WAR 04-09-2016-to-04-15-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?489446-The-United-States-Has-No-Gulf-Allies

For links see article source.....
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http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-united-states-has-no-gulf-allies

April 13, 2016

The United States Has No Gulf Allies

By Bilal Y. Saab

The word “ally” is used far too casually in Washington’s Middle East lexicon. It’s time to break this bad habit, because the truth is that with the exception of Turkey—a NATO member—the United States does not share a single alliance with any Middle Eastern country. As the US-GCC summit in Riyadh approaches, understanding what really constitutes an alliance couldn’t be more important.

All this is not to say that the United States shouldn’t have alliances in the region. But the objective reality is that it doesn’t. That Washington so frequently mischaracterizes its bonds with Middle Eastern capitals does great disservice to them, to their own expectations from the United States, and to US policies toward the region. It also unnecessarily aggravates nations with which the United States has real alliances.

In US public policy debates, the words “partnership” and “alliance” are used interchangeably. But the difference between the two is real. If two or more countries are allies and thus share a mutual defense treaty, it means that one is legally committed to the security of the other and vice versa. In short, it would contribute to the defense of the other if the other were attacked. Such a treaty generally comes with permanent standing headquarters, diplomatic missions, and a range of supporting infrastructure and processes. And in the United States, a mutual defense pact requires Senate ratification and consent. The most prominent example of an alliance is NATO.

If two or more countries share a security partnership, they are not typically obligated to defend one another if either comes under attack. In most, if not all, cases, partners do not sign mutual defense pacts, although they do engage in various forms of security cooperation. Such relationships do not come with massive infrastructure. The most prominent examples here are the United States’ security partnerships with the Gulf Cooperation Council States.

Despite the clear distinction, for decades, US presidents and their top political and military advisors have incorrectly referred to a slew of Middle Eastern nations with which the United States has close ties as allies. On August 5, 2015, for example, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech at American University in which he said, “Iran’s defense budget is eight times smaller than the combined budget of our Gulf allies.” His Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, also specifically called Arab Gulf nations allies on three recent, separate occasions: in January of this year in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos; on November 6, 2015, in an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic; and then en route to Tel Aviv on July 19, 2015 (in fact, four times during that same speech). Secretary of State John Kerry made the same mistake on January 24, 2016, at the US Embassy in Riyadh, saying, “We have as…clear an alliance…with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as we ever had.”

Past administrations have not fared any better. Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and their national security officials have erred too, on multiple occasions. And on Capitol Hill, members of Congress constantly refer to various Middle Eastern states as allies, with Israel taking the lion’s share. The American media has been guilty, too, with some of the most respected newspapers including the Washington Post and the New York Times repeatedly committing factual inaccuracies when it comes to our relations with countries in the region. As to commentaries by prominent foreign policy specialists, it’s virtually impossible to count how many times the word “ally” has been used in a Middle Eastern context (and I’ve done it, too). So, it’s across the board.

There are at least two reasons for the mistake. First, sloppiness. There’s probably nothing malicious about it. Historical and factual imprecisions, whether in speech or in writing, are nothing new. And since no one usually points out the mistake, people will probably keep making it. Second, Washington sometimes goes out of its way to reassure countries we care about and that question our commitment by calling them allies, even when it’s dangerous and technically and morally wrong to do so.

Given these two reasons and possibly others, one could make the case that the distinction between partnership and alliance is irrelevant in world politics and overly legalistic. After all, if Israel, Jordan, Egypt, or any Arab Gulf country came under attack by Iran, the United States would not need a piece of paper to intervene militarily in defense of its friends. And in many cases, it would indeed take action. The 1990-91 Gulf War was a case in point. Kuwait did not have a mutual defense treaty with the United States. Yet when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded, Washington—along with an international coalition that it had built—stepped in forcefully and decisively.

But a defense pact—the most critical element of an inter-state alliance—is hardly an insignificant or superfluous piece of paper. It is a very serious, visible, impactful, and formal mechanism through which the United States prioritizes its relations with other nations. It represents an absolutely clear and remarkably strong message of unity to adversaries, and it provides the most robust type of security reassurance to allies. There is a reason, after all, why Russia is a little extra careful not to mess with a NATO member, yet is so confident with coercing non-NATO European countries such as Ukraine, Georgia, Sweden, and Finland.

The Kuwait experience is unlikely to repeat itself. Today’s threats are no longer tank formations crossing borders and mad dictators bent on territorial conquest. Present and future battles will be fought in the shadows and in the realm of ideas, especially in the Middle East. Furthermore, the United States has military superiority in the region that will continue to help deter conventional war in that part of the world. But a post-sanctions Iran could act in bolder and more irresponsible ways that could lead to conflict. Should a confrontation between Iran and any US Middle Eastern partner occur, the United States would probably intervene, just like it did against Saddam. But it also might not, simply because it is not legally obligated to do so given the absence of a mutually binding defense treaty.

Of course, defense treaties are not blank checks that can be cashed under any circumstance (for example, the United States refused to aid Taiwan in Jinmen and Mazu in 1955, and did not come to the rescue of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954). The United States will and should always consider its own interests first. But violation could come with serious political costs at home and with reputational risks abroad. If the United States were to renege on its security commitment to any NATO ally, small or big, it would seriously jeopardize the unity and well-being of the alliance. The same goes for other US allies in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere.

At the upcoming US-GCC summit in Riyadh, Obama could do future American presidents, Gulf leaders, and the US-Gulf partnership a big favor by making a clean break with the past and refraining from making statements, public or private, that refer to any Gulf country as an ally. This description perpetuates a false reality of nations tied together by mutual defense treaties. Obama and his Gulf counterparts should discuss ways and timelines for upgrading their security ties. But they should recognize that, until a defense pact is signed, they aren’t allies. They are partners.

Bilal Y. Saab is a Senior Fellow for Middle East Security, Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, Atlantic Council.

(This article was first published in Foreign Affairs)

 

[Housecarl]

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...he-Secret-U.S.-Army-Study-That-Targets-Moscow

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/moscow-pentagon-us-secret-study-213811

Washington And The World

The Secret U.S. Army Study That Targets Moscow

A quarter century after the Cold War, the Pentagon is worried about Russia’s military prowess again.

By Bryan Bender
April 14, 2016
Comments 17

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster has a shaved head and gung-ho manner that only add to his reputation as the U.S. Army’s leading warrior-intellectual, one who often quotes famed Prussian general and military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz. A decade ago, McMaster fought a pitched battle inside the Pentagon for a new concept of warfare to address the threat from Islamist terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, Iraq and other trouble spots. Now, his new mission is more focused. Target: Moscow.

POLITICO has learned that, following the stunning success of Russia’s quasi-secret incursion into Ukraine, McMaster is quietly overseeing a high-level government panel intended to figure out how the Army should adapt to this Russian wake-up call. Partly, it is a tacit admission of failure on the part of the Army — and the U.S. government more broadly.

“It is clear that while our Army was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia studied U.S. capabilities and vulnerabilities and embarked on an ambitious and largely successful modernization effort,” McMaster told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “In Ukraine, for example, the combination of unmanned aerial systems and offensive cyber and advanced electronic warfare capabilities depict a high degree of technological sophistication.”

In Ukraine, a rapidly mobilized Russian-supplied rebel army with surprisingly lethal tanks, artillery and anti-tank weapons has unleashed swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles and cyberattacks that shut down battlefield communications and even GPS.

The discussions of what has been gleaned so far on visits to Ukraine—and from various other studies conducted by experts in and out of government in the U.S. and Europe—have highlighted a series of early takeaways, according to a copy of a briefing that was delivered in recent weeks to the top leadership in the Pentagon and in allied capitals.

U.S. military and intelligence officials worry that Moscow now has the advantage in key areas. Lighter armored vehicles like those the Army relied on heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan are highly vulnerable to its new weapons. And main battle tanks like Russia’s T-90—thought to be an anachronism in recent conflicts—are still decisive.

McMaster added that “Russia possesses a variety of rocket, missile and cannon artillery systems that outrange and are more lethal than U.S. Army artillery systems and munitions.” Its tanks, meanwhile, are so improved that they are “largely invulnerable to anti-tank missiles,” says retired General Wesley Clark, who served as NATO commander from 1997 to 2000 and has been sounding the alarm about what the Ukraine conflict means for the U.S. military.

Also on display in Ukraine to an alarming degree: Moscow’s widespread political subversion of Ukrainian institutions, part of what experts are now calling “hybrid warfare” that combines military power with covert efforts to undermine an enemy government. Russia has since then also intervened with ground forces and airstrikes in Syria—apparently somewhat successfully—and flexed its muscles in other ways. This week, two Russian fighter jets and a military helicopter repeatedly buzzed a U.S. Navy warship in the Baltic Sea, despite radio warnings.

McMaster’s response is the Russia New Generation Warfare Study, whose government participants have already made several unpublicized trips to the front lines in Ukraine. The high-level but low-profile effort is intended to ignite a wholesale rethinking—and possibly even a redesign—of the Army in the event it has to confront the Russians in Eastern Europe.

It is expected to have profound impact on what the U.S. Army will look like in the coming years, the types of equipment it buys and how its units train. Some of the early lessons will be road tested in a major war game planned for June in Poland. Says retired Army Chief of Staff General Gordon Sullivan: “That is all designed to demonstrate that we are in the game.”

Among those who have studied the Russian operation in Ukraine closely is Phillip Karber, a professor at Georgetown University and former Marine Corps officer who has made 22 trips to Ukraine since 2014. “Few in the West have paid much attention to Russia’s doctrinal pivot to ‘New Generation War’ until its manifestation in Ukraine,” says Karber. Another surprise, he adds, “is the relative lack of Western attention, particularly given the unexpected scale and duration of the conflict, as well as the unanticipated Russian aggressiveness in sponsoring it.

Karber says the lethality of new Russian munitions has been striking, including the use of scatterable mines, which the U.S. States no longer possesses. And he counts at least 14 different types of drones used in the conflict and reports that one Ukrainian unit he was embedded with witnessed up to eight drone flights in a single day. “How do you attack an adversary’s UAV?” asks Clark. “Can we blind, disrupt or shoot down these systems? The U.S. military hasn’t suffered any significant air attacks since 1943.”

The new Army undertaking is headed by Brigadier General Peter L. Jones, commandant of the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. But it is the brainchild of McMaster, who as head of the Army Capabilities Integration Center at Fort Eustis, Virginia, is responsible for figuring out what the Army should look like in 2025 and beyond.

Clark describes McMaster’s effort as the most dramatic rethinking since the collapse of the Soviet Union. “These are the kind of issues the U.S. Army hasn’t worked since the end of the Cold War 25 years ago.”

The question is why the U.S. government—and the Army in particular—has once again allowed its attention to be diverted for so long that it has been caught by surprise by a major development like Russia’s enhanced capabilities. While Russian President Vladimir Putin undertook an aggressive military buildup, the U.S. Army actually drew up plans to shrink the active-duty force by some 40,000, from about 490,000 to 450,000 over the next several years. That plan is now in question. A bill recently proposed in the House of Representatives would halt the reduction. And last month, the Alaska delegation successfully got the Pentagon to back down on its plans to deactivate an airborne brigade. One of the justifications that were cited: a newly belligerent Russia.

There is also a question about whether McMaster is the general for the job. For most of his career, McMaster has been a controversial figure. In a book he published earlier in his career, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, he attacked the generals of the Vietnam era for not admitting frankly that the war was unwinnable. Yet later, when McMaster pushed for a complex strategy of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, critics said McMaster and his fellow so-called “COIN-dinistas” misrepresented and oversold their own war-fighting strategy. Counterinsurgency calls not just for fighting insurgents but for a kind of “hearts-and-minds” campaign to win over local populations through reconstruction, policing and economic progress that usually takes at least a decade.

But the U.S. never intended to stay in Afghanistan or Iraq for that long.

Now reality is taking McMaster in precisely the direction that some of his critics said he and the other COIN specialists needed to focus on more in the first place: orienting the Army to what it does best, confronting conventional adversaries. The question is whether the U.S. military is able to adopt a realistic approach to Russian aggression without getting the nation into World War III.

Oddly enough, the model for the new effort is the Army’s detailed study of a war fought 43 years ago, one that most people have forgotten about. As a guide to this new major review, Politico has learned, McMaster is dusting off the Army’s landmark after-action review of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Moscow’s then-proxies, Egypt and Syria.

***

In October 1973, as America's painful odyssey in the jungles of Vietnam was winding down, a war broke out thousands of miles away that would profoundly change the U.S. Army.

Tank losses in the first six days of the Yom Kippur War were greater than the entire U.S. tank inventory stationed in Europe to deter the Soviet Union when Egypt and Syria launched the surprise attack on Israel. In the most recent major armored battles, during World War II three decades earlier, opposing tank armies faced off at an average of 750 yards. In the Yom Kippur War, it was 3,000 yards or more, a far bigger killing field.

In the aftermath, Army Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams dispatched a pair of generals to walk the battlefields of smoldering armor, obtain damaged Russian equipment and find out what the Army “should learn from that war.”

“The Yom Kippur War had a shock effect on the U.S. Army,” recalls Karber, who participated in what came to be known as the Starry-Baer panel, named for the officers who oversaw it. “It challenged decades of accumulated assumptions.”

What the Army learned from the Yom Kippur War was that “powerful new antitank weapons, swift-moving formations cutting across the battlefield, and interaction between ground formations and the air arm showed how much the world around our Army had changed as we focused on Vietnam,” as one summary of the Starry-Baer report put it. General Donn Starry’s own description of the circumstances four decades ago could easily describe what the Army is confronting today, if the word Vietnam were replaced with Iraq or Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union with Russia.

“Military attention turned back to the nation’s commitment to NATO Europe,” Starry wrote back then. “We discovered the Soviets had been very busy while we were preoccupied with Vietnam. They had revised operational concepts at the tactical and operational levels, increased their fielded force structure and introduced new equipment featuring one or more generations of new technology.”

Fast forward to 2016. After a decade and a half of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond—longer than even in Vietnam—decades of assumptions about warfare are once again being re-evaluated. McMaster and other top generals have concluded that while the United States was bogged down in the Middle East, Moscow focused its energies on rebuilding its own forces to potentially counter America’s tactics.

The 53-year-old McMaster was one of those who spent the past decade or so re-orienting the Army away from traditional war-fighting. But he is widely considered one of the service’s top strategic thinkers and his supporters insist he is the best person to figure out how to respond. “He learns and he thinks about what could be and what should be,” says Sullivan, the retired Army chief of staff.

McMaster’s pioneering tactics in confronting the Iraq insurgency after the 2003 invasion were rewarded with a key role under General David Petraeus in rewriting the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency operations. It was not an easy undertaking. The U.S. military had not focused on counterinsurgency operations in the decades since the war in Vietnam. As a colonel and brigade commander in 2005 in Iraq’s western Al Anbar province, McMaster helped pioneer a strategy that came to be known as “clear, hold, build”—in which swarms of U.S. forces backed by airstrikes secured a city or town and built up the local security forces until they were deemed ready to maintain security while local government institutions could mature.

But getting the Army as an institution to focus on training and buying the necessary equipment to fight bands of terrorists and guerrillas hidden in population centers—instead of big tank formations like the Iraqi Republican Guard it clobbered in the 1991 Persian Gulf War—proved extremely challenging.

The steady erosion of public support for the conflict—and growing angst in Congress about the seeming lack of an end game—didn’t help.

What is taking place in Ukraine, however, is seen as a game-changer. McMaster and the study team he has put together believe their work could have huge impact on what the Army buys, how it trains and how its units are structured for years to come—maybe even as much as the Yom Kippur War did.

***

The Army has a long history of trying to learn from wars it didn’t fight—and fold the battlefield lessons into its own arsenal.

A decade before the carnage of the American Civil War, George McClellan, who later became the commander of the Union Army, was an official observer of the European armies engaged in the Crimean War, which Russia lost to an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia. That conflict is widely considered the first modern war, in which mass-produced rifles, explosive shells, mines and armored landing craft were first used. John Pershing, who commanded allied forces in World War I had also previously observed the Russo-Japanese War.

But the current thinking of McMaster and his top aides on what the Ukraine war might mean for the U.S. is eerily parallel to the experience of the early 1970s. That is when the U.S. military had been distracted by another guerrilla war, in Vietnam, while Russia’s military grew bolder and more sophisticated, posing a new threat to NATO, the Western military alliance.

It’s not the actual 1973 war that the Army believes parallels the modern-day conflict in Ukraine but rather the Army’s approach afterward in digesting its lessons—and folding them into its own war plans. The study of that earlier war “serves as a useful model for analyzing the conflict in Ukraine,” says Colonel Kelly Ivanoff, a field artillery officer and top aide to McMaster, who adds that the detailed undertaking to study the 1973 war was to “profoundly influence the development of the U.S. Army for the next 15 years.”

The Russia New Generation Warfare study will “examine the Ukraine theater for implications to Army future force development, with emphasis on how Russian forces and their proxies employed disruptive technologies,” he added.

The effort, which is just getting underway, is focused on 20 separate “warfighting challenges”—including maintaining communications in the face of cyberattacks; developing a greater degree of battlefield intelligence; redesigning Army combat formations and tactics; and identifying new air defenses, weapons and ways to employ helicopters.

Indeed, where the Yom Kippur War analogy reaches its limits, say close observers, is the way in which Russia has also employed other, nonmilitary power—first during the Russian military annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and then in its ongoing proxy war in eastern Ukraine.

“They looked at what we were doing in the early ’90s and some of what we were saying we wanted to do and went one better,” said Sullivan, who served as Army chief of staff from 1991 to 1995 and now runs the Association of the U.S. Army, an advocacy group. “They started adding the special operating forces, which included diplomats, people who were subverting [the Ukrainian government] from the inside. It’s a hybrid.”

Now, he said, the Army is trying to apply “what we learned about the way they are using their little green men—people who are subverting the governments.”

That is not to say that the Russian Army and its proxies are 10 feet tall. The Ukrainian Army is credited with deterring an all-out Russian invasion. And the briefing that has been shared at the highest levels of the Army and with a number of foreign allies points out that the Russian military shrank dramatically in size between 1985 and 2015. And its biggest weakness is widely considered its conscript army, which has limited training and suffers from poor morale.

General Starry, who led the Yom Kippur War after-action review, concluded that the quality of the soldiers ultimately can carry the day—not numbers. “It is strikingly evident,” he wrote later, “that battles are yet won by the courage of Soldiers, the character of leaders, and the combat experience of well-trained units.”

But combined with Moscow’s efforts to upgrade its nuclear forces, what has been on display in eastern Ukraine and more recently in its military foray into Syria is expected, at least by the generals, to change the U.S. Army for a long time to come.

 

[vestige]

[QUOTE]"We had captured him a couple of times, released him. He then fled to, I think, Syria. And then he shows (up) - and all of a sudden, I see him on TV making a pronouncement that he's the head of ISIS," Odierno recalled. "You have these individuals who've grown up now fighting the U.S. or whatever - an insurgency - and that becomes their life. And so they continue to grow and grow and grow and some of them become leaders of a movement, which is what he did.”
[/QUOTE]

....and why in hell did we release him?? Gentle tap on the shoulder from the White House?

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://capx.co/nigeria-becomes-the-second-nation-in-chinas-african-empire/

14 April 2016

China adds Nigeria to its African Empire

By Olivia Archdeacon

- China adds Nigeria to its African Empire
- Nigeria converted up to a tenth of its reserves into yuan five years ago
- Let's hope the people of Nigeria pick up Mandarin quickly


Nigeria¡¦s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Geoffrey Onyema, announced on Tuesday that China has offered Nigeria a $6 billion loan to fund infrastructure projects. Onyema and President Muhammadu Buhari secured the deal with President Xi Jinping in Beijing, where Buhari is currently on his first official state visit to China at the invitation of the Chinese president.

The confirmation by Onyema coincided with an agreement reached between Nigeria and China yesterday on a currency swap deal, as he looks for ways to shore up the naira, Nigeria¡¦s currency, and fund a record budget deficit.

Onyema announced that the credit would be:

¡§on the table as soon as we identify the projects. It won¡¦t need an agreement to be signed; it is just to identify the projects and we access it.¡¨

The loan comes at a good time as Nigeria faces its worst economic crisis in decades. The country¡¦s projected 2016 deficit is currently at N2.2 trillion ($11.1 billion). Sinking oil prices have eaten into its foreign reserves and the naira has weakened against other currencies. As a resource-rich country, Nigeria¡¦s economic performance has unfortunately been driven by the oil and gas sector. Unfortunate because the progress recorded towards genuine economic development prior to the discovery of oil in commercial quantity has since been virtually eroded. Relying on oil and gas for around 40% of GDP (50% at peak production in 2004) has left the economy vulnerable to the global oil price crash. The sector also represents 90% of their total exports.

But the oil crash cannot be blamed entirely ¡V Nigeria¡¦s quest for development has spanned decades not months. It is still yet to deliver on the ultimate goal of poverty reduction, despite various plans, programmes, and projects. There is also the added pressure from Buhari who plans to triple capital spending in the 2016 fiscal year.

Much like the despair felt worldwide for economic basket-case Zimbabwe, one can¡¦t help but feel frustrated at the mismanagement of Nigeria¡¦s abundant natural resources. In addition to oil and gas, Nigeria also boasts sizeable reserves of: tin, iron ore, coal, limestone, niobium, lead, zinc and arable land. Its rainforest region is also amongst the richest and most important in the continent for research and conservation. Yet as the World Bank said in 2007, weak and unreliable infrastructure, macroeconomic instability, microeconomic risks from corruption and weakness of institutions and regulations to guide investment behaviour are the main constraints to high performance of the economy.

China and Nigeria established a diplomatic tie in 1972 but the last decade has seen unprecedented developments in bilateral trade agreements, as well as business and diplomatic relations; trade volumes have risen from $2.8 billion in 2005 to $14.9 billion in 2015. Amongst the agreements signed, several so called Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) have been included, supposedly indicative of the cordial relationship.

During Buhari¡¦s current visit to Beijing, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC), the world¡¦s biggest lender, and Nigeria¡¦s central bank signed a deal on yuan transactions.

¡§It means that the renminbi (yuan) is free to flow among different banks in Nigeria, and the renminbi has been included in the foreign exchange reserves of Nigeria,¡¨ said Lin Songtian, Director General of the African Affairs Department of China¡¦s foreign ministry. Nigeria has also been looking at Chinese panda bonds ¡V a Chinese renminbi-denominated bond from a non-Chinese issuer, sold in the People¡¦s Republic of China ¡V on the justification that they would be cheaper than Eurobonds.

This move should not come as a shock to Europe. Nigeria converted up to a tenth of its reserves into yuan five years ago. A Mandate Letter Between the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Central Bank of Nigeria on Renminbi (RMB) Transactions has also been signed.

Other examples of deepening ties have been hidden in plain sight. 46 million Yuan was gifted to Nigeria by China for the purpose of purchasing anti-malaria medicines and for training of Nigerian health personnel on malaria control. Whilst I support that latter move, unfortunately the Chinese government has also been training Nigerian doctors in the art of traditional Chinese medicine. Whatever the benefits of traditional Chinese medicine are, it cannot as yet cure malaria or HIV. There are 3,400,000 adults are currently living with HIV in Nigeria (that¡¦s 9% of all people living with HIV globally) and there has been no reduction in annual fatalities caused by HIV since 2005. Perhaps widening access to antiretroviral treatments (only 20% of infected patients in Nigeria currently have access to treatment), improving administration of the drugs, and increasing education in schools about HIV transmission would be a more appropriate investment China could make to Nigeria¡¦s health industry.

It is now emerging quite how thoroughly China has infiltrated the Nigerian state. From Beijing, Buhari has mandated that technical committees should be established immediately to finalise discussions on the new joint Nigeria/China rail, power, manufacturing, agriculture and solid mineral projects that have been agreed on. (The technical committees are to conclude their assignments before the end of next month.) There is also a $2 billion loan deal between ICBC and the Dangote Group, the company owned by Africa¡¦s richest man (Aliko Dangote), to fund two cement plants it plans. Most alarmingly, Xi has responded to to Buhari¡¦s desire to get the country self-sufficient in food production by offering an additional $15 million in agricultural assistance to Nigeria. The caveat is that 50 Agricultural Demonstration Farms would be established across the country, presumably run by Chinese management.

At the talks, Buhari has welcomed China¡¦s readiness to assist Nigeria. What is not clear is whether his enthusiasm is because he genuinely believes this readiness to invest is part of some philanthropic mission to rapidly industrialise the African nation and help Nigeria join the world¡¦s major economies, or because he desperately needs a major injection of cash into his economy and refuses to devalue the naira. The two Presidents do have a few similarities: namely, their public (but still largely ineffectual) wars on corruption, and their favouring of tax incentive programmes to attract business. But they are in no way equals in this relationship.

Buhari has warned Chinese investors not to see his country as a market for dumping goods:

¡§Although the Nigerian and Chinese business communities have recorded tremendous successes in bilateral trade, there is a large trade imbalance in favour of China, as Chinese exports represent some 80% of the total bilateral trade volume. This gap needs to be reduced. Therefore, I would like to challenge the business communities in both countries to work together to reduce the trade imbalance.¡¨

Xi has said that China will support Nigeria playing a bigger role in international and regional affairs, and strengthen communication and coordination on major issues such as the peace and stability of Africa, climate change, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The first part shouldn¡¦t be too hard. With Zuma steering South Africa into the rocks, Nigeria is comfortably Africa¡¦s biggest economy. Zimbabwe is already a sure-fire trading partner, seeing as China also governs business there. And with China at the helm it looks as though the investments into aviation, technology, finance and mining will help patch up this looming $11.billion debt.

All in all, both men seem fairly pleased that China will help Nigeria solve the bottleneck of infrastructure, professionals and funds in developing industry and modern agriculture. Let¡¦s hope the people of Nigeria pick up Mandarin quickly.

Olivia Archdeacon is Assistant Editor of CapX

This article is an exclusive for CapX, and is available for syndication. Please contact editors@capx.co to discuss details.

 

[Housecarl]

[QUOTE]"We had captured him a couple of times, released him. He then fled to, I think, Syria. And then he shows (up) - and all of a sudden, I see him on TV making a pronouncement that he's the head of ISIS," Odierno recalled. "You have these individuals who've grown up now fighting the U.S. or whatever - an insurgency - and that becomes their life. And so they continue to grow and grow and grow and some of them become leaders of a movement, which is what he did.”

....and why in hell did we release him?? Gentle tap on the shoulder from the White House?[/QUOTE]

JAG and ROE from DC...If we were talking about the US, never mind the French or Russian, occupied sectors of Germany in 1945 they'd have given this guy a field courts martial and likelier than not shot him.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missile-usa-idUSKCN0XB1SZ

Business | Thu Apr 14, 2016 10:16am EDT
Related: World, Aerospace & Defense

U.S. monitoring North Korea situation amid missile reports: State Dept

The United States is aware of reports that North Korea is preparing intermediate-range missiles and is closely monitoring the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. State Department said on Thursday.

"We call again on North Korea to refrain from actions that further raise tensions in the region and focus instead on taking concrete steps toward fulfilling its international commitments and obligations," a State Department representative said.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that North Korea has deployed one or two intermediate-range ballistic missiles on the east coast, possibly preparing for launch on or around Friday.

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Writing by Susan Heavey; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

 

[Housecarl]

Talk about "too little, too late"....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-economy-plan-insight-idUSKCN0XB0S8

Markets | Thu Apr 14, 2016 8:47am EDT
Related: Saudi Arabia

How Saudi Arabia plans to shake up its economy

RIYADH/DUBAI | By Katie Paul, Marwa Rashad and Andrew Torchia

In late February, several hundred Saudi officials, company executives and foreign consultants gathered in a luxury Riyadh hotel to discuss how Saudi Arabia's economy could survive an era of cheap oil.

One company manager at the event told Reuters that officials from about 30 Saudi government bodies manned booths in which they described their challenges. Corporate bosses were encouraged to "figure out ways to do partnerships to address those needs, to offer feedback, to complain, and to plan future ventures or even just future meetings," the manager said. "It was like a private sector version of a national parliament."

The workshop was part of Saudi government attempts to work out how to restructure the economy so it no longer relies on oil.

The National Transformation Plan (NTP), as Riyadh has dubbed the changes, is expected to be unveiled in the next few weeks. Much is still secret. Ministries have refused to discuss plans in detail and Western consultancies contacted by Reuters declined to confirm their involvement, let alone policy details.

Officials, consultants and executives, though, say the five-year program is both ambitious and risky. It includes asset sales, tax increases, spending cuts, changes to the way the state manages its financial reserves, an efficiency drive, and a much bigger role for the private sector.

Such changes have been talked about for years but never put into action. One reason to think this time could be different is that policy-making has in the past year shifted away from conservative bodies such as the finance ministry and central bank. Power is now concentrated in a new 22-member Council of Economic and Development Affairs, formed after King Salman took the throne in January 2015.

The Council is chaired by his son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is about 30. In his role as defense minister, Prince Mohammed launched Saudi Arabia's military intervention in Yemen in March 2015. Now, he wants to shake up economic policy.

"Since the foundation of the kingdom there has been no government-led program that innovates in this way," said Mohamed al-Afif, a veteran banker who now runs Cash Solutions, a boutique financial services firm.


CONSULTANTS AND WHATSAPP

People familiar with the NTP said it was born late last year in discussions between Prince Mohammed and a few other top officials. At the time, oil was sinking below $30 a barrel, about half the low point that had been expected. That saddled the kingdom with an annual budget deficit near $100 billion and strengthened the case for radical changes.

While Prince Mohammed is the ultimate decider, he has chosen Economy and Planning Minister Adel al-Fakieh, a former food industry executive and mayor of Jeddah, to help with the detail. As labor minister between 2010 and 2015, Fakieh overcame opposition from business to policies that pushed companies to hire more Saudis. People involved in the NTP say Fakieh, 57, uses WhatsApp on his mobile phone obsessively, conducting chats with dozens of groups until the small hours.

Riyadh is spending tens of millions of dollars on foreign consultants for the NTP. London-based Source Global Research estimated in March that total Saudi spending on consultancies – mostly by the government or state-linked bodies – grew over 10 percent in 2015, from $1.06 billion in 2014.


Related Coverage
› Fact box: Saudi Arabia's economic plan takes shape

Consultants and ministry officials, many of them young Saudis with Western degrees, work at the Khozama office building in Riyadh, thrashing out policy in as many as 40 groups known as "delivery labs". The plans are heavy on jargon-labeled targets requiring ministries to hit rigid budget and reform goals, according to documents seen by Reuters.


MODELS

One model is neighboring United Arab Emirates, which began radical reforms by cutting gasoline subsidies last year, people familiar with the Saudi plan said.

Another model is Malaysia, which in 2010 moved to diversify beyond commodity exports and attract more foreign investment. Consultancy McKinsey & Co played a major role in the Malaysian plan and is now at the center of the Saudi effort.

The NTP echoes Malaysia's program in three ways. It puts a single body in charge of implementation to force better cooperation between ministries. It seeks feedback from the private sector early, even during planning. And it aims to boost the private sector's share of investment, something Saudi planners consider vital as oil revenues sag.

Riyadh wants private firms to develop tourism facilities on some of its islands, plans to create "free zones" with minimal red tape near airports, and even wants private investment in some schools.

New infrastructure such as roads and port facilities will be constructed under build-operate-transfer contracts, in which private firms finance the projects and then operate them to recoup their investments. "The government will take no risk anymore, it will only provide opportunities," said a Saudi economist who attended a recent workshop.

The NTP will also speed up Saudi Arabia's long-running but slow-paced privatization program. Up to 5 percent of national oil giant Saudi Aramco will be sold to the public, Prince Mohammed says, possibly raising tens of billions of dollars. Also on the block: chunks of other companies in up to 18 sectors, including healthcare, mining and transport.

Management of the country's financial reserves will become more aggressive, according to officials and consultants. The central bank, which acts as the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, holds $584 billion of foreign assets, mostly in conservative investments such as bank deposits and U.S. Treasuries. In the future, privatization proceeds will be invested in corporate assets around the world, generating income and obtaining access to technology and expertise.

Saudi officials have been visiting the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority – which has over $700 billion invested in developed and emerging market equities, fixed income, private equity, real estate and infrastructure – to see how it works, sources said.

Prince Mohammed told Bloomberg last month that one fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), would be expanded to control over $2 trillion eventually. The fund is now believed to have about $100 billion of assets.


DEADLINE

Top officials are reviewing proposals which all the ministries involved were required to submit by March 31, two sources said.

"Everyone is waiting for the NTP announcement for a clue about how things will operate going forward," said a Western diplomat who monitors the economy.

There are many skeptics. Some say the NTP is too late. Local capital markets are too small to absorb a privatization program so attracting foreign money will be vital. But investors are wary of Saudi Arabia's prospects given the low oil price.

Eliminating the budget deficit by 2020 will require an additional $100 billion in spending cuts and tax increases – equivalent to about 16 percent of gross domestic product. That could stifle growth and deter the investment the NTP seeks.

Some plans are headline-grabbing but may involve little real change. For example, the PIF will take over assets such as Saudi Aramco but won't be able to reinvest that wealth unless it sells big pieces of the firm, which would be tough for financial and political reasons.

And then there's the mixed fortunes of some of the models Saudi Arabia has looked at. "Most of the economic transformation programs in various countries didn't succeed or diverged immensely from the original plans," said prominent Saudi economist Ihsan Bu Hulaiga.

Malaysia, for instance, has increased the private sector's share of investment modestly, to 64 percent in 2014 from 52 percent in 2009. But the country's currency has plunged along with commodity prices, something Riyadh wants to avoid.

Many question the role of highly paid consultants. "You have people in their 30s with laptops helping to determine the direction of the country," said one foreign consultant. "The potential for change has certainly gone up, but so has the risk."

Some Saudis think an economic shake-up could lead to the kind of social changes many foreign business executives believe are needed to modernize Saudi's economy: allowing women to drive, for instance, or opening up the legal system.

The planning itself suggests some openness to change. Senior officials, normally given to opulent robes, regularly come to workshops in simple clothes, say some attendees. And unusually, female consultants are working closely with men.


(Additional reporting by Angus McDowall in Riyadh, Tom Arnold and Hadeel Al Sayegh in Dubai, and Joseph Sipalan in Kuala Lumpur; Edited by Simon Robinson)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/13/opinions/j-michael-cole-op-ed-taiwan-kenya/index.html

Can China get away with abducting people overseas?

By J. Michael Cole
Updated 4:11 AM ET, Thu April 14, 2016

(CNN) — Editor's note: J. Michael Cole is a Taipei-based senior non-resident fellow with the University of Nottingham's China Policy Institute and editor-in-chief of Thinking-Taiwan.com -- which is affiliated with an organization founded by Taiwan President-elect Tsai Ing-wen. The views expressed are his own.

The ongoing crisis over the deportation by Kenyan authorities of 45 Taiwanese nationals to China has sparked consternation in Taipei and accusations of international kidnapping worldwide.

Besides the fact that the individuals were cleared of all crimes by a Kenyan court, their extradition to China, ostensibly due to pressure from Chinese officials, raises essential questions about the future implications of the "one China" policy in a time of greater Chinese assertiveness.

Kenya used 'tear gas' to force workers onto plane to China: Taiwan

China's extraterritorial reach worldwide is also cause for apprehension among Taiwanese, Uyghur, Tibetan and Hong Kong activists who now live and travel under the shadow of possible capture and extradition to China for any "crimes" as defined by Beijing's intentionally vague National Security Law.

Coming in the wake of China's alleged kidnapping of five Hong Kong booksellers, this outrage suggests that nobody is safe anymore and that Beijing will not hesitate to break agreements or international conventions to further its aims. In fact, even being a foreign national, as two of the booksellers were (and one of the Taiwanese workers reportedly is), no longer confers the kind of protections that are assumed in such situations.

China denies breaking the law as missing bookseller says he 'wasn't abducted'

Although such action risks being counterproductive in terms of winning the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese, this is possibly a case where ideology is driving policy in China, perhaps the result of domestic developments that are forcing President Xi Jinping's government to adopt a harder line on Taiwan and other "peripheries."

Given its economic sway over a number of countries worldwide, and the apparent reluctance of the international community to push back whenever it breaks international law, it seems unlikely Beijing will run out of willing partners to enforce its rigid definition of "one China" anytime soon.

Fatal blow for cross-strait relations?

The alleged abduction of the Taiwanese workers casts serious doubt on Beijing's willingness to maintain a constructive relationship with Taiwan a little more than a month before a new administration is sworn in in Taipei.

In Taiwan, the reaction to what, for all intents and purposes, amounts to the kidnapping of Taiwanese nationals, has had a rallying impact similar to that seen when Chou Tzu-yu, a 16-year-old Taiwanese K-Pop singer, was forced to make an ISIS-style video apologizing for displaying the Republic of China's flag in a promotional clip.

Besides the consternation that has pervaded Taiwanese society upon seeing their compatriots nabbed by Kenyan police and shoved, black hoods on their heads, onto a China Southern airplane, politicians from all sides are now calling into question the eight years of rapprochement under President Ma Ying-jeou, who steps down on May 20.

The "status quo" that has served as the foundation of cross-straits ties, as well as the different interpretations of "one China" that have provided the necessary flexibility for the two sides to co-exist, now seem under assault by Beijing.

In fact, many of the key accomplishments of the "Beijing-friendly" Ma are now regarded in an entirely new light; rather than instruments of normalization and reciprocity, it is now difficult not to regard those successes cynically, as mere tools for Beijing to lock Taiwan ever more tightly into its embrace.

The Mainland Affairs Council, the agency in charge of communicating with Beijing, has been denied access to the 45 Taiwanese and authorities in Taiwan are being kept largely in the dark.

Moreover, the handling of the matter demonstrates that the joint crime-fighting agreement signed between the two sides in 2009 -- the very kind of agreement that would come into play in such a situation -- is effectively a dead instrument which Beijing can ignore as it sees fit. The same conceivably applies to the twenty or so other agreements signed between the two sides since 2008.

Beijing's behavior will only succeed in alienating ordinary Taiwanese, among whom support for unification is at an all-time, single-digit low. For President-elect Tsai Ing-wen, this incident creates a challenge, as she will have to continue negotiating with a regime that has no compunction in breaking the rules and which is keen to extend the reach of its laws to include Taiwanese citizens, wherever they are.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-oppostion-idUSKCN0XB1MT

World | Thu Apr 14, 2016 10:35am EDT
Related: World, United Nations, Syria

Exclusive: Syrian opposition says will join with government in transitional body, but not with Assad himself

GENEVA | By Tom Miles


Syria's main opposition group is willing to share membership of a transitional governing body with current members of the government of President Bashar al-Assad, but not with Assad himself, the group's spokesman said in Geneva.

"There are many people on the other side who we can really deal with," Salim al-Muslat, spokesman for the High Negotiations Committee, said on the second day of a round of U.N.-mediated peace talks.

"We will have no veto, as long as they don't send us criminals, as long as they don't send us people involved in the killing of Syrians," he said.

U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura has said a political transition would be the main focus of the current round of the peace talks, which aim to end Syria's five-year-old war. More than 250,000 people have been killed in the conflict.

The HNC has always insisted that there can be no place for Assad in a transitional governing body but Muslat said there was room for negotiation on how to handle Assad's departure.

Before the first round of talks, Damascus had ruled out any discussion of the presidency. There was no immediate indication it was ready to change its mind now.

A U.N. resolution governing the talks says the transitional governing body will have full executive powers. Muslat said the body would call for a national conference which would in turn form a constitutional committee.

The HNC was willing to take less than half of the seats on the transitional body, as long as it satisfied Syrians and brought a political solution, he said.

"Even if we only take 25 percent, believe me, 100 percent would be the Syrian people."

If Syria's ally Russia was willing to put pressure on the Damascus government, and if the government delegation was serious about negotiation, then a deal could be done in the current round of talks, he said.

"For a solution, to really help Syria to get relief, then let them suggest what they want for Assad and we discuss it. There is a table here in the United Nations building and we can sit and discuss all these things, we are ready to discuss these things."

The peace process has brought a truce and a humanitarian aid effort but no progress on agreeing prisoner releases.

Muslat said the HNC had lists of 150,000 people held by the government, including women and children. He did not know the number held by opposition groups but said they were well treated.

"Believe me, the minute we see a positive step, we can talk to the factions there and whatever they have is released. I'm against holding hostages whether on this side or that side. But there are talks there and they are willing to free what they have in their hands."

Opposition factions had also talked about uniting to fight hardline Islamist militants once a political solution was in place, all Syrians would be able to unite behind a single army, "whether they were with Assad or on the other side", he said.

"When there is no Assad in Syria, the army will be one, it will be from the opposition, it will be from people who were with Assad, it will be Kurds, also Christians and Muslims fighting terrorism, because this is the future of Syria."


(Reporting by Tom Miles, Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Angus MacSwan)

 

[Housecarl]

Well won't be too much longer...it's 0002 Friday in Pyongyang....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/0...h-as-part-founders-birthday-celebrations.html

CONFLICTS

North Korea reportedly planning Friday missile launch as part of founder's birthday celebrations

Published April 14, 2016 · SkyNews

North Korea appears to be preparing a missile launch to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the country's founder Kim Il-Sung.

One or two Musudan ballistic missiles were deployed around the eastern port of Wonsan some three weeks ago, according to Yonhap news agency which quoted an unnamed Seoul official.

The move came as U.S. intelligence warned the North's ballistic missile capability is expanding.

The founder's birthday is an annual spectacular for North Korea, which celebrates with huge military parades featuring its most impressive-looking weapons or with missile launches.

https://w.graphiq.com/w/b9w5ckmR6dL

"There is an ample possibility that the North would launch them around Kim Il-Sung's birthday," Yonhap quoted the South Korean official as saying.

The nuclear-armed state has staged several short- and mid-range missile launches but has yet to test the Musudan missile, known to have a range of up to 2,485 miles.

Seoul's defense ministry spokesman also said there was a "possibility" the North would carry out such a missile test around Friday's anniversary.

On Tuesday, senior U.S. politician Brian McKeon told a U.S. Senate hearing that North Korea's nuclear and missile program posed a growing threat to the United States and its allies in East Asia.

He said North Korea was trying to develop longer-range nuclear ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S. and was working to make its KN-08 road-mobile ICBM operational.

At the same hearing, Admiral Bill Gortney, the officer in charge of defending U.S. air space, said current assessment showed it was unlikely that North Korean missiles could hit the U.S., but it was prudent to assume it had the capability.

"We don't base our readiness levels on that low probability ... We are prepared to engage that particular threat," he said.

"Eventually, we assess that this low probability will increase, that's why the investment to have us outpace that technology is absolutely critical."

Gortney said he agreed with a South Korean assessment that North Korea was capable of putting a nuclear warhead on a medium-range missile that would reach all of South Korea and most of Japan.

Tension has been running high on the divided peninsula since the North conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a rocket launch a month later that was widely seen as a disguised ballistic missile test.

 

[Housecarl]

Talk about being about time....Now we'll see if it actually gets delivered.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-N...a-as-Mosul-ground-battle-looms/4591460629399/

U.S. arms Kurdish Peshmerga as Mosul ground battle looms

By Andrew V. Pestano Follow @AVPLive9 Contact the Author | April 14, 2016 at 6:54 AM

BAGHDAD, April 14 (UPI) -- The U.S. coalition fighting against the Islamic State in Iraq has begun arming the Kurdish Peshmerga with heavy weapons as the battle for Mosul intensifies.

The Kurdish Peshmerga have received armored personnel carriers, mortars and anti-tank weapons to combat the Islamic State as the ground assault to recapture Mosul looms.

"We have decided to give them about two U.S. Army brigades-worth of equipment -- heavier stuff," Brig. Gen. John E. Novalis II, who is overseeing coalition training of Iraqi security forces, told Stars and Stripes.

The Kurds have often complained that the weapons they use are inferior to the weapons the Islamic State seized when it drove away Iraqi security forces who left weapons and machinery behind. Iraqi officials have expressed worry that arming Kurds directly could later lead to an increased conflict in the Kurdish ambition to establish an independent Kurdish state.

But U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren on Wednesday told reporters that any U.S. weapons delivered to the Kurds would be sent through the Iraqi government.

"One-hundred percent of the arms and equipment that we provide goes through the central government of Iraq," Warren said during a press conference. "There will be times when, of course, there's coordination ... but it all goes through the central government of Iraq. The central government decides where every piece of equipment goes."

Related UPI Stories
•Islamic State destroys gates of Nineveh near Mosul
•Kerry makes surprise visit to Baghdad as Iraqi confidence in Abadi wanes
•U.S. may open 'fire bases' to help Iraqi troops retake Mosul

 

[Housecarl]

Never mind a weaponized Unha-3....I've been looking but haven't found any images online of the silo's the DPRK built in the extreme north of the country. I wonder what would be based there, never mind whether the North Koreans already have a couple of Unha-3s/TD-2s already set up like the PRC did with their DF-4s and early DF-5s....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.koreatimesus.com/n-k-s-k...ng-nuclear-warhead-to-u-s-northern-commander/

N.K.’s KN-08 ICBM capable of delivering nuclear warhead to U.S.: Northern Commander

April 14, 2016

WASHINGTON, (Yonhap) — North Korea’s road-mobile KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile is believed to be capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental U.S., the U.S. northern commander said Thursday, amid growing concern Pyongyang could soon conduct its first mobile missile test.

“I assess that he has the ability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and range the homeland with that warhead,” Adm. William Gortney said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing in response to a question about the KN-08 missile, referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Though the intelligence community assesses the probability of the North fielding a successful road-mobile ICBM with a miniaturized nuclear device capable of reaching the U.S. as low, Gortney stressed that as commander responsible for homeland defense, he chooses to assess the North has the capability.

“I think it’s the prudent course of action. It’s what I think the American people would like me to base my readiness assessment and be prepared to engage it. So we are prepared to engage it today, 24 hours a day and 365 days out of the year,” he said.

Gortney made a similar statement in Wednesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, saying that even though the KN-08 remains untested, “modeling suggests it could deliver a nuclear payload to much of the Continental United States.

Concerns have grown in recent weeks that Pyongyang could undertake yet another provocation, such as a nuclear test and a long-range missile launch, to mark Friday’s birthday of founding leader Kim Il-sung, grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday that the North has deployed one or two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles near the eastern port city of Wonsan for a possible launch, and a launch could come on the occasion of the late leader’s birthday.

U.S. officials have been quoted as saying that the North could attempt to test the longer-range KN-08.

The Guam Homeland Security and Office of Civil Defense said in a statement that it is closely monitoring the possibility of a North Korean missile launch. But it added that “no definitive reports of an immediate threat to Guam or the Northern Marianas (have) surfaced at this time.”

A launch of either Musudan or KN-08 would mark the first time that the North has tested a mobile ballistic missile. The communist nation has displayed the KN-08 and other mobile missiles in military parades in recent years, but has never test-launched them.

U.S. officials have voiced strong concerns about the North’s mobile missiles, especially the KN-08, as they can be fired from mobile launchers and are harder to keep an eye on. The U.S. has steadily strengthened its missile defense system to guard against such threats.

In Thursday’s hearing, Gortney also spoke about challenges associated with a mobile missile.

“They’re mobile and they’re very easy to conceal. Previously, when North Korea assembles a rocket, we have intel that we can detect through all forms of intel. When you get into a road-mobile target, it’s very very difficult to be able to track, quickly set up and shoot,” the commander said.

“Most of my career I dropped bombs for a living and mobile targets would always cause me pause, and that’s exactly why this is a tough challenge for us,” he said.

The North has advanced ballistic missile technologies, and succeeded in putting satellites into orbit aboard long-range rockets twice, first in 2012 and again in February this year. Experts say long-range rockets and ICBMs are basically the same with differences only in payloads.

Last week, the North claimed that it successfully carried out a ground test of a powerful ICBM engine, with leader Kim saying that the test “provided a firm guarantee for mounting another form of nuclear attack upon the U.S. imperialists.”

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. is monitoring the situation closely.

“We’ve seen these reports, we’re watching it closely. I can’t predict one way or the other. And this is a regime, as you well know, that’s difficult to predict. They do tend to conduct these kinds of activities … around significant dates on the calendar,” Kirby said.

“These kinds of activities do nothing to improve the security situation on the peninsula and serve as stark reminders of how important it is for us to stay, and we will, stay committed to our alliance commitments to South Korea,” he said.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/u-...-buildup-1460636272-lMyQjAxMTA2NDE1NTkxNDU2Wj

U.S. Stationing Warplanes in Philippines Amid South China Sea Tensions

Move comes amid concern that Beijing plans to build a military outpost within striking distance of Manila

By Trefor Moss and Jeremy Page
Updated April 15, 2016 12:22 a.m. ET
72 COMMENTS

MANILA—The U.S. will start stationing warplanes in the Philippines this week as the vanguard of a major deployment to the Southeast Asian country as Washington and its allies mount a coordinated response to Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea.

The U.S. and the Philippines began joint patrols of the South China Sea last month, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Thursday on a visit to the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally that is among the five governments whose territorial claims overlap with China’s in those waters.

Tensions have been escalating as a United Nations-backed arbitration panel in The Hague prepares to rule in a case brought by the Philippines against China’s maritime claims.

Mr. Carter’s announcements came after he scrubbed a planned visit to Beijing as part of his Asian tour amid rising U.S. concerns over China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea and its recent deployment of weaponry on another disputed island. Defense officials cited scheduling difficulties as the official reason for canceling.

They also came after China summoned diplomatic envoys from the Group of Seven nations to protest over a statement they issued at a meeting in Japan this week opposing “coercive or provocative” action in the South China Sea and East China Sea.

U.S. allies have been bolstering defense ties with the Philippines, with Australia sending troops to participate in joint exercises with U.S. and Philippine forces, and Japan sending a submarine and two destroyers to visit a Philippine naval base this month.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull planned to warn Chinese leaders during a visit to Beijing this week that their recent muscular posture in Asia risks harming China’s economy and international relations, according people familiar with his plans. At a media briefing in Beijing on Friday, Mr. Turnbull took a circumspect tone, urging all South China Sea claimants to settle disputes peacefully; He declined to comment on the U.S. deployment.

https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OJ-AI565_PHILUS_9U_20160414124518.jpg

China claims sovereignty over all South China Sea islands and their adjacent waters and has pledged not to “militarize” the structures it has built. But U.S. officials say it has recently deployed fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles on another disputed island to the north.

There is also concern in Washington and Manila that China, having almost completed seven artificial islands in the disputed Spratlys archipelago, is planning to build a military outpost at a disputed reef less than 200 nautical miles from Manila.

“In the South China Sea, China’s actions…are causing anxiety and raising regional tensions,” Mr. Carter told reporters at the Philippines’ presidential palace, where he met President Benigno Aquino III. The U.S. deployment is designed “to tamp down tensions here” and wouldn’t provoke a showdown with Beijing, he said.

China’s Defense Ministry strenuously objected, saying the latest U.S.-Philippines military cooperation would exacerbate tensions. It said the joint-patrol plan “promotes the militarization of the region” and called the strengthened military alliance and joint exercises “the embodiment of Cold War thinking and not conducive to peace and stability in the South China Sea.”

The U.S. and the Philippines have been holding 10 days of joint drills that end Friday. Mr. Carter said five American A-10 Thunderbolt ground-attack jets, three H-60G Pavehawk helicopters and one MC-130H Combat Talon special forces infiltration aircraft will remain behind at Clark Air Base north of Manila along with 200 crew members.

Philippines Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said he hoped the U.S. moves would “deter uncalled-for actions by the Chinese.”

Last month, the Philippines said it would make five military bases available to U.S. forces under the terms of a new defense pact signed in 2014. Earlier in the week, Mr. Carter visited India, which is also upgrading its security ties with Washington.

Since the start of the U.S. “pivot” to Asia early in the Obama administration, the Pentagon has moved to beef up its presence in the region to counter China’s rising military power, including with additional personnel, ships and aircraft. U.S. officials have said that by 2020, 60% of the Navy’s ships and aircraft will be deployed to the Pacific, up from about half before the rebalance.

“We’re sending our most advanced warfighting platforms to the region, including multi-mission ballistic missile defense-capable ships, submarines, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft,” a Navy spokesman said.

The Air Force has a large presence across the Pacific. That includes a program in which it has a “continuous bomber presence” that aims to demonstrate American commitment to the region. Pacific Air Forces conducted about 100 continuous bomber presence and bomber assurance and deterrence missions across the Western Pacific in 2015, according to the Air Force. Currently, B-52 bombers fly those missions from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. “Everything we’re doing out here is sending a message to our allies and partners of our commitment to regional security,” said Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Air Forces, in Honolulu.

Dismay about China’s plans deepened last month when U.S. Navy Chief Adm. John Richardson said the U.S. was monitoring increased Chinese activity at Scarborough Shoal, a disputed cluster of reefs, rocks and sandbars that China has controlled since a standoff with the Philippines in 2012. The activity might signal Beijing’s intention to build a military outpost there, he said, on what China considers its sovereign territory.

China has reclaimed land and built facilities at seven other reefs in the South China Sea, ignoring the objections of neighbors. China’s maritime claims cover most of the sea, and overlap with those of Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Taiwan.

Scarborough Shoal is much closer to the Philippines than the seven islets China has been building so far, making any Chinese military outpost there a more overt threat.

The U.S. last year resumed performing what it termed freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea to challenge China’s claims. But those patrols won’t count for much if the U.S. fails to prevent China from fortifying Scarborough Shoal, said Gregory Poling of the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a U.S. think tank.

In recent days, the Obama administration has faced calls from Sen. John McCain (R., Az.) and others to offer explicit guarantees to defend the Philippines in the face of Chinese assertiveness.

“The pressure is building up from the Senate and within the Pentagon towards an explicit American guarantee that Scarborough Shoal falls within the Philippine-U.S. mutual defense treaty, thus providing a pretext for a more robust American pushback,” said Richard Javad Heydarian, a regional-security specialist at Manila’s De La Salle University.

—Gordon Lubold in Washington contributed to this article.

Write to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com

Related Coverage

Australia’s Turnbull to Pressure Beijing on South China Sea
China’s World: How Beijing Upstaged U.S. With a ‘Great Wall of Sand’
U.S., India Deepen Defense Ties

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nationalinterest.org/blo...ar-911-force-remains-crucial-deterrence-15786

The Buzz

ICBMs: America's Nuclear 911 Force Remains Crucial to Deterrence

Constance Baroudos
April 14, 2016
Comments 54

The only defense the United States has against a Russian nuclear attack is the threat of retaliation. To keep that threat credible, the military maintains a “triad” of land-based missiles, sea-based missiles and bombers that would be nearly impossible to destroy in a surprise attack.

Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) stationed in the central U.S. that make up part of the American nuclear deterrent remain critical to national security. Eliminating ICBMs as some have proposed would weaken America’s nuclear deterrent that protects its homeland and allies from a nuclear first strike.

ICBMs are deployed in underground silos at three U.S. bases. Current weapons were fielded in 1970 with a planned service life of 10 years, but have lasted over 40 years because they have been refurbished many times.

The U.S. cannot continue to sustain its Cold War ICBM force any longer because it is antiquated and hard to maintain. Thus, the Air Force will develop a new missile as part of the ground-based strategic deterrent program that will be deployed in the 2027 timeframe.

The Air Force’s initial proposal calls for 642 missiles of which 400 would be operationally deployed until the 2070s. But the ICBM force is facing controversy because funding for its modernization will take place simultaneously with replacements of other legs of the Cold War triad.

While modernizing ICBMs is not cheap, they are the least expensive component of the nuclear deterrent, and they provide many benefits that the other legs do not. ICBMs are on constant alert which shortens [4] execution of a president’s decision to launch weapons in response to a surprise attack.

If ICBMs were eliminated, an enemy would only need to strike a small number of targets to degrade the U.S. strategic posture since there are only three bases for nuclear-capable bombers and two bases for ballistic-missile submarines. In contrast, each hardened ICBM silo would have to be targeted separately.

While nuclear submarines are undetectable in the ocean today, a technological breakthrough could occur that would make the oceans less opaque. The sea-based leg might be weakened and could be at risk of being destroyed by conventional forces. Thus, the land leg would increase in significance. Eliminating ICBMs might motivate potential adversaries to try even harder to develop the capability to locate nuclear submarines underwater.

Consider what countries are doing in other parts of the world today to understand the importance of ICBMs to security. Moscow is modernizing its ICBM force to carry 10 nuclear warheads each. Beijing tested [5] its newest road-mobile ICBM twice last year – road mobile ICBMs increase survivability because they do not have set locations for an enemy to target. North Korea recently launched its sixth long-range rocket test that placed a satellite into orbit (testing rockets through satellite launches provides invaluable data for potential future ICBMs).

Deterrence is effective because it causes the enemy to fear a massive retaliatory response; ICBMs in particular ensure an adversary’s objectives are beyond reach because they are on alert and cannot be destroyed by conventional forces. A new ICBM is an expensive but essential investment that will prevent a potential aggressor from launching a nuclear first strike and ensure these fearsome weapons are never used.

Constance Baroudos is Vice President of the Lexington Institute. Her current research interests include ballistic-missile defense, nuclear strategy, European security, and the Greek financial crisis. @Baroudos


Links:
[1] http://www.nationalinterest.org/blo...ar-911-force-remains-crucial-deterrence-15786
[2] http://www.nationalinterest.org/profile/constance-baroudos
[3] http://twitter.com/share
[4] http://warontherocks.com/2015/07/keeping-icbms-on-alert-enhances-presidential-decision-making/
[5] http://www.janes.com/article/56860/china-developing-new-rail-mobile-icbm-say-us-officials
[6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Romeo.jpg
[7] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/nuclear-weapons
[8] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/deterrence
[9] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/icbms
[10] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/missile-defense
[11] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/russia
[12] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/united-states
[13] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/nuclear-weapons
[14] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/deterrence
[15] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/icbms
[16] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/missile-defense
[17] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/russia
[18] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/united-states
[19] http://www.nationalinterest.org/region/eurasia/russia
[20] http://www.nationalinterest.org/region/americas/north-america/united-states

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/chinas-nuclear-weapons-still-last-resort-15799

The Buzz

China's Nuclear Weapons: Still a Last Resort?

Brendan Thomas-Noone
April 15, 2016
Comments 2

Among Western analysts who watch China's military and strategic development, a debate has been raging for some time over the gap between China's actual military capability and its ambitious strategic concepts.

There is no doubt that China's military capabilities are both growing and improving across the board. This is natural considering China's exponential economic growth – rarely does a country grow economically yet cap its military expenditure.

China's most recent military budget appears to indicate that its military spending is tagged [4] to its slowing GDP growth, allaying some alarm [5]. Yet this growth is still the largest in the region by far. And after years of investment, China's military capability, both in technology and now slowly in its ability to project force throughout the Asia-Pacific, has begun to catch up to its concept of 'integrated strategic deterrence.' That is the argument of a recent report from RAND [6] authored by Michael S Chase and Arthur Chan.

China's conception of 'integrated strategic deterrence' is similar to some strategic thinking in the U.S. which says that, militarily, deterrence encompasses not just nuclear weapons but a range of capabilities which include "conventional, space and cyber forces." But as the authors argue, China's conception of integrated strategic deterrence goes further, encompassing other instruments of national power such as "diplomatic, economic and scientific and technological strength" as part of the country's ability to deter.

What might this mean in practice?

One of the arguments put forward by the authors is that a more capable Chinese military may give Beijing more options to conduct peacetime deterrence:


"Chinese military publications are replete with references to how China can conduct deterrence operations under general peacetime conditions, such as by displaying its strength in these areas with military parades and exercises, and through other channels, such as official and unofficial media reports, commercial satellite imagery, and via the Internet."

These sorts of peacetime operations have certainly been evident [7] in the South China Sea.

The more interesting comments come when the authors turn to nuclear deterrence:


"...as China continues to develop capabilities to support its integrated strategic deterrence concepts, new options associated with the improved capabilities could lead to modification of existing policies and strategic concepts, such as China’s nuclear no-first-use policy and its approach to strategic deterrence operations and nuclear counterattack campaigns. Additionally, China’s further development of its integrated strategic deterrence concepts and capabilities will have implications for strategic stability and escalation management."

In this passage, the authors have lent their voices to a growing number of analysts who argue that, as China's nuclear posture modernizes, so might the way it looks at nuclear deterrence. Will new nuclear capabilities drive Beijing to reconsider the role of nuclear weapons in its national security strategy? Will a perception that the U.S. is gaining credible ballistic-missile defense capability and the ability to conduct a first strike on China's nuclear arsenal (using non-nuclear weapons) also influence this thinking?

The chorus of voices arguing that Chinese nuclear doctrine is evolving in this direction seems to be growing. Some argue that this evolution has led Beijing to switch to a 'launch-on warning posture [8]'. Others say China's modernizing missile force will give Beijing [9] "better options for how it might seek to use these (nuclear) weapons not only, as in the past, as a desperate last resort." Fiona Cunningham and M Taylor Fravel recently argued [10] that there China may be facing so much pressure from the U.S. strategic posture that it could adopt a "limited (nuclear) warfighting strategy envisaging attacks on an adversary's nuclear arsenal or conventional forces."

There is no doubt that China's nuclear forces are modernizing, particularly on the strategic level. Over the last several years, we have seen the testing of a new rail-mobile ICBM [11], the deployment of multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles on some of its silo-based ICBMs [12], a new medium-range ballistic missile that is nuclear-capable [13], and the first ever deterrence patrols [14] of a Chinese SSBN. In terms of sub-strategic capability, it is accurate to say that China has the ability to fight a 'theatre-based' nuclear conflict if it chose to do so (with its nuclear-capable medium-range ballistic missiles and reported nuclear-capable air-launched cruise missile).

But two important caveats. First, there has yet to be an official doctrinal shift, other than the possible raising of the importance of nuclear deterrence through the reorganization [15]of the Second Artillery into the what is now called the Strategic Rocket Forces. And second, while China is capable of building tactical nuclear warheads, there is little evidence Beijing has invested in credible numbers of them.

Overall, I am unsure of the direction of China's nuclear posture (other than clearly seeking a more assured second-strike capability) and am a little skeptical of calls that Beijing is headed towards a limited nuclear war-fighting (and winning) footing. In terms of doctrine, they have a long way to go. But things are changing when it comes to Beijing's nuclear posture, and perhaps more quickly than in the past.

This piece first appeared in The Lowy Interpreter here [16].

Links:
[1] http://www.nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/chinas-nuclear-weapons-still-last-resort-15799
[2] http://www.nationalinterest.org/profile/brendan-thomas-noone
[3] http://twitter.com/share
[4] http://www.dw.com/en/china-looks-to-rein-in-military-spending-as-economy-slows/a-19145801
[5] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-defence-idUSKBN0LK1U520150216
[6] http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1366.html
[7] http://www.smh.com.au/world/south-c...-spotted-on-woody-island-20160413-go5uns.html
[8] http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/us-china-relations/china-hair-trigger#.VxBFofl95hE
[9] http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/de...tion 3 - China's Offensive Missile Forces.pdf
[10] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2697161
[11] http://www.janes.com/article/56860/china-developing-new-rail-mobile-icbm-say-us-officials
[12] https://fas.org/blogs/security/2015/05/china-mirv/
[13] http://www.janes.com/article/53994/...m-variant-china-reveals-at-3-september-parade
[14] http://www.janes.com/article/56667/china-advances-sea-and-land-based-nuclear-deterrent-capabilities
[15] http://thediplomat.com/2016/01/the-new-military-force-in-charge-of-chinas-nuclear-weapons/
[16] http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2016/04/15/Chinas-nuclear-weapons-Still-a-last-resort.aspx
[17] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/china
[18] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/nuclear-weapons
[19] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/military
[20] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/defense
[21] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/politics
[22] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/technology
[23] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/security
[24] http://www.nationalinterest.org/region/asia

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/why-xi-purging-the-chinese-military-15795

Why Xi is Purging the Chinese Military

China's president pulls a page from Mao's little red playbook.

Derek Grossman,Michael S. Chase
April 15, 2016
Comments 45

Much has been made of the flurry of announcements in recent months by Xi Jinping—China’s president, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC)—signaling major structural reforms to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), scheduled for completion by 2020. Veteran China watchers have diligently catalogued what is known and unknown at this point from authoritative pronouncements, and what is speculated on the basis of unofficial sources. Observers, for example, have paid especially close attention to Xi’s establishment of the PLA Strategic Support Force and ruminated over its stature in the PLA vis-à-vis the services, as well as its precise role and mission. Analysts have also pondered questions such as the future membership of the CMC and how cooperative the traditionally army-dominated top levels of the PLA’s leadership will become under the reforms.

While understanding the details of Xi’s reforms is critical to assessing the direction of PLA modernization going forward, it is also necessary to consider the broader implications of Xi’s apparent relationship with the military. Many observers have stated the obvious: Xi is as “large and in charge” in military circles as he is in Chinese politics generally. This is true, but his control over the PLA deserves more attention than it has received. That is the subject of this article. We argue that Xi is reviving Maoist-style tactics—including purges of corrupt officers, forced public displays of respect for Mao and support of Maoist thinking, and a formidable internal monitoring system—to ensure his personal dominance over the military. Xi’s leadership style vis-à-vis the military will have profound implications for civilian-military relations in China.



Purging the Military

When Xi assumed power in November 2012, he vowed to fight both “tigers” and “flies”—a reference to taking on corrupt leaders as well as lower-level bureaucrats engaged in corrupt practices throughout the Chinese system. The PLA would be no exception.

The first warning shot was aimed toward the tigers. In 2014, Xi arrested a former CMC vice chairman, Xu Caihou, for participating in a “cash for ranks” scheme. After expelling Xu from the party, Xi followed up in 2015 with the arrest and purging of another former CMC vice chairman, Guo Boxiong, on similar charges. The arrests were unprecedented in that Xu and Guo were the two highest-ranking officers in China’s military when they served as CMC vice chairmen, and their arrests marked the first time the PLA’s highest-level retired officers faced corruption charges. As of early March 2016, Xi’s anticorruption campaign had resulted in the arrest of at least forty-four senior military officers, although the actual numbers could be higher.

Xi did not forget about the flies, either. At least sixteen lower-level military officers are facing punishment for corruption charges as well. The military anticorruption drive is part of a much broader dragnet: all told, nearly 1,600 individuals throughout China’s government are either under investigation for corruption, or have been arrested, purged or sentenced since Xi came to power.

The only other PRC leader that resorted to purges at such a high level—and so routinely—was Mao. After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, there were at least four major purges; two of these episodes involved military leaders. Mao first purged his defense minister Peng Dehuai in 1959 for questioning the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Peng’s purge was more about leadership politics than it was a struggle between Mao and the PLA, but Peng was also known as an advocate of Soviet-style military modernization and professionalization, which Mao believed ran contrary to his own emphasis on political indoctrination. Mao’s second purge of the PLA occurred in 1971, against the lieutenants of Peng’s replacement Lin Biao, who was widely viewed as Mao’s heir apparent during the tumultuous years of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Although historical accounts differ on the details, it appears that Mao suspected Lin was involved in plotting a coup against him, perhaps impatient to replace the “Great Helmsman” as China’s supreme leader. Whatever Lin’s knowledge or involvement, he suffered the consequences when he died in a plane crash as he was supposedly fleeing China en route to the Soviet Union. A substantial number of Lin’s supporters were reportedly purged following his mysterious death.

According to one recent assessment, Xi’s anticorruption campaign represents the largest systematic purge since Lin’s death and, according to new analysis from noted China scholar David Shambaugh, the largest in PRC history. Xi’s immediate predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, both used such purges sparingly. More to the point, neither Hu nor Jiang ever used them against the PLA in so daring a manner, probably because neither had the stature among top brass to do so. Even Deng Xiaoping, who like Mao was a paramount leader himself, never technically purged the PLA in the way Xi has done. It is often said that Deng “purged” fellow communist revolutionaries General Yang Shangkun and General Yang Baibing (the “Yang brothers”) after suspicions that they were trying to depose Jiang Zemin, who was then Communist Party general secretary. Deng forced Yang Shangkun to retire, and sidelined Yang Baibing by removing him from the CMC, in effect ending their influence over the PLA. But it is important to note that neither was arrested or expelled (i.e. purged) from the party. In fact, in the case of Yang Shangkun, he retained ceremonial honors until his death.

In contrast to Jiang’s approach, Xi’s anticorruption campaign has regularly featured expulsion from the party and harsh punishment. To be sure, Xi seems focused on cleaning up rampant corruption when deciding whether to purge military officers, whereas mere disagreement with Mao was often sufficient for removal—and in some cases far worse, with punishment so severe that it resulted in the demise of some of Mao’s ousted rivals. It would also appear that purges might not be the first go-to option, as Xi has relied on massive reshufflings of military officials to reduce their influence, echoing tactics that Deng Xiaoping employed as China’s top leader.



Returning Mao to the Forefront of Thought

Since Mao’s death in 1976, his successors have tended to emphasize pragmatic and scientific thinking over conducting daily business in the spirit of Maoist thought. Xi, however, believes that a lack of civilian leadership intervention, especially under Hu and Jiang, has resulted in a substantial drift of the PLA away from party oversight. This, in Xi’s view, explains why the PLA has become so pervasively corrupt. Xi therefore instills fear in his senior military officers by reminding them that his “core” leadership status allows him to intervene at will to curb the PLA’s excesses. Regardless of whether Xi finds any truth in Maoist thought, he appears to see some utility in exploiting a supposed lack of adherence to it as a way to cow the military.

Xi drew a direct line between Mao and the present at a major meeting in November 2014. In commemoration of the eighty-fifth anniversary of the so-called Gutian Congress, at which Mao first affirmed the party’s absolute control over the military in 1929, Xi convened 420 of his most senior officers to meet in the small town of Gutian in southeastern Fujian Province. To our knowledge, this was the first time a PRC leader reconvened military leadership at Gutian since Mao—symbolism that was certainly not lost on the top brass.

The atmospherics of the 2014 Gutian meeting was perhaps best captured by Dr. James Mulvenon, vice president for intelligence at Defense Group, Inc., who describes scenes of military officials who “gazed upon a statue of Mao Zedong ‘with reverence,’ dined on a likely Spartan representation of something called the ‘Red Army meal,’ studied historical documents, listened to lectures about ‘tradition,’ and saw ‘red movies.’” Mulvenon goes on to detail a scene in which “Xi climbed the 151-flight staircase of the Chairman Mao Memorial Garden, ‘respectfully laid a floral basket at Mao Zedong statue, personally smoothed out the ribbons on the floral basket, led the people to bow three times to Mao Zedong statue, paid homage to the statue, and deeply remembered the great exploits of the revolutionaries of the older generation.’”

Besides the obvious deference to Mao, Gutian’s message was also very much derived from Mao’s notion of the proper balance between the party and military. Prior reading material, for example, reaffirmed the unassailable and preeminent position the party has over the military. This set the stage for Xi to implicitly convey to all in attendance that they, too, could become victims of his anticorruption campaign, just as General Xu had a few months earlier, if they refused to “deeply reflect on the lessons learned and thoroughly exterminate its influence.” According to Mulvenon, Xu’s successful purge probably contained enough incriminating material to be used against everyone present at Gutian, which may be the most important source of Xi’s power over the PLA.



Establishment of the CMC Chairman Responsibility System

Finally, Xi replaced the “CMC Vice Chairman Responsibility System” with a new “CMC Chairman Responsibility System.” From Xi’s perspective, the CMC Vice Chairman Responsibility System featured Hu and Jiang as figureheads while the PLA itself handled most decisions, particularly important administrative and personnel issues, which were the genesis of precisely the types of corruption scandals that involved former CMC vice chairmen Xu and Guo. Formally announced as part of Xi’s structural military reforms in January, the new system grants Xi full authority to manage the PLA and to intervene personally when deemed necessary. According to one source, Xi spends a half a day per week on average in his CMC office addressing military affairs—a stark contrast to Hu Jintao, who rarely worked there.

Xi’s new, self-appointed direct involvement moves him one step closer to acquiring Mao’s unfettered access to and influence over the PLA. Because the CMC Chairman Responsibility System and the PLA’s organizational reforms abolished the PLA’s four general departments, this means that the CMC now has direct control over the PLA’s top commanders, making resistance to Xi’s directives, or perhaps even feigned compliance, more of a challenge. In addition, the system will include a new disciplinary committee charged with monitoring and punishing corrupt PLA officials.



Implications

Xi’s tactics for handling the PLA, which echo Mao in certain respects, could have several significant consequences. First, Xi’s approach is not without its risks. The intense pressure wrought from Xi’s anticorruption campaign could foment rising dissatisfaction with and opposition to Xi’s leadership. Last month, for example, disaffected Communist Party members reportedly penned an open letter to Xi calling for his resignation. It was published briefly online and then removed by authorities. Hostility toward Xi’s style of rule seems real, and some observers have speculated that in an extreme but highly unlikely event, Xi might even become the victim of a coup attempt. After all, it was Mao’s defense minister Lin Biao who allegedly considered removing Mao because of the dire conditions created by the ideological witch hunt of the day—the Cultural Revolution. It would be extremely difficult, however, to muster enough credible opposition to Xi given his robust monitoring of corruption and disloyalty in the PLA ranks. Even if a coup is far-fetched, however, tensions could rise between the PLA and Xi in the coming years if officers perceive that his approach to the military is aggressive and high-handed.

It will also be instructive to see how Xi’s reassertion of paramount leader-type power over the PLA plays out for his successor. The general trend after Deng had been to increasingly leave the PLA to its own devices. Jiang ordered the PLA to get out of business and focus on improving its professionalism and combat capabilities, but by the time the torch had passed to Hu, he had very little leverage over the military and had to find ways to work with senior military officials that were mutually beneficial in nature. Like Jiang, Hu lacked any military experience and did not have anything approaching the stature of Mao and Deng, who were vaunted communist revolutionaries. This made his time as China’s commander-in-chief exceptionally challenging.

The trend has certainly reversed under Xi, but will more personalized control over the PLA continue after him? The critical factor in answering this question may be whether Xi’s successor is the scion of a well-respected communist revolutionary or otherwise possesses ties to the PLA. Xi is the son of a former revolutionary and served briefly in a secretarial position for a top CMC official. It is difficult to imagine that a future leader would have such personal control over the military without connections to it or the PRC’s revolutionary past.

Another important question that we can probably put to rest, at least for now, is whether the PLA is a rogue actor in the Chinese system. Clearly, the military is more closely managed under Xi than at any time since Mao. And now that the general departments have been reconstituted and placed directly under the CMC, commanders may have to respond directly to a new joint staff or even the CMC itself. On its face, this new chain of command might be a hindrance to decisionmaking downrange, whether pertaining to the South China Sea, Taiwan or elsewhere. To be sure, Xi’s new war zone commands—announced as part of the sweeping military reforms—are supposed to empower, not limit, commanders to make critical decisions. We will have to wait and see how this dynamic progresses.

Finally, despite some speculation to the contrary, Xi’s assertion of control over the military is unlikely to negatively impact the PLA’s ongoing modernization efforts. Part of Xi’s “China Dream” is to produce a strong military capable of deterring, or if necessary taking on powerful potential adversaries including even the United States. Xi seems intent on keeping his anticorruption campaign and homage to Mao severely circumscribed, to focus on combating the problem of corruption and rooting out any disloyalty or opposition to reform within the ranks. Mao, on the other hand, sought ideological purity as defined by him at the expense of PLA modernization and professionalization efforts.

To date, there is no evidence that Xi is considering this path. In fact, his military reforms suggest quite the opposite: Xi wants a PLA that demonstrates utmost loyalty to the party, but he also wants a far more competent and operationally capable PLA by 2020—one that is commensurate with China’s status as a major world power and capable of protecting China’s regional and global interests.

Derek Grossman is a senior project associate at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. Michael Chase is a senior political scientist at RAND and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/04/15/how_north_korea_got_its_made_in_china_nukes.html

April 15, 2016

How North Korea got its "Made in China" Nukes

By Peter Navarro

Video

INTERVIEWER: I mean, they are going to get pretty good at hitting Los Angeles at some point.

DAVID LAMPTON: That’s probably undeniably true over a long run, but you still have to deal with the reality:what are you prepared to do to prevent that?


The wild child of North Korea – Dictator-in-Chief Kim Jong-un – has overseen four nuclear tests to date, the earliest in 2006 and the latest just this year. It is now only a matter of time until Pyongyang can order direct strikes on Seoul, Tokyo, or Seattle.

Just how did the Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. let North Korea get the bomb? In my book/film Crouching Tiger, the Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz, Princeton’s Aaron Friedberg, Forbes columnist Gordon Chang, and the Potomac Foundation’s Phillip Karber trace the origins of North Korea’s nukes right to China’s doorstep.

GERTZ: China is a major proliferator of nuclear weapons technology. Back in 2003 when Libya gave up its nuclear programs, among the documents that were discovered were Chinese language documents showing how to make a small nuclear warhead.

CHANG: China transferred all that Pakistan needed for a splendid nuclear weapon; and then the Pakistanis merchandised that around the world, including to the Iranians. We did nothing about it.

KARBER: China stole some of our nuclear designs and helped Pakistan develop its own nuclear weapons in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And we know that because Pakistan then gave those designs to the Libyans, and we found them in Libya. It was our designs with Chinese characteristics.

FRIEDBERG: So China perhaps has gotten a little tougher about proliferation than it was 20 years ago. But most of the major proliferation problems in the world right now track back to China.

GERTZ: So secrets were stolen by China in the 1990’s. Those secrets were then passed on to China’s ally Pakistan and proliferated around the world, including to the most dangerous rogue states today, Iran and North Korea.

While China, Iran, and Pakistan all have their fingerprints on North Korea’s nukes, the biggest dupe of all in this “Mouse That Roared” set piece may well be former President George W. Bush. It is by now conventional wisdom that Bush committed a tremendous strategic blunder by putting far more emphasis on the invasion of Iraq than the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

What is far less known is Bush’s incompetence in the surveilling of North Korea nuclear weapons program during his 2003 Iraqi invasion. As Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon explains in my book/film Crouching Tiger:


"If there was a moment for preemption in North Korea it was 2003 when the Bush administration was more focused on Iraq. Up until 2003, the North Korean bomb material was all in reactor fuel inside a nuclear reactor and in a place where it could not be immediately converted into a weapon. And we knew where it was, and we could watch with satellites, and also inspectors.

Then, the North Koreans kicked out the inspectors, reprocessed the plutonium, and separated it chemically from all the other reactor waste products. At that point, the fissile material became small enough amount that they can put it wherever they want. So we don’t know where it is any longer. And they have probably ten bombs worth of material."

As a result of Bush’s Middle East distraction – and China’s supplying of nuclear technologies to North Korea – Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. are now faced with a nuclear fait accompli. And here’s the biggest folly of all: Despite China’s prominent role in North Korea’s dangerous proliferation, a naïve White House still clings to the unrealizable hope that somehow Beijing will rein its Wild Child.

Against the backdrop of this increasingly perilous situation, it is only appropriate that Gordon Chang and Bill Gertz, along with Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center have these last words from Crouching Tiger:

CHANG: For more than a decade North Korea and Iran have essentially had a joint venture on nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles, and the Chinese have been in the background aiding North Korea in proliferation. This is the nuclear chain reaction.

GERTZ: The Chinese have been the main suppliers of missile technology, and now we have North Korea, a rogue state, which has threatened to fire nuclear missiles at the United States with Chinese made ICBM mobile launchers.

CHANG: The United States has been hesitant to confront China over proliferation. We don’t want to anger Beijing leaders. But when some American city is a radioactive slab, it's not going be good enough for an American leader to say: “I could have done something about this, but I didn’t want to anger the Chinese.”

FISHER: When North Korea and Iran begin selling nuclear missiles to other hostile regimes, then the United States is going to be facing a virtual global whack-a-mole challenge, endless wars, endless challenges, with nuclear armed states.

CHANG: We should be demanding that China stop support of North Korea’s nuclear weapons proliferation. China permits Iranian technicians and scientists to transit through its airport, on the way to Pyongyang and back. Every single test of a North Korean nuclear weapon has had Iranian technicians onsite in North Korea. You know, we talk about these Geneva negotiations with Iran, hoping to put the Iranian program in freeze. And we think that if we come to a deal with Iran that we’ll be able to do so.

The problem is that while we're talking to the Iranians, we have Iranian technicians and scientists in North Korea working on nukes. Take a look at a map, how do the Iranians get to North Korea? Well, we know that they’ve been transmitting through the Beijing airport. We know this. We track these guys. And what do we do? We do nothing about it. So we're not freezing the Iranian program at all, it's going full speed in the hills of North Korea.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://ramenir.com/2016/04/14/nord-stream-ii-another-threat-to-the-eus-fragile-unity/

Nord Stream II: Another Threat to the EU’s Fragile Unity

Posted on April 14, 2016
by Fiona Wong

Despite commitments to solidarity under the Treaty of Lisbon, energy policy remains problematic for the EU regarding the primacy of national interests and preferences for bilateralism over multilateralism. Recent debates over Nord Stream II epitomise the challenges to solidarity between member states as well as posing a significant obstacle to the EU’s Energy Union strategy.

Nord Stream II is the proposed sub-sea pipeline to provide an additional route for Russian gas to be delivered to Germany via the Baltic Sea. If operationalised, it would be the second pipeline built by Russia’s Gazprom and Germany’s BASF and E.ON energy companies. Although primarily being a Russian-German collaboration, a number of other energy companies have partnered with Gazprom, to include Austria’s OMV, France’s Engie and Royal Dutch Shell. The pipeline is intended to run parallel to and double the volume of its successor, the Nord Stream pipeline, which was completed in 2011.

Not unlike its predecessor, Nord Stream II is a highly controversial project, which has brought to light a number of significant cleavages between EU member states in their support for its implementation. Countries such as Germany and companies in the group of Nord Stream II partners have argued that the project will mitigate the problem of declining indigenous European gas production, help meet Europe’s future consumption of natural gas (which will likely increase due to it being preferable to coal in realising climate change objectives), and alleviate the supposed supply risk by decreasing dependence on the Ukrainian transit route. The development of the pipeline is contested, however, by a number of European governments who believe that Nord Stream II lacks an economic rationale and is driven more by a political agenda with “potentially destabilising geopolitical consequences.”

Indeed, although the Nord Stream route would cost less for Gazprom to ship gas directly into North-Western Europe given that Russia’s new production base in Yamal is closer, a solely economic justification is questionable. The fact that Gazprom is seeking to expand capacity by constructing new pipelines, when half of the existing transit capacity from Russia to Europe is currently not utilised, brings to question the dominant motivation for the project. As such, it is argued that the primary logic for Nord Stream II is to bypass supposed “unreliable” transit routes (i.e. Ukraine) rather than diversifying sources or routes of supply.

In this regard, it is no surprise that the countries that have signed the letter objecting to Nord Stream II are largely composed of central and eastern European nations (the Visegrad Group, as well as Estonia, Latvia, Romania and Lithuania). As well as citing the absence of an economic justification for the project, these countries stipulate that there are a myriad of political and legal grounds for objection.

Contrary to the EU’s stated aims to diversify supply routes, Nord Stream II would arguably increase dependence on Russian gas. As Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, stated last December, Nord Stream II “would increase Europe’s dependence on one supplier and concentrate 80 percent of Russian gas imports on one route.” For example, in Germany, Gazprom’s market share would actually increase from 40% to 60%. Consequently, in addition to not furthering the objectives of the EU’s Energy Union regarding diversification, opponents have also cited that Nord Stream II would result in Gazprom holding too much power in the market as a single actor. Nord Stream II is not only incongruous with the commitment to diversify supply and decrease energy dependency, but the reliance on Russian shipments arguably undermines the EU’s sanctions on Russia introduced in 2014 in response to the country’s aggression in Ukraine. German support for the project is certainly extremely difficult to reconcile with Angela Merkel’s tough stance regarding Putin’s actions in Ukraine, with Italy’s Matteo Renzi accusing Germany of “double standards” in such an approach.

Moreover, legal concerns are salient in objections to the project. The signatories of the letter sent to Juncker last month requested that Nord Stream II’s compliance with existing energy laws be further scrutinised. Under the EU’s 2009 Gas Directive and its accompanying legislation, the Third Energy Package (TEP), gas suppliers to the EU must separate ownership and distribution assets. It was due to such legal restrictions that Gazprom abandoned the South Stream pipeline (which was intended to travel via the Black Sea). The intention to go-ahead with Nord Stream II after recently cancelling the construction of the South Stream pipeline has also fed into accusations that it is primarily a political rather than commercial project. Proponents of Nord Stream II, however, have argued that it is outside the scope of the principles of the Third Energy Package (TEP) as it is an offshore pipeline from a non-EU and non-European Economic Area country.

In addition, given the geographic location of the proposed pipeline, a number of governments have cited the uneven economic repercussions of its construction. German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has sought to assuage concerns by stating that Nord Stream II will only proceed if gas flows through Ukraine continue after its transit contract with Russia expires in 2019. By reducing both dependence on and use of the Ukrainian transit route, however, Nord Stream II is set to greatly damage Ukrainian revenues which are currently worth more than $2 billion a year. Moreover, given that energy supply is largely tethered to geography, decreasing dependence on Ukraine as a route of supply would not only cause an economic blow to the country, but would also greatly inhibit its geostrategic leverage with both the EU and Russia. Furthermore, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia would also be set to lose out economically due to the billions lost in transit fees.

As these objections demonstrate, the debates over the construction of Nord Stream II has divided the EU, with a number of countries arguing that it not only ignores the objectives of the Energy Union framework, but serves individual (namely German) national interest at the expense of a unified response that takes into account Central and Eastern European concerns. As Romas Svedas, an independent Lithuanian energy expert at Vilnius University, has commented:


“By creating additional gas transportation capacities, Russia benefits from the gas exports to Western Europe, but, at the same time – note, with Europe’s nodding – retains the geopolitical grip on eastern and central Europe”

By maintaining gas flows to “core EU states,” a number of Central and Eastern European countries fear that Russia will be able to more readily use its energy resources as a means to exert political pressure. As the CEO of Ukraine’s state oil firm Naftogaz commented this month, Nord Stream II is seen as a “Trojan Horse” rather than a commercial project that would not only damage Ukraine economically, but be used as “geopolitical blackmail.” Indeed, given Russia’s explicit commitment to utilise ‘great energy resources as an instrument of…internal and external policy’ in the Energy Strategy of 2003, as well as Russia’s track record of utilising this tool against Ukraine and the subsequent spill-over effect into the EU, such fears are not without foundation.

There exists, therefore, a kind of “internal dichotomy” between EU member states due to different levels of energy dependence and risk, economic repercussions due to geographic location, as well as different historical experiences with and perceptions of Russia as an energy partner which, for many Central and Eastern European countries, are premised on suspicion of Russia’s use of energy supply as a foreign policy tool. Indeed, geopolitical arguments and Nord Stream II’s claimed incompatibility with the EU’s Energy Union framework have come to the fore in opponents’ objections to the project. In this regard, the notion of doubling the supply from one source along one route is said to be clearly politically motivated by undermining the aims of diversifying supply, increasing dependence on Russia at a time when policy vis-à-vis Russia is paramount given the conflict in Ukraine, and deliberately side-stepping and jeopardising the position of Central and Eastern European countries. In contrast, proponents have highlighted Nord Stream II’s commerciality and downplayed claims of geopolitical manoeuvring. As Alex Barnes, the head of regulatory affairs for Gazprom Marketing and Trading, has argued, the “idea that bringing gas into Germany isolates Eastern Europe or Poland is not true [for the] European internal market is no longer about point-to-point pipeline routes.”

As such, it is evident that hopes for solidarity in the EU is once again under severe pressure. At a time when a trusted and diplomatic Germany is greatly needed in the EU, the strong support for Nord Stream II has been heavily criticised by Central and Eastern European countries, as well as Southern member states such as Italy, who were invested in the South Stream project. Therefore, whatever the final decision may be following the European Commission’s investigation on Nord Stream II’s compliance with EU rules, it is clear that Nord Stream II will continue to act as a divider between EU member states, thus posing an additional challenge to the EU’s fragile unity which is already beset by the refugee crisis and the looming possibility of Brexit.

***

Born in Singapore but raised in Britain, Fiona Wong completed her Bachelor of Science in Politics with International Relations at the University of Bath, before recently finishing her M.A. in European Politics, Policy and Society at the University of Bath, Univerzita Karlova v Praze and Università degli Studi di Siena. She currently lives and works in Tuscany, and is seeking an opportunity to further explore identity politics, immigration, and asylum policy. Her Twitter is @caipirinha27.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/military/u-s-military-equal-threat/

A U.S. Military Equal to the Threat

Max Boot / Apr. 14, 2016

The U.S. Navy’s supremacy at sea — a reality since 1942 — is being challenged more than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Just a few days ago Russian Su-24 fighters and a KA-27 Helix helicopter repeatedly buzzed a U.S. Navy destroyer steaming in international waters in the Baltic Sea. The Navy reports: “The Russian aircraft flew in a simulated attack profile and failed to respond to repeated safety advisories in both English and Russian. USS Donald Cook’s commanding officer deemed several of these maneuvers as unsafe and unprofessional.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China is ramping up its offensive to secure control of the South China Sea. There is new evidence of how China is building up its military arsenal on Woody Island, part of the Paracel chain in the South China Sea about 250 miles southeast of China’s Hainan Island, home to a major Chinese naval base. Satellite imagery shows the presence on Woody Island of two J-11 fighter jets, comparable to the U.S. F-15 or F-18. There is also a new HQ-9 fire-control radar system on the island, comparable to Russia’s S-300, along with surface to air missile launchers that can target U.S. aircraft from 125 miles away.

China is also apparently planning to construct a new island at Scarborough Shoal that would allow it to create a military base only 120 miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon, where U.S. aircraft are now returning after having left Clark Air Force Base in the early 1990s.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter has just visited the Philippines and he is working to strengthen military cooperation with our oldest ally in Asia. The U.S. will now rotate military forces back through the Philippines and conduct joint naval and air patrols with our Philippine partner, who lacks the resources to deal with the Chinese threat on their own. The U.S. Navy is also undertaking some freedom of navigation patrols through the South China Sea to make clear the U.S. doesn’t recognize China’s claims to sovereignty.

There is more that can and should be done on both counts — to strengthen the U.S. military presence in the Philippines and to more regularly challenge China’s claims. Two patrols in six months isn’t enough!

But the largest priority is one that nobody seems to be discussing in Washington: It is the urgent need to reverse budget cuts that have cut the end-strength of all of our armed forces. The Army has been particularly hard hit, which makes it harder to deal with the growing Russian conventional threat in Europe. But while the Navy hasn’t suffered the kind of drastic downsizing that the Army is undergoing, it has become much too small to handle all of its missions. There are currently only 272 deployable Navy ships. Based on exiting requirements the Navy should have 350 ships. Unless the Navy is increased in size, it will be increasingly difficult to counter China’s power-grab which is made possible by double-digit growth in China’s defense budget every year.

It is imperative that any increase in the size of the Navy not come out of the hide of the other services, which need to grow too. Can we afford to spend more on defense? Absolutely! We are currently spending only 16 percent of the federal budget and 3.5 percent of GDP — far less than we did for decades during the Cold War.

The argument is made that we already spend far more than China; our defense budget is nearly $600 billion, theirs is around $130 billion (if you believe official figures). The U.S. has ten aircraft carriers; China only one. But that’s comparing apples and kumquats. The U.S. needs to maintain military strength everywhere from the Baltic to the South China Sea. China need only dominate its nearby waters. And China doesn’t need floating aircraft carriers when it can convert islands in the middle of the South China Sea into air bases. Moreover, China doesn’t have to worry about the ballooning personnel costs and health-care costs that are swallowing an ever-larger share of our defense spending.

It won’t happen in this administration, but the next president will need to rebuild American military strength so as to prevent rivals such as Russia and China from upsetting the delicate balance of power in Europe and Asia.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-13/once-and-future-superpower

Essay April 13, 2016

The Once and Future Superpower

Why China Won’t Overtake the United States

By Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth

After two and a half decades, is the United States’ run as the world’s sole superpower coming to an end? Many say yes, seeing a rising China ready to catch up to or even surpass the United States in the near future. By many measures, after all, China’s economy is on track to become the world’s biggest, and even if its growth slows, it will still outpace that of the United States for many years. Its coffers overflowing, Beijing has used its new wealth to attract friends, deter enemies, modernize its military, and aggressively assert sovereignty claims in its periphery. For many, therefore, the question is not whether China will become a superpower but just how soon.

But this is wishful, or fearful, thinking. Economic growth no longer translates as directly into military power as it did in the past, which means that it is now harder than ever for rising powers to rise and established ones to fall. And China—the only country with the raw potential to become a true global peer of the United States—also faces a more daunting challenge than previous rising states because of how far it lags behind technologically. Even though the United States’ economic dominance has eroded from its peak, the country’s military superiority is not going anywhere, nor is the globe-spanning alliance structure that constitutes the core of the existing liberal international order (unless Washington unwisely decides to throw it away). Rather than expecting a power transition in international politics, everyone should start getting used to a world in which the United States remains the sole superpower for decades to come.

Lasting preeminence will help the United States ward off the greatest traditional international danger, war between the world’s major powers. And it will give Washington options for dealing with nonstate threats such as terrorism and transnational challenges such as climate change. But it will also impose burdens of leadership and force choices among competing priorities, particularly as finances grow more straitened. With great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes, and playing its leading role successfully will require Washington to display a maturity that U.S. foreign policy has all too often lacked.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

In forecasts of China’s future power position, much has been made of the country’s pressing domestic challenges: its slowing economy, polluted environment, widespread corruption, perilous financial markets, nonexistent social safety net, rapidly aging population, and restive middle class. But as harmful as these problems are, China’s true Achilles’ heel on the world stage is something else: its low level of technological expertise compared with the United States’. Relative to past rising powers, China has a much wider technological gap to close with the leading power. China may export container after container of high-tech goods, but in a world of globalized production, that doesn’t reveal much. Half of all Chinese exports consist of what economists call “processing trade,” meaning that parts are imported into China for assembly and then exported afterward. And the vast majority of these Chinese exports are directed not by Chinese firms but by corporations from more developed countries.

When looking at measures of technological prowess that better reflect the national origin of the expertise, China’s true position becomes clear. World Bank data on payments for the use of intellectual property, for example, indicate that the United States is far and away the leading source of innovative technologies, boasting $128 billion in receipts in 2013—more than four times as much as the country in second place, Japan. China, by contrast, imports technologies on a massive scale yet received less than $1 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of its intellectual property. Another good indicator of the technological gap is the number of so-called triadic patents, those registered in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2012, nearly 14,000 such patents originated in the United States, compared with just under 2,000 in China. The distribution of highly influential articles in science and engineering—those in the top one percent of citations, as measured by the National Science Foundation—tells the same story, with the United States accounting for almost half of these articles, more than eight times China’s share. So does the breakdown of Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine. Since 1990, 114 have gone to U.S.-based researchers. China-based researchers have received two.

Precisely because the Chinese economy is so unlike the U.S. economy, the measure fueling expectations of a power shift, GDP, greatly underestimates the true economic gap between the two countries. For one thing, the immense destruction that China is now wreaking on its environment counts favorably toward its GDP, even though it will reduce economic capacity over time by shortening life spans and raising cleanup and health-care costs. For another thing, GDP was originally designed to measure mid-twentieth-century manufacturing economies, and so the more knowledge-based and global*ized a country’s production is, the more its GDP underestimates its economy’s true size.

A new statistic developed by the UN suggests the degree to which GDP inflates China’s relative power. Called “inclusive wealth,” this measure represents economists’ most systematic effort to date to calculate a state’s wealth. As a UN report explained, it counts a country’s stock of assets in three areas: “(i) manufactured capital (roads, buildings, machines, and equipment), (ii) human capital (skills, education, health), and (iii) natural capital (sub-soil resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).” Added up, the United States’ inclusive wealth comes to almost $144 trillion—4.5 times China’s $32 trillion.

The true size of China’s economy relative to the United States’ may lie somewhere in between the numbers provided by GDP and inclusive wealth, and admittedly, the latter measure has yet to receive the same level of scrutiny as GDP. The problem with GDP, however, is that it measures a flow (typically, the value of goods and services produced in a year), whereas inclusive wealth measures a stock. As The Economist put it, “Gauging an economy by its GDP is like judging a company by its quarterly profits, without ever peeking at its balance-sheet.” Because inclusive wealth measures the pool of resources a government can conceivably draw on to achieve its strategic objectives, it is the more useful metric when thinking about geopolitical competition.

But no matter how one compares the size of the U.S. and Chinese economies, it is clear that the United States is far more capable of converting its resources into military might. In the past, rising states had levels of technological prowess similar to those of leading ones. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the United States didn’t lag far behind the United Kingdom in terms of technology, nor did Germany lag far behind the erstwhile Allies during the interwar years, nor was the Soviet Union backward technologically compared with the United States during the early Cold War. This meant that when these challengers rose economically, they could soon mount a serious military challenge to the dominant power. China’s relative technological backwardness today, however, means that even if its economy continues to gain ground, it will not be easy for it to catch up militarily and become a true global strategic peer, as opposed to a merely a major player in its own neighborhood.

BARRIERS TO ENTRY

The technological and economic differences between China and the United States wouldn’t matter much if all it took to gain superpower status were the ability to use force locally. But what makes the United States a superpower is its ability to operate globally, and the bar for that capability is high. It means having what the political scientist Barry Posen has called “command of the commons”—that is, control over the air, space, and the open sea, along with the necessary infrastructure for managing these domains. When one measures the 14 categories of systems that create this capability (everything from nuclear attack submarines to satellites to transport aircraft), what emerges is an overwhelming U.S. advantage in each area, the result of decades of advances on multiple fronts. It would take a very long time for China to approach U.S. power on any of these fronts, let alone all of them.

For one thing, the United States has built up a massive scientific and industrial base. China is rapidly enhancing its technological inputs, increasing its R & D spending and its numbers of graduates with degrees in science and engineering. But there are limits to how fast any country can leap forward in such matters, and there are various obstacles in China’s way—such as a lack of effective intellectual property protections and inefficient methods of allocating capital—that will be extremely hard to change given its rigid political system. Adding to the difficulty, China is chasing a moving target. In 2012, the United States spent $79 billion on military R & D, more than 13 times as much as China’s estimated amount, so even rapid Chinese advances might be insufficient to close the gap.

Then there are the decades the United States has spent procuring advanced weapons systems, which have grown only more complex over time. In the 1960s, aircraft took about five years to develop, but by the 1990s, as the number of parts and lines of code ballooned, the figure reached ten years. Today, it takes 15 to 20 years to design and build the most advanced fighter aircraft, and military satellites can take even longer. So even if another country managed to build the scientific and industrial base to develop the many types of weapons that give the United States command of the commons, there would be a lengthy lag before it could actually possess them. Even Chinese defense planners recognize the scale of the challenge.

Command of the commons also requires the ability to supervise a wide range of giant defense projects. For all the hullabaloo over the evils of the military-industrial complex and the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the Pentagon, in the United States, research labs, contractors, and bureaucrats have painstakingly acquired this expertise over many decades, and their Chinese counterparts do not yet have it. This kind of “learning by doing” experience resides in organizations, not in individuals. It can be transferred only through demonstration and instruction, so cybertheft or other forms of espionage are not an effective shortcut for acquiring it.

This is not your grandfather’s power transition.

China’s defense industry is still in its infancy, and as the scholar Richard Bitzinger and his colleagues have concluded, “Aside from a few pockets of excellence such as ballistic missiles, the Chinese military-industrial complex has appeared to demonstrate few capacities for designing and producing relatively advanced conventional weapon systems.” For example, China still cannot mass-produce high-performance aircraft engines, despite the immense resources it has thrown at the effort, and relies instead on second-rate Russian models. In other areas, Beijing has not even bothered competing. Take undersea warfare. China is poorly equipped for antisubmarine warfare and is doing very little to improve. And only now is the country capable of producing nuclear-powered attack submarines that are comparable in quietness to the kinds that the U.S. Navy commissioned in the 1950s. Since then, however, the U.S. government has invested hundreds of billions of dollars and six decades of effort in its current generation of Virginia-class submarines, which have achieved absolute levels of silencing.

Finally, it takes a very particular set of skills and infrastructure to actually use all these weapons. Employing them is difficult not just because the weapons themselves tend to be so complex but also because they typically need to be used in a coordinated manner. It is an incredibly complicated endeavor, for example, to deploy a carrier battle group; the many associated ships and aircraft must work together in real time. Even systems that may seem simple require a complex surrounding architecture in order to be truly effective. Drones, for example, work best when a military has the highly trained personnel to operate them and the technological and organizational capacity to rapidly gather, process, and act on information collected from them. Developing the necessary infrastructure to seek command of the commons would take any military a very long time. And since the task places a high premium on flexibility and delegation, China’s centralized and hierarchical forces are particularly ill suited for it.

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT

In the 1930s alone, Japan escaped the depths of depression and morphed into a rampaging military machine, Germany transformed from the disarmed loser of World War I into a juggernaut capable of conquering Europe, and the Soviet Union recovered from war and revolution to become a formidable land power. The next decade saw the United States’ own sprint from military also-ran to global superpower, with a nuclear Soviet Union close on its heels. Today, few seriously anticipate another world war, or even another cold war, but many observers argue that these past experiences reveal just how quickly countries can become dangerous once they try to extract military capabilities from their economies.

But what is taking place now is not your grandfather’s power transition. One can debate whether China will soon reach the first major milestone on the journey from great power to superpower: having the requisite economic resources. But a giant economy alone won’t make China the world’s second superpower, nor would overcoming the next big hurdle, attaining the requisite technological capacity. After that lies the challenge of transforming all this latent power into the full range of systems needed for global power projection and learning how to use them. Each of these steps is time consuming and fraught with difficulty. As a result, China will, for a long time, continue to hover somewhere between a great power and a superpower. You might call it “an emerging potential superpower”: thanks to its economic growth, China has broken free from the great-power pack, but it still has a long way to go before it might gain the economic and technological capacity to become a superpower.

China’s quest for superpower status is undermined by something else, too: weak incentives to make the sacrifices required. The United States owes its far-reaching military capabilities to the existential imperatives of the Cold War. The country would never have borne the burden it did had policymakers not faced the challenge of balancing the Soviet Union, a superpower with the potential to dominate Eurasia. (Indeed, it is no surprise that two and a half decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, it is Russia that possesses the second-greatest military capability in the world.) Today, China faces nothing like the Cold War pressures that led the United States to invest so much in its military. The United States is a far less threatening superpower than the Soviet Union was: however aggravating Chinese policymakers find U.S. foreign policy, it is unlikely to engender the level of fear that motivated Washington during the Cold War.

Stacking the odds against China even more, the United States has few incentives to give up power, thanks to the web of alliances it has long boasted. A list of U.S. allies reads as a who’s who of the world’s most advanced economies, and these partners have lowered the price of maintaining the United States’ superpower status. U.S. defense spending stood at around three percent of GDP at the end of the 1990s, rose to around five percent in the next decade on account of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has now fallen back to close to three percent. Washington has been able to sustain a global military capacity with relatively little effort thanks in part to the bases its allies host and the top-end weapons they help develop. China’s only steadfast ally is North Korea, which is often more trouble than it is worth.

Given the barriers thwarting China’s path to superpower status, as well as the low incentives for trying to overcome them, the future of the international system hinges most on whether the United States continues to bear the much lower burden of sustaining what we and others have called “deep engagement,” the globe-girdling grand strategy it has followed for some 70 years. And barring some odd change of heart that results in a true abnegation of its global role (as opposed to overwrought, politicized charges sometimes made about its already having done so), Washington will be well positioned for decades to maintain the core military capabilities, alliances, and commitments that secure key regions, backstop the global economy, and foster cooperation on transnational problems.

The benefits of this grand strategy can be difficult to discern, especially in light of the United States’ foreign misadventures in recent years. Fiascos such as the invasion of Iraq stand as stark reminders of the difficulty of using force to alter domestic politics abroad. But power is as much about preventing unfavorable outcomes as it is about causing favorable ones, and here Washington has done a much better job than most Americans appreciate.

For a largely satisfied power leading the international system, having enough strength to deter or block challengers is in fact more valuable than having the ability to improve one’s position further on the margins. A crucial objective of U.S. grand strategy over the decades has been to prevent a much more dangerous world from emerging, and its success in this endeavor can be measured largely by the absence of outcomes common to history: important regions destabilized by severe security dilemmas, tattered alliances unable to contain breakout challengers, rapid weapons proliferation, great-power arms races, and a descent into competitive economic or military blocs.

A world of lasting U.S. military preeminence and declining U.S. economic dominance will test the United States’ capacity for restraint.

Were Washington to truly pull back from the world, more of these challenges would emerge, and transnational threats would likely loom even larger than they do today. Even if such threats did not grow, the task of addressing them would become immeasurably harder if the United States had to grapple with a much less stable global order at the same time. And as difficult as it sometimes is today for the United States to pull together coalitions to address transnational challenges, it would be even harder to do so if the country abdicated its leadership role and retreated to tend its garden, as a growing number of analysts and policymakers—and a large swath of the public—are now calling for.

LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION

Ever since the Soviet Union’s demise, the United States’ dramatic power advantage over other states has been accompanied by the risk of self-inflicted wounds, as occurred in Iraq. But the slippage in the United States’ economic position may have the beneficial effect of forcing U.S. leaders to focus more on the core mission of the country’s grand strategy rather than being sucked into messy peripheral conflicts. Indeed, that has been the guiding logic behind President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Nonetheless, a world of lasting U.S. military preeminence and declining U.S. economic dominance will continue to test the United States’ capacity for restraint, in four main ways.

First is the temptation to bully or exploit American allies in the pursuit of self-interested gain. U.S. allies are dependent on Washington in many ways, and leaning on them to provide favors in return—whether approving of controversial U.S. policies, refraining from activities the United States opposes, or agreeing to lopsided terms in mutually beneficial deals—seems like something only a chump would forgo. (Think of the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s frequent claims that the United States always loses in its dealings with foreigners, including crucial allies, and that he would restore the country’s ability to win.) But the basic contract at the heart of the contemporary international order is that if its members put aside the quest for relative military advantage, join a dense web of institutional networks, and agree to play by common rules, then the United States will not take advantage of its dominance to extract undue returns from its allies. It would be asking too much to expect Washington to never use its leverage to seek better deals, and a wide range of presidents—including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Obama—have done so at various times. But if Washington too often uses its power to achieve narrowly self-interested gains, rather than to protect and advance the system as a whole, it will run a real risk of eroding the legitimacy of both its leadership and the existing order.

Second, the United States will be increasingly tempted to overreact when other states—namely, China—use their growing economic clout on the world stage. Most of the recent rising powers of note, including Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, were stronger militarily than economically. China, by contrast, will for decades be stronger economically than militarily. This is a good thing, since military challenges to global order can turn ugly quickly. But it means that China will mount economic challenges instead, and these will need to be handled wisely. Most of China’s efforts along these lines will likely involve only minor or cosmetic alterations to the existing order, important for burnishing Beijing’s prestige but not threatening to the order’s basic arrangements or principles. Washington should respond to these gracefully and with forbearance, recognizing that paying a modest price for including Beijing within the order is preferable to risking provoking a more fundamental challenge to the structure in general.

The recent fracas over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a good example of how not to behave. China proposed the AIIB in 2013 as a means to bolster its status and provide investment in infrastructure in Asia. Although its criteria for loans might turn out to be less constructive than desired, it is not likely to do major harm to the region or undermine the structure of the global economy. And yet the United States responded by launching a public diplomatic campaign to dissuade its allies from joining. They balked at U.S. opposition and signed up eagerly. By its reflexive opposition both to a relatively constructive Chinese initiative and to its allies’ participation in it, Washington created an unnecessary zero-sum battle that ended in a humiliating diplomatic defeat. (A failure by the U.S. Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership as negotiated, meanwhile, would be an even greater fiasco, leading to serious questions abroad about U.S. global leadership.)

Third, the United States will still face the temptation that always accompanies power, to intervene in places where its core national interests are not in play (or to expand the definition of its core national interests so much as to hollow out the concept). That temptation can exist in the midst of a superpower struggle—the United States got bogged down in Vietnam during the Cold War, as did the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—and it clearly exists today, at a time when the United States has no peer rivals. Obama has carefully guarded against this temptation. He attracted much criticism for elevating “Don’t do stupid stuff” to a grand-strategic maxim. But if doing stupid stuff threatens the United States’ ability to sustain its grand strategy and associated global presence, then he had a point. Missing, though, was a corollary: “Keep your eye on the ball.” And for nearly seven decades, that has meant continuing Washington’s core mission of fostering stability in key regions and keeping the global economy and wider order humming.

Finally, Washington will need to avoid adopting overly aggressive military postures even when core interests are at stake, such as with China’s increasingly assertive stance in its periphery. It is true that Beijing’s “anti-access/area-denial” capabilities have greatly raised the costs and risks of operating U.S. aircraft and surface ships (but not submarines) near China. How Washington should respond to Beijing’s newfound local military capability, however, depends on what Washington’s strategic goals are. To regain all the military freedom of action the United States enjoyed during its extraordinary dominance throughout the 1990s would indeed be difficult, and the actions necessary would increase the risk of future confrontations. Yet if Washington’s goals are more limited—securing regional allies and sustaining a favorable institutional and economic order—then the challenge should be manageable.

By adopting its own area-denial strategy, the United States could still deter Chinese aggression and protect U.S. allies.

By adopting its own area-denial strategy, for example, the United States could still deter Chinese aggression and protect U.S. allies despite China’s rising military power. Unlike the much-discussed Air-Sea Battle doctrine for a Pacific conflict, this approach would not envision hostilities rapidly escalating to strikes on the Chinese mainland. Rather, it would be designed to curtail China’s ability during a conflict to operate within what is commonly known as “the first island chain,” encompassing parts of Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Under this strategy, the United States and its allies would employ the same mix of capabilities—such as mines and mobile antiship missiles—that China itself has used to push U.S. surface ships and aircraft away from its coast. And it could turn the tables and force China to compete in areas where it remains very weak, most notably, undersea warfare.

The premise of such a strategy is that even if China were able to deny U.S. surface forces and aircraft access to the area near its coast, it would not be able to use that space as a launching pad for projecting military power farther during a conflict. China’s coastal waters, in this scenario, would turn into a sort of no man’s sea, in which neither state could make much use of surface ships or aircraft. This would be a far cry from the situation that prevailed during the 1990s, when China could not stop the world’s leading military power from enjoying unfettered access to its airspace and ocean right up to its territorial border. But the change needs to be put in perspective: it is only natural that after spending tens of billions of dollars over decades, China has begun to reverse this unusual vulnerability, one the United States would never accept for itself.

While this area-denial strategy would help solve a long-term problem, it would do little to address the most immediate challenge from China: the military facilities it is steadily building on artificial islands in the South China Sea. There is no easy answer, but Washington should avoid too aggressive a reaction, which could spark a conflict. After all, these small, exposed islands arguably leave the overall military balance unchanged, since they would be all but impossible to defend in a conflict. China’s assertiveness may even be backfiring. Last year, the Philippines—real islands with extremely valuable basing facilities—welcomed U.S. forces back onto its shores after a 24-year absence. And the United States is now in talks to base long-range bombers in Australia.

To date, the Obama administration has chosen to conduct so-called freedom-of-navigation operations in order to contest China’s maritime claims. But as the leader of the order it largely shaped, the United States has many other arrows in its quiver. To place the burden of escalation on China, the United States—or, even better, its allies—could take a page from China’s playbook and ramp up quasi-official research voyages in the area. Another asset Washington has is international law. Pressure is mounting on China to submit its territorial disputes to arbitration in international courts, and if Beijing continues to resist doing so, it will lose legitimacy and could find itself a target of sanctions and other diplomatic punishments. And if Beijing tried to extract economic gains from contested regions, Washington could facilitate a process along the lines of the proportional punishment strategy it helped make part of the World Trade Organization: let the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague, determine the gains of China’s illegal actions, place a temporary tariff on Chinese exports to collect exactly that much revenue while the sovereignty claims are being adjudicated, and then distribute them once the matter is settled before the International Court of Justice. Whatever approach is adopted, what matters for U.S. global interests is not the islands themselves or the nature of the claims per se but what these provocations do to the wider order.

Although China can “pose problems without catching up,” in the words of the political scientist Thomas Christensen, the bottom line is that the United States’ global position gives it room to maneuver. The key is to exploit the advantages of standing on the defensive: as a raft of strategic thinkers have pointed out, challenging a settled status quo is very hard to do.

KNOW THYSELF

Despite China’s ascent, the United States’ superpower position is more secure than recent commentary would have one believe—so secure, in fact, that the chief threat to the world’s preeminent power arguably lies within. As U.S. dominance ebbs slightly from its peak two decades ago, Washington may be tempted to overreact to the setbacks inherent in an admittedly frustrating and hard-to-manage world by either lashing out or coming home—either way abandoning the patient and constructive approach that has been the core of its grand strategy for many decades. This would be a grave mistake. That grand strategy has been far more successful and beneficial than most people realize, since they take for granted its chief accomplishment—preventing the emergence of a much less congenial world.

One sure way to generate a wrong-headed push for retrenchment would be to undertake another misadventure like the war in Iraq. That America has so far weathered that disaster with its global position intact is a testament to just how robust its superpower status is. But that does not mean that policymakers can make perpetual blunders with impunity. In a world in which the United States retains its overwhelming military preeminence as its economic dominance slips, the temptation to overreact to perceived threats will grow—even as the margin of error for absorbing the costs of the resulting mistakes will shrink. Despite what is being said on the campaign trail these days, the United States is hardly in an unusually perilous global situation. But nor is its standing so secure that irresponsible policies by the next president won’t take their toll.

 

[Housecarl]

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?489533-A-Europe-of-Citizens

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.project-syndicate.org/c...snational-constituency-by-ana-palacio-2016-04

Ana Palacio

Ana Palacio, a former Spanish foreign minister and former Senior Vice President of the World Bank, is a member of the Spanish Council of State, a visiting lecturer at Georgetown University, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the United States.

APR 14, 2016
A Europe of Citizens

MADRID – Last month was another cruel one for Europe, culminating in the horrific terrorist attacks in Brussels on March 22. The aftermath has seen a new round of soul searching, with Europeans mulling over the European Union’s institutional failures and sheer incompetence, not to mention the existential challenge it currently faces.

Such considerations seem to arise frequently these days, as Europe encounters a seemingly endless series of emergencies, from the Greek crisis to the influx of refugees. Yet complacency remains the order of the day, with EU leaders adopting to a crisis-response mentality that privileges reaction over action and perpetuates the cycle of destabilization.

The fact that crises have become the EU’s new normal has reinforced the notion, already ubiquitous among Europhiles and Eurocrats, that we will simply continue to muddle through. This approach is both misguided and dangerous.

As it stands, European unity is disintegrating rapidly. The just-concluded referendum in the Netherlands, in which Dutch voters overwhelmingly rejected an association agreement between the EU and Ukraine, is merely the latest example. If the EU is to survive this slow-motion train wreck, let alone thrive in the long run, bold action – not just valiant rhetoric – is urgently needed.

It is time to decide whether the EU is a truly transnational undertaking or merely a vessel for inter-governmental arrangements. If it is the latter, we should call a spade a spade. But, in that case, we should understand that we – both the EU and individual countries – are effectively resigning ourselves to increasing irrelevance. Paying little more than lip service to a common approach in critical areas leaves problems unaddressed and opportunities unexplored. Simply put, with an “every man for himself” approach, everyone will sink.

A transnational undertaking is the superior option. But it is also the more difficult one, because it demands deep and fundamental changes in how the question of European integration is approached.

The original sin of the European project is that, Brussels notwithstanding, there is no European constituency. Events, policies, and challenges are all viewed through a national lens. The refugee crisis has brought this into sharp relief; but every stress on the European system brings to the fore nationalist perspectives.

And why shouldn’t this be the case? After all, political accountability – not to mention tax money – flows from citizens to the national capitals. But the split between the EU and national governments is a false one. Subsidiarity, properly applied and understood as decision-making power at the appropriate level of government, is and must remain a guiding principle of European action. There are, however, times when collective action is needed. For such action to be effective, the EU level cannot be a place for scapegoating and bloviating.

National political figures cannot continue to claim that Brussels or the European Commission is the source of all their problems, and pursue self-centered and shortsighted measures that ultimately exacerbate crises. Nor can EU officials continue to shrug their shoulders and blame national politicians for failing to implement proposed EU-wide measures. Instead, the EU needs real authority to execute policy.

One Brussels insider recently noted to me that the EU, propelled by its crises, is already entering a new phase of empowerment, where it, not its member states, has real implementing authority. And, indeed, there are assorted examples of the EU assuming something of an executive position; notably, the EU is expected to play a leading role in implementing its recent deal with Turkey to resolve the refugee crisis.

But a genuine and legitimate shift to an effective EU executive requires a stronger connection between the people and those acting on their behalf. In other words, we must create a transnational constituency.

This is not a new idea. There has long been support for the idea of European citizenry, and the EU treaties include provisions that could serve as stepping stones to this end. But limited progress on this front reflects popular sentiment. In the five years since Eurobarometer began asking survey participants whether they feel like citizens of the EU, the number responding positively has increased by only 2% (from 62% in 2010 to 64% in 2015).

Deepening the political links among Europeans requires institutional reform based on collective action, awareness, and ownership. The seeds of such an endeavor – from replacing the elegant but bloodless Spitzenkandidaten system with direct EU-wide elections for European Commission President to considering a limited but direct EU tax to establish a clear line of accountability – are already available.

Such efforts would certainly face serious political headwinds; the current system is, after all, quite comfortable for many. But the process of unraveling is already underway. Only a conscious European citizenry can weaken the centrifugal forces that emerge in every crisis, because only such a citizenry can ensure accountability at the EU level, compel officials to formulate and execute effective policy, and thereby break the cycle of blame that has become entrenched in European decision-making. Creating this awareness would be a long-term process, but it is essential.

At a time of such difficult challenges, strengthening transnationalism might seem extreme and unachievable. But unless we recognize the real reasons that we continue to be battered by crises, we will be doomed to continue muddling through until there is no EU left.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missile-test-idUSKCN0XC24H

Business | Fri Apr 15, 2016 3:04pm EDT
Related: World, North Korea, Aerospace & Defense

After missile failure, higher possibility of North Korea nuclear test

SEOUL | By Jack Kim


The possibility of North Korea conducting a fifth nuclear test, possibly within weeks, has been heightened by a failed missile launch on Friday that was an embarrassing setback for leader Kim Jong-un, South Korean officials and international experts said.

North Korea holds a ruling Workers Party congress in early May, at which Kim is likely to trumpet his achievements in building up Pyongyang's weapons prowess. The South Korean officials and experts say he will be keen to go into the congress with a show of strength, and not a failed rocket launch.

"North Korea is capable of conducting an additional nuclear test at any time if there is a decision by Kim Jong-un," said a senior South Korean official involved in national security policies involving the North, its bitter rival.

When asked if the failed missile launch had increased the possibility that Kim would order a nuclear test, the official said the North is likely to "engage in additional provocations."

"Such a nuclear test and the missile launch believed to be a failure this morning are both among the provocations that North Korea would have reasonably tried," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the media on the matter.

U.S. and South Korean officials have said the North attempted and failed to launch what was believed to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile on Friday as it celebrated the "Day of the Sun" birthday of the country's founder Kim Il Sung, the current leader's grandfather.

Secretive North Korea has not made any public comment on the issue.

Kim's military aides would try to compensate for the failed missile launch, the South Korean official said.

Another official in Seoul said the South Korean military was on high alert for an additional missile launch by the North or a nuclear test.

Michael Elleman, a U.S.-based rocket expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said another missile test was unlikely.

"Given that this test failed, North Korea might elect to conduct another nuclear test," he said.


IMPATIENT FOR SUCCESS

The missile that failed on Friday was likely a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile, experts and South Korean media said. The Musudan has a design range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) that can be fired from a road-mobile launcher.

It has never been flight-tested, although many experts believe that the North may launch it as part of its effort to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

For South Korean President Park Geun-hye, the possibility of another nuclear test by the North will give her an opportunity to work with the opposition to meet the threat, and salvage her presidency after an upset defeat in parliamentary elections on Wednesday.

"If North Korea continues to go on with these provocations, national security will become a more pressing issue, and that's where the president can try to resolve a very difficult situation for herself," said Kookmin University political science professor Hong Sung-gul.

An Chan-il, a former North Korean military officer who now heads a think tank in the South, said ordinarily the North would repeat the failed missile launch to try and perfect it, but the impending party congress may mean Kim and his military aides will be impatient to show off success.

"What if they try the Musudan and fail again? That will look so bad, so I would say a nuclear test is more likely next," An said.

The North conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and said it was a successful hydrogen bomb test, a claim disputed by experts and the South Korean and U.S. governments.

The U.N. Security Council imposed new sanctions on the North in March, for its nuclear and rocket tests this year.

The U.S.-based 38 North website, which monitors events in North Korea, said earlier this week that satellite imagery showed there had been activity at the country's nuclear site and the possibility of a fifth nuclear test "could not be ruled out".


(Story corrects spelling of North Korean leader's name in first and third paragraphs).

(Additional reporting by Ju-min Park in Seoul and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

 

[Housecarl]

When this gets rolling it will get ugly.....One of the openers for the corruption investigations was Brazil's nuclear program and nuclear submarine program....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.wsj.com/articles/brazilians-braces-for-rousseff-impeachment-vote-1460748723

World | Latin America

Brazilians Brace for Dilma Rousseff Impeachment Vote

Country confronts whether her possible removal would help the country climb out of its deep recession

By Reed Johnson and Rogerio Jelmayer
April 15, 2016 3:32 p.m. ET
0 COMMENTS

SÃO PAULO—As congress gains momentum to impeach President Dilma Rousseff on Sunday, Brazilians are confronting whether her removal would help the country climb out of its deep recession and ease unrest inflamed by months of bitter political jousting.

Ms. Rousseff and her leftist Workers’ Party remained defiant on Friday, and her supporters held out hope that she would pull out enough last-minute votes to stop the impeachment from proceeding to the Senate.

But other signs point toward a defeat for Ms. Rousseff. Early Friday, a Supreme Court majority rejected a request by her government to suspend the impeachment vote scheduled for Sunday in the lower house of congress. A tally compiled by the pro-impeachment newspaper Estado de S. Paulo indicates that Ms. Rousseff’s foes already have more than the 342 needed congressional votes, a two-thirds majority.

Ms. Rousseff’s adversaries, many of whom are engaged in their own legal battles, have labored to reassure Brazilians that they would be ready to tackle the country’s soaring unemployment and rising inflation.

Vice President Michel Temer of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB, who would succeed Ms. Rousseff, has tried to reassure Brazilians, foreign governments and investors that a power transfer can be smoothly achieved.

Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, of the center-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party, said in an interview that if Ms. Rousseff is impeached and the PMDB assumes power, it will have to deliver results quickly.

“If they are not capable, they will fall too,” he said.

A vote by congress to impeach Ms. Rousseff on Sunday wouldn’t end the impeachment process. The Senate would have to vote on whether to accept the case; if it does, Ms. Rousseff would have to temporarily stand down while the Senate holds a trial that would rule whether or not Ms. Rousseff is removed from office.

Lindbergh Farias, a Workers’ Party senator, said Thursday that even if congress votes for impeachment, the action would be blocked when it passes on to the Senate for a possible trial in coming weeks.

Ms. Rousseff is facing impeachment on allegations that she used bookkeeping maneuvers to mask a budget deficit, accusations she denies.

A fiery defense of Ms. Rousseff was delivered Friday by José Eduardo Cardozo, the solicitor general, who gave an impassioned speech at the Chamber of Deputies denouncing impeachment as akin to a coup d’état.

“This process of impeachment, if approved by this house, will qualify as an institutional rupture and violence against democracy,” Mr. Cardozo said. “History will not forgive.”

Ms. Rousseff has steadily lost confidence not only from the country’s economic and political sectors, but from the streets as well. According to a survey by Datafolha polling institute, 61% of Brazilians support impeachment and 60% think the president should resign, although the number supporting impeachment has declined in recent weeks.

Many of Ms. Rousseff’s key Workers’ Party allies have been implicated and convicted on charges related to the giant corruption scandal centered on state oil company Petróleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras.

Ms. Rousseff hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with the investigation. But the so-called Operation Car Wash scandal has badly tarnished her administration, as well as her mentor and presidential predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

But the PMDB and other major parties that could form a new government are riven by internal rivalries. Mr. Temer and Eduardo Cunha, the powerful house speaker who is second in-line to succeed Ms. Rousseff, have both been implicated in the Petrobras scandal. Both deny any wrongdoing.

Lidice da Mata, a senator with the Brazilian Socialist Party, who opposes impeachment, said Mr. Temer would have less legitimacy to govern because he wasn’t directly elected president.

Although Ms. Rousseff has been blamed for the country’s recessionary economy, Mr. da Mata said that any quick-fix austerity measures would be fiercely opposed by trade unions and other groups.

“Temer might have a little lull, but it will be very momentary and the pressure will increase rapidly against him,” Mr. da Mata said.

Daniel Freifeld, founder of Callaway Capital Management, a U.S. investment fund, said that any new government would have to maintain the raised living standards of the millions of Brazilians who rose from poverty into the lower middle class during the mid-2000s, partly as a result of social-entitlement programs enacted by Ms. Rousseff’s party.

“The consequences of backsliding can be incredibly violent, figuratively and literally,” Mr. Freifeld said.

The most pressing challenge for Mr. Temer and any new government would be to mollify Ms. Rousseff’s enraged hard-core base.

Guilherme Boulos, the leader of a well-known São Paulo homeless workers’ activist group called MTST, said that Brazilians would resist any attempt by Mr. Temer to “apply a bitter medicine to the whole society” by cutting funding for social programs and other measures designed to please investors.

“The country will be taken by social mobilizations, strikes, workers’ occupations by the homeless and landless,” Mr. Boulos said.

Whatever the outcome of Sunday’s vote, some believe that after months of uncertainty and hardship, this frazzled country is inevitably headed for more of the same.

“The political atmosphere will be uncomfortable,” said Mr. da Mata, the anti-impeachment senator. “It cannot be worse than we have today, but it will not be much better.”

—Luciana Magalhaes contributed to this article.

--

How This Weekend’s Session Will Work

Brazil’s lower house of Congress begins a three-day process on Friday that will end Sunday with a vote on whether President Dilma Rousseff should face an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Friday: The session started Friday morning with debate on the report approved by a congressional panel on Monday. One of the three legal experts who filed the original request to start the impeachment process presented the case against Ms. Rousseff. The solicitor general presented Ms. Rousseff’s defense. The 25 political parties represented in the lower house get 25 minutes each for their leaders to present their views.
Saturday: Individual lawmakers get their turns. Deputies who registered ahead of time will have three minutes each to speak. The session will last until all the deputies have spoken.
Sunday: The voting session with all 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies begins at 2 p.m. local time. First, the author of the impeachment committee report will have 25 minutes, then party leaders will have an opportunity to say a few words. Next, deputies are expected to start voting. Each lawmaker will have 10 seconds to announce his or her vote over a microphone. The session is expected to end around 9 p.m. local time.
After Sunday: If the supporters of impeachment fail to get 342 votes, the process is finished. If impeachment is approved by the chamber on Sunday, the process moves to the Senate. If the Senate votes in favor of holding a trial, Ms. Rousseff must step aside for as long as 180 days while she is tried.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-corruption-idUSL2N17I1J6

Markets | Fri Apr 15, 2016 4:14pm EDT
Related: Energy

UPDATE 1-Brazil builder made undeclared donations to Rousseff campaign-paper

BRASILIA, April 15


(Adds comment from Rousseff campaign lawyer)

Brazilian engineering company Andrade Gutierrez made undeclared donations to President Dilma Rousseff's 2014 reelection campaign, newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported on Friday, in an article that could bolster calls for her impeachment.

The newspaper did not say how it obtained the information, which adds to previous reports that some of the official donations to Rousseff's 2014 campaign were funded with kickbacks from large infrastructure projects.

Flavio Caetano, the legal coordinator for Rousseff's campaign, said the allegations were "absolutely false."

"It is regretful and weird that, on the eve of an impeachment vote, another blatant lie regarding Dilma's reelection campaign is highlighted by media," he said in a message to Reuters after a request for comment.

A spokeswoman for Andrade Gutierrez declined to comment.

According to Folha, Andrade Gutierrez paid more than 10 million reais ($2.86 million) for opinion polls that were actually commissioned by Rousseff's Workers Party.

The services were not declared by Rousseff's campaign, a criminal offense under Brazilian electoral law, Folha said.

Andrade Gutierrez' executives have signed a plea bargain deal as part of a police investigation into a broad corruption scheme linking state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA , political parties and major builders, sources have told Reuters.

The allegations may bolster the case of the main opposition party PSDB, which has demanded that electoral authorities annul Rousseff's 2014 re-election for using illegal funding.

Brazil's lower house on Friday opened a three-day debate on whether to impeach President Dilma Rousseff on charges of manipulating budget accounts, after the government lost a last-ditch appeal before the Supreme Court to halt the process. ($1 = 3.4934 Brazilian reais) (Reporting by Silvio Cascione; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Andrew Hay)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/15/europe/uk-terror-arrests/

UK police arrest 5 in terror probe

By Michael Pearson and Paul Cruickshank, CNN
Updated 2:22 PM ET, Fri April 15, 2016


(CNN) ¡X Police in Birmingham, England, said Friday they have arrested five terror suspects in a joint investigation involving UK intelligence and French and Belgian authorities.

The suspects -- four men ranging in age from 26 to 59, and a 29-year-old woman, were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of terrorist acts, West Midlands police said in a statement. Four were arrested in Birmingham, the fifth at London's Gatwick Airport, police said.

"The arrests were preplanned and intelligence-led," Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale said in a statement. "There was no risk to the public at any time and there is no information to suggest an attack in the UK was being planned."

The arrests followed revelations that Mohamed Abrini -- who investigators say has been linked to the terror March attacks in Brussels and the November 2015 attack in Paris -- had traveled to Birmingham several times in the year before the Paris attacks.

Abrini is known as the "man in the hat" in surveillance video taken of bombers in the Brussels Airport attack. His DNA and fingerprints were lifted from a vehicle used in the Paris attacks, and surveillance video spotted him with Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam at a gas station between Brussels and the French capital.

A senior British counterterrorism source told CNN on Friday that investigators have determined he met with people suspected of terrorist activity and took several photos of landmarks in the Birmingham area, including a football stadium.

Abrini was arrested April 8 in Belgium.

Source: Paris, Brussels attackers sought to target Euro 2016

„Ý

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.breitbart.com/national-s...orea-reveals-details-nuclear-weapons-program/

North Korea Reveals Details of Nuclear Weapons Program

by John Hayward
15 Apr 2016
Comments 3

Next month, North Korea will convene the first Korean Workers’ Party Congress in 36 years. The impending event has been seen by analysts as influencing everything the secretive Communist state does – an opportunity to refresh the North Korean peoples’ sense of “unity” with their oppressive government and consolidate the power of dictator Kim Jong Un’s cabal of relatively young leaders.

The old leaders, perceived as either unduly loyal to Kim’s late father or their own ambitions, have been liquidated by the hundreds in a series of ruthless purges. An analysis at Forbes suggests Kim is a little more execution-happy than a truly secure ruler would be, and recent stories of defections among the few North Koreans trusted to travel overseas have clearly made the regime uncomfortable.

With the upcoming Party congress in mind, North Korea has publicly revealed details of its program for developing nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles through a series of articles published over the past month.

The material published by Pyongyang includes close-up images of ground test activity, which aerospace engineer John Schilling described to Reuters as “almost unprecedented.”

“The openness suggests that the underlying strategy is as much diplomatic as military: it is important to Pyongyang not only that they have these capabilities, but that we believe they have these capabilities,” said Schilling, echoing many observers who believe North Korea’s recent nuclear moves are intended to both rally its population and impress outside powers.

“The revelations, pronouncements and ‘tests’ appear to be part of a campaign to establish the narrative that Pyongyang has, or will soon have, a nuclear-armed, long-range missile that could threaten the U.S. mainland,” said Michael Elleman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He thought the North Koreans clearly wanted to send the message that their nuclear and ballistic-missile programs would proceed at full speed ahead, in defiance of warnings and sanctions.

Elleman spoke for many skeptics when he said, “Each unveiling, if real, would be part of a structured program aimed at developing the capability. The open question is: How real are these tests?”

The question of veracity hangs over every statement North Korea makes, but Reuters describes an “increasing feeling among international arms experts that North Korea’s capability may be more advanced than previously thought.”

For example, it might be able to hit the continental United States with an ICBM by the end of this decade. Other claims made by North Korea include developing a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on a ballistic missile, testing long-range solid-fuel rocket engines, and – most dubiously – testing a crude hydrogen bomb.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that “U.S. intelligence satellites have spotted signs that North Korea may be preparing for an unprecedented launch of a mobile ballistic missile which could potentially hit portions of the U.S.”

The weapon system most likely to be tested, known as the Musudan missile, cannot reach the continental United States, but “could potentially hit Guam and perhaps Shemya Island in the outer reaches of Alaska’s Aleutian chain,” according to American officials.

However, those officials said it was possible North Korea would launch one of two different mobile ballistic missiles, designated Kn-08 or Kn-14, which “would have a longer range and could potentially hit the Pacific Northwest of the United States.” The more accurate Kn-14 is believed to have been displayed at a military parade last year, but its operational capabilities have not yet been demonstrated.

The South Korean military also believes another North Korean nuclear test could be in the works.

Echoing what was said in the Reuters piece about North Korea deliberately revealing details of its nuclear and missile programs, one American official told CNN that Kim Jong-Un “is determined to prove his doubters wrong.”