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Henry Kissinger meets China’s defence minister in surprise visit to Beijing

Amy Hawkins Senior China correspondent | The Guardian — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 22:34:05 +0000

Ex-US secretary of state’s meeting with Li Shangfu comes amid hopes of improved ties between two countries

The veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger has met China’s defence minister in Beijing.

According to a readout on Tuesday from the Chinese defence ministry, Li Shangfu said “friendly communication” between China and the US had been “destroyed” because “some people in the United States did not meet China halfway”. Kissinger said he was a “friend of China”, according to the readout.

“Neither the United States nor China can afford to treat the other as an adversary. If the two countries go to war, it will not lead to any meaningful results for the two peoples,” the Chinese statement reported Kissinger as saying.

The surprise visit of the 100-year-old former US secretary of state comes as John Kerry, the US climate envoy, is in Beijing to meet Chinese officials to discuss how the two countries can cooperate on confronting the climate crisis. Kerry is the latest in a string of senior US officials who have travelled to China this summer, after the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, completed a long-awaited trip in June.

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/18/henry-kissinger-meets-china-defence-minister-beijing

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What if Russia succeeds in Ukraine’s Donbas region?

Damien McElroy — Mon, 30 May 2022 07:03:24 +0000

The chances of Moscow’s limited victory opening the next phase of a destabilizing situation for the world are high.

The question preoccupying Europe is whether Russia is on the brink of a surprise breakthrough on the Ukraine battlefield, allowing it to declare a victory on its own terms. The big issue, were this to materialize, is to ask what then?

The artillery battles across the Donbas have recently been going well for the Russian high command. A traditional attack plan has been prosecuted, involving tactics that Russia has favored for almost century. The original presumptions of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership are now within its sights.

Having annexed Crimea and sustained the two breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk since the first round of this conflict in 2014, Moscow wants a contiguous strip of south-eastern Ukraine to say that it has secured the future of the Russian-speaking population in the area.

It has also overcome and vanquished the resistance of the neo-Nazi-tainted Azov Battalion after weeks of resistance to a Russian onslaught in Mariupol, the port city on the Black Sea. That means that the Kremlin’s “denazification” justification for the assault on Ukraine – it said the specter of Nazism had risen in the country – can also be defined as a success.

Any such victory declaration would be viewed from several angles.

The western countries that backed Kyiv would be forced to confront the fear that they had not in the end done enough for their ally to withstand the Russia tempest. Yet, for Russia having drawn the broadest aim for its offensive, the resulting gains look awfully puny on a map.

Faced with this, allies of Ukraine are stepping up the weapons shipments. The shoulder-fired missile systems that proved so effective when Russia’s army was advancing in columns and could be picked off are not the game changer they once were.

Ukrainian forces are only now getting access to mobile artillery. The French Caesar howitzer gun has turned up on the battlefield and offered a tantalizing glimpse of what bulk deliveries could do. The US has been trying to get M777-towed 155-millimetre howitzers to Ukraine’s frontline for a month.

The German government is being criticized for not enabling the next step, which is the delivery of main battle tanks. The Ukrainian military desperately needs these to meet the mass of forces that Russia is bringing to bear in a relatively small section of terrain.

Last week, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for the delivery of M270 multiple launch rocket systems, or MLRS, to Ukraine after receiving a downbeat assessment from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy regarding how long Kyiv’s forces can hold out in the eastern region.

The introduction of this system has escalatory potential. Reports that US officials opened talks with Kyiv over placing limits on the range of outgoing fire for any donations Washington might make underline this. The MLRS can target as far away as 300 kilometers but the US cannot allow its guns to be striking inside Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came out to warn that the “few sane” minds in the West should think twice.

Intelligence reporting indicates that Russia has lost 1,000 of the tanks it sent to Ukraine. Its new-generation tanks have proved to be sitting ducks.

So it has removed from mothballs the hundreds of T-72s left over from the erstwhile Soviet Union’s Red Army. Pictures of its heavy fire power are telling. Iron armour will now have to do the job that was not done by the smart or next-generation technology that Russia gambled on.

Days before the war was launched, a western think tank expert predicted to me that Russia would not rush to war because the modernization of its armed forces was incomplete. To do so now would be to “waste” the heavy expenditure since 2012 under the New Look reform programme, the expert said. He pointed out that Russia’s army could only say that its pace of change was well behind the target of renewing 70 per cent of its equipment inventory by 2020. It is believed to have been hovering near 50 per cent when the war began.

Western officials view any move by Russia to draw a line north of Crimea and along to Donetsk and Luhansk as unsustainable peace. Not only would Russia have an iron hand on the export of Ukraine’s all-important crops as a result. It is not clear that the boundaries it is currently targeting would guarantee the water supply to Crimea, a key Moscow objective.

Yet, this is the type of outcome Henry Kissinger, the realist diplomatic thinker and former US secretary of state, argued for last week in his controversial intervention in Davos. Mr. Kissinger argued about two things: that Ukraine cede territory to Russia for a peace agreement, and that a humiliating defeat for Russia would endanger Europe’s stability.

Currently serving European officials, instead, argue that a peace deal would be more likely to kick off a new eight-year cycle of rearmament by Moscow. The inevitable result would be a renewed effort thereafter to carve up Ukraine. In such an atmosphere, and with global food shortages, there can be no reliable turning point in the confrontation.

If Russia is able to achieve a short-term comeback, the outcome looks likely to merely open the next phase of a deeply destabilizing situation.

Damien McElroy
Damien is a foreign correspondent who has covered politics and conflict across Europe, the Middle East, the US, Africa and Asia. Before joining The National in 2017, he worked for The Sunday Times and Telegraph titles as an editor and roving reporter. He started his career in China and has a degree in finance.

Source: https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/05/30/what-if-russia-succeeds-in-ukraines-donbas-region/

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The little-known agreement that could lead the U.S. and China to war

Gregory Winger — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 06:06:57 +0000

The definitions in an agreement with the Philippines have long been forgotten but could have huge ramifications.

Filipinos march June 12 outside the Chinese Embassy in Makati, Metro Manila, as they mark Independence Day with a protest on continued Chinese intrusions in Philippine waters. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

With NATO labeling China a “systemic” threat to the international order and the Pentagon debating the creation of a permanent naval task force in the Pacific, the prospect of war with China has never felt more concrete. Yet if Washington and Beijing ultimately go to war, it might have less to do with today’s great power competition than with how Donald H. Rumsfeld and Cyrus Vance dealt with the American relationship with the Philippines in the wake of the Vietnam War.

Concerned by American inaction and unwillingness to provide emergency military assistance as Saigon fell in 1975, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos undertook a review of his county’s alliance with its former colonial ruler and the continued American military presence in the Philippines. He demanded formal statements clarifying U.S. obligations under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), including how the treaty applied in the pivotal South China Sea. The resulting formulation has underpinned U.S. policy for more than 40 years and leaves the United States committed to a position that could bring it into conflict with China over this crucial waterway.

The South China Sea emerged as a geopolitical flashpoint in the 1970s amid a surge in offshore oil exploration by nearby countries including the Philippines. Yet the dispute was also intrinsically shaped by the waning days of the Vietnam War. As South Vietnam floundered, both North Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China jockeyed for maritime features to bolster their territorial claims in the disputed sea.

This scramble had a spillover effect on the U.S.-Philippines alliance. The fall of Saigon had triggered an existential crisis in Manila. Since gaining independence in 1946, the Philippines had continued to depend upon the United States as the guarantor of its national security.

Yet Washington’s handling of the Indochina conflict brought the reliability of this arrangement into question. U.S. diplomats in Manila related widespread dismay over the “abandonment of Cambodia and Viet-Nam” and calls for the Philippines to end its reliance on Washington. Marcos demanded a renegotiation of the Military Base Agreement (MBA) governing the U.S. military installations in the Philippines and a clarification of the MDT. The potential loss of or restriction upon the U.S. bases was particularly distressing for Washington. They were among the largest American military bases in the world and remained vital to defending U.S. interests in Asia.

The South China Sea increasingly became central to these negotiations. North Vietnam’s April 1975 takeover of Southwest Cay in the Spratly Islands spurred Marcos to have a pointed discussion with U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan over whether and how the MDT applied to these islands.

This conversation led to a State Department review, which determined that the MDT would not, in fact, cover an attack by a foreign aggressor on Philippine forces stationed in the Spratly Islands. Yet American diplomats tried to finesse the issue, with Sullivan warning that if this judgment “were ever to come to [the] attention of Filipinos,” it “would confirm their worst fears and suspicions concerning [the] value of U.S. treaty commitments.”

Marcos, however, rejected vague answers. During a visit by Deputy Secretary of State Charles Robinson in August 1976, he pressed Robinson for a firm statement that the U.S. was committed to protecting those engaged in Philippine oil exploration near Reed Bank, a maritime feature near the Spratly Islands. Dissatisfied by Robinson’s answers, Marcos formally requested an explicit statement on American MDT obligations in this area.

Marcos made clear that an unsatisfactory answer would have an impact on the military base negotiations — his ultimate trump card.

With ambiguity and evasions having failed, Washington needed to craft an answer that would meet Philippine expectations without prematurely committing the United States to a future conflict in the South China Sea. Although Washington regarded Philippine concerns as genuine, it also feared provocative actions by Manila that might embroil the United States in a conflict that it neither sought nor supported at a time when the American public wanted little to do with another conflict in Southeast Asia.

Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, came up with a solution. As he explained to President Gerald Ford, the key was tying the U.S. commitment to defend the Philippines to “what the Philippines are doing rather than where in the disputed area they may be doing it.” The United States could promise to protect the Philippines’ “armed forces, public vessels and aircraft” in the South China Sea as long as they weren’t behaving provocatively. This gave the United States some flexibility, while also reassuring Marcos that the United States wouldn’t renege on its commitment because of location.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was supposed to present this revised formula to the Philippine secretary of foreign affairs, Carlos Romulo, on Oct. 6, 1976. Instead, Kissinger swerved. He bluntly explained that the United States was fully prepared to defend “the metropolitan area of the Philippines.” But if Marcos’s government wanted “the Reed Bank and the Spratlys included,” then the United States would “insert a waffling clause” — which would create new problems and blurriness.

Romulo chose the first option, asserting that the Philippines wanted to exclude “controversial areas,” and only cover the metropolitan territory of the Philippines.

The result was an official document reaffirming American obligations to respond to an attack on the Philippines and stating that the United States was “pleased to receive the assurances of the Philippine government that it has no intention of involving the United States in the resolution of disputed territorial claims.” This language avoided potential U.S. involvement in a war over control of the South China Sea. This note seemingly diffused Philippine concerns that the United States would abandon its commitments, but negotiations over the Military Base Agreement collapsed following Ford’s 1976 election loss.

The new Carter administration resumed talks, and the sides reached an agreement in late 1978. However, days before the amended MBA was to be signed, Marcos revived the defense treaty issue, insisting that the Kissinger note from 1976 was now insufficient.

In response, Vance, now secretary of state, sent Romulo a diplomatic note outlining America’s interpretation of the MDT. The note bluntly stated that an attack on Philippine forces or public vessels “would not have to occur within the metropolitan territory of the Philippines or island territories” for the treaty to be invoked.

Vance’s letter reflected the Rumsfeld formulation and established that while the United States did not take a stand on who owns the South China Sea, Philippine forces there were nevertheless protected by the MDT. Successive American administrations reaffirmed this framework and it remains U.S. policy today.

Moreover, this understanding of the MDT has shaped events in the South China Sea. Notably, in 1999 the Philippines intentionally grounded a naval vessel, the BRP Sierra Madre, on Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands to prevent China from seizing the shoals. The Sierra Madre’s rusting hulk may not dissuade aggression from China, but the knowledge that any attempt to forcibly dislodge the Philippine vessel could risk conflict with the United States has proved a potent deterrent. Kissinger probably would have approved of the ploy. As he told Romulo in 1976, “if you seize the territory, it’s always easier to handle.”

The Philippines has not seized more territory, but rather sought to resolve the dispute through diplomatic and legal means. Yet rising Chinese assertiveness and harassment of Philippine vessels has kept the South China Sea simmering. Today, with the Philippines increasing its maritime activities in response, the Rumsfeld-Vance framework ensures that the United States cannot remain aloof. Ultimately, if tensions in the South China Sea erupt into violence, the formula adopted in the 1970s means Washington will either have to abandon a longtime ally or embrace a conflict with China that it otherwise may have wished to avoid.

Gregory Winger is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. He is also a fellow with the National Asia Research Program and a participant in the Pacific Forum’s U.S.-Philippines’ Next Generation Leaders Initiative.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/23/little-known-agreement-that-could-lead-us-china-war/

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North Korea has taken provocative actions for decades, but this time could trigger war

Jim Michaels - USA Today — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 06:15:57 +0000

The April 15, 1969, incident is drawing renewed scrutiny amid threats from North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho that the North has the right to shoot down American warplanes even if they didn’t enter the nation’s airspace.

The Pentagon said it would not alter any operations in response to the threats, and it is unclear if North Korea is capable of downing a stealth American jet, which is capable of evading and jamming enemy radar.

But the earlier incident does highlight the challenges the United States faces in responding to North Korea’s provocations and why the isolated nation feels confident in repeatedly antagonizing Washington.

As bad as the rhetoric may seem, some of North Korea’s brazen attacks in the past have brought the United States even closer to war than the current heated climate, said Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a professor at Oberlin College and author of Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea.

For decades North Korea has felt free to challenge the U.S., betting that Washington will not react militarily.

In 1994 North Korea shot down an American helicopter when it mistakenly crossed the DMZ during a training mission. One of the two pilots was killed in the attack.

In 1968, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo, a Navy spy ship. One crew member was killed and 82 others were held as prisoners for nearly a year.

In 1976, North Korean guards attacked a group of South Koreans and U.S. soldiers preparing to prune a tree in the DMZ in order to improve visibility from a watch tower. Two U.S. officers were killed.

The United States returned with a 60-man security platoon and a 16-man tree-cutting detail to remove the tree. B-52s and a South Korean reconnaissance company was positioned to react if North Koreans tried to interfere.

The Americans cut down the tree without incident, but it was tense. The U.S. was prepared to go to war if North Koreans attempted to resist, Jager said.

Today, the stakes are even higher since North Korea has stockpiled nuclear weapons and will soon have the capability to place warheads on missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland, the Pentagon said.

“Whether it’s three months or six months or 18 months, it is soon, and we ought to conduct ourselves as though it is just a matter of time, and a matter of very short time, before North Korea has that capability,” Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday.

The relationship between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump is also more personal than previous leaders of both countries.

Trump said Tuesday if the U.S. takes a military option in dealing with the threat from North Korea, “it will be devastating.”

“We are totally prepared” for a military option, but it’s not the preferred one, Trump said. “If we have to take it, we will.”

Trump also went on to blame previous U.S. presidents for not dealing with the North Korean threat. “I will fix this mess,” he said.

Trump previously dismissed Kim as “rocket man” and said the North will be met with “fire and fury” if it continues to threaten America. Kim has called Trump a “dotard” and likened him to a scared dog.

Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, said the president’s comments about Kim have been similar in substance to other American presidents, though he acknowledged the earlier statements “probably don’t include the word, ‘rocket man.’”

McMaster said Trump’s remarks are to make clear how the U.S. would respond to a threat from the North. “I don’t think there is any lack of clarity now,” McMaster said during a conference sponsored by the Institute for the Study of War.

Dunford told Congress Tuesday that North Korea has not altered its military posture despite the heightened rhetoric between Pyongyang and Washington.

“While the political space is clearly very charged right now, we haven’t seen a change in the posture of North Korean forces,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/aerial-journalism/2017/09/26/north-korea-threats-united-states-kim-jong-un/704978001/

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