China Snatches U.S. Navy Spy Apparatus; U.S. Demands Its Return

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.

Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations "Realist"?

"International relations" is an academic field, a subset of "political science," that deals with the relations of nation-states to each other and the system in which they operate. There are various schools of thought within international relations in U.S. academe. One is the "realist" school. Perhaps its leading public exponent today is University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer, a military veteran and self-described "conservative" who was a protege and admirer of Samuel "Mad Dog" Huntington, late of Harvard University. [1]

Two things Trump has been up to create an interesting parallel to a strategic policy advocated by Mearsheimer. They involve Russia, and China.

 Mearsheimer sees China as the only potential competitor and threat to the U.S., a rising power with a population over four times the size of the U.S.' and a rapidly growing economy. China has been flexing its muscles in the South China sea and aggressively claiming ownership over the area. Russia on the other hand is a declining power, in this view. Mearsheimer sees the natural outcome of the U.S.-China power rivalry as a containment strategy, especially if war is to be avoided. He sees the U.S. as the linchpin of a coalition including Russia, Japan, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others that will surround and contain China. We're already seeing friction between the U.S. and China in the region, and military feints and muscle-flexing by both nations.

President-to-be Donald Trump has been accused for months by the U.S. media, by Democratic operatives, and prior to the November 8th U.S. election by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, of being cozy with Russia and admiring of Russian president Vladimir Putin. This hectoring has continued post-election, by much of the U.S. media, and by Democratic Party poohbahs, accusing Trump of allegedly being "pro-Russia," "friendly" with Putin, even being a Putin stooge.

There is indeed evidence that Trump isn't interested in pursuing the anti-Russian policy of the Obama regime, a policy supported by the elitists of the so-called foreign policy establishment, a claque of unelected people who rotate between cushy seats in government, academia, and various foundations and institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, the latter functioning like a mother-in-law engaging in backseat driving to presidents and to the State Department.  These people keep accusing Trump of "praising" Putin, apparently because Trump called Putin a "strong leader." (These same carpers consistently brand Putin an "autocrat." So he's a weak autocrat? That's an oxymoron. Of COURSE Putin is "strong," if we accept the U.S. establishment's own insistence that he's an autocrat! That's just a fact. As a matter of logic- and admittedly logic isn't the U.S. blatherariat's strong suit- it's not necessarily a compliment. If I say "Hitler was a strong leader," I can assure you I don't intend it as praise. But let's posit that Trump admires Putin- I think he at least respects him.)

There's also much chatter about Trump's "business ties" to Russia. Evidence of Trump's "business ties" with Russia seem to amount to a lot of Big Talk about deals that never materialized. Trump does a lot of fishing until he finds a sucker to hook.

Stronger evidence of an impending "pro-Russia" tilt comes from Trump's announcement of his pick for Secretary of State: the boss of oil company giant ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson. (Rex by the way comes from Latin, and is defined in English as reigning king.) According to The New Yorker magazine website, Tillerson "has forged close ties with Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s state oil company." [2] Putin even awarded Tillerson a medal in 2013, the "Order of Friendship." ExxonMobil has a multibillion dollar deal with the Russian oil firm Rosneft to develop Russian oil fields. This relationship had the necessary blessing of Russian president (excuse me, "autocrat") Putin. (See my previous post for a partially-facetious photo essay on the Tillerson-Putin connection.) U.S. sanctions against Russia (punishment for Russian resistance to the U.S. takeover of Ukraine) have put the Rosneft deal in the deep freeze. ExxonMobil shareholders can look forward to the deal to be thawed out under the Trump regime.

We should expect that Tillerson will safeguard the interests of the company that is his sole adult employer and to which he owes his wealth, contrary to fatuous assertions in the U.S. media that OF COURSE Tillerson will put the U.S. "national interest" (whatever THAT is) first- and it's not just Trump partisans making that ridiculous claim. (I guess these people didn't notice how Hillary Clinton sold favors from her position as Secretary of State to donors to the Clinton Foundation, including a huge uranium mining deal. These propagandist shills will say anything, no matter how patently absurd, to shore up the perceived "legitimacy" of the corrupt U.S. power system.) Money talks, and billions of dollars is a very forceful voice.

Finally there's the ongoing campaign to blame Russia for Trump's victory with the evidence-free claim, now treated as fact, that Putin ordered computer hacking into Democratic computers and delivery of the resulting email caches to WikiLeaks to help Trump. Obama is now threatening retaliation. That needs to be the subject of another essay. Briefly, this ignores the fact that the archaic Electoral College allowed Trump to "win" with fewer votes than Clinton, and that the worst damage to Clinton occurred shortly before election day, when Republican FBI secret police chief James Comey revivified the Clinton private server "scandal" by announcing new evidence in the closed investigation in the form of more emails found on devices seized from disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the man the media never tires of publicly humiliating for texting pictures of his penis to various women. Comey caused Clinton's lead to plunge from 14% ahead nationally to even with Trump. So the Democrats are scapegoating Putin! Similarly, after the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) stole the 2000 election, with five GOP agents sitting on the Supreme Court delivering the coup de grace, the Democrats ever since have blamed Ralph Nader. In that election too, the Democrat, Albert Gore, won millions more votes than George W. Bush. (Clinton actually won the nation by 2.5 million votes. Some "democracy." Just imagine if it happened in Russia, what the U.S. media would be saying!)

If it can be anticipated that Trump will pursue a friendlier policy towards Russia, on the China side of the ledger, Trump added minuses, committing what the U.S. establishment considered a gross diplomatic faux pas, namely accepting a congratulatory phone call after his election "win" from the president of Taiwan. This irked the Chinese rulers, who issued a public growl. U.S. establishment elite types added their own disapproving tongue-clucks over Trump's annoying the Chinese tyrants by seeming to call into question the "one China" policy of the U.S. by accepting the phone call. The "one China" policy means the U.S. recognizes China's claim to Taiwan as a mere province of China, not an independent nation as most Taiwanese prefer.

Trump, a habitual counter-puncher, upped the ante, saying in effect So What? The U.S. "doesn't have to be bound" by the old policy. To this China responded with a veiled threat of war, saying if Trump failed to hew to the one China line, it could "threaten peace." [The current U.S. policy is a schizophrenic one of recognizing China's claim to Taiwan as a mere Chinese province, refusing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which it helped kick out of the UN to appease China, yet on the other hand maintaining a posture of preparing to use military force to protect Taiwan from China! If Taiwan is nothing but a Chinese province, like Florida is a U.S. state, by what right does the U.S. threaten to wage war to "defend" it from the country it is ostensibly a part of? For me, I favor self-determination, and loath repressive dictatorships, so I think Taiwan should be recognized as an independent nation. That is the human perspective on the matter.]

U.S. foreign policy and media elites wasted no time pounding on Trump to try and force him into line on the "established" -that is, preexisting- U.S. policy. An example popped up today even as I write, on the U.S. Government radio propaganda network NPR, on the program "Here and Now," (Dec 12). [NOTE: I ended up not finishing this essay until later.] The program's "security expert," an Imperialist named Jim Walsh, who heads the "Security Studies" program at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, broke it down for us. Walsh tsk-tsked that Trump wasn't getting the proper "security" briefings- i.e. being indoctrinated by people like Walsh. Opining disapprovingly on Trump announcing he's not bound by the "one China" policy," Walsh said, "it's been settled policy since Nixon;" a U.S. policy "for 30 years;" Taiwan is "a vital interest to China;" "normally it's a bad idea to threaten a nuclear weapons state;"  dropping the policy "could be a dangerous thing;" and "we should be trying to cooperate " with China on things like North Korea. Other NPR programs today similarly piled on Trump. [3] 

Jim The Security Expert would no doubt disagree, but almost all of that applies to how the U.S. has been treating RUSSIA over Ukraine. I say he would probably disagree because there is virtual unanimity in the U.S. establishment that Russia "caused" the Ukraine "crisis." But take each point: Ukraine is a vital strategic interest to Russia- it's on its border, and it has an absolutely vital naval base in the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine. Russia is a nuclear power. And the U.S. needs Russia's cooperation in Syria, among other places, and needed it to conclude a nuclear enrichment deal with Iran stopping Iran's program. But on one point there's a difference. The U.S. has  been consistent in its policy towards Russia. It has extended its policy of unremitting hostility to the U.S.S.R. to Russia. Too consistent, in fact. Sometimes Change Is Good. But the American bourgeoisie only think so when it's something BAD they're cramming down our throats, like job insecurity, "globalization," loss of company pensions, and soon the gutting of Social Security and Medicare, if they can. Or if there's some government they're peeved at and decide to overthrow. Suddenly "stability" doesn't matter and change is the thing.

Add it all up, and you get a friendly rather than hostile attitude towards Russia and a hardened stance against China, in line with the "realist" prescription of Mearsheimer.

Trump of course is too unschooled and ignorant to be consciously subscribing to the Mearsheimer strategy. He's probably never even heard of John J. Mearsheimer, or the Realist school of international relations theory. But his actions and attitudes have been accidentally dove-tailing with the strategy Mearsheimer advocates, at least so far. Ironically, Mearsheimer considered Trump unqualified to be president, but has deemed Obama "basically a realist" in the technical academic sense that Mearsheimer categorizes himself. This despite the fact that Obama has created hostile relations with Russia (by aggressively ripping Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence, violently overthrowing the democratically-elected government there using fascist mobs who set policemen on fire- you can view youtube.com videos of this- and sending in false flag snipers to shoot both police and protesters- and for good measure we had Victoria Nuland not just handing out cookies to "protesters" but publicly bragging about the billions spent by the U.S. to achieve its aim, namely subversion of an elected government, which the U.S. euphemizes as "democracy promotion," an Orwellian inversion of dictionary definitions of words- in a country that had a scheduled election coming up in months, where the president to be overthrown offered major concessions to the mob, which at U.S. direction it rejected) with Obama thus driving Russia into the arms of China. The entire Western establishment has dutifully followed along in this moronic and capricious strategy.

China and Russia already have had joint naval maneuvers and signed major economic deals as a result of the irrational policy towards Russia of the U.S., a policy driven by the hyper-aggressive imperialism of the U.S. The U.S. is a nation that won't be satisfied until it controls the entire planet, at which point it will move on to controlling other planets in the solar system. (Actually that's not even facetious. The U.S. military is already plotting to control the immediate space above the earth.)

Of course the U.S. will never achieve true world domination. It cannot dominate China, for one. For another, the world is too fractious to effectively rule, as the quasi-anarchic situation in the Middle East as well as in Somalia, Mali, and other places, demonstrates.)

The truth is, as boorish, ignorant, and improvisational as he is, Trump may accidentally end up following a far wiser foreign policy towards China and Russia than the "experts" have been prescribing! Who'd a thunk it! [4]

1]  "Mad Dog" isn't my sobriquet for Huntington. It was bestowed by his fellow imperialists during the Vietnam War, during which he offered his expertise in helping destroy Vietnam.

2] "Rex Tillerson, from a Corporate Oil Sovereign to the State Department," The New Yorker, December 11, 2016.

3] Another example from NPR,; John Hockenberry brought on to his radio show "The Takeaway"  a creep from the infamous secret police corporation Stratfor, an outfit run by veteran secret policemen that works to attack and delegitimize American dissidents, often using illegal means. The Stratfor ghoul pushed the line of the day, that Russian "hacking" of the U.S. election helped Trump win, which supposedly demonstrates a Trump-Putin Axis. (In the extreme version, Trump is a Putin puppet.) Trump of course actually lost- by which I mean he got fewer votes than Clinton. But the U.S. isn't a normal nation. Here, the loser "wins" if he gets more "Electoral College" votes, a bizarre creation of the slavery-favoring U.S. Constitution. Trump will actually be "elected" in December, when the 500-plus "Electors" meet in their respective state capitals and the District of Columbia to rubber-stamp the preordained outcome with their own "votes."

4]  That's not to endorse Trump. His other appointments have been truly monstrous. A racist for Attorney General, rabid generals for key posts wielding repressive powers, a pro-pollution climate science denying fanatic to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a man at Interior to allow a free-for-all looting of Federal lands in the west and mountain states, and the dunderheaded and corrupt former Texas Governor Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy, a Department Perry vowed to abolish when he ran for president in 2012. And Trump's bankruptcy lawyer, a fanatical Zionist who wants Israel to annex the entire West Bank, as Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. Friedman compares progressive American Jews to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis. Oy vey!

Trump wanted to out-Zionist Hillary Clinton during the campaign, promising to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The Palestinians can expect more suffering, and more death and destruction to be periodically rained down on them. Which is the say, the same they would have gotten with another President Clinton.