China has recently been attempting to have the U.S. sign onto a Fourth Communique under which the U.S. would no longer consider Taiwan as an ally or deal with it in any military or diplomatic terms. In effect, the U.S. would peacefully decline and leave the Western Pacific to China. The White House rejected it prior to the meeting of the U.S. and Chinese presidents on April 6-7 at Mar-a-Lago. It was raised again by Henry Kissinger, now in the pay of the Chinese government, at his meeting with President Trump on May 10.
It has been said that President Xi wants the Fourth Communique to crown his consolidation of power at the national congress of Communist Party of China in autumn this year. But he is likely indifferent. If the U.S. could be talked into abandoning the Western Pacific and all its allies in Asia, that would be a bonus. It is more likely that he is making a casus belli for the war that he wants and thus head off intra-party criticism for military adventurism with its attendant horrors.
China expects to win a short, sharp, glorious war.
China, the U.S., Japan and Vietnam are all expecting war. China may have claimed all of the South China Sea but Vietnam still has 17 island bases there. These are a major long-term embarrassment to China. Vietnam will not give them up voluntarily so China will attempt to remove them by force – thus the current buildup of China’s amphibious warfare capability. China would also attack Vietnam along their land border to put maximum pressure on Hanoi.
Satellite imagery suggests preparations are being made to that end. For example at 22° 24’ N, 106° 42’ E, there are 12 large warehouses across the road from an army base that is six miles from the border with Vietnam. We can tell it’s an army base because it has a running track. China’s three major bases in the South China Sea and all have running tracks and 24 hardened shelters for fighter aircraft. The warehouses have red roofs when almost all the industrial buildings in the region have blue roofs, suggesting a central directive for their construction. The purpose of the warehouses would be to hide an armored force buildup prior to the invasion of Vietnam.
Along parts of the China-Vietnam border, there are areas with an abundance of roads leading up to the border and ending in pads suitable for artillery. These likely preparations give us an indication of what China’s war plans for Vietnam might include, just as the ten-pad, expeditionary helicopter base in the Nanji Islands at 27° 27’ N, 121° 4’ E provides China with an option to attack Japan in the Senkaku Islands.
China is now back to seeking hegemony of the Asia-Pacific region and so that voids the Second Communique. Fortunately President Trump’s advisers, recognizing the reality of the situation, have suggested that all three communiques be scrapped.
The question from here is the timing of China’s war. China’s bases in the Spratly Islands are now essentially complete. All they have to do from here is fly in the fighter aircraft. It is thought that China’s strategic petroleum reserve is near full after its stockpiling rate fell from the peak in March 2017 at 1.6 million barrels per day. Another sign that war is approaching and not receding is that the rate of Chinese incursions into Japanese territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands:
Russia said Friday it was verifying whether it had killed the leader of the Islamic State group in an airstrike targeting a meeting of IS leaders just outside the group's de facto capital in Syria, dealing a potentially severe blow to the extremist group as it fights to hang on to its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a Russian strike in late May along with other senior group commanders, adding that the information about his death was still "being verified through various channels."
There had been previous reports of al-Baghdadi being killed but they did not turn out to be true. The IS leader last released an audio on Nov. 3, urging his followers to keep up the fight for Mosul as they defend the Iraqi city against a major offensive that began weeks earlier.
If confirmed, al-Baghdadi's death would mark a major military success for Russia, which has conducted a military campaign in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad since September 2015.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett is reportedly set to propose legislation that would require a special two-thirds Knesset majority on any decision to divide Jerusalem under a future peace deal with the Palestinians.
Bennett, who leads the pro-settlement Jewish Home party, says he wants to amend the Basic Law on Jerusalem so that votes to divide the city will require the approval of 80 MKs to pass, as opposed to a regular majority, Israel Hayom reported on Friday.
The proposal will come up for approval in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, presided over by Bennett’s fellow party member Justice Ministry Ayelet Shaked, within two weeks, the report said.
A spokesman for the Jewish Home party was quoted as saying that the proposed legislation was intended to strengthen Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position vis-a-vis the new administration of US President Donald Trump.
“Jerusalem is the heart of the Jewish people,” Bennett told Israel Hayom. “I see the Trump era as an opportunity to strengthen Jerusalem so that it will never be possible to divide it again.”
Bennett said that he was concerned that a future temporary coalition may agree to divide the city, whose eastern neighborhoods, including the Old City, the Palestinians claim for their future capital.
“I am working to enact this law to prevent any situation in the future,” Bennett said, “where a fleeting consensus, such as the ones under [prime ministers] Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak, will lead to the division of Jerusalem.”
The left is simply perverse lunacy pampered and protected by cynical cadres who use it as a source of power, wealth, and prestige. This sick madness leads leftists to do profoundly stupid and evil things. This sick madness also leads the left to political suicide and revulsion by the majority of Americans.
Consider Shakespeare in the Park portraying the assassination of President Trump, and, more importantly, consider the gaggle of New York leftists applauding that theatrically produced murder. Consider the attempted assassination at a charity baseball game of the House majority whip, Steve Scalise, an early supporter within the Republican Party of Donald Trump, by James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders supporter, who asked before he began his attack on Scalise and other congressmen if the people on the field were Democrats or Republicans – and when told "Republican," he began his carnage.
What if one of the crazy leftists takes a shot at President Trump or tries again to kill important Republican congressional leaders? What if he seriously wounds the president? What if – God forbid! – some demented leftist actually kills our president?
The response of the vast majority of America would be strong, clear, and devastating. When Kennedy was assassinated, even though no Republican had called for harm to him, Democrats went from having an incumbent president likely to lose re-election to a party that won the 1964 election by a landslide. No one dared even criticize Kennedy for a generation.
When President Reagan was shot early in his first term, his approval ratings jumped through the roof, Congress gave him a long standing ovation when he addressed that body a few weeks later, and Reagan's domestic agenda sailed through a Congress in which few Democrats dared attack President Reagan as the left had been doing for a long, long time.
Americans would react in a similar manner if men like Majority Whip Scalise, who has the second highest conservative rating in conservative Louisiana, are killed. The unhinged violence and totalitarian fantasyland of the left would repel Americans not just politically, but in every other aspect of public and civil life.
Unlike Republicans after Kennedy's assassination, who had never called for harm to President Kennedy or produced plays depicting his murder, and unlike Republicans after Clinton's impeachment, who were using their peaceful, proper, and constitutional power against a president who had blatantly lied to the American people and to Congress and to federal courts, leftists, before any tragic crime is committed against conservative leaders, have slobbered and sputtered incoherent violence against the left's perceived enemies.
Leftists will have no place to hide, no excuse of any worth, no alibi of any sort if a conservative leader is killed for his beliefs and his political intentions. Americans – at least all the conservatives and moderates, who are the overwhelming majority – will see leftism as a mental disorder of the criminally insane and will demand that the left be denied power not only in government, but in those institutions of society which are leftism's secret source of power.
The left's very dangerous game, this awful game of physical intimidation and attempted murder of conservatives, is something all of us ought to hope leftists quit – for the sake of the nation and for the sake of their souls.
0 comments:
Post a Comment