Thursday, April 10, 2014

Obama to Asia to confront China

24 International EIR April 11, 2014
April 7—The Obama Administration last week took a
big step toward implementing the British plan for war
on China, complementing the growing British/U.S. political
and military confrontation against Russia. The
driving force for war is the onrushing financial collapse
of the Western banking system. Obama’s planned trip
to Asia, to begin April 24, is clearly intended to forge a
“coalition of the willing” in Asia, ready to confront
China with war if Beijing does not capitulate to “regime
change” policies along its borders, and the economic
looting so familiar to the developing nations, and now,
to western Europe and the U.S. itself.
Open Threats
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia
Daniel Russel, on April 3, just days before Secretary of
Defense Chuck Hagel was scheduled to visit Japan and
China, threatened sanctions and military action against
China in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing,
comparing China’s intentions with Russian President
Putin’s supposed aggressive intentions in Europe.
Russel claimed that China is “increasingly threatening
force or other forms of coercion to advance their territorial
interests,” and warned China: “The prospect of the
kind of incremental retaliatory steps that are gradually
being imposed on Russia in terms of its banks, in terms
of cronies and other areas, should have a chilling effect
on anyone in China who might contemplate the Crimea
annexation as a model.”
Russel referred to China’s territorial disputes with
Japan and the Philippines, claiming that Beijing had
taken “what to us appear to be intimidating steps.” He
praised the Philippines for filing a case with the Arbitration
Board under the UN Convention on the Law of the
Sea (UNCLOS), despite the fact that the rules of
UNCLOS require both sides to agree to arbitration—
which China adamantly refuses to do, insisting on bilateral
negotiations, which the Philippines rejects, under
Obama’s direction.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei,
when asked about Russel’s comments at his daily briefing,
said: “No matter whether the Ukraine issue or the
South China Sea issue, China has many times expressed
its position. Why must this U.S. official mention the
two issues in the same breath, and obstinately say these
things about China?”
At the same time, Financial Times associate editor
Philip Stephens, wrote on April 3 that “Beyond economic
strength and military prowess, one of the precious
ingredients in great power relations is credibility.
Allies and adversaries should know that you mean
what you say. Nowhere is this truer than in east Asia.
Barack Obama might bear that thought in mind when
he carries the American flag around the region later
this month.”
Empire spokesman Stephens makes clear that he
means to urge Obama to threaten military action: “Russia’s
march into Crimea has raised questions as to where
the west would draw the line. Would NATO go to war
over the Baltic states? Much the same is asked in east
Asia: would Mr Obama fight China over a bunch of
rocks in the East China Sea? The more credibly the US
and its allies can answer yes to both questions, the less
likely their resolve will be tested.”
These fulminations echo the war cry issued two
weeks ago by another Commonwealth spokesman for
war, Australia’s Hugh White, an Oxford-trained former
Deputy Secretary of Defence, who wrote in the New
York Times March 19 that China must give up even the
threat of force, or face direct miltary action by the dumb
giant—the United States. White called on Obama to
forge a new security arrangement in the Pacific, “including
the all-important norm against the use or threat
of force to settle disputes. . . . America should be willing
to fight China to protect that norm. . . . If China persists
in threatening the use of force, then America should be
willing to fight, and must say so clearly.”
Note that China has always reserved the right to use
On Eve of Asia Trip: Obama Threatens
China with ‘Russia Treatment’
by Mike Billington
April 11, 2014 EIR International 25
force to protect its territory, especially in the case of a
separatist movement in Taiwan, such as that which is
taking place right now, with a Western NGO-backed
occupation of the legislative and executive office buildings,
demanding a break with China. While the executive
building was cleared of demonstrators by force, the
legislative offices have remained occupied, for a total
of three weeks as of this writing.
Hagel Follows Up
Secretary Hagel’s first stop on his April 4-7 Asian
tour was Japan, where he did nothing (at least not in
public) to counter the threats from Russel. Hagel encouraged
the militant anti-China posturing of Japan’s
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over disputed rocks in the
Sea of Japan, and repeated the provocative comparison
to the Crimea situation, by assuring Japan of
America’s “commitment to its security, as Russia’s annexation
of Crimea raises eyebrows in a region facing
its own territorial disputes with an increasingly assertive
China.”
Hagel defended the U.S. strategy to punish Russia,
telling reporters (apparently suffering from amnesia regarding
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, among
others), ahead of two days of talks with Japanese leaders
that, “You cannot go around the world and redefine
boundaries and violate territorial
integrity and the sovereignty
of nations by force, coercion
or intimidation, whether
it’s in small islands in the Pacific
or in large nations in
Europe.”
Hagel also announced the
deployment of two more Aegisequipped
destroyers to Japan by
2017, adding to the five already
there, thus further encircling
China with ABM systems
which facilitate a first strike
under Obama’s Air-Sea Battle
doctrine.
Hagel held private talks in
Japan before going on to China
and Mongolia. It is hoped that
his close relations with Chairman
of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey
and other competent military
commanders led him to conduct a more reasonable dialogue
in those private talks, than his public statements,
which echoed the insanity of his boss in the White
House.
These private discussions are of extreme importance
in regard to his visit to China, where Hagel arrived
on April 7. While the Chinese publicly criticized
Russel’s statement, they have been far more reserved in
regard to Hagel, emphasizing instead the importance of
good military-to-military relations, within the context
of President Xi Jinping’s policy of forging a “new type
of major power relationship” betweeen China and the
U.S., based on mutual cooperation in all areas of development
and security.
Hagel began his China visit in Qingdao to attend the
Western Pacific Naval Symposium, a biannual meeting
of the countries that border the Pacific Ocean, and the
first hosted by China. He was invited on his first day in
China to tour a Chinese aircraft carrier—the first foreign
defense official to do so.
Nerobama to Asia
President Obama’s Asia trip will begin in Japan
April 24, to be followed by South Korea, the Philippines,
and Malaysia. The military alliance among the
U.S., Japan, and Australia is perceived as the bedrock
DoD/Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo
On his visit to Asia in early April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel publicly toed the line on
Obama’s confrontation with China policy. Yet, it is hoped that his close relations with JCS
chief Martin Dempsey will lead to more reasonable dialogue in private talks. Shown: Hagel
in Qingdau, China, April 7, with Chinese military officers.
26 International EIR April 11, 2014
of the containment and confrontation of China, both to
Obama and his neoconservative allies in the Republican
Party, and Obama is intent on drawing South Korea
into such a suicide mission. At the Nuclear Security
Summit in the Hague at the end of March, Obama corraled
South Korean President Park Geun-hye into a
meeting with himself and Japan’s Abe—a meeting that
did not go far in easing Korea’s concerns about Japan’s
growing militarism under Abe, nor did it diminish
Seoul’s rejection of Obama’s confrontation with China.
It is highly unlikely that Obama’s visit to Seoul will
be any more successful. The Park government recognizes
that the only hope for a lasting solution to the division
of the Korean Peninsula rests in joint development
between the North and the South, and that it is precisely
Russia and China that are committed to that approach,
unlike the belligerent demands for sanctions and confrontation
by Washington.
In the Philippines, Obama hopes to sign a new military
basing agreement, allowing unrestricted U.S.
military deployment of war ships, planes, weapons
stockpiles, and troops across the Philippines. Despite
the intense desire of Obama’s clone-President in
Manila, Noynoy Aquino, to turn his nation into a U.S.
military base for a war on China, it is still, at this point,
unlikely that the agreement can be signed during
Obama’s visit. The ploy by Aquino and Obama to
avoid the Philippine Constitution’s explicit outlawing
of foreign military bases on Philippine soil, is to pretend
that the U.S. bases are not U.S. bases at all, but
only “visiting forces” being “rotated” in and out of
Philippine military bases on a temporary basis (with no
time limit at all on their duration).
However, while Aquino is facing accusations at
home of bribing the Congress to falsely impeach the
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in order to get his
way in his criminal submission to the British/Obama
war plan, EIR sources in the Philippines report that one
of Obama’s demands may scuttle the whole deal—that
Filipinos must be excluded from the U.S. bases, even
though they are supposedly not really U.S. bases! (This
reminds Asians of the British sign outside the foreign
concession in Shanghai in the 19th Century: “No dogs
or Chinamen allowed.”)
One concern among the patriotic Filipinos is that the
U.S. would use such a restraint to bring in nuclear
weapons, which is also against the Philippine Constitution.
Wooing Malaysia
As to Obama’s Malaysia visit—the first by a U.S.
President since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1966—it is of note
that Malaysia has been a staunch friend of China. But
with the MH 370 airliner fiasco being blamed on the
government in Kuala Lumpur, and China furious about
Prime Minister Najib accepting the spurious report by
the British that “proved” that the plane went down in
the Indian Ocean, with no evidence, Obama’s controllers
are hoping they can win the country over to his anti-
China campaign.
Malaysia has also refused to buckle under to
Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ploy, a freetrade
pact aimed at forcing nations to sacrifice sovereign
control over their economies, while also economically
isolating China. Thus far, Malaysia’s refusal to do
either helped to undermine Obama’s effort to rush the
TPP into being by the end of last year—and the whole
deal may now be moot. This is very much in the tradition
of Malaysia’s patriotic leader Dr. Mahathir Mohammad,
who ruled from 1981 to 2003, and who forged
the nation as an independent defender of economic and
strategic sovereignty. That tradition, although weakened
under subsequent governments, is still a point of
pride in the nation, which Obama will find difficult to
overcome.
Overall, Obama’s trip represents an extreme danger
of escalating the British Empire’s encirclement of
Russia and China with military forces and strategic destabilizations.
The continuing crises in Thailand and
Taiwan are directly aimed at disrupting the peaceful collaboration
of the Asian nations, as is the western support
for the Uighur separatist movement, despite the expanding
Uighur terrorist attacks across China, sponsored by
the Saudi-British Wahhabi terrorist operations.
But the trip may instead be a further blow to the
failed British puppet Obama, who is now facing the
prospect of impeachment within the U.S. for his multiple
crimes against the population and against the
Constitution. If the Asian nations reject the imperial
divide-and-conquer policies of London and Washington,
and proceed with the scientific development of
Eurasia as their mission, then the potential for the U.S.
population to do its duty and remove this tyrant from
office, and restore the American System, will be much
enhanced.
mobeir@aol.com

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