On 5/10/2020 at 9:37 AM, Mlodj said:

I think much of their propaganda is more for internal consumption, setting up an "Us against the world" vibe for their citizens.

Sounds familiar...

1 hour ago, DaEagles4Life said:

 

F china 

Trump would love to do that to Pelosi or Schumer.

Oh, Joe, say it ain't so!  The troublesome portion of this recording, for Biden anyway, is where they seem to directly undercut the Democrats mantra that everyone knew the Shokin was corrupt.  Not that that will stop anyone from continuing to claim it.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/ukrainian-lawmaker-releases-recorded-phone-calls-of-biden-poroshenko-that-contain-eyebrow-raising-remarks/

 

Quote

 

Ukrainian Lawmaker Releases Recorded Phone Calls Of Biden, Poroshenko That Contain Eyebrow-Raising Remarks

By  Ryan SaavedraDailyWire.com...

..."I have some positive and negative news. I will start with positive news. … Yesterday, I met with the General Prosecutor Shokin. And despite the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I specifically asked him – no, it was a day before yesterday – I specifically asked him to resign … as his position as a state person. And despite of the fact that he has a support in the power and as a finish of meeting with him, he promised me to give me the statement on resignation. And one hour ago he bring me the written statement of his resignation. And this is my second step for keeping my promises."

 

 

On 5/12/2020 at 9:20 PM, EaglePhan1986 said:

I think there’s a chunk of the extreme left who would have sided with Japan in 1941

We already have a chunk of the extreme right siding with Russia in 2020

Quote

 

In Kiev late last month, District Court Judge S. V. Vovk ordered the country’s law enforcement services to formally list the fired prosecutor, Victor Shokin, as the victim of an alleged crime by the former U.S. vice president, according to an official English translation of the ruling obtained by Just the News.

The court had previously ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigations in February to investigate Shokin’s claim that he was fired in spring 2016 under pressure from Biden because he was investigating Burisma Holdings, the natural gas company where Biden’s son Hunter worked.

 

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/05/21/politics/pompeo-saudi-arms-sale/index.html
 

So what’s the Republican spin for firing IG’s trying to enforce US policy pertaining to selling weapons to Saudi’s?

At this point, the list of countries China hasn't threatened is pretty short

China warns of ‘continuous harm’ to relations with Canada unless Meng Wanzhou is released

By Andrew Russell Global News

Posted May 26, 2020 10:58 am

Updated May 27, 2020 3:45 pm

China is warning Canada to release Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou to avoid "any continuous harm” to relations between the two countries one day before the British Columbia Supreme Court is set to issue a key decision in her extradition case.  "The Canadian side should immediately correct its mistake, release Ms. Meng and ensure her safe return to China at an early date so as to avoid any continuous harm to China-Canada relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Tuesday.  "The U.S. and Canada abused their bilateral extradition treaty and arbitrarily took compulsory measures against a Chinese citizen without cause.”  B.C. Justice Heather Holmes is expected to release a ruling on Wednesday that centres around the issue of so-called double criminality — whether what Meng is accused of in the United States would be a crime in Canada.

Meng was arrested in December 2018 at the Vancouver airport at the request of U.S. prosecutors on fraud charges over allegations she violated American sanctions against Iran, which she and the Chinese telecommunications giant have vigorously denied.  The arrest infuriated China and was followed by a series of punitive measures, including the arrests of Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor and the blocked imports of Canadian agricultural goods. Kovrig, a diplomat on leave who was working with the International Crisis Group, and Spavor, an entrepreneur, have been imprisoned in China since December 2018.  China has said they are "suspected” of endangering the country’s national security, and Kovrig and Spavor are being kept in detention facilities with 24-hour lighting and denied consular visits.  "China urges the Canadian side to respect the spirit of the rule of law and China’s judicial sovereignty and stop making irresponsible remarks,” Zhao said Tuesday in response to a question from the Globe and Mail.  "I want to stress that the legal rights of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor have been guaranteed in accordance with law.”  The statement on Tuesday is the latest from the Chinese government, which has continuously pressed for Meng’s release. 

Last Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused China of "retaliation” over the detentions of Kovrig and Spavor and said Beijing doesn’t seem to comprehend how Canada’s legal system works.  "We have seen Chinese officials linking those two cases from the very beginning,” Trudeau told reporters.  "Canada has an independent judicial system that functions without interference or override by politicians,” he said. "China doesn’t work quite the same way and doesn’t seem to understand that we do have an independent judiciary from political interference.”  David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China, said in a recent interview that China is no longer pretending there was a legal justification for arresting the two Canadians and have directly linked them to Meng’s arrest.  "They’re showing both a power play to intimidate us and they’re showing contempt, frankly, to Canada and to Canadians,” he told Global’s The West Block. "We’re seeing this in more of their diplomatic announcements and messages but we’re seeing the real China in all of this.”

Charles Burton, an associate professor of political science at Brock University and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, called Tuesday’s statement by the Chinese foreign minister "disturbing” and "aggressive.”  "The implication seems to be that if the decision goes against Ms. Meng, that China will engage in further retaliatory measures,” he said. "It’s time for Canada to show more backbone.”  The ruling Wednesday could lead to Meng’s release or launch a fresh round of legal arguments, including whether her initial arrest was unlawful.

While U.S. prosecutors have accused Meng of fraud over violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, her lawyers have argued that because Canada has not imposed similar sanctions against the Iranian government, Meng’s conduct doesn’t amount to fraud.  Lawyers representing Canada’s attorney general have argued that the Huawei executive lied to a bank, which is a crime in Canada.  "It’s not complex,” Crown prosecutor Robert Frater said in January. "Lying to a bank is fraud.”

— With files from Abigail Bimman and the Canadian Press

 

 

On 5/20/2020 at 12:04 AM, Dave Moss said:

Trump would love to do that to Pelosi or Schumer.

Most of America might love to do that to the entirety of 2 of the 3 branches of government.

On 5/20/2020 at 12:04 AM, Dave Moss said:

Trump would love to do that to Pelosi or Schumer.

Hell so would I. 

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

China said on Monday it hopes the United States will eliminate racial discrimination and safeguard the lawful rights of ethnic minorities in the country as protests rock American cities after the death of a black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  "Black lives matter and their human rights should be guaranteed", Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a daily news briefing, adding that racism against ethnic minorities is a chronic disease in US society.  The unrest triggered by the death of George Floyd has again reflected "the severity of racism and police violence in the US and the urgency to solve those problems", Zhao said.  China hopes the US will fulfill its obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and take concrete measures to secure the legitimate rights of ethnic minorities, he said.

The killing of Floyd and racism against African-Americans also received strong condemnation from Africa.  African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat condemned Floyd's death in a statement on Friday, saying "The AU Commission firmly reaffirms and reiterates its rejection of the continuing discriminatory practices against Black citizens of the United States of America."  Noting that the voices against racial discrimination from Africa are a universal consensus of the international community, Zhao said he hopes the US will face up and listen to the appeal for justice from Africa.  China will stand with and support Africa to oppose all forms of racial discrimination as well as remarks that would provoke racism and hatred, he said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-waits-out-trump-11591052890?mod=e2fb

Brits open doors to Hong Kong Citizen.. F you communist China 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/03/boris-johnson-says-3m-people-hong-kong-will-get-path-british/

Al-Qaeda chief in north Africa Abdelmalek Droukdel killed - France

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52943692

June 1st: Trump talks to Putin on the phone, again.

June 5th: Trump announces he withdrawing one-third of US troops from Germany

June 5th: Putin announces he's moving more troops to Russia's western border with Europe Police riots make a great distraction from collusion!

LINK from Foreign Affairs

The Endangered Asian Century

America, China, and the Perils of Confrontation

By Lee Hsien Loong

July/August 2020

"In recent years, people have been saying that the next century will be the century of Asia and the Pacific, as if that were sure to be the case. I disagree with this view.” The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made that argument to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988. More than 30 years later, Deng has proved prescient. After decades of extraordinary economic success, Asia today is the world’s fastest-growing region. Within this decade, Asian economies will become larger than the rest of the world’s economies combined, something that has not been true since the nineteenth century. Yet even now, Deng’s warning holds: an Asian century is neither inevitable nor foreordained.

Asia has prospered because Pax Americana, which has held since the end of World War II, provided a favorable strategic context. But now, the troubled U.S.-Chinese relationship raises profound questions about Asia’s future and the shape of the emerging international order. Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, are especially concerned, as they live at the intersection of the interests of various major powers and must avoid being caught in the middle or forced into invidious choices.

The status quo in Asia must change. But will the new configuration enable further success or bring dangerous instability? That depends on the choices that the United States and China make, separately and together. The two powers must work out a modus vivendi that will be competitive in some areas without allowing rivalry to poison cooperation in others.

Asian countries see the United States as a resident power that has vital interests in the region. At the same time, China is a reality on the doorstep. Asian countries do not want to be forced to choose between the two. And if either attempts to force such a choice—if Washington tries to contain China’s rise or Beijing seeks to build an exclusive sphere of influence in Asia—they will begin a course of confrontation that will last decades and put the long-heralded Asian century in jeopardy.

THE TWO PHASES OF PAX AMERICANA

Pax Americana in Asia in the twentieth century had two distinct phases. The first was from 1945 to the 1970s, during the early decades of the Cold War, when the United States and its allies competed with the Soviet bloc for influence. Although China joined the Soviet Union to confront the United States during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, its economy remained inwardly focused and isolated, and it maintained few economic links with other Asian countries. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Asia, free-market economies were taking off. Japan’s was the earliest to do so, followed by the newly industrializing economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

What made Asia’s stability and prosperity possible was the United States. The United States championed an open, integrated, and rules-based global order and provided a security umbrella under which regional countries could cooperate and peacefully compete. American multinational corporations invested extensively in Asia, bringing with them capital, technology, and ideas. As Washington promoted free trade and opened U.S. markets to the world, Asian trade with the United States grew.

Two pivotal events in the 1970s shifted Pax Americana in Asia into a new phase: the secret visit to China in 1971 by Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. national security adviser, which laid the basis for U.S.-Chinese rapprochement after decades of hostility, and the launch, in 1978, of Deng’s program of "reform and opening up,” which allowed China’s economy to take off. By the end of the decade, economic barriers were coming down, and international trade was growing rapidly. After the Vietnam War and the war in Cambodia ended, Vietnam and the other countries of Indochina were able to focus their energies and resources on economic development, and they started catching up with the rest of Asia.

Many Asian countries had long viewed the United States and other developed countries as their main economic partners. But they now increasingly seized the opportunities created by China’s rapid development. Trade and tourism with China grew, and supply chains became tightly integrated. Within a few decades, China went from being economically inconsequential for the rest of Asia to being the region’s biggest economy and major economic partner. China’s influence in regional affairs grew correspondingly.

Still, Pax Americana held, and these radical changes in China’s role took place within its framework. China was not in a position to challenge U.S. preeminence and did not attempt to do so. Indeed, it adopted as its guiding philosophy Deng’s dictum "Hide your strength, bide your time” and prioritized the modernization of its agricultural, industrial, and science and technology sectors over building military strength.

Southeast Asian countries thus enjoyed the best of both worlds, building economic relationships with China while maintaining strong ties with the United States and other developed countries. They also deepened ties with one another and worked together to create an open architecture for regional cooperation rooted in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN played a central role in forming the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in 1989, establishing the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1994, and convening the annual East Asia Summit since 2005.

China participates fully in these processes. Every year, the Chinese premier travels to an ASEAN member state to meet the ASEAN countries’ leaders, well prepared to explain how China sees the region and armed with proposals to enhance Chinese cooperation with the grouping’s members. As China’s stake in the region has grown, it has launched its own initiatives, including the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. These have helped deepen China’s engagement with its neighbors and, of course, increased its influence.

But because the regional architecture is open, China’s influence is not exclusive. The United States remains an important participant, underpinning regional security and stability and enhancing its economic engagement through initiatives such as the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act and the BUILD Act. ASEAN also has formal dialogue mechanisms with the European Union, as well as with India and many other countries. ASEAN believes that such a network of connections creates a more robust framework for cooperation and more space to advance its members’ collective interests internationally.

So far, this formula has worked well. But the strategic basis of Pax Americana has shifted fundamentally. In the four decades since it began to reform and open up, China has been transformed. As its economy, technological capabilities, and political influence have grown exponentially, its outlook on the world has changed, as well. Chinese leaders today no longer cite Deng’s maxim about hiding one’s strength and biding one’s time. China sees itself as a continental power and aspires to become a maritime power, too; it has been modernizing its army and navy and aims to turn its military into a world-class fighting force. Increasingly, and quite understandably, China wants to protect and advance its interests abroad and secure what it sees as its rightful place in international affairs.

At the same time, the United States, which is still the preeminent power in many dimensions, is reassessing its grand strategy. As its share of global GDP diminishes, it is unclear whether the United States will continue to shoulder the burden of maintaining international peace and stability, or whether it might instead pursue a narrower, "America first” approach to protecting its interests. As Washington asks fundamental questions about its responsibilities in the global system, its relationship with Beijing has come under increased scrutiny.

THE FUNDAMENTAL CHOICES OF THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA

The United States and China each face fundamental choices. The United States must decide whether to view China’s rise as an existential threat and try to hold China back through all available means or to accept China as a major power in its own right. If it chooses the latter path, the United States must craft an approach to China that will foster cooperation and healthy competition wherever possible and not allow rivalry to poison the entire relationship. Ideally, this competition will take place within an agreed multilateral framework of rules and norms of the kind that govern the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The United States is likely to find this a painful adjustment, especially with the growing consensus in Washington that engaging Beijing has failed and that a tougher approach is necessary to preserve U.S. interests. But however difficult the task will be for the United States, it is well worth making a serious effort to accommodate China’s aspirations within the current system of international rules and norms. This system imposes responsibilities and restraints on all countries, strengthens trust, helps manage conflicts, and creates a safer and stabler environment for both cooperation and competition.

If the United States chooses instead to try to contain China’s rise, it will risk provoking a reaction that could set the two countries on a path to decades of confrontation. The United States is not a declining power. It has great resilience and strengths, one of which is its ability to attract talent from around the world; of the nine people of Chinese ethnicity who have been awarded Nobel Prizes in the sciences, eight were U.S. citizens or subsequently became U.S. citizens. On the other side, the Chinese economy possesses tremendous dynamism and increasingly advanced technology; it is far from being a Potemkin village or the tottering command economy that defined the Soviet Union in its final years. Any confrontation between these two great powers is unlikely to end as the Cold War did, in one country’s peaceful collapse.

For its part, China must decide whether to try to get its way as an unencumbered major power, prevailing by dint of its sheer weight and economic strength—but at the risk of strong pushback, not just from the United States but from other countries, too. This approach is likely to increase tensions and resentment, which would affect China’s standing and influence in the longer term. This is a real danger: a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that people in Canada, the United States, and other Asian and western European countries have increasingly unfavorable views of China. Despite China’s recent efforts to build soft power abroad—through its network of Confucius Institutes, for example, and through Chinese-owned international newspapers and television outlets—the trend is negative.

Alternatively, China could acknowledge that it is no longer poor and weak and accept that the world now has higher expectations of it. It is no longer politically justifiable for China to enjoy the concessions and privileges it won when it was smaller and less developed, such as the generous terms under which it joined the WTO in 2001. A larger and more powerful China should not only respect global rules and norms but also take on greater responsibility for upholding and updating the international order under which it has prospered so spectacularly. Where the existing rules and norms are no longer fit for purpose, China should collaborate with the United States and other countries to work out revised arrangements that all can live with.

The path to creating a new order is not straightforward. Powerful domestic pressures impel and constrain both countries’ foreign policy choices. Foreign policy has featured little in the current U.S. presidential campaign, and when it has, the prevailing focus has been variants of the theme of "America first.” In China, the leadership’s overriding priority is to maintain internal political stability and, after enduring nearly two centuries of weakness and humiliation, to manifest the confidence of an ancient civilization on the rise again. So it cannot be taken for granted that the United States and China will manage their bilateral relations based on rational calculations of their national interests or even share a desire for win-win outcomes. The countries are not necessarily set on a course of confrontation, but confrontation cannot be ruled out.

DYNAMICS IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC

These dynamics will play out all over the world, but one crucial arena will be the Asia-Pacific. The United States has always had vital national interests in this region. It expended blood and treasure fighting the Pacific War to defeat Japan, a war in which the United States nearly lost three future presidents. It fought two costly wars in Korea and Vietnam, which bought precious time for noncommunist countries in Asia to consolidate their societies and economies and win the battle of hearts and minds against communism.

The United States’ generous, open policies that have so greatly benefited the Asia-Pacific derived from deep-rooted political ideals and its self-image as "a city upon a hill” and "a light unto the nations,” but they also reflected its enlightened self-interest. A stable and prospering Asia-Pacific was first a bulwark against the communist countries in the Cold War and then an important region of the world comprising many stable and prosperous countries well disposed toward the United States. To U.S. businesses, the Asia-Pacific offered sizable markets and important production bases. Unsurprisingly, several of the United States’ staunchest allies are in Asia, such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea, and so are some of its long-standing partners, such as Singapore.

China has vital interests in the region, too. In Northeast Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Korean War still cast long shadows. In Southeast Asia, China sees a source of energy and raw materials, economic partners, and important sea lines of communication. It also sees chokepoints in the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea that must be kept open to protect China’s energy security. But one critical difference with the United States is that China sees the Asia-Pacific as its "near abroad,” to borrow a Russian expression, and thus as essential to its own security.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that the Pacific Ocean is big enough to accommodate both the United States and China. But he has also said that Asian security should be left to Asians. A natural question arises: Does Xi think that the Pacific Ocean is big enough for the United States and China to coexist peacefully, with overlapping circles of friends and partners, or that it is big enough to be divided down the middle between the two powers, into rival spheres of influence? Singapore and other Asia-Pacific countries have no doubt which interpretation they prefer. Although they may not have much influence over how things will turn out, they fervently hope not to be forced to choose between the United States and China.

The U.S. security presence remains vital to the Asia-Pacific region. Without it, Japan and South Korea would be compelled to contemplate developing nuclear weapons; both are nuclear threshold states, and the subject already regularly surfaces in their public discourse, especially given North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons capabilities. Such developments are fortunately still hypothetical, but their prospect is conducive neither to stability in Northeast Asia nor to nonproliferation efforts globally.  In Southeast Asia, the U.S. Seventh Fleet has contributed to regional security since World War II, ensuring that sea lines of communication remain safe and open, which has enabled trade and stimulated economic growth. Despite its increasing military strength, China would be unable to take over the United States’ security role. Unlike the United States, China has competing maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea with several countries in the region, which will always see China’s naval presence as an attempt to advance those claims.

Another obstacle that would prevent China from taking over the security role currently played by the United States stems from the fact that many Southeast Asian countries have significant ethnic Chinese minorities, whose relations with the non-Chinese majority are often delicate. These countries are extremely sensitive about any perception that China has an inordinate influence on their ethnic Chinese populations—especially recalling the history of China’s support for communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia until the early 1980s. Those sensitivities will constrain China’s role in Southeast Asian affairs for the foreseeable future.

Singapore is the only Southeast Asian country whose multiracial population is majority ethnic Chinese. In fact, it is the only sovereign state in the world with such demographics other than China itself. But Singapore has made enormous efforts to build a multiracial national identity and not a Chinese one. And it has also been extremely careful to avoid doing anything that could be misperceived as allowing itself to be used as a cat’s-paw by China. For this reason, Singapore did not establish diplomatic relations with China until 1990, making it the final Southeast Asian country, except for Brunei, to do so.

Of course, Singapore and all other Asian countries want to cultivate good relations with China. They hope to enjoy the goodwill and support of such a major power and to participate in its growth. Global supply chains—whether for aircraft, cellular phones, or surgical masks—link China and other Asian countries closely together. China’s sheer size has made it the largest trading partner of most other Asian countries, including every treaty ally of the United States in the region, as well as Singapore and nearly every other ASEAN country.

It would be very difficult, bordering on impossible, for the United States to replace China as the world’s chief supplier, just as it would be unthinkable for the United States itself to do without the Chinese market, which is the third-largest importer of U.S. goods, after Canada and Mexico. But neither can China displace the United States’ economic role in Asia. The global financial system relies heavily on U.S. financial institutions, and the renminbi will not replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency anytime soon. Although the other Asian countries export more to China than to the United States, U.S. multinational corporations still form the largest source of foreign investments in many Asia-Pacific countries, including Singapore. China’s major companies are starting to invest abroad, but it will be many years before China has multinational corporations of the same scale and sophistication as those based in the United States, which tie global production chains together, link Asia with the global economy, and create millions of jobs.

For these reasons, Asia-Pacific countries do not wish to be forced to choose between the United States and China. They want to cultivate good relations with both. They cannot afford to alienate China, and other Asian countries will try their best not to let any single dispute dominate their overall relationships with Beijing. At the same time, those Asian countries regard the United States as a resident power with vital interests in the region. They were supportive—some more overtly than others—when U.S. President Barack Obama declared that the United States intended to "rebalance” American foreign policy toward Asia. They take comfort that although the Trump administration has raised issues of cost and burden sharing with its friends and allies, it has also put forward a strategy for the Indo-Pacific region and announced its intention to build up the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command.

But those Asian countries also recognize that the United States is a global hyperpower, with far-flung preoccupations and urgent priorities all over the world. They are realistic that should tensions grow—or, even worse, should conflict occur—they cannot automatically take U.S. support for granted. They expect to do their part to defend their countries and interests. They also hope that the United States understands that if other Asian countries promote ties with China, that does not necessarily mean that they are working against the United States. (And of course, these Asian countries hope for the same understanding from China, too, if they strengthen their ties with the United States.)

AN INCLUSIVE REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE

The United States and China are not the only major countries with a great deal of influence in the region; other players also have significant roles. Japan, in particular, has much to contribute to the region, given the size and sophistication of its economy. Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, it has contributed more actively than before. For example, after the United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, Japan stepped up. It galvanized the remaining 11 members to complete the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which brings together developed and developing countries on both sides of the Pacific Ocean and is a step toward free trade in the Asia-Pacific region.

India also enjoys a great deal of potential influence. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has declared a strategic shift through its Act East Policy, and other countries look forward to seeing this policy put into action. The East Asia Summit includes India as a member because other members hoped that as India’s economy grew, it would see more value in regional cooperation. India was also one of the original countries negotiating to form the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a proposed free-trade agreement that aims to integrate all the major economies in the Asia-Pacific, similar to the way that the North American Free Trade Agreement (now the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement) linked together countries in North America. After extensive negotiations, India decided last year not to join the RCEP; the remaining 15 participating countries are moving forward, although without India, something significant has been lost.

 

It is great powers’ capacity for cooperation that is the true test of statecraft.

As most Asian countries recognize, the value of such agreements goes beyond the economic gains they generate. They are platforms that enable Asia-Pacific countries to cooperate with one another, develop stakes in one another’s success, and together mold the regional architecture and the rules that govern it. Such regional arrangements must be open and inclusive. They should not, whether by design or result, keep any party out, undermine existing cooperation arrangements, create rival blocs, or force countries to take sides. This is why CPTPP members have left the door open for the United States to sign on once again, and why the countries that are working to form the RCEP still hope that India will join one day.

This is also the basis on which Asia-Pacific countries support regional cooperation initiatives such as the various Indo-Pacific concepts proposed by Japan, the United States, and other countries, as well as China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Many other Asian countries view supporting the Belt and Road Initiative as a constructive way to accommodate China’s growing influence in the region. If implemented well and with financial discipline, the initiative’s projects can strengthen regional and multilateral cooperation and address the pressing need for better infrastructure and connectivity in many developing countries. Some such projects have been criticized for lacking transparency or viability, but there is no reason to believe that all of the initiative’s projects, by definition, will impose unsustainable financial burdens on countries or prevent them from growing their links with other major economies. Such consequences would not serve China’s interests, either, since they would undermine its international standing and influence. 

Developing new regional arrangements does not mean abandoning or sidelining existing multilateral institutions. These hard-won multilateral arrangements and institutions continue to give all countries, especially smaller ones, a framework for working together and advancing their collective interests. But many existing multilateral institutions are in urgent need of reform: they are no longer effective, given current economic and strategic realities. For instance, since the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1994, the WTO has found it increasingly difficult to reach meaningful trade agreements, because any deal requires consensus from its 164 members, which have hugely divergent interests and economic philosophies. And since last year, the WTO’s Appellate Body has been paralyzed by the lack of a quorum. This is a loss for all countries, who should work constructively toward reforming such organizations rather than diminishing their effectiveness or bypassing them altogether.

A FERVENT HOPE

The strategic choices that the United States and China make will shape the contours of the emerging global order. It is natural for big powers to compete. But it is their capacity for cooperation that is the true test of statecraft, and it will determine whether humanity makes progress on global problems such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the spread of infectious diseases.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of how vital it is for countries to work together. Diseases do not respect national borders, and international cooperation is desperately needed to bring the pandemic under control and reduce damage to the global economy. Even with the best relations between the United States and China, mounting a collective response to COVID-19 would be hugely challenging. Unfortunately, the pandemic is exacerbating the U.S.-Chinese rivalry, increasing mistrust, one-upmanship, and mutual blame. This will surely worsen if, as now seems inevitable, the pandemic becomes a major issue in the U.S. presidential election. One can only hope that the gravity of the situation will concentrate minds and allow wiser counsel to prevail.

In the meantime, Asian countries have their hands full, coping with the pandemic and the many other obstacles to improving the lives of their citizens and creating a more secure and prosperous region. Their success—and the prospect of an Asian century—will depend greatly on whether the United States and China can overcome their differences, build mutual trust, and work constructively to uphold a stable and peaceful international order. This is a fundamental issue of our time.

LEE HSIEN LOONG is Prime Minister of Singapore.

 

7 hours ago, Toastrel said:

June 1st: Trump talks to Putin on the phone, again.

June 5th: Trump announces he withdrawing one-third of US troops from Germany

June 5th: Putin announces he's moving more troops to Russia's western border with Europe Police riots make a great distraction from collusion!

Troop removal from Europe has been a long time coming. The only country I can see is maintaining a presence in is the UK. Outside of that there’s no reason to be there. 

24 minutes ago, Bill said:

Troop removal from Europe has been a long time coming. The only country I can see is maintaining a presence in is the UK. Outside of that there’s no reason to be there. 

Trump has ceded more influence to Russia than any other President.  It’s like he’s trying to reverse the outcome of the Cold War.

33 minutes ago, Bill said:

Troop removal from Europe has been a long time coming. The only country I can see is maintaining a presence in is the UK. Outside of that there’s no reason to be there. 

I am fine with troop removal.

I am not okay with us doing favors for the Russians.

2 hours ago, Dave Moss said:

Trump has ceded more influence to Russia than any other President.  It’s like he’s trying to reverse the outcome of the Cold War.

 

2 hours ago, Toastrel said:

I am fine with troop removal.

I am not okay with us doing favors for the Russians.

I can’t speak to Trumps relationship with the Russians, but Trump or not it’s an inevitability. 

2 hours ago, Bill said:

 

I can’t speak to Trumps relationship with the Russians, but Trump or not it’s an inevitability. 

Not really.  NATO is made up of North American and European countries and has served as a bulwark against Russia.  Putin hates NATO.  And Trump has gone out of his way to sabotage the NATO alliance.

1 hour ago, Dave Moss said:

Not really.  NATO is made up of North American and European countries and has served as a bulwark against Russia.  Putin hates NATO.  And Trump has gone out of his way to sabotage the NATO alliance.

Yes really. Regardless of the president the continued withdrawal of the US from the world is an inevitability. 

On 6/9/2020 at 7:21 PM, Dave Moss said:

Not really.  NATO is made up of North American and European countries and has served as a bulwark against Russia.  Putin hates NATO.  And Trump has gone out of his way to sabotage the NATO alliance.

NATO was formed as a defense against the Soviet Union and what became the Warsaw Pact; both of those ended in 1991, almost thirty years ago.  In the years since, the European countries have slashed their defense spending leaving the U.S. on the hook for defending them even more than it was during the Cold War.  Germany's and Canada's armed forces, for instance, are currently a joke; their booming economies have come at our expense.  At the same time NATO has admitted a host of Eastern European countries that have no hope of defending themselves, so now the U.S. could be forced to go to war and risk a nuclear exchange over Latvia, or Lithuania, or Montenegro.  I'll pass on that. 

As far as what Trump has done to NATO, the truly drastic reductions in our NATO forces took place in the early and mid-1990s, he is simply continuing that trend.  If the Europeans are that concerned about the Russian threat then let them put their money where their mouth is rather than always relying on us to spend the money to protect them.  Trump's "sin" of publicly badgering our allies over their defense spending is merely him repeating what NATO defense ministers have been saying about their own countries for years in private; he's simply taken the complaint out of the back rooms, so that's crocodile tears. 

The existence of NATO is not ordained by the heavens for all eternity; it was formed for a specific purpose, which ended long ago and like any other commitment is open to question as to whether it still serves America's needs.  Unfortunately rather than rationally deciding what to do when the Cold War ended the American public has elected a series of leaders that ran for office in part on their ignorance of foreign policy, so we have drifted along on inertia while our military leaders have had little guidance, or conflicting guidance, on what their strategic priorities should be since 1991. 

LINK

China’s spy agencies are coming to Hong Kong

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Zach Dorfman of the Aspen Institute

Chinese intelligence officers have been covertly operating in Hong Kong for years, but Hong Kong’s new national security law means Beijing’s spies will likely establish a more official presence there.  

Why it matters: Allowing mainland China’s security and intelligence services to operate with impunity in Hong Kong would dramatically reduce the political freedoms enshrined in the "one country, two systems” agreement that was supposed to provide the region with a high degree of autonomy until 2047. This could endanger Hong Kong-based pro-democracy figures and other local anti-Communist Party dissidents.

What’s happening: A draft of the new national security law states, "When needed, relevant national security organs of the Central People’s Government will set up agencies” in Hong Kong.

Background: The Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s foremost intelligence and political security agency, is notoriously brutal.  It operates both domestically and abroad, monitoring political and criminal targets, detaining and torturing those deemed threats to the state, and performing traditional espionage.  The national security law likely means China’s security and intelligence officers could legally be allowed to pursue targets in Hong Kong in one of two ways.

Extradition: The security law could pave the way for establishing a framework for extradition from Hong Kong to China. This would mean that Chinese security agencies would have to submit extradition requests to Hong Kong authorities, and cases would go through Hong Kong’s courts before a target could be sent to mainland China.

Rendition: In a darker scenario, mainland security officers could apprehend individuals and simply take them over the border to the mainland for interrogation or imprisonment.

"There have already been several known cases of Chinese intelligence officers operating in Hong Kong and Macao taking people over the border,” said Rodney Faraon, a partner at Crumpton Group and former senior CIA officer. "But these have always been officially denied.”  The most infamous recent case is that of Causeway Bay Books, a well-known bookstore and monument to press freedom, whose employees were kidnapped from Hong Kong and elsewhere and detained in mainland China in 2015. (The bookstore was subsequently forced to relocate to Taiwan.)

But a formal presence for the MSS in Hong Kong doesn’t necessarily mean a visible one.  "Even in China they can be pretty quiet and don't try to build a large overt presence, preferring to work through fronts and proxies,” said Alex Joske, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.  "If Chinese intelligence agencies are allowed to operate openly and officially, then that becomes an alternative center of power to the law enforcement agencies that the Hong Kong government currently has, one that would undoubtedly have legal primacy in the jurisdiction,” said Faraon.  "It would be the subversion of the role that Hong Kong law enforcement is supposed to play under one country two systems.”