been considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth in the pivoteer quadrant in the aftermath of Duterte’s state visit to Beijing. Understandably. When the president of the Philippines, a keystone of the anti-China kinda-containment US alliance, makes statements in China’s Great Hall of the People like this… "In this venue, your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States…Both in military, not maybe social, but economics also. America has lost." …it’s not a good day for Uncle Sam. However,...
Though you’ll only find discrete murmurings on the subject, especially in the inflamed Indian press, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s gambit to “internationalize” Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan in his August 15 Independence Day speech and in contemporaneous private but widely reported remarks to the BJP does not appear to be some of his best work. His pious declarations of solidarity with the people of Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan not only provoked Pakistan’s anxiety over an India threat to its territorial sovereignty and...
Balochistan separatists have unsurprisingly responded to Indian PM Narendra Modi’s “internationalization” of the issue of Pakistan human rights abuses in its province of Balochistan by imploring India to “do a Bangladesh” and assist in the separation of Balochistan from Pakistan. Does Bangladesh provide a useful template for Indian intervention in Balochistan? The basic outlines of the Bangladesh story are pretty simple. In 1970, Pakistan ditched a program to maintain parity between (less populous but politically, militarily, and economically dominant) West Pakistan and...
The one thing that can be said for sure is, if India and Pakistan hadn’t become proxies for the US-China rivalry, things would have been less complicated. Not much less. Just a little. And maybe a little less murderous. The latest point of acute friction between India and Pakistan is the seemingly inextinguishable popular opposition to Indian rule in Kashmir. The Indian government’s inability to keep a lid on Kashmir is a considerable rebuke to counter-insurgency doctrine (COIN), at least in its...
I can pat myself on the back for predicting back in April that, sooner or later, US nukes would return to Asia to counter the relative decline in America’s military advantage. That moment seems to have come sooner, rather than later, thanks to the ingenuity of North Korean bomb builders. North Korea’s most recent nuclear test elicited considerable anxiety among the cognoscenti, as it appears to have been a successful test of a warhead with a big bang that has...
Judging by the spate of attacks on Duterte in the Western press and veiled criticism from some of the Manila papers, it looks like Duterte’s insufficient loyalty to the pivot vision may result in his downfall. Indeed, with the Duterte-US split deepening, his removal may become a strategic imperative for America. Serial misreporting on Asian affairs is the price the media pays for loyally supporting the US pivot to Asia. It’s also a sign that, after a brief US government...
U.S. is truly the indispensable nation when it comes to empowering, instead of restraining, ambitious regional powers to pursue their narrower interests in the name of anti-China containment. We can expect more of the same “indispensability” when Hillary Clinton assumes the U.S. presidency. Hillary Clinton affirmed “American exceptionalism” in a speech to the American Legion in Cincinnati on August 31. If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this. The United...
While economic power is waiting in the outer office — and soft power is downstairs watching TV with the limo drivers — hard power is behind closed doors at the boss’s elbow making sure the right decisions get made. That was a message driven home to the People’s Republic of China when the government of New South Wales disqualified Chinese bidders (including Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing) for control of “Ausgrid”, an Australian power network. As the local press put it: Every one...
In his Independence Day Address from Red Fort on Aug 15, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the plight of the people of Baluchistan in Pakistan to deflect public attention from the mess in Jammu and Kashmir state where his party is a coalition partner. Pro-independence Baluchis were impressed by Modi's gesture and now hope India might set them free like it liberated Bangladesh in 1971. But nuclear-armed Pakistan will not allow that to happen this time and for India, the...
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