The West need not fear China’s war games with Russia

In fact, America’s navy should co-operate more with China’s, too

RARELY in times of peace has a country acquired naval power at such a rate as China has in recent years. Three decades ago its warships were clapped out, capable of operating only close to shore. Now its shipyards are churning out state-of-the-art combat vessels at a furious pace. Some experts believe it could have as many warships as America within a few years. China’s navy is also developing global range: this week three of its ships have been staging war games in the Baltic Sea with the Russian navy, the first joint exercises by the two countries in those waters. The intended message to the West is clear. China and Russia, united in their resentment of American power, are thumbing their noses at NATO on its doorstep.

.. This week’s exercises with Russia in the Baltic, meanwhile, suggest not only a shared enmity towards the West but also mutual admiration of each other’s thuggish political systems. President Xi Jinping has turned a blind eye to Russia’s land-grab in Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin to China’s in the South China Sea.

 .. Yet there is far less to the Russia-China relationship than meets the eye (see article). Russian officials worry about China’s growing economic and military might almost as much as their American counterparts do. Russia sells China a lot of weapons, but sells similar stuff to India, China’s rival. True, Mr Xi ignores the West’s sanctions on Russia—but that is mainly because he wants a stable relationship with a huge neighbour which China has come close to fighting in living memory.
.. As for China’s naval muscle-flexing in the Baltic, that is a development that should, in several respects, be welcomed rather than feared. If China wants to show that its warships can operate in distant seas, there is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, it is entirely right that China, as a global economic power, should play a larger part in providing the maritime security on which global trade depends. It is already taking part in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden—something for which its base in Djibouti will play a useful supporting role.

Deploying its navy far beyond its own waters might also help China understand that America, too, has good reasons for doing so. China frequently huffs about American warships in the western Pacific, refusing to accept one of the Pentagon’s main reasons for deploying there: that America has a vital stake in the security of Asian trade.

..  the biennial multi-country RIMPAC manoeuvres, to be held off Hawaii next year. In May the Pentagon invited China to join in, for what would be the third time. Some American politicians grumble about the involvement of a navy so unfriendly to the West. But they are wrong to do so. Such exercises are an important way to prevent confrontation triggered by misunderstanding. And China’s inclusion would help ensure that its increasing naval assertiveness bolsters global security, rather than threatens it.

Trump May Doubt Climate Change, Pentagon Sees It as Threat Multiplier

At his confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called climate change a “driver of instability” that “requires a broader, whole-of-government response.”

For more than a decade, military leaders have said that extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels are aggravating social tensions, destabilizing regions and feeding the rise of extremist groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

.. Another Pentagon report in 2015 called climate change a “threat multiplier.”

.. Climate change is already impacting the military itself, how it operates, and the countries in which we have an interest where it can result in instability, which leads to violence, which leads to conflict and where we end up moving our young men and women overseas

.. He warned the U.S. that “if one country decides to leave a void, I can guarantee someone else will occupy it.” The only other countries not in the accord are Syria and Nicaragua.

.. “Around the world, military strategists view climate change as a threat to global peace and security,” he said in a speech at New York University. “We are all aware of the political turmoil and societal tensions that have been generated by the mass movement of refugees.”

.. a three-foot sea level rise would threaten at least 128 U.S. military bases, which are valued at $100 billion. Nine of those are major hubs for the U.S. Navy.

The “soft coup” under way in Washington

If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama’s hit squad­-John Brennan,

Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information.

Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud.

.. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.

Namely, the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who could not be counted upon to serve as a “trusty” for the status quo; and whose naïve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal threat to the very modus operandi of the Imperial City.

.. After all, it didn’t take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened him to Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete, that he didn’t want to give lethal aid to the Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.

.. Given that he is up against a Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance of survival short of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.

But that’s not happening because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is being advised by a cacophonous coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.

.. “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt”

So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own demise. Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they send in the men in white coats with a straight jacket.

.. Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today’s surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn’t exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going­-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to.

.. To wit, Mueller’s #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department’s Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.

.. Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney’s silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America.

.. But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community’s flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad.

.. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.

.. in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda­-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran.

.. the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington­–the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs­-was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.

.. the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its leader.

.. Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere­ – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII­ – there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated “Yats”, a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising.

.. Russia moved to protect its legitimate interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine, including protecting its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. The War Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of aggression by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its European neighbors.