General

Guangdong is reopening after fully containing the latest COVID-19 outbreaks without losing one single life. Global TImes reports today that the virus has been brought under control, with no cases being reported the last ten days as of Friday.

Since May 21,  three separate outbreaks in Guangzhou, nearby Shenzhen and Dongguan. All were caused by imported virus variants, including the Delta strain. After isolating the three areas and conducting extensive testing and treatment, followed by a further 60 million nucleic acid tests on high risk groups in mid June, no positive results were found, according to the Guangdong provincial government.

Before today, residents in the three regions were required to provide negative nucleic acid test results from within the last 48 hours before they could leave the regions. Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, has reopened with some restrictions on closed public places, including cinemas, theaters and indoor stadiums, to reopen with a 75 percent capacity limit.

An expert team under China’s joint prevention and control mechanism have also withdrawn from Guangdong on Friday Global Times reports. Again, China has set the example to the world of competent public health measures to protect its population.

It took just two days for El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to deliver his public response to the imperious orders he had been delivered by Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, notorious neo-Nazi supporter Victoria Nuland. Nuland threatened that all Salvadorans identified as “corrupt” and “anti-democratic” on the State Department’s “Engel’s List,” must be investigated and prosecuted—or else. The list of those names, released as Nuland was meeting with Bukele in San Salvador, was egregiously weighted towards allies of the Bukele government, including naming four top officials in his government. Note that Nuland’s other theme was to lecture Bukele against accepting “malign influences” from the Peoples’ Republic of China.

“Thanks for the list, but in El Salvador we have our own,” Bukele tweeted yesterday.

And then: the Prosecutor General, with the authorization of the relevant court, ordered National Civilian Police units to search and seize the headquarters of the ARENA party, the rightwing party founded by death squad commander Roberto d’Aubisson, the man accused of planning the assassination at the altar of the now-sainted Bishop Oscar Romero during a mass in the national cathedral in 1980. The grounds for the action was the long-known but never prosecuted “Taiwan Case,” in which the ARENA government in 2003 channeled at least $10 million donated by Taiwan in the name of helping victims of an earthquake into the party’s 2004 presidential election campaign and the pockets of several top party leaders. The “Taiwan case” was so egregious that some ARENA party officials admitted to it after it became public in 2013-2014. (El Salvador’s diplomatic ties with Taiwan were only cut the year before Bukele took office in 2019.)

Bukele’s government recovered $3.9 million in assets from ARENA: two buildings, 17 vehicles and $2.9 million in public electoral funds the ARENA party had received in February this year for the legislative elections. Bukele reports that the money will be used to remodel 15 schools, and one of the seized buildings will be converted into a gym.

As for the life-size bronze statue of Roberto d’Aubuisson found inside ARENA’s headquarters: Bukele proposed to melt it down, and use the metal to make sewer manhole covers. “Sublime…” he tweeted!

Megan Dobrodt, President, Schiller Institute (U.S.A.): “Why the Universe Needs More People”

Presented at the June 26-27 Schiller Institute conference.

In his annual conversation with the Russian people, Russian President Putin emphasized that the world is changing, and one of the most important changes is that no nation, or group of nations, can dictate policy, under the umbrella of enforcement of a self-interested “Rules-Based Order.” He reiterated that Russia is open for dialogue, for cooperation, but its sovereignty cannot be challenged. He stated that he hopes Russia’s partners in the west understand this, and will cease the provocations and sanctions, for the sake of peaceful and mutually beneficial cooperation.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the keynote speaker at a Monday event titled the Lanting Forum on Promoting Dialogue and Cooperation and Managing Differences, focused on the restoration of civil and productive relations between China and the US. Wang Yi pointed to the following extensive list of divisive, and in many cases illegal, policies implemented by Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

Wang urged the new Biden Administration to:

Stop smearing the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese political system;

Stop supporting separatists in Taiwan;

Stop interfering in China’s sovereign affairs in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

End the unreasonable tariffs;

Lift the sanctions;

Abandon the irrational suppression of Chinese tech companies;

Lift the restrictions on educational, cultural and media institutions;

Support research exchange. 

Seeing the list in one place provides a shocking sense of the madness and criminality of the Pompeo belief that the US could abandon international law and decency to act as a global dictator. 

The Global Times coverage of the event noted that President Biden had stated in his speech to the G7 and the Munich Security Forum last week, “We cannot and must not return to the reflexive opposition and rigid blocs of the Cold War.” They also took note that Biden has already taken several steps to reverse some of the Trump-Pompeo anti-China policies (although reports on these steps were largely blacked out of the US press): He paused the ban on Wechat and Tik Tok, the Chinese apps; he withdrew the order for universities to disclose financial arrangements with the Confucius Institutes; and he sponsored a dialogue between the leading epidemiologists of the two nations, Dr. Fauchi and Dr. Zhong Nanshan, who have spoken by phone about cooperation in the fight against COVID-19, and will meet at an international conference on March 2.

Lyle Goldstein had never been afraid to “sail against the current” with regard to his vision of a sane U.S. defense policy, and it is hoped that his view is also shared by a number of U.S. defense intellectuals, who have some awareness of how the world is changing. In his latest article, entitled “The Indo-Pacific Strategy is a Recipe for Disaster,” Goldstein scores the malarkey dreamed up by U.S. policy planners based on the notion that the U.S. has now entered a period of intense rivalry with China and with Russia.

Goldstein goes back to a 1992 strategy document that asserted that the goal of U.S. policy was “to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge” and to maintain the continuity of “the unipolar moment.” He also notes that the DoD declassified, long before it was normal, the U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Paciific, which built on the same basic notion. “The authors of the Trump administration’s framework were evidently so pleased with the work that they thought it necessary to declassify it before leaving office and share it with the public, even though the general custom is to wait 30 years before declassification,” Goldstein writes. “But surely they also intended that the document might constrain and direct the Biden administration’s approach to U.S. strategy heads.”

“The strategy represents a fusion of neoconservative and neoliberal thinking and may satisfy large segments of the foreign policy elite, orchestrating the design for a new cold war—this time focusing on China,” Goldstein writes. And what are the problems that this strategy represents? While harping a lot on the “alliance of democracies”, the strategy is meant to include countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore, all of which fall into that category only with great effort. Even with South Korea and Japan, traditional U.S. allies, he argues, it will be difficult for them to follow in the wake of a U.S. man-of-war heading for China.

More serious, he notes, is the situation with changing the policy toward Taiwan. “The island has befuddled American strategists for decades and their clever solution has been ‘strategic ambiguity,’ balancing a general acceptance of China’s claim with a subtle hint of deterrence in the hope that the complex issue could be settled peacefully. The newly declassified strategy overtly codifies the deterrence aspect without even the slightest nod to Chinese claims—something acknowledged by American presidents going back to Franklin Roosevelt. The attempt to shift the policy during the Trump Administration put the U.S. on a clear collision course with China.

“Some Americans seem to welcome that possibility, but they are not well informed about the military balance and likely scenarios. The truth is that the United States could very well lose such a war, a fact admitted in early 2021 by a senior Air Force official, and there is no telling whether nuclear weapons would be used or not.”

And then there is India. Goldstein notes that India’s military potential is not what it is cracked up  to be and that any attempt to promote trouble on the India-China border could lead to a disaster for India similar to that in 1962. And promoting an Indian presence in the South China Sea, he notes, has already led to a major Chinese naval build-up. He also notes the folly for India in pushing a major military build-up with so much of its domestic needs crying for attention.

“In the end,” Goldstein writes, “the Indo-Pacific framework proved long on rhetoric and ideology, but failed to grapple seriously with the underlying changes in the regional balance of power that must occasion a new U.S. strategy based on realism and restraint. The Biden administration should not overlook the former strategy’s foundational weaknesses. The new team would be wise to junk the old strategy and start fresh.”

Good advice from a defense scholar with great experience. Goldstein set up the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. But his article was published in a lesser known internet site, the “lawfareblog.” It is hoped that it will be transmitted further. For although Lyle Goldstein may be a lone voice, in a cacophony of disparate—and mostly outlandish—voices, it does remain the voice of reason, and therefore deserves to be heard.

Read the full article: https://www.lawfareblog.com/indo-pacific-strategy-recipe-disaster