An underwater, unmanned "drone" operated by the U.S. Navy was seized
by the Chinese Navy. China claims it was in Chinese waters, the U.S.
claims it was in international waters. [It was in the South China Sea,
which China now claims as a virtual Chinese lake. Hence the
disagreement.] The U.S. has demanded that China give its drone back, and
China said okay, it'll give it back- (when it's good and ready, no
doubt). (A curve ball was thrown into the play by president-to-be Donald
Trump, who said China should keep the drone. Don't ask me why. I
suppose he just always has to grab the spotlight, and that often
requires saying something outlandish, in order to stand out. He
is a narcissist, an exhibitionist, and an egomaniac, remember. In fact, I'm sure he won't
let you forget that for the coming four years, at least.)
The
U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, absurdly
claimed that this spy device was engaged in "scientific" research- as if
the U.S. Navy is a scientific research organization.
The
Pentagon propaganda office issued a statement under the name of its
chief mouthpiece Peter Cook asserting that the underwater spy vehicle
was gathering "
military oceanographic data...." [My
emphasis.] I guess the propagandists at the Pentagon and at NPR didn't
get their stories straight. But NPR regards it as one of its missions to
always protect the U.S. government, so that could account for the misrepresentation of the drone's mission.
[1]
China
will doubtless disassemble and study and copy their booty. They did
this sort of thing before, when a U.S. spy plane was forced to land on
Chinese territory after a Chinese fighter jet clipped and damaged it in
flight. (The hot-dogging Chinese pilot was killed in his reckless act,
which infuriated the Chinese towards the U.S. But since the U.S. bombed
the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, after the CIA gave its location to
NATO, supposedly in ignorance that it was the Chinese embassy, the
Chinese are I think predisposed to blame the U.S. for their losses in
confrontations with the U.S. By the way, that embassy bombing is NEVER
mentioned in the U.S. Amnesia handicaps ones ability to deal
realistically with the world and its other inhabitants.)
This
incident is another small step in China's nibbling away at the edge of
U.S. power in the Pacific. A much bigger milestone is Philippines death
squad president Rodrigo Duterte telling the U.S. to kiss-off, and openly
embracing China. The Obama regime has responded like a deer in the
headlights, seemingly frozen. When Duterte called Obama a "son of a
whore" and publicly cursed him, the U.S. barely reacted to this
effrontery. Then the Philippines won a court case against China for
China appropriating islands in the South China Sea. The U.S. reacted to
that by talking like a mediator, instead of clearly siding with the
winner, the Philippines. This signaled weakness. Obviously the U.S.
wishes to avoid confrontation with China- but that means the U.S. must
retreat in the face of growing Chinese power and "assertiveness."
The Philippines then abandoned its claim and started cozying up to China, under Duterte.
Duterte
brags of personally murdering "criminals." No doubt the mild verbal
remonstrances the U.S. has to make over his "human rights record," in
order to maintain its image as the beacon of freedom and democracy and
human rights, irked Duterte, even though the criticisms were strictly
pro forma. Duterte is a crude thug, unsophisticated to play the game
with winks and nods and understand that some things are just political
theater, not to be taken seriously. (The U.S. "objecting" to relentless
Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a
long-running, very tired political play.) A murderous goon like Duterte
is temperamentally more comfortable with the tyrants of Beijing than
with the two-stepping hypocrites of Washington.
A bit of
background: The Philippines was a U.S. colony until after World War II,
when it became a neocolony and client dictatorship. It was a Spanish
colony until the U.S. seized it as war booty during the Spanish-American
war of 1898, when the U.S. also gained control of Guam, Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and carved Panama out of Colombia for its own uses. The Filipinos
had the crazy idea that they should be independent, so several hundred
thousand of them had to be killed to convince them to stop resisting
U.S. conquest. President Theodore Roosevelt, an iconic figure in U.S.
pseudo-history (quasi-mythology) sent hearty congratulations to the U.S.
military commander of the invasion and occupation force for his fine
work in suppressing Filipino resistance.
During World War II,
the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Their brutality alienated the
Filipinos, just as Japanese barbarism alienated the other victims in
their "Co-Prosperity Sphere," such as the Koreans and Chinese. In this,
they made exactly the same strategic blunder as the Nazis. Their
ideology of racial "superiority," hyper-militarism and fascism proved
too much for the colonized to bear, unlike other imperialisms which are
tolerated by the conquered for longer time-spans.
Two giant
U.S. military bases, the Subic Bay naval base and Clark airfield, were
long occupied by the U.S. Some years after U.S.-backed dictator Marcos
was overthrown, the U.S. was asked to vacate those bases. The U.S. has
been angling to get those or other bases in the Philippines back ever
since.
For a number of years now, U.S. "special forces" have
been semi-covertly helping the Filipino military hunt and kill
Islamofascist rebels in the Philippines. Duterte now says he wants the
U.S. military out, and the U.S. can keep its money too.
EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT! DUTERTE DUMPS DIRT ON U.S.!
Instead
of the U.S. successfully constructing a coalition of nations to contain
China, things seem to be going the other way, first with the U.S.
gratuitously picking a fight with Russia over the Ukraine, which the
U.S. gleefully destabilized, and driving Russia into China's arms
(witness a recent multi-billion dollar economic deal and joint naval
maneuvers between Russia and China), friendlier ties between India and
China, and now the Philippines rushing to embrace China and spurning its
long-time dominant political spouse the U.S.
The U.S. is so
powerful that it has gotten away with some major blunders (the Indochina
War, siding with jihadists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the
2003 invasion of Iraq, and fecklessly allowing Pakistan to become a
nuclear weapons power, for example), but with China's rise, the stakes
may be higher than ever. In the two World Wars, other nations did the
heavy fighting and dying, and the U.S. picked up the chips at the end of
the games. But all-out war with nuclear-armed China is out of the
question, as obviously a land invasion is!
China is ruled by a
patient one-party dictatorship that has less pressure from domestic
public opinion when it comes to how it conducts foreign affairs than in
the U.S. case. It also has a much more unified ruling class, whereas in
the U.S. the Republican Party seems determined to destroy the Democratic
Party and monopolize political power. No matter what a Democratic
president does, even if it is identical with Republican policies, he is
attacked by the Republicans. That won't be a problem for the next four
to eight years, with a Republican president and Congress, and the
Democrats inclined to bark but never bite. But U.S. politicians are
still remarkably short-sighted, and this is reflected in its conduct of
foreign affairs. Part of this is due to their need to get reelected
(every two years in the case of House Representatives). Part is due to
Americans' temperamental impatience. And part is a disinterest in
history, which to Americans is like intellectual broccoli, something
off-putting.
But ironically, it may be the mercurial, notoriously short-attention-spanned Donald Trump who makes some changes.
[2]1]
Here is the Pentagon's statement. The title links to
globalsecurity.org, which reproduced the Pentagon statement. If you want
to have the Pentagon record you computer ID so they can track you, put
you in the NSA database, and maybe plant spyware/malware on your
computer, I have also provided the Pentagon's URL for the statement,
from global security, below the statement. Note that the type of data
the Pentagon admits the drone was collecting is pertinent to anti-sub
warfare, especially
"sound speed." To destroy subs, one has to track them by listening for them. Sound travels through water at different speeds depending on
salinity and
temperature, for example. So this drone is
not so innocent, to quote a song.
"
Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Incident in South China Sea, Release No. NR-448-16," December 16, 2016.
Using
appropriate government-to-government channels, the Department of
Defense has called upon China to immediately return an unmanned
underwater vehicle (UUV) that China unlawfully seized on Dec. 15 in the
South China Sea while it was being recovered by a U.S. Navy
oceanographic survey ship. The USNS Bowditch (T-AGS 62) and the UUV --
an unclassified "ocean glider" system used around the world to gather
military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature, and sound speed - were conducting routine [sic!]operations
in accordance with international law about 50 nautical miles northwest
of Subic Bay, Philippines, when a Chinese Navy PRC DALANG III-Class ship
(ASR-510) launched a small boat and retrieved the UUV. Bowditch made
contact with the PRC Navy ship via bridge-to-bridge radio to request the
return of the UUV. The radio contact was acknowledged by the PRC Navy
ship, but the request was ignored. The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel
of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately,
and to comply with all of its obligations under international law.
http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1032611/
2] See "
Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations 'Realist'?," December 16, 2016.
