Wednesday 27 April 2016
Photo, left:
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com & Daily Beast. Dr. David M. Livingston, The Space Show.
Hour One
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Fraser Howie, co-author of Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise, in re: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/04/24/china-punishes-apple-shutting-itunes-movies/ ; http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/media/disneylife-alibaba-china/
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Harry Kazianis, senior fellow for Defense Policy at the Center for the National Interest, in re: PLA militarizes the Spratly Islands, the Paracels, and now moves Eastward to Scarborough Shoal: within easy striking distance of Manila; breaks through the First Island Chain. These are Filipino waters, it’s within their economic zone, no disagreement on that. Australian intell thought that China might dynamite the shoal and rebuild it for military benefit - it’s also near US operations. Building new islands, airfields, putting air _, and air defense systems – on top of which Scarborough Shoals is a full notch up in aggression – is escalatory. The US needs to take a stand somewhere in the South China Sea. Continue FONOP – freedom of navigation ops. Also, A-10 flights over Scarborough. Should give UAVs/drones to Philippines, and silent reconnaissance to give data to Philippines. This US administration has no coherent grand strategy.
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Scarborough ‘Shoaldown’: An Opportunity to Push Back Against China Over the last few weeks any lingering doubts have surely been erased when it comes to China’s so-called ‘intentions’ in the South China Sea. There is clearly only one goal, a single strategic objective: to dominate this important body of water and ensure Beijing holds de-facto sovereignty from the waves that move from Malaysia all the way to the shores of Taiwan. Indeed, recent events prove that Beijing is not only consolidating its claims but now acting in a way that demonstrates China will utilize the South China Sea however it wishes, or, as reports declared a few years back, as “Lake Beijing.” As first reported here, China has tested its new DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile. Such tests, while certainly provocative but by now routine, come with an interesting twist: the missiles were fired over the South China Sea. Beijing pushed back on the report in almost comedic fashion, with a spokesperson explaining, “It is normal for China to execute scientific experiments within its territory [emphasis mine], and these experiments are not aimed at any specific country nor target.” Clearly the only “science experiment” that China was conducting was to measure the lack of international outrage over such an action — and Beijing has to be happy with the results.
Incremental Aggression: But should we be all that shocked anymore? Such actions build on Beijing’s strategy to slowly change the status-quo one small move at a time. Each action is carefully crafted — nothing is ever done that would create a crisis that leads on a path towards kinetic conflict or war, however, over time, the cumulative impact puts Beijing in the driver seat with a clear course towards regional hegemony in the South China Sea.
So is there any place on the map where China could be challenged, a spot where Washington and its regional partners could turn the tables, making their intentions known that Beijing’s coercive actions will now come at the steepest of costs, and that they will no longer be able to so easily disrupt the status-quo?
Enter Scarborough Shoal. Essentially stolen from The Philippines back in 2012 after the US helped broker a de-escalation of tensions–sitting clearly in Manila’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) — could be the place where America could slow or possibly halt China’s dangerous ambitions. So why pick Scarborough Shoal to make a stand and why now? Because according to various reports, it seems likely to be Beijing’s next island reclamation project. A report in The Diplomat explains that, “China is poised to take “decisive and provocative action” in the Spratly Islands. These sources report that China may dynamite Scarborough Shoal to build an artificial island to house military facilities…”
A Line in the Sand: And while putting an emphasis on this one shoal can’t make up for the absence of a clear strategy for the South China Sea and the region when it comes to dealing with Beijing’s coercive and bullying acts in recent years, Scarborough Shoal could offer an opportunity to halt a dangerous trend.
In fact, Washington might already be laying the groundwork to make sure Beijing would not have an easy time reclaiming Scarborough after all. One of the toughest and battle tested symbols of US military power, the mighty A-10 Warthog, is now in the Philippines. A-10s as well as Sikorsky HH-60s helicopters “conducted a flying mission through international airspace in the vicinity of Scarborough Shoal west of the Philippines providing air and maritime situational awareness” recently according to a statement released by the U.S. military. “These missions promote transparency and safety of movement in international waters and airspace, representing the US commitment to ally and partner nations and to the Indo-Asia-Pacific region’s continued stability now and for generations to come.”
But what happens next is key. The Obama Administration should heed the advice of the Wall Street Journal with the US Navy sending a signal of “seriousness by parking a destroyer or two nearby.” Such a bold action would show China that America is serious about Scarborough and will not allow Beijing’s coercive actions to go unchecked forever. Washington should also send UAVs to the Philippines to conduct 24 hours surveillance of the area around the shoal in an effort to not only enhance Manila’s maritime awareness but send a signal to Beijing that it won’t easily turn this shoal into its next “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”
Some would argue there is nothing the United States can do — well, short of war according to one expert, to halt China’s assault on the status-quo. Scarborough Shoal offers the perfect opportunity for Washington to begin to signal to Beijing that its actions from now on will have consequences–something the Obama Administration has failed to do. But the question as always is this: Will Washington act before its too late?
Harry Kazianis (@grecianformula) is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Center for the National Interest. Kazianis is the co-author and Editor of the report: Tackling Asia’s Greatest Challenges: A U.S.-Japan-Vietnam Trilateral Report, and also the author of the forthcoming monograph: The Tao of A2/AD. The views expressed are his own. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/scarborough-%E2%80%98shoaldown%E2%80%99-opportunity-push-back-against-china-15919
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Dr. Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science, in re: Hayabusa 1 mission: we created an MOU with JACSA delineating our respective roles. We've done deep space missions and could help in in engines navigation. Tracking, and how to manage extraterrestrial samples – requires careful curation. It was highly agreeable to collaborate with the Japanese.
We work closely with British, French and German space agencies, in addition to Japanese. It’s very international. . . . http://global.jaxa.jp ; http://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/muses_c/index.html
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 1, Block D: Dr. Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science, in re: http://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/hayabusa2/ ; http://global.jaxa.jp/projects/past_project/sat.html
Hour Two
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 2, Block A: Phelim Kine, deputy director, Asia Division, Human Rights Watch, in re: Woman who documented govt harassment in China is thrown in jail – it's not only about journalism, it's about advocacy groups, plus universities, all sorts of organizations that are noncontroversial in the West: environmental rights, labor rights, anything, Not only can Human Rights Watch not function in China, but many of its former colleagues have been thrown in prison. Even five years ago there was a lot more breathing space; a near-paranoic perception by the govt that any group outside of the Chinese Communist party constitutes a threat to the Party. The inordinate courage of citizens who step up the plate despite the grave danger to them is inspiring. Scores of journalists are leaving the trade and many are fleeing the country. The pressure is building up to an unmanageable degree. Presumably, at some point it’ll blow. Meanwhile, the Chinese Miracle is over. http://time.com/4307516/china-ngo-law-foreign-human-rights/
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 2, Block B: Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow on Asian Military Affairs, Intl Assessment and Strategy Center; in re: Submarine-launched ballistic missiles. 23 April North Korean development of SLBM: in the past year, it's migrated from a liquid-fuel engine to a solid-fuel engine – much easier to store and to put on a sub. Moreover, it's provided cold-launch launch: can eject from a tube and send it flying above water. Missile can be store-able , and with solid fuel rocket motor and cold launch, North Korea now is able to build modern long-range ballistic missiles. It soon can have mobile missiles that re very hard to find and hard to defend against. DPRK has made remarkable progress in 52 weeks: in the next two to three years, we’ll see a new generation of missiles, and already has mobile launchers – thanks to China – so they can be stored more easily and very rapidly deployed, the latter fast enough for us not to be able to stop and attack on the US. Marry that warhead with this missile in a sub, the whole thing changes US defense posture. Iran has a 1.25 meter diameter rocker motor; so does the new North Korean motor. When it can produce a two-stage rocket, then it'll have technology that obviates the problem of its noisy subs. China has spent decades creating this network of rogue regimes (North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, inter al.). When the sub cruises on its electric motor underwater, it's quiet; is noisy only on the surface. China can greatly extend he underwater range of DPRK subs. These missiles can be put on merchant ships. Surprise terrorist strikes against the US or other nations. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/23/asia/north-korea-launches-missile-from-submarine/ ; http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36127011
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: John Bolton, AEI, in re: In January 2017, America’s new president will face Beijing’s ongoing efforts to run its own extortion campaign against Taiwan. If the Obama administration fails to support Taiwan in responding appropriately to China’s assertive, nearly belligerent actions on deportations and many other issues, the new president will have even graver problems to solve. This is not a case where America should simply tote up its investments in Taiwan and on the mainland and go with the bigger number. This is a matter of resisting Chinese efforts at establishing hegemony in East and Southeast Asia not only at the expense of its near neighbors, but of the United States as well.
read this article online.
Bolton: China-Taiwan tensions are rising. How Obama responds is critical China and Taiwan are locked in a spiraling controversy over conflicting concepts of “citizenship,” with enormous implications both for them and the United States. The timing of the dispute is especially significant, as Taiwan prepares for next month’s inauguration of Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (and Taiwan’s first female president). The DPP has long advocated explicitly declaring Taiwan independent from the mainland, rather than continuing its current ambiguous status.
Although extraditing alleged international phone scammers may not initially seem the stuff of high-stakes diplomatic statecraft, the stakes are high and figure in the much broader ongoing dispute across the Strait of Taiwan. Beijing struck first in Kenya, where Chinese and Taiwanese swindlers allegedly extorted money from mainland Chinese by masquerading as police calling about “illegal” conduct. Almost certainly because of Chinese threats to withhold substantial amounts of economic assistance, Kenya “deported” 45 Taiwanese citizens to China, even though they had been acquitted of phone fraud. Taiwan immediately complained that its citizens’ rights were violated by not being sent to their home country. Just days later, Malaysia returned 20 Taiwanese (apparently part of the same scam) to Taiwan, which promptly released them because of insufficient evidence, thereby eliciting Chinese complaints.
The ostensible dispute is whether China or Taiwan should have primary jurisdiction to investigate the phone scammers. Just beneath the surface, however, is the highly sensitive issue of citizenship, and how foreign governments treat Taiwan’s citizens and Taiwan itself. Taipei emphatically rejects Beijing’s claim that it is merely a province of China, and that its citizens are therefore really citizens of China itself. Now a free-spirited democracy, Taiwan is still formally called “the Republic of China” (as Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government was known when it fled to Taiwan in 1949, defeated in a decades-long civil war by Mao Tse-tung’s Communists).
Beijing has seized the deportation issue to fire a shot across Tsai’s bow, to warn the president-elect that China’s patience is limited. Xi Xinping’s regime did not want the DPP to defeat the ruling Kuomintang, with which it shares the “one China” view that Taiwan and China should ultimately be reunited (although with significant differences on how, when, under what circumstances). Mainland Chinese intervention in Taiwan’s politics has backfired more often than not, but the Communists have nonetheless persisted in trying to shape Taiwanese thinking to their advantage. Intimidating the incoming Tsai, known already as far more cautious than many other DPP leaders, is thus par for the course. The real issue is whether there is more coming, perhaps in the form of the Chinese equivalent of the 3:00 A.M. wake-up call to Taiwan’s new government after Inauguration Day.
America also has much at stake. China’s belligerent behavior in the South China Sea has escalated from building man-made islands to bolster Beijing’s territorial claims to constructing air and naval facilities on these islands. China already has a provincial capital for the region, and is proceeding rapidly to change the South China Sea from international waters into a Chinese lake before President Obama leaves office. Xi, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Eastern Europe, is testing how far it can push Obama before it meets real resistance. And for Xi, squeezing Taiwan is important in advancing China’s aim to achieve in the East China Sea what it is already doing to the south.
Beijing does not want actual hostilities, but believes it can achieve its central objectives by threats and pressure alone. In response, America should immediately engage in more extensive and assertive “freedom of navigation” operations in the South China Sea. Moreover, Washington should launch far more active diplomatic efforts to induce Southeast Asia’s other territorial claimants to resolve their competing claims and thereby present a united front to Beijing. With Taiwan, the United States should consider significant steps to upgrade its diplomatic relations. Washington should make clear that it considers Taiwan to be an independent, democratic society that has the full right to reject a forced merger with China, no matter what the aging rhetoric about “one China.”
In January 2017, America’s new president will face Beijing’s ongoing efforts to run its own extortion campaign against Taiwan. If the Obama administration fails to support Taiwan in responding appropriately to China’s assertive, nearly belligerent actions on deportations and many other issues, the new president will have even graver problems to solve. This is not a case where America should simply tote up its investments in Taiwan and on the mainland and go with the bigger number. This is a matter of resisting Chinese efforts at establishing hegemony in East and Southeast Asia not only at the expense of its near neighbors, but of the United States as well.
John Bolton was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 through 2006. He’s currently a senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Fox News contributor
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: Sadanand Dhume, AEI, in re: India, the economy, governance, and Modi. [Note: AEI public event: "Modinomics at two: Is it working for India and its citizens?" on May 10. Call for information.]
Hour Three
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 3, Block A: Monica Crowley, Fox, & Washington Times Online opinion editor; in re: Trump gives a foreign-policy speech filled with realpolitik: a cold calculation of America’s interests and how another sovereign serves or opposes America’s well-being. , , , Anent ISIS: Trump raises the genocide of Christians across the Middle East; also Islamism as a threat. He needs to draw out more of a context; it’s not just ISIS and an entity, it's an ideology. Cheney, Rumsfeld: no one offered a good answer; but it needs to be fought not only geographically and with missiles but ideologically, as well. Intl relations theory called The rationality of Irrationality – it behooves a leader to be unpredictable in order to keep adversaries a bit off-balance. Powerful as useful for a US president. Also, urgent need for a fully-equipped Navy, for which there’s currently not enough funding. Were so much more debt-ridden now than in 1980 – and entitlements are overwhelming . “Trump was [as though] trying to get change out of the couch” – he spoke bravely of affording needed tings, but it’s not at all clear how, and he may be overpromising early.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-foreign-policy-speech ; http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-trumps-nomination-to-lose/
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 3, Block B: Monica Crowley, Fox, & Washington Times Online opinion editor; in re: Graham tears into Trump’s "pathetic" foreign policy speech hill.cm/K5IX1th pic.twitter.com/60PqL5CTQd ; https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-foreign-policy-speech
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 3, Block C: Monica Crowley, Fox, & Washington Times Online opinion editor; in re: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-foreign-poli...
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 3, Block D: Monica Crowley, Fox, & Washington Times Online opinion editor; in re: Domestic politics.
Hour Four
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re: Cruz to tap Fiorina as running mate hill.cm/HSqWVv4 pic.twitter.com/RAgd3sUY0v
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re: Dem leaders: Trump puts House in play hill.cm/h8yZtbY pic.twitter.com/uu8pAaGLpJ Cruz praises running mate Carly Fiorina for shattering glass ceilings "over and over again" bloom.bg/1NAAptq pic.twitter.com/lB4fNq6Sdq . Trump declares himself the "presumptive nominee" as Clinton all but seals the Dem race bloom.bg/1NQOQUZ pic.twitter.com/KT1bMGaaA4 .
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, School of Geographical Sciences University of Bristol, in re: “How Antarctica got its ice” Caroline H. Lear, Dan J. Lunt. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/34 ; Science 01 Apr 2016: Vol. 352, Issue 6281, pp. 34-35 ; DOI: 10.1126/science.aad6284
Ice sheets such as those on Greenland and Antarctica today not only respond to changing climate but can also cause climate to change. Their sizes have fluctuated substantially in the past. In particular, Antarctica was effectively ice-free until its ice cover began to expand rapidly at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary around 34 million years ago (see the figure). Recent research, including a report by Galeotti et al. on page 76 of this issue (1), helps to identify the mechanisms that led to this rapid ice sheet growth. (1 of 2)
Wednesday 27 April 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, School of Geographical Sciences University of Bristol, in re: “How Antarctica got its ice” Caroline H. Lear, Dan J. Lunt. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/34 Science 01 Apr 2016: Vol. 352, Issue 6281, pp. 34-35 ; DOI: 10.1126/science.aad6284
Ice sheets such as those on Greenland and Antarctica today not only respond to changing climate but can also cause climate to change. Their sizes have fluctuated substantially in the past. In particular, Antarctica was effectively ice-free until its ice cover began to expand rapidly at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary around 34 million years ago (see the figure). Recent research, including a report by Galeotti et al. on page 76 of this issue (1), helps to identify the mechanisms that led to this rapid ice sheet growth. (2 of 2)
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