The Chinese team members and support staff confronted the eight activists who were seated close to them during Saturday’s friendly international match at the Allianz stadium in St. Paul, Minnesota, that the U.S. won 3-0.

The activists, dressed in white T-shirts, had been shouting slogans and holding up white banners that read “Free Tibet” during the second half of the game.

(Tenzin Shakya/RTYC-MN)

Members of the Chinese team sought their removal from the stands, and the activists were asked to leave the stadium by security guards. That prompted boos from other spectators who shouted, “Let them stay!” and chanted “Free speech!”

Soon after, stadium officials allowed the activists to return to their seats but confiscated their white banners. The activists watched the rest of the game holding up the Tibetan national flag that is banned by China inside Tibet. They also still wore their “Free Tibet” T-shirts.

(Tenzin Shakya/RTYC-MN)

“The biggest takeaway (from this campaign) is that if Tibetans stand up, raise our voices, and take action for our own cause, then the people of the world automatically rise up in support,” one of the protesters, Tenzin Palsang, told Radio Free Asia on Tuesday.

“China doesn’t just play soccer. They also play games with human rights,” said Palsang, who is president of the Minnesota chapter of the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress.

She cited harsh conditions inside Tibet, where she said children are suffering “colonial boarding school policies,” referring to the Chinese government-run schools where Tibetan children, aged 6-17, have reportedly been held in “prison-like” conditions and forced to study a Mandarin-heavy curriculum that promotes party loyalty or a state-approved “patriotic education.”

(Tenzin Shakya/RTYC-MN)

According to Freedom House’s annual 2025 Freedom in the World report, Tibet was given a score of 0, based on an analysis of political and civil freedoms, making it one of the least-free places in the world. China annexed Tibet in 1950 and has since governed the territory with an oppressively heavy-hand while seeking to erase Tibetan culture and identity.

Beijing denies it represses Tibet or seeks to erase its cultural traditions, instead pointing to economic development in the region as evidence of its positive impacts on the population of about 6 million Tibetans.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan.

What is a tariff?

A tariff is simply a tax on trade and all countries impose tariffs to varying degrees. The importer of goods pays whatever tariff rate applies and this customs revenue goes to the government of the nation where the importer is located.

Why are tariffs imposed?

Historically, tariffs were an important source of revenue for governments. This role was diminished by income and consumption taxes and as countries gradually lowered tariffs in an era of global free-trade following World War II. Tariffs can be used to protect emerging or important industries—and jobs—from competition from cheaper imports, but this can also mean higher costs for consumers and businesses, and in time, reduced prosperity in the country that extensively erects such barriers. Tariffs can also be a tool of foreign policy, used by one country to punish another for policies or behavior that run counter to its national interest.

Why is China the main target of US tariffs?

In a stunning about-face, Trump this week paused sharply higher tariffs against dozens of countries for 90 days but escalated a trade war with China, imposing a total tariff of 145% on its exports, after Beijing retaliated with increased tariffs on U.S. goods. The U.S. has a litany of complaints about China’s trade and industrial policies such as subsidies that create an unfair playing field, barriers to U.S. companies operating in China, intellectual property theft and its massive trade surplus. The U.S. also has a mixed track record in some of these areas such as subsidizing farmers.

The Trump administration is hoping it can wound export powerhouse China and force it into concessions. It is not without risks because China through its purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds plays a key role in financing the U.S. government, which has spent more than it earned every year since 2001. This situation shows a fundamental interdependence between the U.S. and China despite a tense relationship. China’s central bank receives a torrent of U.S. dollars from the country’s exports to the U.S. and then parks those dollars in U.S. government bonds.

What are the deep trends at work?

For decades, the world economy has been organized around the principle that free trade boosts economic growth and prosperity overall. The rapid increase in living standards for hundreds of millions of Chinese from abject poverty in the 1970s is often cited as proof of that theory. In aggregate terms, the free-trade proponents appear to be right but the broad picture obscures the mix of costs and benefits. In the U.S., manufacturing has declined as a proportion of the economy and employment since the 1990s.

Many Americans benefited from cheaper goods such as TVs, clothing and iPhones manufactured in China and elsewhere in Asia but at the cost of other Americans losing stable factory jobs. It was the U.S. that paved the way for China’s entry into the world economy when President Richard Nixon established diplomatic relations in 1972, ending Beijing’s quarter century of isolation. The Make America Great Again moment in U.S. politics is one of the long-range reverberations of those seismic changes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Stephen Wright for RFA.

Since 1565, the Philippines has been in the grip of one imperialist power after another. Even after independence, the archipelago remains a kind of functional US colony. Now, territorial conflict in the South China Sea could turn the Philippines into a battleground for US-China war. Josua Mata joins Solidarity Without Exception to discuss the Philippines long history of colonization and resistance.

Production: Ashley Smith
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Ashley Smith:

Welcome to Solidarity Without Exception. I’m Ashley Smith, who along with Blanca Misse, are co-hosts of this ongoing podcast series. Solidarity Without Exception is sponsored by the Ukraine Solidarity Network and produced by The Real News Network. Today, we’re joined by Josua Mata to discuss the Philippines, a country caught in the crossfire between the US and China over hegemony in the Asia Pacific.

Josua Mata is the General Secretary of the Filipino Labor Federation, SENTRO, which organizes workers across many sectors in the country. The Philippines has long been a battleground between empires fighting for dominance over the Asia Pacific. The US replaced Spain as the country’s colonial overlord in 1898 through President William McKinley’s Spanish-American War. The US used that war to seize control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, projecting its imperial power over the Americas and Asia. Japan drove out the US during World War II, imposing its own brutal dominance over the country, only to be replaced after its defeat by the United States.

Ever since, Washington has used the Philippines as a base to project its hegemony in Asia. Today, the country is caught between the intensifying conflict between the US and China in the region. The Philippines elite has historically been a willing collaborator with the US. Washington backed the country’s dynastic families, including the notorious dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, until it was overthrown in the People’s Power Revolution in 1986. Because the uprising did not have a party of its own to lead a thoroughgoing transformation of society, the liberal elite were able to hijack the revolution.

While they did reestablish democracy and kick out the US military bases, they enacted Washington’s neoliberal reforms that have driven the country into debt and devastated the living standards of the working class and peasantry. They also collaborated with the US in challenging China’s construction of military bases in the South China Sea. China established those bases to project its regional power, control shipping lanes, and secure access to fisheries and drilling rights to the undersea oil and natural gas reserves.

The Philippines challenged Beijing’s encroachment into what it regarded as its sovereign territory, winning a case under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in The Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration. China has not recognized or obeyed that decision, stoking what has become a semi-militarized conflict between China and the Philippines. But amid spiraling poverty, the masses of the country grew disappointed with the liberal elite, opening the door to the return of authoritarian forces.

Far-right populist Rodrigo Duterte won election in 2016. He launched his so-called War on drugs that massacred tens of thousands of people, escalated the government’s brutal repression of the Muslim separatist groups in Mindanao, and tilted the Philippines toward China in the hopes of securing investment as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. After the end of his term in office, Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte, ran as the vice president on the presidential ticket of Marcos son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr.

Their joint dynastic ticket one handily, but the pact between the families has fallen apart. Marcos has back to the US and permitted the International Criminal Court to arrest Rodrigo Duterte and place him on trial in The Hague for the mass killing he carried out in his so-called war on drugs. Now, Sara Duterte is mobilizing protests against Marcos, thrusting the country towards political conflict between dynastic elites.

Amidst this conflict, the Marcos government is whipping up nationalism against China’s ongoing encroachment on its seas. The Trump administration is pouring fuel on the fire. It dispatched Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia to escalate the US confrontation with China. He promised to back the Philippines, Taiwan, and other countries in the region against Beijing. Thus, the Philippines has become yet another flashpoint between the US and China in their ongoing rivalry.

In this podcast, Josua Mata lays out an alternative approach for working people. He advocates progressive internationalism. He calls for the demilitarization of the region, international solidarity from below against both imperial powers as well as the region’s elite, and the transformation of the contested seas into a commons to be shared by the region, and developed in the interests of the people and our planet. Now on to the discussion with Josua Mata.

The Philippines has been a battleground of empires, various imperial powers, really for centuries. And I really couldn’t help but think about that when President Trump and his inaugural address referred to President McKinley and the Spanish American War, which the US used to take over the Philippines and impose a brutal occupation and semi or direct colonial rule of the country for decades. So what is the history of the Philippines’ experience of colonization by different imperialist powers and how have Filipinos resisted?

Josua Mata:

Well, we normally would start the history of the Philippine labor movement by tracing it all the way to the time that we were struggling against pain. In fact, the working-class hero, Andres Bonifacio, is considered as a working-class hero, primarily because he was the one who founded the revolutionary organization that fought Spain after 300 years of colonial rule.

And to be honest, that revolution have already won almost all the territories in the country except for Manila, particularly the fort, the world city of Manila, and some small parts in the provinces. But primarily, the Katipunan, which was what it was called them, was already able to liberate most of the areas from Spanish colonial rule. However, that was also the time when the American colonial project started, and it started with the coming of Commodore George Dewey and where they staged our mock naval battle in Manila Bay.

And then they took over Fort Santiago, pretending to have a firefight with the Spaniards, just to give them the semblance that they are really fighting for their dignity, when if fact it’s really a mock bottle. And then they started fooling the Filipino forces then by telling them that this is something that they came to the Philippines to help the revolution. Of course, the Philippine Republic was already declared as an independent country then. But then, as soon as George Dewey was able to amass enough resources coming from, enough reinforcements, I mean, coming from the US, then they started to have this really brutal fight with the Filipino revolutionaries.

Eventually, of course, we were overtaken by more superior technology and much more better trained American soldiers who were fresh from their experiences in practically decimating the Native American Indians in North America. So, a lot of the things that they did here in the Philippines were actually efforts to perfect what they have learned in killing the Native American Indians. And in turn, what they learned from the Philippines are exactly the same things that they brought with them to Vietnam.

So, to answer your question quite clearly, how was the Filipino experience when it came to American imperial control? Well, the simplest answer is that we were the first Vietnam. So Japan came in, and then the Americans, of course came back with MacArthur’s promise of, “I shall return.” And he did return, but unfortunately when he did, he was more interested in making sure that the elites that he had befriended when he was still the security advisor of Manuel L. Quezon, that was the first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, he was more interested in making sure that the elites are able to regain their power, their prestige, and even their economic wealth, to the point that he was so eager to pardon everyone who practically collaborated with the Japanese.

And that is so unlike the practice that he demonstrated. That’s so unlike what he did when he was the proconsul of Japan, where he literally punished everyone who had ties with the military’s Japanese empire, except of course, the Japanese leaders who have very strong ties with those who amass so much wealth plundering every country in this part of the world. So, the so-called Yamashita gold, this actually historical reality, and it is suspected that MacArthur readily pardoned many of the Japanese war criminals in exchange for some share of that looted gold. So, those are two very different approaches.

So for example, as soon as they returned to the Philippines, one of the first things that the US government did was to help the elite to destroy the armed Huk Rebellion, which is essentially an armed group controlled by the old Communist Party, who were fighting with the peasants who wanted, of course, to have a control over the land that they have been historically cultivating. That’s so contrary to what MacArthur did in Japan, where one of the first thing he imposed was punishing, undergoing agrarian reform in order to dismantle, partly, also to dismantle the Zaibatsus that armed the imperial government of Japan. It’s a contrasting way of dealing with a colonial country, and obviously it has to do with the loyalties of MacArthur to the elites in the Philippines.

Ashley Smith:

So, in the wake of World War II, the Philippines eventually achieves a kind of nominal independence, but with serious control by the United States through military bases, through economic domination.

Josua Mata:

That’s right. And that’s one of the biggest problems, the so-called parity rights that Americans imposed on the Philippines, wherein American capitalists would have the same rights as Filipinos in running their business in the country, or even in exploiting our natural resources. And that was one of the nastiest things that made sure that even if we have nominal independence, the country practically continues to serve as a colony, a new colony of the US, if you like.

Ashley Smith:

So, now we’re in a situation where the United States is still the predominant power in Asia, but it faces a rival for its dominance in the form of China. And the Philippines is caught in the middle of this conflict between the US and China. And China in particular has been trying to assert its control of the South China Sea, and with that, islands fisheries, undersea natural resources, oil, natural gas, and shipping lanes. And the Philippines has been caught in between the US and China. So, what is the character of this conflict between the United States and China, and what impact has it had on the Philippines?

Josua Mata:

Well, clearly this is a fight between two imperial powers, and the Philippines is being caught between them, and that’s not a good place to be. On the one hand, the US, because of its historical ties to the country, and because it has an existing mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, it is dangling this promise that they would come to the aid of the Philippines if it is attacked militarily by a foreign aggressor, in this case, for example, China.

But interestingly, actually, for many presidents in the past, it was so difficult for them to be very categorical about coming to the aid of the Philippines, to the point that you’re not really sure whether the US would actually support the Philippines or not. And with Trump around, many are obviously now having a problem because nobody knows if Trump would actually lift a finger to help Filipinos. And why would he, when he’s so preoccupied with ejecting everyone who is not a white American in his own country? Why would he then spend time, energy and resources and American lives to save Filipinos? So that’s a big question mark.

Now, that is putting the current government in a quandary because it casted its lot with American power, and it started having a much more robust, if you like, stance to US intervention and intrusion, if you like, in our part of the world. Now, that’s problematic for them because now they have been supported by the previous government of the US, the Biden administration, to stand fast, fight back. Now they’re not so sure whether the Americans would really come to their support. And I think that clearly is the problem, because in the first place, why did they decide to side with the US in this conflict and eventually be used as a pawn of one imperial power as against another rising imperial power?

Now, having said that, China on the other hand, is obviously keen on making sure that it can exercise its own manifest destiny in this part of the world. They have been very, very clear, if the US run the Americas throughout history as if it’s its own backyard, they should have the, “Same right to do that,” quote, unquote. Which then puts Filipinos, particularly the fishermen who have traditionally been going out to those parts of the South China Sea, which we now call the West Philippine Sea, in order to do their livelihood. And prior to this conflict, it has been said that Filipinos, Taiwanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, even Indonesians were all free to gather resources peacefully and in coexistence when there was no conflict. But then, now that’s not possible because China was asserting its nine-dash lines, which is now back to 10-dash lines in a very, very aggressive manner.

But in the meantime, rather than call for sobriety and call for making sure that there’s no potential for any flashpoint that could lead to war, unfortunately my country, the government, my government opted to bring in and invite more military arrangements, not only with the US, but also with several other countries like Japan, Australia. Now they’re forging now another agreement with New Zealand. They’re trying to forge an agreement with Germany as well as in India. And what would that mean? It means that this would only lead to more militarization of that part of the world. And with more naval forces loitering in that area, then you have an ever-increasing possibility of having a flashpoint that could lead eventually to war. So, this is a very, very dangerous moment for all of us.

Ashley Smith:

One thing I wanted to get you to talk a little bit more about was the Philippine elite and how it has vacillated the Duterte government, which was the predecessor to the current Marcos Jr. government, tilted seemingly towards China, and then Marcos has swung back to the United States pretty decisively. And what explains this vacillation, and also how is it related to the kind of increasing authoritarian nature of the Filipino government itself and its rule over the country?

Josua Mata:

Well, first of all, to be clear, while we have always called the country a democratic country, we have very, very little experience in actual democracy in this country. Ever since we gained our, “Independence,” quote, unquote, from the American empire, our nominal freedom, if you like, we’ve always been ruled by the elites who are much more subservient to the US empire than to anyone else. And the US empire has always been happy to keep them happy, our elites happy, as long as they allow the US bases to continue untouched in this part of the world, for a longest time. That changed somehow when we finally managed to kick out the US bases, but then the economic ties are still so strong.

So let me put it out first. We don’t have much experience in democracy in this country. That’s the first point. The second point I want to say is that our economy has always been designed to serve the needs of capital, particularly, specifically US capital. And most of our elites have almost always directed their economic transactions to be part of the US global capitalist system. However, with the rise of China, it gave an opportunity for some parts of the elites in the country to have their own entry to global trade. But that’s a very small part of the elite, but that was given much more space when Duterte came to power. But let’s not forget that Duterte came to power primarily because he was supported by China, not just financially, but also politically.

And the reason is, and this is where it gets weird, the reason is because Duterte is the kind of leader that actually fits perfectly well with the kind of politics that we have in this country, which is a highly personalistic kind of politic, where our politics is essentially dominated by personalities, specifically by family dynasties. For example, in this current Congress, more than 85% of all congressmen are actually part of the political dynasties. Our mayors, about 68% of our mayors are part of political dynasties. We have a president who is a Marcos, his sister is a senator, his son is a congressman, and he’s got several uncles and nieces and cousins who are congressmen and mayors and local government officials. That’s the kind of political system that we have.

And Duterte came to the picture when these political dynasties have started asserting themselves once again in our history with a vengeance. It’s like having political dynasties on steroids at that point in time. But you see, Duterte has had a really bad experience with the US, and because he takes things personally, when he was applying for a visa, he apparently was rejected being given a visa, and that he took that personally. And since then, he has become anti-American and packaging his anti-Americanism as part of a nationalist position in the Philippines. Which is funny, because while he keeps claiming that he is nationalist, the first thing he did was actually, after he declared that he’s no longer with the US empire, he then shifted immediately and told Xi Jinping himself, of China, that now he would depend on China. So that’s really incredible.

And I told you, that’s where it gets funny, because here’s the personal preference of a president that is essentially affecting the entire country. But that link goes deeper if you look more closely, because his family is suspected of having very, very deep links with Chinese businessmen, particularly those who are operating in the shadow economy of China, which means the underground economy, specifically the drugs trade. So, there’s that very strong suspicion in this country, that they’ve always been linked to the Chinese triads. And that’s why he had that preference of being with China.

So, you have here the personal interconnection of political clan who is now using, who is now intent on using their power in order to deepen that connection and to favor the economic interest of their family. But then, we only have one term for presidents in this country, and that was specifically designed to prevent a dictator from ruling us, so that means he only had six years to be a dictator. So there’s a natural limit for dictatorship in this country. So when Marcos won by running a campaign where both the Duterte family and the Marcos family are in close unity, and they call themselves UniTeam, as soon as he won, I don’t think he had any intention of moving away from China.

In fact, what we now know is that he had all the intention to keep going, to keep the relationship going with China. The problem is, he felt insulted after China promised exactly the same things that they promised to Duterte, but they never delivered. So, all the billions of investments that Xi Jinping promised to Duterte, none of it actually materialized. Even the official development programs that they promised, of all the many things that they promised, including massive railway infrastructure, none of that materialized. The only thing that materialized are two bridges that were built by China.

So Marcos felt insulted by that, and that’s from what I heard, is that that’s one reason why he immediately shifted to the US. But I also think it’s because the Marcoses have always been closed to the US. They’ve been trained. The children of Marcos Senior were trained in the US. They never graduated, but they can claim that they have actually stepped inside a US university like Princeton, but I’m not so sure what they learned. But the outlook has always been closer to the US as a family more than anything else. But more importantly, he has also to contend with the fact that the military infrastructure in this country, the military personnel, the ideology, as well as the doctrines that they’re using are all developed using the US influence. So, the military has always been pro-US. So that’s also one reason why it’s not that difficult for Marcos to shift to the US away from China.

So that’s how things are, I mean if you look at why the elites would vacillate between the two countries. But now, it’s important to talk about, so what do the people really know about this conflict? Because the way it is being presented to the public is that this is a fight for national sovereignty. This is a fight for our own freedoms. But the elites, and even parts of the left, has been failing to explain the fact that one of the things that pushed the Philippine government to file a case in the UN was primarily because those who have commercial interests, the Filipino oligarchs who have commercial interests to drill the fossil fuels that are supposedly found in those areas, and they failed to drill because China has been preventing them. That is actually what pushed the country to file an arbitration case.

Now, we all know what happened when the Philippine case was heard, UNCLOS made a decision that favors the Philippines, but now their problem is how could they have it enforced when China doesn’t recognize that decision? And that’s why we are now in this situation, because parts of the elites, parts of the oligarchs wanted to get their hands in the fossil fuels buried in that part of the world. And yet, they’re mobilizing people’s sentiment to support what is necessarily a nationalist position to defend our territory, and that we find very, very dangerous.

Ashley Smith:

Now, let’s talk a little bit more about the conflicts that are happening in this clash over the islands of the so-called South China Sea. Are we headed towards a conflict between the Philippines, backed by the US, with China? How close to an actual military conflict? Because it seems like it’s gotten close and then both have backed off, and then it’s gotten close again. And so we’re kind of feeling like we’re at the edge of a military conflagration.

Josua Mata:

To be honest, I don’t think China wants to start a war. It doesn’t help them. It just won’t help them. And I don’t think US wants to have a war as well, not even the Philippines. So nobody wants to have a war, but let’s not forget that’s exactly the attitude of most world powers before World War I. Nobody wanted the World War I, but then it was too late when everyone realized that European powers were actually sleepwalking into a world war, so that’s exactly what we have right now.

I don’t think anyone wants to have a war, but the fact that you’re increasing militarization in that area, where China has built its artificial islands and then put up naval bases and air facilities for their air forces, and then the Philippines started arming itself as if we have all the money to do it when we can’t even feed our people properly. Now, we’re even looking at the possibility of buying submarines.

So I really don’t understand what’s the plan here, because do we intend to arm ourselves to the teeth, thinking that we can actually frighten the Chinese away? Where is the end game if you try to militarize? And now you’re inviting everyone, all your allies to have military arrangements with you. So all this militarization is the problem, and unfortunately there’s no pushback that I can see, nor do I hear, even among the progressive elements of the society. It’s as if everyone just accepted that there’s no other solution to the problem but to try to arm ourselves, and come up with more military arrangements so that we can all push China out of those islands, and that’s very, very dangerous.

Ashley Smith:

Yeah. So, what impact has this increasing military budget, this sleepwalking dynamic into a military conflagration, what impact has that had on the domestic politics of the Philippines? What impact has it had on working people, both at the ideological level, what people are thinking, and also on the economy of the country and the experience of working class life?

Josua Mata:

Well, let’s start with economy, which is the simplest thing to explain because we’re not a rich country, despite the way many of our economic mismanagers would try to brag, that we are almost at the middle income level country. We are still a poor country. We still have many people who don’t even have access to electricity or access to sanitation. So we still need resources in order to develop the economy so that we can provide material needs of our people.

Now, you have to funnel a huge chunk of that money to military expenditures in order to modernize supposedly our military forces. And so what’s a concrete impact? This year, in 2025, the government just signed, the president just signed a budget, a trillion peso budget. Now it’s like 5 trillion pesos, if I’m not mistaken, and there’s zero budget or zero subsidy for field health. Field Health, that’s the health system in this country, zero subsidy so that they can now use it in order to put more money and more resources into militarization.

But more importantly, because this is an election period, then politicians would want to have a capacity to dip their hands into the coffers so that they can actually buy their way back to power. So that’s the economic impact. We have to shift a lot of our resources, much needed resources away from social expenditure into military expenditure.

Ideologically, for me the bigger problem is that there’s a stark increase or there’s a tendency to encourage nationalist thinking, which again is very dangerous, because for me it means that you put a premium on your own country, and therefore, it prepares everyone to fight anyone else outside of the country. And that obviously is the foundation for war. That’s the psychological preparation for war, if you like.

And who would suffer first and foremost in a war? It’s the working class, specifically the women and the children who are all unarmed, the civilians. And whose interests would this kind of war be waged for? Well, obviously, this is what the oligarchs and the powers that be are not explaining. It’s actually in the interest of the oligarchs who wanted to drill fossil fuel in that part of the world.

So that really is what the government is not explaining to the working class. And that is what we in SENTRO are really explaining to workers. And we are trying to tell everyone that militarization is not the only solution. In fact, militarization is the worst solution that you can ever think of, if it is called a solution in the first place. I don’t think we are in a situation where we only need to choose between Beijing or Washington.

These are false choices. These are imperialist powers who wanted to have the upper hand in the global competition for resources, for markets, et cetera. And both of them will not do anything good for the Filipino people. But then, the elites are forcing the Filipino people to take sides, and these binary choices that they’re presenting are all false choices. I think the more appropriate response should come from an international response, particularly from the labor movement, where the first question that all workers should ask is that, what is it that we can do to make sure that there is no war?

Ashley Smith:

One of the things that is clear in the US-China rivalry, in particular, is that every corner of the earth is affecting every other corner of the earth. You can’t separate any region of the world geopolitically. They’re all interrelated. And in particular, the impact of what happens in Europe has an impact of what happens in Asia.

So right now, Trump is trying to foist a pro-Russian imperialist deal on Ukraine, which basically forces Ukraine to give up 20% of its territory, no security guarantees, which means there’s likelihood for more war, but Trump has pushed for that deal. And many in Asia have thought if Ukraine falls, Taiwan’s next, and then there’s lots of other countries that are in the path. Because what it’s affirmed is a kind of annexationist imperialism by these great powers, the United States under Trump, Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China.

On the other hand, people have also said that Trump is trying to strike a deal over Ukraine to redeploy forces of the United States to Asia for a sharper confrontation with China. So, like you said earlier, it’s a little bit hard to figure out what Trump is really up to. What’s the plan behind this deal in Europe and what’s its impact going to be on China? So what’s your take on what is going on there in Europe and what’s impact it’s going to have on Asia?

Josua Mata:

Well, to be honest, as I said, many are now wondering could the country actually rely on the US? Because the country, as I said, it’s locked with the US, but now with Trump and his extremely volatile positioning and highly unpredictable way of conducting foreign policy, nobody actually knows what would happen. So that’s what people are wondering about in this part of the world. And I think that’s a natural result of the strategy when you start casting your luck with the US. So, now you’re in that kind of a dilemma, precisely because you did what you did.

Now, having said that, I think Trump’s positioning in Ukraine right now, whether it pans out or not, already sends a very strong message to everyone else, that you cannot rely on the US, you cannot rely on Trump. And that’s also the reason why I think the Philippine government, particularly the president, is starting to figure out how to recalculate things.

And this is where his statement about, remember we have Typhon missiles here that were deployed by the US. Now, I’m not so sure if we have the nuclear weapons here, nuclear warheads here. Hopefully not because that’s unconstitutional. But we both know that the US, it’s not the first time. If ever the US deploys a nuclear weapon in a country with constitutional bans against nuclear weapons, it’s not the first time. They did it with Japan, right? So without the Japanese government actually knowing about it. So I wouldn’t be surprised.

But having said that, now Marcos is saying, “Oh, I’d be happy to return the Typhon missiles, provided that China, you will stop harassing us and you will respect our rights,” et cetera. So to me, that’s a signal that he’s trying to recalibrate his own positioning, knowing fully well that he can no longer rely fully on what the US will do. So that’s one impact, at least that I can see.

But the worrisome thing for me is that it also tells us that weak countries have no say in solving the problems of this world, but even if these problems are the ones that are faced by these weak countries. I cannot imagine how Ukrainian people right now feel. Their future is being decided by two superpowers without them having any voice at all.

And that’s, I think, also the message to everyone in this part of the world. Whether Trump would launch a much more militarist front, whether Trump would be much more militaristic in dealing with China when it comes to the West or the South China Sea or Taiwan or not, the fact is, it is very clear that he will make the decision without thinking of consulting, whether the Taiwanese people or the Filipino people who would be affected by his decision, and that that’s just not good for anyone.

Ashley Smith:

So now, let’s turn to what progressive forces in the Philippines and what the left and the trade union movement can do. You’re one of the leaders of one of the key unions in the Philippines. So, how should the labor movement, oppressed people, workers more broadly, the peasant movement in the Philippines position themselves in this sharpening rivalry, this instability, the unreliability of the United States? What are the traps that should be avoided, and what are the kind of solutions that the working class movement in the Philippines should put forward?

Josua Mata:

That’s one of the questions that we have been trying to grapple with for many, many years now, since this whole thing started. And we’re still developing our ideas, but one thing is very clear for us at the onset. We can never respond to these problems coming from narrow nationalistic thinking. That, for us, is a disaster, which unfortunately is what the elites are peddling in order to gather more support for their position.

And unfortunately, many in the left in the Philippines, many in the progressive movement, including the left in the Philippines, who are also so steep into nationalist thinking, even in their own ideological moorings, is finding it, because of their own steep nationalist thinking, they are finding it very difficult to step away from that. But that’s the biggest trap, if you like, if you get into this nationalist thinking that, “We should wave the flag and defend those islands as our own.” That’s just going to lead to war.

Now, that was very clear for us from the very start. It was also very clear to us that the key issue here are the fossil fuels that are supposedly buried down there, but we’re in the midst of a climate crisis, and this is a real climate crisis. So, are we saying that we’re going to wage a war only to dig up and kill each other, only to dig up those fossil fuels so that we can burn the planet even more? That’s just absurd.

So, people should also sit back and think very clearly, is that the way you want to make use of these resources? Now, obviously we would have to burn some fossil fuels if you want to lift people from poverty, of course. But then, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we be thinking along the lines of, how do we do this in a way where we can minimize the impact on climate? And isn’t it better to think about these resources as something that all of us in this part of the world can use and not just the Filipinos?

I’m a socialist. As a socialist, I’ve always been raised with the thinking that resources are things that we should be sharing with everyone, no matter what your nationality is. So why can’t we think of, so this is second thing that we thought of immediately, is that why can’t we think of these islands of regional commons, where everyone who’s had any claim on it, let’s just all sit down and let’s all agree on how we can make sure that we can make use of these resources in an equitable way?

And then finally, clearly the solution to prevent the intensification or to prevent any potential military conflict, I think the solution is simply to call for a complete demilitarization of that area. And this is where we don’t have any support, even among the progressive groups in this country. Again, it’s because I think of this one-track thinking, that the only solution or the only response that you can present to a bully like China is to present a military solution. That, again, would only lead to disaster.

So these are some of the key things that we’re trying to develop at this point in time. But the problem here is that we still have yet to develop a broader constituency for this thinking, because there are very, very few people who would subscribe to this idea in a situation where nationalist thinking nationalist solutions are so powerful, even among the left in this country.

Ashley Smith:

A couple of final questions I wanted to ask you. First about this moment, because this moment that we’re living through has both these kind of interstate conflicts and inter-imperial conflicts, but it also has been 15 years of explosive struggle from below, pro-democracy movements, national liberation movements, revolutionary uprisings, especially in the Middle East. And a lot of them have not broken through and rebuilt the society in a progressive way, yet.

And one question, because of the Philippines history of intense pro-democracy struggles, explosive pro-democracy struggles, in particular the People’s Power movement that toppled the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos’ father, Ferdinand Marcos, what lessons do you think the left in the Philippines, and more broadly and globally, should people draw from the experience of these struggles, and in particular in the Philippines, from the People Power movement?

Josua Mata:

It’s a perfect question to end this discussion, and I’d like to remind you that in a few days time, we will actually celebrate or commemorate EDSA Revolution. And then this current government, the Marcos government, is trying its darnedest best to make sure that people actually forget it. So, I think the first thing that our first job is to make sure that people don’t forget. That’s the first job. And as we have often heard, the battle, the fight against authoritarianism, dictatorship is actually a fight against forgetting. It’s a fight to make sure that our memory is not left behind or it’s not forgotten. It’s a fight for memory. It’s a fight for historical memory. And that is the first thing that I think we lost as a progressive movement, as part of the left in the Philippines. And so that’s one lesson.

Many people no longer have the idea that the Marcos dictatorship was a really dark moment in our history. Most people may have heard of that and they have probably read of that in our textbook, but they have no clue on what it actually means. To the point that workers, 61% of voters even voted for Marcos during the last election. Now, that really is frustrating, because most of these voters are working class people, and they have forgotten that when the father declared the martial law, the first ones that he arrested were not the politicians. It was the trade union leaders. The first thing that he tried to destroy was not just the democratic systems that we have, but the labor movement that can potentially be an opposition to his martial law. So, the battle for memory, I think is something that we need to keep fighting for.

The second lesson that we can learn from the People Power, the failed People Power Revolution in this country, is that it is always important to make sure that there is an organized mass, an organized force that can provide the backbone, if you like, for the continuous push for social transformation. What we had in the EDSA Revolution was a political moment, a moment where we had the potential to transform society by ushering a thorough going social reform, a social transformation, if you like. The problem is People Power Revolution was largely led by people who were unorganized.

And the only organized forces that you can imagine that you can see during that period where the military and the politicians, the elite politicians. They were the only ones who had the machinery, the organization to make sure that the gains of the revolution could be pushed towards their agenda. Because the dominant left at that point in time, made a mistake of ignoring People Power Revolution because they have this sectarian belief, this Stalinist belief that the only way to wage a revolution in the Philippines is only through armed struggle, nothing more. So that effectively sidelined the Communist Party, which then led to… That was his historical error that led to them being sidelined.

Maybe I should say it this way. My political upbringing was when I joined the EDSA Revolution. I was still a student then, and I was a working student. And I distinctly remember when there was a call for people to come to EDSA. And at that time, many of us didn’t realize what was happening. Many of us didn’t know until much, much later that EDSA was actually started when a coup d’etat, a military coup d’etat of General Ramos and the secretary of defense minister at that time, minister of defense at that time. And really, they were planning a coup d’etat against Marcos because he knew he was dying and they were afraid that it’s the wife, Imelda, now together with General Ver, who would take over. Nobody knew that at that point in time.

And that plot, that coup plot, which they wanted to launch in 1984, was postponed to 1985 because the Americans managed to convince Marcos to hold snap elections. So they postponed it, but then they wanted to do it again, they were discovered by de Marcoses. And that forced Fidel Ramos and Enrile to come out in public, have a press conference and declare that they’re no longer supporting Marcos. The funny thing is, a funny footnote, actually, is that Imelda and General Ver could have nipped that pressy in the bud had one of the aides actually had the gall to disturb them during a party they were having.

No, it’s true, this is true. I think it’s a wedding party. They were having a wedding party and nobody wanted to disturb them. And then by the time they found out about it, it was too late. Enrile and the General Ramos were already able to start mobilizing support for them for their rebellion, if you like. But people heeded the call of cardinal sin. Who supported Marcos for a long time, but then eventually turned away from him. These are people, who are like me at that point in time, who were not organized. And we were there out in the streets. We didn’t sleep, we didn’t take a bath. You don’t eat much, except when there’s food, except that you can always rely on someone giving you food in the streets when we were manning the barricades.

And then when we heard that finally Marcos has left, everybody was so jubilant, everybody was crying, dancing, laughing, and then the first thing that we thought of, “We should sleep.” So we all went home, we slept, not knowing that the elites were up constructing the new system, so by the time that we woke up welcome back, we woke up to a government that’s once again run by the oligarchs. That is the biggest lesson. You don’t wage a revolution, and then on the verge of your victory, you go to sleep.

Which means it only brings us back to what many of us who are practitioners of professional revolutionaries, if you like, it only brings us back to the point that we always know that nothing beats people being organized, knowing fully well, not just what they are against, but what they really want. Because if we don’t have that organization with very clear vision and strategy on how do you want to transform society, then someone else will step in and hijack what we have started.

Ashley Smith:

Exactly. So this podcast is entitled Solidarity Without Exception. So I wanted to ask you about what you think about the popular struggle in the Philippines and its relation to similar ones in Palestine and Ukraine. Because so often, progressives fall into a trap of selective solidarity, siding with some popular struggles but not other popular struggles because of the camp that those struggles happen in, either a Russian or Chinese camp, or as an American camp, and people don’t have universal solidarity with progressive struggles from below. So, in the context that we’re in, of rising inter-imperial antagonism, increasing national oppression, and with that, growing popular struggle of various kinds from below, how do we build a kind of new internationalism that practices solidarity without exceptions? And what are the openings for that kind of internationalism today?

Josua Mata:

I think the problem in the Philippines, for us in the labor movement, is not the kind of problems that you’re facing that you just mentioned. Our problem is that there’s not much solidarity among Filipino working class and the labor movement, simply because people are so tied up with their day-to-day struggles. But don’t get me wrong, when I started the labor movement three decades ago, one of my first international work was actually supporting Burma. It wasn’t called Myanmar then.

So I was supporting Free Burma Coalition, not as an individual, but as part of the labor movement. I was then working as an education officer of the hotel unions, and I was very, very proud that we were providing spaces for the Burmese, the exiled Burmese leaders. Whenever they come to the Philippines, we actually host them, and so that they can meet quietly in one of the hotels that we organize. So, it’s so easy for us to be very, very involved in that kind of solidarity.

But then, looking back, one wonders so why are many trade union leaders then were very supportive of the struggle for Burma, but then when we asked them to look at the situation of the Muslims in Mindanao who were also waging their own war for their freedom, and who were for the longest time were being treated as if they are our own Palestine, then why is it that it’s so difficult for them to support that?

And that was really a nagging question that led my organization to actually have a program to combat the prejudice that many Catholics, if you like, Christians, if you like, against Muslims. Because in the first place, that fight for freedom of the moral people was never a religious fight. It was a completely secular fight for the freedom of people who have never agreed to be part of the country.

So, we realized that it’s not easy for people to readily provide solidarity to them because they have been fooled into thinking that this is a religious war. So we had to launch a massive, within our organization, we had to launch a massive education campaign to address the prejudice and make sure that at the minimum the labor movement should at least be able to ensure that its membership is a constituency for peace. So, that’s the lesson we draw for that.

But the problem for us now is that it’s so difficult for us to get the people to support, for example, the struggle of the people in Ukraine or even in Palestine. We hold rallies, we hold activities, we hold actions, but it’s this small community of activists and believers and not the general public. That is the kind of challenge that we have right now. And I attribute that to the fact that people are so burdened with day-to-day living, that’s just difficult for them to… The bandwidth for solidarity, if you like, is so limited. And that is a challenge that we have to figure out, “Now, how do we address that?”

So yes, having said that, I completely believe that real solidarity is the solution to the problems that we’re facing, even in the West Philippine Sea or the South China Sea, if you like. The starting point in our efforts to develop working class narrative to the so-called China question has always been to understand the workers of China. We firmly believe that there’s no way we can build solidarity with the Chinese working class, unless people understand that they, like us, are workers who are suffering not just the atrocious behavior of capitalists, but they’re also suffering from dictatorship of the Communist Party of China.

Unless Filipino workers starts thinking along those lines, the elites would always have the power to sway them to wave the flag and wage a war against the Chinese people. And that’s going to be a war that will decimate the working class only to profit the oligarchs.

Ashley Smith:

Thanks to Josua Mata for that revealing discussion of the Philippines, its working class struggle against the country’s dynastic rulers, the necessity of the country’s left opposing the US and China’s militarism in the Asia Pacific, and advocating for regional demilitarization. To hear about upcoming episodes of Solidarity Without Exception, sign up for the Real News Network newsletter. Don’t miss an episode.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ashley Smith.

Australia is caught in a jam, between an assertive American ally and a bold Chinese trading partner. America is accelerating its pivot to the Indo-Pacific, building up its fighting forces and expanding its military bases.

As Australia tries to navigate a pathway between America’s and Australia’s national interests, sometimes Australia’s national interest seems to submerge out of view.

Admiral David Johnston, the Chief of the Australia’s Defence Force, is steering this ship as China flexes its muscle sending a small warship flotilla south to circumnavigate the continent.

• READ MORE: Other Declassified Australia investigative reports
• Other AUKUS reports

He has admitted that the first the Defence Force heard of a live-fire exercise by the three Chinese Navy ships sailing in the South Pacific east of Australia on February 21, was a phone call from the civilian Airservices Australia.

“The absence of any advance notice to Australian authorities was a concern, notably, that the limited notice provided by the PLA could have unnecessarily increased the risk to aircraft and vessels in the area,” Johnston told Senate Estimates .

Johnston was pressed to clarify how Defence first came to know of the live-fire drill: “Is it the case that Defence was only notified, via Virgin and Airservices Australia, 28 minutes [sic] after the firing window commenced?”

To this, Admiral Johnston replied: “Yes.”

If it happened as stated by the Admiral — that a live-fire exercise by the Chinese ships was undertaken and a warning notice was transmitted from the Chinese ships, all without being detected by Australian defence and surveillance assets — this is a defence failure of considerable significance.

Sources with knowledge of Defence spoken to by Declassified Australia say that this is either a failure of surveillance, or a failure of communication, or even more far-reaching, a failure of US alliance cooperation.

And from the very start the official facts became slippery.

Our latest investigation –

AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE: NAVIGATING US-CHINA TENSIONS

We investigate a significant intelligence failure to detect live-firing by Chinese warships near Australia, has exposed Defence weaknesses, and the fact that when it counts, we are all alone.

… pic.twitter.com/GxbSxrtXyc

— Declassified Australia (@DeclassifiedAus) March 7, 2025

What did they know and when did they know it
The first information passed on to Defence by Airservices Australia came from the pilot of a Virgin passenger jet passing overhead the flotilla in the Tasman Sea that had picked up the Chinese Navy VHF radio notification of an impending live-fire exercise.

The radio transmission had advised the window for the live-fire drill commenced at 9.30am and would conclude at 3pm.

We know this from testimony given to Senate Estimates by the head of Airservices Australia. He said Airservices was notified at 9.58am by an aviation control tower informed by the Virgin pilot. Two minutes later Airservices issued a “hazard alert” to commercial airlines in the area.

The Headquarters of the Defence Force’s Joint Operations Command (HJOC), at Bungendore 30km east of Canberra, was then notified about the drill by Airservices at 10.08am, 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.

When questioned a few days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to try to cover for Defence’s apparent failure to detect the live-fire drill or the advisory transmission.

“At around the same time, there were two areas of notification. One was from the New Zealand vessels that were tailing . ..  the [Chinese] vessels in the area by both sea and air,” Albanese stated. “So that occurred and at the same time through the channels that occur when something like this is occurring, Airservices got notified as well.”

But the New Zealand Defence Force had not notified Defence “at the same time”. In fact it was not until 11.01am that an alert was received by Defence from the New Zealand Defence Force — 53 minutes after Defence HQ was told by Airservices and an hour and a half after the drill window had begun.

Defence Minister Richard Marles later in a round-about way admitted on ABC Radio that it wasn’t the New Zealanders who informed Australia first: “Well, to be clear, we weren’t notified by China. I mean, we became aware of this during the course of the day.

“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live firing. By that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines or literally planes that were commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman.”

Later the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, told ABC that two live-fire training drills were carried out at sea on February 21 and 22, in accordance with international law and “after repeatedly issuing safety notices in advance”.

Eyes and ears on ‘every move’
It was expected the Chinese-navy flotilla would end its three week voyage around Australia on March 7, after a circumnavigation of the continent. That is not before finally passing at some distance the newly acquired US-UK nuclear submarine base at HMAS Stirling near Perth and the powerful US communications and surveillance base at North West Cape.

Just as Australia spies on China to develop intelligence and targeting for a potential US war, China responds in kind, collecting data on US military and intelligence bases and facilities in Australia, as future targets should hostilities commence.

The presence of the Chinese Navy ships that headed into the northern and eastern seas around Australia attracted the attention of the Defence Department ever since they first set off south through the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines and through the Indonesian archipelago from the South China Sea on February 3.

“We are keeping a close watch on them and we will be making sure that we watch every move,” Marles stated in the week before the live-fire incident.

“Just as they have a right to be in international waters . . .  we have a right to be prudent and to make sure that we are surveilling them, which is what we are doing.”

Around 3500 km to the north, a week into the Chinese ships’ voyage, a spy flight by an RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane on February 11, in a disputed area of the South China Sea south of China’s Hainan Island, was warned off by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Australian protests claiming the Australian aircraft “deliberately intruded” into China’s claimed territorial airspace around the Paracel Islands without China’s permission, thereby “infringing on China’s sovereignty and endangering China’s national security”.

Australia criticised the Chinese manoeuvre, defending the Australian flight saying it was “exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace”.

Two days after the incident, the three Chinese ships on their way to Australian waters were taking different routes in beginning their own “right to freedom of navigation” in international waters off the Australian coast. The three ships formed up their mini flotilla in the Coral Sea as they turned south paralleling the Australian eastern coastline outside of territorial waters, and sometimes within Australia’s 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.

“Defence always monitors foreign military activity in proximity to Australia. This includes the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Task Group.” Admiral Johnston told Senate Estimates.

“We have been monitoring the movement of the Task Group through its transit through Southeast Asia and we have observed the Task Group as it has come south through that region.”

The Task Group was made up of a modern stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, the frigate Hengyang, and the Weishanhu, a 20,500 tonne supply ship carrying fuel, fresh water, cargo and ammunition. The Hengyang moved eastwards through the Torres Strait, while the Zunyi and Weishanhu passed south near Bougainville and Solomon Islands, meeting in the Coral Sea.

As the Chinese ships moved near northern Australia and through the Coral Sea heading further south, the Defence Department deployed Navy and Air Force assets to watch over the ships. These included various RAN warships including the frigate HMAS Arunta and a RAAF P-8A Poseidon intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane.

With unconfirmed reports a Chinese nuclear submarine may also be accompanying the surface ships, the monitoring may have also included one of the RAN’s Collins-class submarines, with their active range of sonar, radar and radio monitoring – however it is uncertain whether one was able to be made available from the fleet.

“From the point of time the first of the vessels entered into our more immediate region, we have been conducting active surveillance of their activities,” the Defence chief confirmed.

As the Chinese ships moved into the southern Tasman Sea, New Zealand navy ships joined in the monitoring alongside Australia’s Navy and Air Force.

The range of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that theoretically can be intercepted emanating from a naval ship at sea includes encrypted data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, aerial drone data and communications, as well as data of radar, gunnery, and weapon launches.

There are a number of surveillance facilities in Australia that would have been able to be directed at the Chinese ships.

Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) Shoal Bay Receiving Station outside of Darwin, picks up transmissions and data emanating from radio signals and satellite communications from Australia’s near north region. ASD’s Cocos Islands receiving station in the mid-Indian ocean would have been available too.

The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) over-the-horizon radar network, spread across northern Australia, is an early warning system that monitors aircraft and ship movements across Australia’s north-western, northern, and north-eastern ocean areas — but its range off the eastern coast is not thought to presently reach further south than the sea off Mackay on the Queensland coast.

Of land-based surveillance facilities, it is the American Pine Gap base that is believed to have the best capability of intercepting the ship’s radio communications in the Tasman Sea.

Enter, Pine Gap and the Americans
The US satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia is a US and Australian jointly-run satellite ground station. It is regarded as the most important such American satellite base outside of the USA.

The role of ASD in supporting the extensive US surveillance mission against China is increasingly valued by Australia’s large Five Eyes alliance partner.

A Top Secret ‘Information Paper’, titled “NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia”, leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden and published by ABC’s Background Briefing, spells out the “close collaboration” between the NSA and ASD, in particular on China:

“Increased emphasis on China will not only help ensure the security of Australia, but also synergize with the U.S. in its renewed emphasis on Asia and the Pacific . . .   Australia’s overall intelligence effort on China, as a target, is already significant and will increase.”

The Pine Gap base, as further revealed in 2023 by Declassified Australia, is being used to collect signals intelligence and other data from the Israeli battlefield of Gaza, and also Ukraine and other global hotspots within view of the US spy satellites.

It’s recently had a significant expansion (reported by this author in The Saturday Paper) which has seen its total of satellite dishes and radomes rapidly increase in just a few years from 35 to 45 to accommodate new heightened-capability surveillance satellites.

Pine Gap base collects an enormous range and quantity of intelligence and data from thermal imaging satellites, photographic reconnaissance satellites, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites, as expert researchers Des Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute have detailed.

These SIGINT satellites intercept electronic communications and signals from ground-based sources, such as radio communications, telemetry, radar signals, satellite communications, microwave emissions, mobile phone signals, and geolocation data.

Alliance priorities
The US’s SIGINT satellites have a capability to detect and receive signals from VHF radio transmissions on or near the earth’s surface, but they need to be tasked to do so and appropriately targeted on the source of the transmission.

For the Pine Gap base to intercept VHF radio signals from the Chinese Navy ships, the base would have needed to specifically realign one of those SIGINT satellites to provide coverage of the VHF signals in the Tasman Sea at the time of the Chinese ships’ passage. It is not known publicly if they did this, but they certainly have that capability.

However, it is not only the VHF radio transmission that would have carried information about the live-firing exercise.

Pine Gap would be able to monitor a range of other SIGINT transmissions from the Chinese ships. Details of the planning and preparations for the live-firing exercise would almost certainly have been transmitted over data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, and even in the data of radar and gunnery operations.

But it is here that there is another possibility for the failure.

The Pine Gap base was built and exists to serve the national interests of the United States. The tasking of the surveillance satellites in range of Pine Gap base is generally not set by Australia, but is directed by United States’ agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together with the US Defense Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Australia has learnt over time that US priorities may not be the same as Australia’s.

Australian defence and intelligence services can request surveillance tasks to be added to the schedule, and would have been expected to have done so in order to target the southern leg of the Chinese Navy ships’ voyage, when the ships were out of the range of the JORN network.

The military demands for satellite time can be excessive in times of heightened global conflict, as is the case now.

Whether the Pine Gap base was devoting sufficient surveillance resources to monitoring the Chinese Navy ships, due to United States’ priorities in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, North Korea, and to our north in the South China Sea, is a relevant question.

It can only be answered now by a formal government inquiry into what went on — preferably held in public by a parliamentary committee or separately commissioned inquiry. The sovereign defence of Australia failed in this incident and lessons need to be learned.

Who knew and when did they know
If the Pine Gap base had been monitoring the VHF radio band and heard the Chinese Navy live-fire alert, or had been monitoring other SIGINT transmissions to discover the live-fire drill, the normal procedure would be for the active surveillance team to inform a number of levels of senior officers, a former Defence official familiar with the process told Declassified Australia.

Expected to be included in the information chain are the Australian Deputy-Chief of Facility at the US base, NSA liaison staff at the base, the Australian Signals Directorate head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra, the Defence Force’s Headquarters Joint Operations Command, in Bungendore, and the Chief of the Defence Force. From there the Defence Minister’s office would need to have been informed.

As has been reported in media interviews and in testimony to the Senate Estimates hearings, it has been stated that Defence was not informed of the Chinese ships’ live-firing alert until a full 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.

The former Defence official told Declassified Australia it is vital the reason for the failure to detect the live-firing in a timely fashion is ascertained.

Either the Australian Defence Force and US Pine Gap base were not effectively actively monitoring the Chinese flotilla at this time — and the reasons for that need to be examined — or they were, but the information gathered was somewhere stalled and not passed on to correct channels.

If the evidence so far tendered by the Defence chief and the Minister is true, and it was not informed of the drill by any of its intelligence or surveillance assets before that phone call from Airservices Australia, the implications need to be seriously addressed.

A final word
In just a couple of weeks the whole Defence environment for Australia has changed, for the worse.

The US military announces a drawdown in Europe and a new pivot to the Indo-Pacific. China shows Australia it can do tit-for-tat “navigational freedom” voyages close to the Australian coast. US intelligence support is withdrawn from Ukraine during the war. Australia discovers the AUKUS submarines’ arrival looks even more remote. The prime minister confuses the limited cover provided by the ANZUS treaty.

Meanwhile, the US militarisation of Australia’s north continues at pace. At the same time a senior Pentagon official pressures Australia to massively increase defence spending. And now, the country’s defence intelligence system has experienced an unexplained major failure.

Australia, it seems, is adrift in a sea of unpredictable global events and changing alliance priorities.

Peter Cronau is an award-winning, investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentary, The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting, was broadcast on Australian ABC Radio National and featured on ABC News. He produced and directed the documentary film Drawing the Line, revealing details of Australian spying in East Timor, on ABC TV’s premier investigative programme Four Corners. He won the Gold Walkley Award in 2007 for a report he produced on an outbreak of political violence in East Timor. This article was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished here with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Neo recycles a few dozen tons of high-purity gallium a year, mostly from semiconductor chip manufacturing scrap, at a factory in Ontario, Canada. In North America, it’s the only industrial-scale producer of the metal, which is used in not only chips, but also clean energy technologies and military equipment. 

China, the world’s leading producer by far, had just announced new export controls on gallium, apparently in response to reports that the United States government was considering restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China. 

All of a sudden, people wanted to talk to Neo. “We’ve spoken to almost everyone” interested in producing gallium outside of China, Tsianos told Grist.

Since Tsianos started receiving those calls, tensions over the 31st element on the periodic table — as well as the 32nd, germanium, also used in a bevy of advanced technologies — have escalated. In December, China outright banned exports of both metals to the United States following the Biden administration’s decision to further restrict U.S. chip exports. 

Now, several companies operating in the U.S. and Canada are considering expanding production of the rare metals to help meet U.S. demand. While Canadian critical minerals producers may get swept up in a new geopolitical tit-for-tat should Trump go through with his threat to impose tariffs, U.S. metal producers could see support from the new administration, which called for prioritizing federal funding for critical minerals projects in a Day 1 executive order. Beyond the U.S. and Canada, industry observers say China’s export ban is fueling global interest in making critical mineral supply chains more diverse so that no single country has a chokehold over materials vital for a high-tech, clean energy future.

“This latest round of export bans are putting a lot of wind in the sails of critical minerals supply chain efforts, not just in the U.S. but globally,” Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute, a research center focused on technological solutions to environmental problems, told Grist.

Gallium and germanium aren’t exactly household names. But they are found in products that are indispensable to modern life — and a fossil fuel-free society. With its impressive electrical properties, gallium is used in semiconductor chips that make their way into everything from cell phones to power converters in electric vehicles to LED lighting displays. The metal is also used in the manufacturing of rare earth magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines, in thin film solar cells, and sometimes, in commercially popular silicon solar photovoltaic cells, where it can help increase performance and extend lifespan. 

Germanium, meanwhile, is used to refract light inside fiber optic cables. In addition to helping form the backbone of the internet, the metal’s exceptional light-scattering properties make it useful for infrared lenses, semiconductor chips, and high-efficiency solar cells used by satellites.

There aren’t many substitutes for these two elements.  Some silicon-based semiconductors lack gallium, and specialized glasses can be substituted for germanium in certain infrared technologies. Solar cells are often doped with boron instead of gallium. But these two metals have specific properties that often make them the ideal material. When it comes to clean energy, Tsianos told Grist, there are no substitutes “within the material performance and cost trade-off spectrum” offered by gallium.

Because a little bit goes a long way, the market for both metals is small — and it’s dominated by China. In 2022, the world produced about 640 tons of low-purity gallium and a little over 200 tons of germanium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In recent years, China has accounted for virtually all of the world’s low-purity gallium output and more than half of refined germanium. 

That’s partly due to the fact that both metals are byproducts of other industries. Gallium is typically extracted from bauxite ores as they are being processed to make aluminum oxide, while zinc miners sometimes squeeze germanium out of waste produced during refining. China is a leading producer of these common metals, too — and its government has made co-extracting gallium and germanium a priority, according to Wang. “It is very strategic,” he said.

China’s dominance of the two metals’ supply chains gives it a considerable cudgel in its ongoing trade war with the U.S. America produces no virgin gallium and only a small amount of germanium, while consuming approximately fifty tons a year of the two metals combined. A U.S. Geological Survey study published in November found that if China implemented a total moratorium on exports of both metals, it could cost the U.S. economy billions. Weeks after that study was published, China announced its ban.

The ban is so new that it’s not yet clear how U.S. companies, or the federal government, are responding. But America’s high-tech manufacturing sector isn’t without fallback options. North of the border, Neo’s facility in Ontario stands ready to double its production of gallium, according to Tsianos. “We have the capacity,” he told Grist. “We’re waiting for more feedstock.” 

Currently, Neo’s only source of gallium is the semiconductor industry. Chip makers in Europe, North America, and Asia send the company their scrap, which it processes to recover high-purity gallium that feeds back into semiconductor manufacturing. But Tsianos says Neo is piloting its technology with bauxite miners around the world to create new sources of virgin gallium. The idea, he says, is that bauxite miners would do some initial processing on-site, then send low-purity gallium to Neo for further refining in Canada. Tsianos declined to name specific bauxite firms Neo is partnering with, but said the company is “making progress” toward making new resources available.

Meanwhile, in British Columbia, mining giant Teck Resources is already a leading producer of germanium outside of China. The firm’s Trail Operations refinery complex receives zinc ore from the Red Dog mine in northwest Alaska and turns it into various products, including around 20 tons of refined germanium a year, according to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate. (Teck doesn’t disclose production volumes.) 

That germanium is sold primarily to customers in the U.S., Teck spokesperson Dale Steeves told Grist. In wake of the export ban, Steeves said that the firm is now “examining options and market support for increasing production capacity of germanium.”

Kwasi Ampofo, the head of metals and mining at the clean energy research firm BloombergNEF, told Grist that in the near term, he would expect the U.S. to “try to establish new supply chain relationships” with countries that already have significant production, like Canada, to secure the gallium and germanium it needs. That may be true whether or not Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canadian imports become reality. Tsianos was bullish in spite of the tariff threat, noting in an email that Neo “remains the only industrial-scale and commercially-operating Gallium facility in North America.”

“[W]e are committed to continue serving our European, American, and Japanese customers in the semiconductor and renewable energy industries,’ Tsianos added.

Steeves told Grist that a trade war between the U.S. and Canada would be “a negative for the economy of both nations, disrupting the flow of essential critical minerals and increasing costs and inefficiencies on both sides of the border.” Teck, he said,  “will continue to actively manage our sales arrangements to minimize the impact to Trail Operations.”

While Canada may be the U.S.’s best short-term option for these rare metals, farther down the line Ampofo expects to see the U.S. take a  “renewed interest” in recycling — particularly of military equipment. In 2022, the Department of Defense announced it had initiated a program for recovering “optical-grade germanium” from old military equipment. At the time, the initiative was expected to recycle up to 3 tons of the metal each year, or roughly 10 percent of the nation’s annual demand. The Defense sub-agency responsible for the program didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on the program’s status.

There’s another small source of production capacity in the U.S. The global metals company Umicore recycles germanium from manufacturing scrap, fiber optic cables, solar cells, and infrared optical devices at an optical materials facility in Quapaw, Oklahoma, as well as in Belgium. The company has been recycling germanium since the 1950s, a spokesperson told Grist, calling it a “core and historical activity at Umicore.” Umicore declined to disclose how much of the metal it recycles and wouldn’t say whether China’s export ban will impact this part of its business.

While recycling is able to fill some of the nation’s gallium and germanium needs, there may be a larger source of both metals lurking in sludge ponds in central Tennessee. 

There, in the city of Clarksville, the Netherlands-headquartered Nyrstar operates a zinc processing facility that produces wastes containing gallium and germanium. A U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson told Grist that the company has previously partnered with Ames National Laboratory’s Critical Materials Innovation Hub to develop processes for extracting gallium, which isn’t typically produced from zinc waste. 

In 2023, Nyrstar announced plans to build a new, $150-million facility, co-located with its existing zinc smelter in Clarksville, capable of producing 30 tons of germanium and 40 tons of gallium a year. However, the current status of the project is uncertain, with no timetable to begin construction. A spokesperson for Nyrstar told Grist the company is “continu[ing] to work on and evaluate the business case” for the facility, while declining to offer additional details.

Making a business case to produce gallium or germanium is the central challenge for firms outside of China, experts told Grist. As Tsianos of Neo put it, these metals are a “side hustle” that requires major up-front investment for a relatively small amount of extra revenue. Moreover, a bauxite or zinc miner’s ability to produce gallium or germanium typically hinges on the market conditions for the metal it is primarily focused on. That means “if aluminum prices are low or the zinc prices are low, the mine or the smelter might just not operate, even if the world is sort of screaming out for more gallium or germanium,” Wang said.

Still, there’s more economic incentive to produce these metals now than there was a few years ago. The recent geopolitical drama, Tsianos says, has caused a “bifurcation” in the price of gallium. Outside of China, the price of the metal is now “almost double” what it is within the nation’s borders. 

“There’s a structural change in the market that has created a business case for outside of China production,” Tsianos said. “And it started because of the export control.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 2 obscure clean energy metals are caught in the crosshairs of the US-China trade war on Feb 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddie Stone.

Carter died on Sunday, nearly two years after he entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, his family announced.

His 1977-81 tenure in the White House was marked by the Camp David Accords peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, the Iran hostage crisis – and the rapprochement with China at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

In a speech at the White House in December 1978, Carter announced the severance of diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan and recognition of the People’s Republic of China, effective Jan. 1, 1979.

“The normalization of U.S.-China relations has no other purpose than to promote peace,” Carter said.

Recognition of Beijing meant the termination of diplomatic relations and a mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China in Taipei. In response Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979, which was signed and implemented by Carter.

“The opening to China by Nixon and Kissinger is what’s remembered. But it was Carter who established diplomatic relations when Nixon and Kissinger and Gerald Ford couldn’t politically,” said author and China expert James Mann.

Mann said Carter “fleshed out” the 1971-72 opening made by the Nixon administration with stronger military and intelligence ties to counter the Soviet Union, as well as student exchanges that brought hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to the U.S.

The opening to China was promising at a time when the U.S. was facing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Middle East oil crisis and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

Line of defense

Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping saw opening up to the outside world and improving relations with the West as way to get technology and resources for his impoverished country.

“What was more important at the time was that the People’s Republic of China and the United States jointly established a line of defense against the former Soviet Union,” Yang Dali, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, told RFA.

Carter’s earliest impression of China came from accounts he heard from Baptist missionaries in rural Georgia and his uncle who served in the U.S. Navy.

Moved by stories about dire poverty in China, the young Carter donated 5 cents every week to a church program that built hospitals and schools for Chinese children, according to the Carter Center.

Carter set foot in China for the first time in 1949, before the communist takeover, during a port call as a U.S. Navy submarine officer.

The wartime destruction suffered by China left a deep impression on him and motivated him to seek peace, said Liu Yawei, director of the China Project at the Carter Center.

“When he negotiated with Deng Xiaoping to establish diplomatic relations, the contradictions between China and the United States were far greater than the current contradictions between China and the United States,” he told RFA.

In 1982, Carter and Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years who died in November 2023, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a non-profit focused on peace negotiations, and spreading health and democracy.

The Carter Center’s China project began in the 1980s, making prosthetics for disabled people in rural China and providing educational opportunities for deaf and blind children.

Until his health started to decline, Carter went to China almost every year and often traveled deep into the countryside, visiting earthquake zones and other disaster areas after to assist relief efforts.

From 1996 to 2012, the Carter Center’s China Project worked to help promote political reform through grassroots democratic elections in rural China, providing technical assistance and training election officials, said Liu.

(China Daily CDIC/Reuters)

Human rights questions

The election program, like all foreign NGO activity in China, came under scrutiny when authoritarian leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, and the Carter Center “began to withdraw from China’s internal affairs and only focus on Sino-U.S. relations,” he said.

As the leader of the Carter Center, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his “unremitting efforts to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, democracy and human rights.”

Carter is not without his critics when it comes to his handling of human rights in China. They say he pulled his punches on conditions in China during his time in office and in his long post-presidential career.

“Human rights was his issue around the world, but he paid little to no attention to human rights issues in China,” said Mann, author of three books on U.S.-China relations.

Carter resisted calls to raise specific jailed dissidents or condemn crackdowns on nascent democracy movements in the late 1970s, he said.

“I think he thought it was an important issue that China had come out of the Mao years and was changing,” Mann added.

“Carter has never embarrassed China on key issues,” said Xia Ming, a professor of political science at the City University of New York.

“Perhaps in the eyes of some people, (humanitarians like Carter) do not understand the toxicity of the Chinese Communist Party’s autocracy and communism enough -- especially today when we see China, Iran and Russia hugging together again,” he said.

Asked about the critics, Liu of the Carter Center said Carter felt he had bigger fish to fry.

“For President Carter, reducing and relieving the misery of the great masses of the people are probably more important than one or two individual cases,” he said.

Edited by RFA Staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jane Tang, Paul Eckert.

Amid this volatile environment, rumors targeting American chipmaker Nvidia have surfaced in China, particularly after Beijing announced an antitrust investigation into the company.

As the world’s largest provider of processors that power artificial intelligence, Nvidia is now under scrutiny just weeks after the U.S. unveiled a sweeping semiconductor export control package aimed at curbing China’s technological advances.

Below is what AFCL found.

Did Nvidia’s CEO mock Chinese people?

A video emerged in Chinese-language social media posts that claim it shows Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mocking Chinese people by saying they enjoyed pain and suffering.

The caption of the video shared here and here reads: “Nvidia’s founder Jensen Huang provocatively says: The life of ordinary Chinese people is full of pain and suffering, which they call will and grit. And the room laughs.”

The 54-second video shows what appears to be Huang’s media interview.

(Screenshot/Weibo)

But the claim is false.

A keyword search found the original video published on the YouTube channel of the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association on Dec. 11, 2023.

A review of the video shows Huang was actually discussing the benefits of being raised by Chinese parents.

At the video’s 54-minute mark, a member of the audience can be heard asking Huang what qualities he believed most contributed to his success.

In response, Huang stressed the importance of character in success, saying that he thought the questioner was “blessed to have been raised (as) Chinese.”

He added: “One of the characteristics of Chinese, of course, is the ability to tolerate long-term pain and suffering. If you’ve been raised by a Chinese parent, you have enjoyed a lot of pain and suffering.

“Isn’t that right? And so, in fact, the ability to endure pain and suffering is called grit, GRIT. It is now recognized as one of the most important characteristics of successful people and so I wish upon you a lifelong, plenty of pain and suffering.”

It’s clear that Huang was referring to the broader values and traditions he associated with Chinese culture when he mentioned the term “Chinese”, not specifically “Chinese nationality.”

Does a photo show Huang getting drunk in Vietnam after ‘losing’ the Chinese market?

A photo of Huang was shared on Douyin, China’s equivalent of TikTok, on Dec. 15, 2024, alongside a claim that it shows Huang “getting drunk” in Vietnam after “losing” the Chinese market.

The photo and the claim began to circulate online after China opened an antitrust investigation into Nvidia.

“Down at losing the Chinese market, Jensen Huang drowned his sorrows on a Vietnamese street corner, going grey haired overnight,” the caption of the image reads.

“Don’t know where his new beloved leather jacket went, he’s just wearing a T-shirt, clearly distraught.”

(Screenshot/Douyin)

But the claim is false.

A reverse image search found the corresponding photo published in media reports in December 2023, months before China’s recent investigation against the American chipmaker.

The same photo was also uploaded by Vietnam’s consul-general in San Francisco Hoang Anh Tuan on his Facebook page on Dec. 10, 2024.

(Screenshots/Facebook and Vietnam+)

Is Nvidia pulling out of China due to the investigation?

A claim has been repeatedly circulated in Chinese-language posts that Nvidia plans to exit China due to Beijing’s antitrust investigation.

However, the claim lacks evidence.

Nvidia dismissed the claim on Dec. 12, a few days after China’s announcement of the investigation, and said it would “continue” to serve Chinese customers.

“China is an important market for Nvidia. Nvidia adheres to the original intention of putting customers first and will continue to provide Chinese customers with the highest quality and most efficient products and services,” the company said in its official Weibo page.

(Screenshot/Weibo)

Separately, Huang said in November that the chipmaker remained committed to maintaining its presence in mainland China.

Keyword searches found no credible reports or statements that show Nvidia’s plan to exit China.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Rita Cheng and Alan Lu for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Vietnam has recently become an attractive place for Western companies looking for ways to reduce their reliance on China, as geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing intensify.

“We are delighted to open Nvidia’s R&D center to accelerate Vietnam’s AI journey,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, in a statement on Thursday, referring to the research and development center.

“With our expertise in AI development, we will partner with a vibrant ecosystem of researchers, startups and enterprise organizations to build incredible AI right here in Vietnam.”

The agreement, signed in Hanoi in the presence of Huang and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, will involve the expansion of an AI data center belonging to the Vietnamese military-owned Viettel Group, which already uses Nvidia technology.

“The new center will develop valuable platforms for Nvidia and partners to nurture AI innovation,” said Nvidia in the statement.

“Researchers and startups will be able to use this infrastructure to develop AI applications for key industries such as healthcare, education, transportation and finance,” the company said

Nvidia’s agreement came a few weeks after the U.S. announced a new semiconductor export control package against China, curbing exports to 140 companies, its latest major effort to block China’s access to and production of chips capable of advancing artificial intelligence for military purposes.

In response, China retaliated, tightening controls on the export of key raw materials to the U.S. and cautioning Chinese companies against buying American chips.

Nvidia has been a key supplier of high-performance GPUs and AI chips to Chinese companies. In the July quarter of 2024, China accounted for approximately 12% of Nvidia’s revenue, amounting to about US$3.7 billion – a more than 30% increase from the previous year.

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Although Huang said in November that the chipmaker remained committed to maintaining its presence in mainland China, the U.S. chipmaker has also been eyeing ways to reduce its reliance on China.

During his visit to Hanoi late last year, Huang said that his firm was committed to investing in Vietnam and making it a “second home.”

At that time, he said the company planned to expand its partnerships with Vietnam’s top tech firms and support it in training talent for developing AI and digital infrastructure.

Last year, Nvidia partnered with Vietnamese AI and cloud computing service provider FPT Smart Cloud. In April, FPT announced that it and Nvidia would build a US$200 million AI “factory” using Nvidia’s graphic chip and software.

Apart from Vietnam, Nvidia has increased partnerships and investments in other Southeast Asian countries in recent years including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Edited by RFA Staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

Calling tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” the president-elect threatened during the 2024 election campaign to hit Chinese imports with tariffs of “more than” 60%, effectively slamming the brakes on trade between the world’s two biggest economies.

On Monday, he said that whatever rate was ultimately levied, there would be an extra 10% tariff on top of that to punish Beijing for continued outflows of precursors for the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which U.S. authorities say is killing around 75,000 Americans a year.

All that suggests that the U.S.-China relationship looks set under the second Trump presidency to become increasingly dominated by a grand rebalancing of trade ties, experts told Radio Free Asia.

In many ways, they said, things will pick right up from where Trump left them in January 2021, having hit China with some $50 billion worth of tariffs, which the Biden administration has since declined to roll back.

Yet things may be a lot different this time.

Trump tariffs 2.0

Beijing now has nearly a decade of experience in dealing with trade pressure from the United States, said Shanghai-based Han Lin, the China country director for the Asia Group business consultancy.

While the world’s second-biggest economy was looking to increased exports as its ticket out of slumping growth, he said, Chinese economic officials also now have experience with retaliatory measures and knowledge of how best to hit back at aggressive U.S. policies.

“China is better prepared now than during Trump 1.0,” Han told RFA. “It has a wider range of carrot-and-stick trade responses, but the ever-present need for foreign investment may calibrate their behavior to send a message of strength without unnecessary escalation.”

A likely response from Beijing, he explained, would be to let the Chinese yuan “drift weaker,” so the exchange rate with the U.S. dollar makes Chinese goods more competitive for American buyers without directly needing to confront Trump or spark a tit-for-tat trade war.

“This will help offset the impact of U.S. tariffs on China exporters,” he said, noting they would “inevitably” get requests to lower their prices from American importers looking to avoid their own revenue losses.

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But it’s not even clear yet how much damage control will be needed.

Zhiwu Chen, a professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong, said China’s leadership likely saw Trump’s campaign threats of 60% tariffs as more of a “negotiating tactic” than a solid policy promise.

From Beijing’s view, he said, the final tariff rate was likely to be lower – especially if China agrees to buy more American exports like agricultural goods or oil, thereby mitigating the U.S. current account deficit.

“What the leadership in Beijing learned from Trump 1.0 is that he is for real and transactional, kind of like an open book, so they may prefer his style, though they don’t like his bare-knuckle style,” Chen said, adding he believed trade ties could even “warm up somewhat in 2025.”

Trump ally Elon Musk would be a key dissenting voice in the White House, he explained, and would advocate against a total decoupling with the Chinese market, given his extensive business ties there.

“Elon Musk can be counted on to temper that push as Tesla depends so much on the China market,” Chen told Radio Free Asia.

The art of the deal

Others are less convinced that the author of the “The Art of the Deal” is necessarily so focussed this time on striking a deal with Beijing.

Tao Wang, the Hong Kong-based chief China economist at the UBS Investment Bank, noted that China’s government would not blush at the idea of negotiating with Trump to find a new status quo.

“I think the Chinese government would be very open to having a deal,” Wang at a Nov. 20 event at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It’s just not really clear to me what Trump would want.”

“Last time, he said he’s the great salesperson – he wants to sell more soybeans, and LNG, and all these American products,” she said. “Now he seems to want something different: He wants fiscal revenue from tariffs, and he wants to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.”

On the campaign trail and in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10, Trump touted the fiscal revenue a 60% tariff on Chinese imports would generate, arguing that the funds paid by Chinese importers could even offset tax cuts for Americans.

Still, even if Trump is serious about the 60% Chinese tariff rate, the practicalities of governing could temper his plans once in office.

At the same Nov. 20 event, Mary E. Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that the campaign pledges of tariffs on China would be the easy part for Trump.

When so many basic goods used by American consumers and businesses come from inexpensive Chinese sources, she argued, implementing the tariffs without fanning inflation would be the hard part.

Economists warn that the tariffs on China will accelerate inflation just as the U.S. economy is recovering from an extended bout of surging prices.

“I don’t think anyone really knows how realistic his team has been about alternative sources,” Lovely said, explaining that the current White House had been struggling to diversify U.S. supply chains.

“We saw that in the Biden administration, where there was effort to create alternatives. They really didn’t make a whole lot of progress,” she said. “This is a really difficult problem. I’m afraid we don’t know if the new team has really faced up to how difficult it is going to be.”

Dear leader

One thing seems clear though, and that’s that the U.S.-China relationship will increasingly be defined by the personal relationship between Xi and Trump, who in his first term variously expressed both admiration and disdain for China’s authoritarian leader.

“President Trump will probably want to engage directly with President Xi, and the leader-to-leader level interaction will color and inform the agenda and the tone of the relationship going forward,” said Ryan Hass, the director of the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, at an event hosted by the think tank on Friday.

The Biden administration struggled to ignite talks between lower-level U.S. and Chinese officials. Bilateral tensions saw many Chinese officials – even the defense minister – ignore overtures from their U.S. counterparts, fearing the consequences of appearing too friendly.

After Biden and Xi’s high-profile summit in San Francisco last November, though, cooperation at the lower levels was resumed.

Still, Hass cautioned that Trump would not have absolute power in his dealmaking with Xi. Pressure would remain on him to maintain close alliances with allies like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, he said.

“President Trump is not Kim Jong Un: He does not decide by fiat what the United States is, or where the United States is going,” Hass said, noting Trump was now “elderly” and “in his final term” as president.

He pointed to Rep. Matt Gaetz’s decision last week – apparently forced by Trump – to step aside as the nominee for attorney-general amid private opposition even from Trump-allied Senate Republicans.

“I mention that because President Trump’s views on alliances are also out-of-sync with the views of many members of Congress related to alliances,” Hass said, listing Senators Bill Haggerty, Jim Risch, Dan Sullivan and Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state.

“These are all Republicans who feel very strongly about the importance of alliances,” he said, “so I encourage us to keep that front of mind.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns.

The post Overhyping a US-China “AI Arms Race” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Roberto J. González.

While the Xi-Biden talks at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum did result in in the resumption of military-to-military contacts, along with discussion of measures to stem fentanyl exports from China and scientific and technical cooperation, they didn't make close allies out of the two rivals, President Joe Biden said at the time.

Coming as it did after an alleged Chinese spy balloon derailed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing in February, the presidential summit gave some cause for cautious optimism.

Yet Sam Zhao, professor of international relations at the University of Denver and director of the Center for U.S.-China Cooperation, described the bilateral relationship as being in a state of "prolonged crisis." 

"It's not a cold war like in the past, but a bilateral relationship that has periods of detente, then further retreat," Zhao said. "But they remain in a state of crisis."

China's threat to force "unification" on democratic Taiwan – referenced in a pledge by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at New Year and rebuffed by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen this week – along with its military saber-rattling in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait still looms large over bilateral ties, creating ongoing tension, he said.

"Neither side has room for concessions," Zhao said. "There is no possibility of compromise."

He said moves to cooperate on climate change, transnational crime including fentanyl exports, artificial intelligence and disease control and prevention were ways for Beijing and Washington to "help stabilize bilateral ties and rescue them from a linear decline."

‘Surely be reunified’

Xi said in his New Year message to the nation that the merger of Taiwan and China was a sure thing, ignoring years of opinion polls showing that Taiwan's 23 million people have no wish to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.

"China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," Xi Jinping said in his Dec. 31 address published in English by state news agency Xinhua.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said on Monday that the island's future should be decided by its people, democratically.

"This is taking the joint will of Taiwan's people to make a decision,” she said. “After all, we are a democratic country.”

Much depends on the outcome of the Taiwan presidential and parliamentary elections on Jan. 13, seen as a battle between ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te and Hou Yu-ih for the Kuomintang.

"If Lai does win in three weeks or so, I imagine that [China], regardless of the state of US-China relations, is going to increase its pressure on Taiwan," said David Sacks of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

"It will increase its military activities in the Taiwan Strait, and economic sanctions on Taiwan, political and diplomatic pressure and the like," he said.

"And so the question then is what the United States would do to respond to try to alleviate pressure on Taiwan and to show that it showed support for Taiwan as well."

Possible outcomes

Lu Yeh-Chung, assistant professor of diplomacy at Taiwan's National Chengchi University, agreed, adding that the U.S. presidential election in November 2024 would also play a role in deciding the direction of future ties.

"The most stable outcome will be a victory for the [opposition] in Taiwan, the re-election of Biden in the U.S.," Lu said. "If Trump won, that would require careful management by all three governments."

"The worst-case scenario would be a Lai Ching-te victory followed by a Trump victory in the U.S., which would be the most unstable outcome," he said.

Zhao said no Taiwanese leader – even the opposition Kuomintang – will dare to get too close to Beijing, however, for fear of losing voters at home.

Meanwhile, a growing bipartisan consensus in Washington over the growing threat to democracies posed by Beijing's overseas activities will likely see more political pressure on the relationship coming from Capitol Hill, Lu said.

"Even if Xi and Biden hold a second face-to-face summit in November 2024, the window of opportunity for improving bilateral ties will actually be very small," he said.

And bipartisan pressure is only likely to get worse as campaigning starts for the U.S. presidential race.

"It's a question of whether Beijing can recognize the difference between campaign trail talk and actual U.S. policy," Lily McElwee, deputy director and fellow in the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told RFA Mandarin.

"I'm not confident that they're making that distinction right now."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qiao Qinen for RFA Mandarin.

While pundits would not have expected the meeting between President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping this week to have moved the needle as far as Taiwan is concerned, the issue was tabled and discussed, with both sides posturing as they always have.

Biden reiterated the U.S.’s agreement to a One China policy and its position that Taiwan maintains its sovereignty despite China’s claims to the contrary. Xi, according to Xinhua news agency, called for the U.S. to take concrete actions to show that it is not supporting “Taiwan’s independence,” stop arming Taiwan and back China’s reunification.

“China will realize reunification, and this is unstoppable,” Xi said during the summit, which nonetheless resulted in both sides agreeing to a dialogue on artificial intelligence, set up a working group to combat precursors for fentanyl, as well as resume high-level military-to-military communications.

The self-governed democratic island has been the flashpoint amid the increasingly tense bilateral relationship between China and the U.S. The two have disputed the Taiwan issue for years, especially since the previous administration of Donald Trump. Beijing has claimed numerous times that it could resort to using force to reclaim the island if necessary.

The escalated diplomatic stand-off, coupled with China’s apparent increased inward-looking and restricting investment environment for foreign investors to be topped by Beijing’s tightened grip on Hong Kong have triggered an outflow of capital. 

“Taiwan was really an essential part of the summit,” pointed out Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis.

“The well-crafted speech by Xi during the business summit referring to the fact that China will not engage in any cold war, or that China is looking for a military conflict is very important. I think China knows well that the Taiwan issue is top on the agendas of business executives. And that risk is now one of the reasons actually why some people aren’t investing either in Taiwan for that matter or the mainland. So I think that is a big statement.”

“Peaceful coexistence”

The evening after his summit with Biden, Xi addressed a room full of top U.S. business leaders in San Francisco, where he called “peaceful coexistence” a baseline for China and the U.S. to uphold as two major countries.

Xi stressed that China never bets against the U.S. or interferes in its internal affairs. “Likewise the United States should not bet against China, or interfere in China's internal affairs.”

He added, “aggression and expansion are not in our genes.”

To what extent Xi’s remarks will help de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and by virtue the broader South China Sea, will likely be watched closely by analysts, but more importantly by Taiwan’s neighbors Japan and South Korea which are key allies of the U.S. in the region. At the same time, it also raises the question of how reassuring it would be to investors to bring fresh capital back to China.

The U.S., Japan and South Korea have expressed their objection to what they saw as threats from Beijing, as China conducted military exercises around Taiwan to assert its sovereignty over the island. The Chinese navy has also been engaging in aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea in a standoff with the Philippines.

The dispute between the two major powers over the island amplified when Beijing issued a strong criticism following the visit of the then-Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan in August 2022. Since the event, the Chinese side had suspended its military communication channels with the U.S., a critical channel considered a last resort to prevent an unintended military confrontation.

According to Zhang Baohui, professor of government and international affairs at Hong Kong-based Lingnan University, although the resumption of military communication channels between the U.S. and China will have a limited effect on the Taiwan issue, it is still a stabilizer to the high-risk relations between the two.

“The US achieved its goal of reopening military to military ties and secured Chinese cooperation, while China achieved the goal of stabilizing the strategic rivalry, preventing it from getting worse,” said Zhang.

“I think the outcome is positive for both countries. Both gained the image that they can work together to enhance global welfare.”

Financial implications 

On the financial and business front, investors are taking a wait-and-see approach to the impact of the summit. For one, the U.S. did not lift any export controls on high-end semiconductors, an issue that China raised in the summit, criticizing the Americans for attempting to deny Chinese people the right to development.

“The meeting should prove to have little long-term impact on financial markets. Xi did receive a very positive reception from business leaders, but here he was preaching to the choir,” said Brock Silvers, chief investment officer of Kaiyuan Capital. 

“Little was said or agreed that would convince recalcitrant investors that China was now prepared to tackle systemic or deflationary pressures, make necessary reforms, or meaningfully address investability concerns.

“For investors, very few minds were likely changed.” 

Garcia-Herrero is more optimistic. Overall, the Xi-Biden meeting could prompt the foreign business community to see that “maybe China's not so uninvestable,” she said. 

“I’m expecting inflows into China because of this meeting, even though nothing concrete was decided in terms of lifting export controls or promises of lifting import tariffs. But it does show that maybe humbly for once, compared to the past, China is realizing that it’s on the wrong path in terms of attracting investment if it continues to show such an aggressive posture.”

Garcia-Herrero added that it’s too soon to gauge direct foreign investment inflows, but she expects portfolio flows into the stock markets to increase soon. 

James Downes, head of the Politics and Public Administration Programme at Hong Kong Metropolitan University, believes the meeting provided a positive economic starting base and foundation to move forward with.

“The [Taiwan] issue is a complex long-term geopolitical problem. It is best for both sides that the issue remains off the table for the time being, with a focus on economic issues, tech and AI instead dominating the agenda going forward.”

The Chinese would have agreed. Afterall, even Xi conceded that Taiwan remains “the most important and most sensitive issue” in U.S.-China relations.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Elaine Chan and Lee Jeong-Ho for RFA.

Biden also said the countries around the Pacific Rim should shift from focusing only on increasing trade to also consider resilience from future pandemics, supply-chain shocks and climate change.

Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit, Biden said he and Xi were “straightforward” with each other about their differences on Wednesday at the Filoli estate, outside San Francisco, where they met for about four hours, enjoyed a private lunch and strolled around manicured gardens.

He said the talks, which produced deals to restart military-to-military contacts, stem fentanyl exports from China and to discuss regulations on artificial intelligence, had been “candid and constructive.”

But that did not mean they were now close allies, he added.

“As my generation would say back in the day, it is not all ‘kumbaya,’ but it's straightforward. We have real differences with Beijing,” Biden said, referring to an upbeat spiritual song often cited in American politics as a metaphor for unanimity.

He said the United States would continue to take “targeted action to protect our vital national security interests” with respect to China.

“At the same time, on critical global issues such as climate, AI, counternarcotics, it makes sense to work together. We’ve committed to work together,” he said. “We're going to continue our commitment to diplomacy, to avoid surprises and prevent misunderstandings.”

“A stable relationship between the world's two largest economies is not merely good for the two economies, but for the world,” he said.

Dictator Xi?

The comments clashed with remarks made by Xi following the talks.

At a dinner with U.S. business leaders on Wednesday evening, where he made the case for continued investment across the Pacific, Xi said that Beijing was willing to go further and be “a partner and friend.”

“If one sees the other side as ‘a primary competitor,’ ‘the most consequential geopolitical challenge’ and ‘a pacing threat,’ it will only lead to misinformed policymaking, misguided actions and unwanted results,” Xi said, after pondering “Are we adversaries or partners?”

Differences between the two powers were already on display, though, before Biden’s speech to APEC leaders on Thursday morning. 

Leaving a press conference following the talks on Wednesday, the U.S. president had reiterated a comment he made in June – after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s landmark visit to Beijing, which reopened direct talks after a year of tensions – calling Xi a “dictator.”

“Well look, he is,” Biden said. “I mean, he’s a dictator in the sense that he’s the guy who runs a country that’s a communist country.”

Beijing replied that it “strongly opposed” the description. Biden, though, was not explicitly named, with Chinese state media currently in the middle of a pro-U.S. swing amid Xi’s ongoing trip.

“This statement is extremely wrong and irresponsible political manipulation,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters on Thursday, according to a report by Reuters. However, the remarks did not appear in an official transcript of the briefing posted online. 

“It should be pointed out that there will always be some people with ulterior motives who attempt to incite and damage U.S.-China relations,” she was quoted as saying. “They are doomed to fail.” 

More than trade

Thursday’s schedule at the APEC summit is otherwise being dominated by the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, or IPEF, which the Biden administration unveiled in May 2022 and was at the time slammed by Beijing as an effort to “decouple from China.”

The IPEF, which groups Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam, is not a free-trade agreement but an economic cooperation framework seeking to establish trade rules across “four pillars” – trade resiliency, infrastructure, decarbonization and anti-corruption.

It has been described as something “nobody really understands,” and the White House’s plans to unveil a major IPEF trade initiative at APEC this week was rocked by opposition from Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. 

The IPEF has already stood in place of the usual efforts by U.S. presidents to promote free trade, as countries across the world continue to seek more access to U.S. markets even as such policies are perceived increasingly as kryptonite in the American electorate.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaigning against the Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, for instance, is widely viewed as contributing to his victory in the 2016 presidential election, with both U.S. parties now seemingly allergic to the deals.

Biden seemed to reference that change in the U.S. global posture over the past decade, telling leaders at the summit that “the world is fundamentally different than it was 30 years ago at the first annual APEC leaders meeting at Blake island in Washington State.”

The important thing to focus on, he said, was “not about how much we trade,” but instead “how we build resilience, lift-up working people, reduce carbon emissions, and set up our economies to succeed.”

“The idea behind this new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework,” he explained, was to tackle “urgent issues like pandemic response, vulnerable supply chains, climate change, and natural disasters, which we've learned can gravely impact our economies.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.

The post Imperialism and Neocolonialism Around the Globe: US-China Relations; West African Nations appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Lai arrives in New York on Saturday en route to Paraguay to attend the inauguration of President-elect Santiago Peña Palacios, before flying home next week – this time after overnighting in San Francisco.

The so-called U.S. “transits” by the front-runner in January’s presidential election in Taiwan come at a sensitive time in relations between Washington and Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its own territory and opposes direct ties between it and the United States.

At the Aspen Security Forum last month, China’s ambassador in Washington, Xie Fang, even described Lai as being “like a gray rhino charging at us,” a euphemism that suggested the vice-president could create a loud disturbance in the warming U.S.-China relationship.

As a result, Lai’s visit will take place with little fanfare.

“I think the Biden administration wants to keep this visit low-profile,” said Kharis Templeman, a research fellow and Taiwan expert at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, “and Lai’s team understands that and won’t do anything to push the limits this time around.”

While such a trip was nothing out of the ordinary, Templeman noted, Beijing was already “pathologically suspicious of Lai,” who has in the past been associated with Taiwanese independence, and will likely react angrily “to indicate the depth of their opposition to Lai’s visit.” 

“They may also want to make it clear to Taiwan voters that cross-Strait relations will only get worse if they vote for Lai,” he added.

Cooling ties

Lai’s trip mirrors transits through the United States earlier this year by his boss, President Tsai Ing-wen, which were at the time similarly slammed by Beijing as flagrant violations of the “One China principle,” by which it claims the self-governing island as “inalienable” territory.

However, Tsai’s trip came during a more perilous time in U.S.-China relations, with ties heavily strained by the spy balloon incident, U.S. microchip policies and aggressive maneuvers by Chinese fighter jets and warships near Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Since that friction started to ebb in mid-June, though, three members of President Joe Biden’s cabinet have made trips to Beijing, with a fourth – Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo – expected to follow.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has also been invited to make a trip to Washington, with State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller saying this week that it is “our full expectation that he will travel to the United States” to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

That may be muddied by the U.S. trips by Lai, though, who could soon lead the self-governing island Beijing says is a renegade province.

While Tsai’s trip in April en route to similar engagements in Taiwan’s few remaining Latin American allies was more high-profile – it included the president receiving a leadership award in New York from the conservative Hudson Institute – China has seemed no less peeved by this trip by the man it calls “the deputy leader of the Taiwan region.”

Besides the Chinese ambassador’s comments likening Lai’s trip to a stampeding rhino, China’s foreign ministry has separately called on the United States to “refuse” Lai’s visit, and reiterated its anger at “U.S. connivance and support for ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists.”

“The Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests and a red line that cannot be crossed,” a spokesperson for the ministry said.
“China urges the U.S. to abide by the ‘One China’ principle.”

No meet, no foul

Lai is no stranger to controversy, having called himself a “pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence.” In 2017, he also declared: “I am without a doubt a politician who supports Taiwanese independence” who “will never change this stance no matter what office I hold.”

But he has since largely hewed to his party’s line that since Taiwan is “already” independent of Beijing and operating as its own sovereign nation, it does not need to make any “further” declarations.

Lai himself is also clearly hoping for a lower-profile trip this time than Tsai’s earlier this year, with Wang Juntao, a leader of the pro-Taiwan Chinese Democratic Party in New York City, saying there are plans to organize rallies to welcome him as they did Tsai earlier this year.

Wang said he understood Taipei’s diplomatic “dilemma.”

“They want to use the ‘transit’ to showcase the U.S. support for Taiwan's democracy, but also don't want to create any potential trouble for the U.S.,” Wang said, adding that “the U.S. doesn’t want to provoke too much conflict. It’s difficult to strike the right balance.”

As is usual for such unofficial “transits” by Taiwan’s leaders, U.S. officials also say there are no plans for White House officials to meet with Lai during his trips through the United States, and note his itinerary – like Tsai’s in April – carefully avoids Washington.

U.S. executive branch leaders have over the years left such meetings to lawmakers, as with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s meeting with Tsai in April or his predecessor Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last August, which triggered the nearly year of tense ties with Beijing.

U.S.-Taiwan relationship

In the background, though, some in Congress have been pressing for even closer official ties with Taiwan. A group of House members last month wrote a public letter to Vice President Kamala Harris calling on her to meet with Lai during his trip, as his formal U.S. counterpart.

Lawmakers in 2018 also passed a law – the Taiwan Travel Act – that expressly allows Taiwanese leaders and officials to visit the United States and authorizes White House officials, as well as officials at the departments of defense and state, to openly meet with them.

More recently, a bipartisan group of senators has pushed to end the practice of “double taxation” for people who work in both Taiwan and the United States by allowing them to choose where they will be taxed, a measure that would treat the island even more like its own country.

Others still want to outright recognize Taiwan as independent.

Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican from Wisconsin who was one of the House members who wrote to Harris, told Radio Free Asia that since Chinese President Xi Jinping had made “very clear” he planned to one day annex Taiwan, current U.S. policy was akin to “appeasement.”

He said that’s why he introduced a bill to recognize Taiwan as a country. The legislation, he said, was considered fringe only a few years ago, with only one other co-sponsor, but has since gained steam amid growing tensions with China and now has 44 co-sponsors.

“History is littered with people who have chosen appeasement with those who are belligerent. It simply does not work,” he said. “Taiwan has never been part of China. The Taiwanese want to be an independent nation, and they should be allowed to be.”

A threat to the thaw

Still, many in Washington still see that kind of stance as unnecessarily belligerent in itself, fearing that changing the U.S. stance could provoke an invasion Beijing could otherwise indefinitely delay as unwise.

“We want Xi Jinping to wake up every day and say ‘Hey, you know, it’s too costly. The risk is too high. Today’s not the day we’re going to invade,’” said Bonnie Glaser, the managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

“Xi Jinping has not made a political decision to invade Taiwan,” she added. “He has a huge amount of problems on his plate already.”

But for Lai, the ever-present threat of an invasion makes paying a visit to the United States a no-brainer, especially if that annoys Beijing, said Wu’er Kaixi, a former Tiananmen Square protest leader and general secretary of the Taiwan Parliamentary Human Rights Commission.

“If China is going to play any role in the upcoming presidential elections, it would be the question of whether Taiwan is prepared to defend itself, or whether it’s better off doing a deal with Beijing,” Wu’er Kaixi told RFA, adding it seemed clear where the votes were.

“Taiwanese watched what happened in Hong Kong,” he said, “and most of them refuse doing a deal with Beijing.”

Jane Tang contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns and Chris Taylor for RFA.

Among the many troubling trends in US-China relations these days is the lack of high-level diplomatic engagement. Until a few weeks ago, only John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy on climate change, had been able to meet with his Chinese counterpart.

The US defense department is just one agency that had publicly expressed concern about not being able to meet with Chinese officials. This failure to connect could determine whether the two countries fight or negotiate.

The Chinese surely understand this, yet they not only had refused to meet; they had rejected a US proposal to add hotlines for crisis communications, apparently on the argument that the US was not respecting China’s One China principle, so why trust to hotlines to ease matters?

Now things may be changing. At the close of the G7 summit in Hiroshima on May 21, President Biden said US-China relations are going to improve “very shortly.” He is probably referring to the flurry of resumed diplomatic contacts. Here’s the background, and the problems still ahead.

“Constructive Relationship”?

Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, one of several US cabinet secretaries whose visits to China had been on hold since the Chinese spy balloon incident in February, spoke April 20 at Johns Hopkins University; Yellen stressed that the US wants a “constructive relationship” with China. She sought to assure China that economic decoupling is a national security strategy, not an economic strategy directed at China. She also suggested ways for both great powers to work together, such as on debt relief for Developing Countries and climate change.

But the speech still reeked of American self-righteousness. “Even as our targeted actions may have economic impacts, they are motivated solely by our concerns about our security and values.” On trade, the US seeks “healthy competition” with China and supports its economic progress—so long as China “plays by the rules.” The US will continue “engaging with the world to advance our vision for an open, fair, and rules-based global economic order.”

In short, it’s SOP: Play by rules made in the USA, and respect our need to protect national security. Trouble is, the Chinese also claim to act in the name of national security, for example to justify repressing human rights and harassing Taiwan. They can also make their own rules, for example by cutting off trade with the US and others in the West in essential resources, such as rare earth minerals and green energy materials. This interdependency with China seems not to be understood by the China hawks in Congress—or outside.

Yellen defended the administration’s export controls and sanctions that keep advanced technology out of Chinese hands, especially those of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). She said the administration “will not compromise” on that.

Unwillingness to compromise, however, takes the US and China back to square one: denial of semiconductor technology and advanced computer chips feeds China’s accusation that the US is using “national security” to constrain China’s development. And that unwillingness to compromise probably has a role in the sudden crackdown on US businesses in China, justified (again) by citing national security concerns.

Yellen’s concluding comments were, nevertheless, welcome: “China and the United States can and need to find a way to live together and share in global prosperity. We can acknowledge our differences, defend our own interests, and compete fairly.” There’s room for both of us, in short. But as the Chinese say, baiwen buru yi jian (seeing is believing).

Ready to Talk

Yellen’s speech was followed on May 2 by a call for dialogue by Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to China: “Our view is we need better channels between the two governments and deeper channels, and we are ready to talk,” Burns said. “We’ve had a decoupling of our societies over the last three years. It’s not healthy. It’s not smart. What we really need is a more broad-based engagement at the Cabinet level, and the United States is ready for that. We have never supported an icing of this relationship,” Burns insisted.

If Washington wanted the Chinese to pick up the phone just then, it might have paid attention to the mixed messages it was sending to Beijing. For one thing, Yellen and Burns were not in sync with other senior US officials, such as the secretary of state and the national security adviser, and most certainly not in sync with Congress and some state governors.

The bipartisan consensus in Congress is foursquare behind economic decoupling and undermining the “strategic ambiguity” that has long underpinned US policy on Taiwan. Republicans, led by Marco Rubio, have been especially active. Some of their bills call for extreme measures against China, such as ending US investment in China, closing China’s consulate in NY, recognizing Taiwan as an independent country, and restricting US technology exports to China that might have military applications.

And there are the antics of two far-right governors: Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has signed laws to forbid Chinese ownership of agricultural property and prohibit state colleges and universities from accepting funding or forming partnerships with Chinese institutions; and Montana’s Greg Gianforte, who has pushed through a ban on residents’ use of TikTok.

Positive Signs

Nevertheless, an upswing in US-China communications was beginning. On May 8 Ambassador Burns met with Qin Gang, foreign minister and former ambassador to the US.

It seemed to be a one-sided meeting, however. Qin blamed the US for the freeze in relations since the balloon incident. He expressed the hope that the US would “deeply reflect” on the importance of the relationship and “return to the right track.”

While China is seeking a way out of the impasse, the US is seeking to contain China, he said. The US “must respect China’s bottom line, its red line, and stop harming Chinese sovereignty, security, and development interests, especially on correctly handling the Taiwan problem.” He urged the ambassador to be the “link and bridge to constructive efforts” in China-US relations.

The Burns-Qin meeting was followed by still others. Burns met with China’s commerce minister, Wang Wentao, on May 11. That same day, the White House announced that national security adviser Jake Sullivan met in Vienna for several hours with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign affairs official.

They “had candid, substantive, and constructive discussions on key issues in the U.S.-China bilateral relationship,” the readout said. A meeting between the US trade representative and minister Wang is scheduled for later in May.

In short, both countries seem to find that a further deterioration in the relationship serves neither’s interest. To judge from the meetings this month, commerce seems to be driving a coming together—roughly $700 billion in bilateral trade and $150 billion in direct investments are on the line.

Obstacle Course

As is often the case, however, political barriers within China and the US may constrain the areas of agreement. There are America hawks in Beijing just as there are China hawks in Washington.

China is not going to yield suddenly on Taiwan or the South China Sea, and the US is not going to yield on human rights and semiconductor exports. Public opinion in both countries is increasingly nationalistic, which in the US comes to 83 percent of respondents viewing China unfavorably, with 38 percent seeing China as an “enemy.”

There is also the potential for direct conflict, most likely in the Taiwan Strait but also in the contested South China Sea —especially now that the US has formally pledged to back the Philippines if any of its ships takes Chinese fire, an increasingly likely scenario these days.

Even with the best of intentions, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping may have a very hard time finding common ground beyond agreeing to talk more often. Yet they must find common ground at least on the climate crisis, pandemics, and nuclear weapons—the three great issues that threaten both national and international security.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.

But she arrives home just in time to meet another U.S. congressional delegation – this time, led by House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul, who on Wednesday night landed in Taipei and compared Chinese President Xi Jinping to Adolf Hitler.

“This struggle for global power, the balance of power that we find ourselves in today often reminds me of my father’s generation, often referred to as the greatest in the United States,” McCaul, a Republican from Texas, said at a meeting with Tsai’s vice-president, Lai Ching-te.

“Then we had Hitler and today we have Putin and Chairman Xi,” he said, also referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Tsai is scheduled to meet with McCaul and his bipartisan delegation on Saturday – her third such meeting in little over a week, following talks with a cross-party group led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries last Thursday in New York and her high-profile meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin then arrives in Taiwan on April 24 for a six-day trade mission, which also includes a meeting with Tsai.

The trips are set to further anger Beijing, which considers the self-governing island a province and has vowed to “reunite” it with the mainland, by force if necessary. In August, it cut off all cooperation with Washington after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit.

Blockade soft-launch

Tsai will likely consider her trip to the United States a success, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, even if it means the U.S.-China relationship is now “dangerously fraught.”

“U.S.-Taiwan relations are stronger than ever. Support for Taiwan in the U.S. Congress is at an all-time high,” Glaser said. “For these reasons, President Tsai is likely to see the transit as a success.” 

Yet the “mistrust is deep” between Beijing and Washington, she noted, and it was not helped by Tsai’s “warm reception” in America. “Not only is a thaw unlikely but the risk of conflict is growing,” she said.

Efforts to repair U.S.-China ties have fizzled since Pelosi’s trip.

Hours before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was set to leave Washington for a visit to Beijing in February, he called off the trip after an alleged Chinese spying balloon was found in U.S. airspace. 

Then in the week before Tsai’s March 29 arrival in New York, Rick Waters – deputy U.S. assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan and the head of the State Department’s “China House” – met Chinese officials in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing to rekindle talks.

But Tsai’s trip seems to have again nixed a detente.

As the Taiwanese leader met McCarthy, China’s navy launched aircraft carriers into the Western Pacific just south of Taiwan, with Beijing accusing the United States of “crossing the line” with Tsai’s trip.

In an apparent trial of a blockade of the island – which some U.S. military planners consider Beijing’s most likely first-move in a conflict – Chinese officials also announced they will for the next three weeks stop and board ships in the Taiwan Strait for “on-site inspections.” 

Taiwan, in turn, instructed any ships to refuse to cooperate.

European oversight

There’s one saving grace for cross-strait peace.

While McCaul and other American lawmakers are in Taiwan, China has its own visitors: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanual Macron arrived in Beijing and on Thursday met with Xi as Tsai was preparing to fly home.

Amid such a visit, “it would not be in Beijing’s strategic interest to use egregiously escalatory military action,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a lecturer at the Australian National University’s Taiwan Studies program.

“If Beijing seriously raises military tension at this juncture,” Sung said, “it would make life very difficult for Von der Leyen and Macron, and take the wind out of the sails of European China dove voices.”

“Europe would rather not see the Taiwan Strait situation escalate, for they are already busy with Ukraine and post-COVID economic recovery,” he added, explaining that McCarthy and Tsai seemed to have read the room by shifting their meeting away from Taiwan.

“In other words, Taiwan and the U.S. are already choosing the relatively less provocative option,” he said. “If in response, Beijing still chooses to retaliate … then the U.S. and Taiwan will paint a picture of insatiable Beijing that no one can work with.”

There’s also the recent mirror-image visit by Tsai’s predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, to mainland China while Tsai was in the United States.

Ma’s Kuomintang party, which campaigns its greater willingness to cooperate with Beijing in pursuit of peace than Tsai’s party, hopes to win back the presidency in the January 2024 election, with Lai, the vice-president, expected to carry the baton for the ruling party.

“If Beijing escalates militarily, it will waste away this rare opportunity to underscore cross-strait friendship, in exchange for chipping away the success of President Tsai’s U.S. trip ever so slightly,” Sung said. 

One country, two systems

In the long-term, Tsai’s trip has laid bare a gulf between Beijing, on the one hand, and the United States and Taiwan, on the other.

Ja Ian Chong, a professor of international relations and expert in Chinese foreign policy at the National University of Singapore, said the Taiwanese appetite for a rapprochement with Beijing was fading.

In Taiwan, he said, “efforts to cast Tsai’s U.S. visits as unnecessarily risky by the opposition Kuomintang also do not seem to have gained much traction.” That failure, Chong added, was largely “in keeping with a broad popular acceptance in Taiwan of the current direction of travel in relations between Taipei and Washington.”

Beijing, meanwhile, has not minced its own words. Xi himself pledged in October never to renounce the use of force on Taiwan, and U.S. military leaders have predicted an invasion by the decade’s close.

“We will not allow any foreign force to bully, suppress or enslave us,” Hua Chunying, a foreign ministry spokesperson, said after Pelosi’s trip last year. “Whoever wants to do so will be on a collision course with the Great Wall of steel forged by the 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

Along with the ever closer ties between the U.S. Congress and Taiwan’s leaders, that’s all a problem for America’s “One China” policy, which holds that the island should govern itself while a peaceful reunification with mainland China is negotiated with Beijing.

The idea is for the United States “to kick the can down the road” until one day “the people of Taiwan would actually endorse some sort of arrangement that would unify China,” said Dennis Wilder, a former CIA deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific.

But that seems increasingly unviable.

“One of the very clear messages you get when you go to Taiwan these days is that they do not accept ‘One country, two systems,’” Wilder said. “They've seen the way Beijing behaved with Hong Kong – they think that Beijing betrayed the people of Hong Kong.”

“At this point, they want no part of any kind of arrangement where Beijing makes promises that they don't believe they would keep,” he added. “The big concern I have is: Will Beijing lose its patience?”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns for RFA.

The national broadcaster carried out the interviews with “four of Australia’s most experienced military strategists” who all “have held the highest security clearances that it’s possible to have” and have been involved in sensitive military operations.

Their opinions differ somewhat from a wargame developed by the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C., in which American strategists said a U.S.-led coalition would defeat an invasion by China and maintain an autonomous Taiwan. 

CSIS’s ‘The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan’ launched early January also predicted that China would also suffer “high losses” that might destabilize Chinese Communist Party rule, even if Taiwan’s economy would be left shattered and the U.S. global position would also be damaged for many years.

‘A costly stalemate’

Hugh White, former Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Australian Department of Defence, said that a war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan would "probably be the biggest and most disruptive war the world has seen since 1945" as it would swiftly escalate into a full-scale regional maritime war.

The expert said America would neither be able to force Beijing to concede over Taiwan without using nuclear weapons nor be willing to risk Chinese nuclear retaliation for Taiwan's sake.

“I do not think there is any credible chance that America, with or without Australia's support, could win a war with China over Taiwan,” White said, adding that it would be a mistake for the U.S., and Australia, to get involved in such a war.

According to him, “by far the most likely outcome would be a costly stalemate in which both sides lost heavily but neither side could secure a decisive, war-winning advantage.”

Another analyst, Allan Behm, former head of the International Policy and Strategy Divisions of the Defence Department, shared a similar view.

“Were the U.S. and China to go to war over the next five to 10 years, the best scenario one might envisage for the U.S. is a stalemate,” Behm said.

However, given the rate at which the Chinese forces are developing, “a Chinese victory over the U.S. is the more likely outcome beyond 2035,” the expert warned.

Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer with the Australian Army Intelligence Corps and now a professor at the University of New South Wales, said that in his opinion, President Joe Biden “will avoid a direct confrontation with China.”

"He would rather support Taiwan and enlist countries around the world in sanctioning or condemning China,” Fernandes said.

Cross-strait invasion or blockade?

Among war scenarios, a blockade of Taiwan may be more likely than a conventional invasion, according to the Australian experts.

It would be “a far cheaper and less risky way” for Beijing to achieve its objectives by establishing “a credible air and sea exclusion zone around Taiwan, and thereby put immense pressure on the Taiwanese to accept Beijing’s terms,” said Hugh White.

Allan Behm predicted a China-U.S. war over Taiwan “would begin as an air-sea war, with China seeking to impose punitive costs on the U.S. Navy and such U.S. Air Force units as were able to operate.”

“Assuming that China was eventually able to control the Taiwan Strait, it would deploy land forces to Taiwan … and then to occupy the country," he said.

Behm also warned that the impact on Australia of a war with China would be "profoundly and devastatingly different" from any other war since World War II.

Meanwhile, Clinton Fernandes said a blockade, when 80% of ships and aircraft are unable to pass, would be the most likely option.

“It means mine laying by air and naval units, particularly submarines, blockading ports, inspecting maritime traffic including commercial shipping, intercepting aircraft, and attacking adversary military forces as necessary,” he said.

"China's leaders could discreetly offer negotiations to Taiwan's leaders during a blockade before the risky step of ordering an amphibious invasion," said Fernandes.

Adm. (Ret.) Chris Barrie, former Chief of the Defence Force, forewarned that a war between U.S. and China is “likely to impoverish us all, it may even kill most of us if it goes nuclear".

"The fundamental assumption that we could win a war against China is wrong-headed and hawkish,” he said.

"Australia should use all the means at its disposal to avert a war with China,” the retired admiral added.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Bt RFA Staff.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken called off a planned trip to Beijing after the suspected spy balloon was spotted over Montana last week. The U.S. military shot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon on Feb. 4, prompting protests from Beijing.

Anger in the U.S. Congress has spiked and new revelations of the scope and capacities of China’s surveillance program continue to emerge as the U.S. Navy retrieves remnants of the Chinese balloon and the FBI analyzes evidence.

China has rejected U.S. accounts of the balloon episode, with China rejecting a Pentagon request for a phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe, citing the lack of goodwill on the U.S side.

The timing of the balloon incident sparked speculation about deliberate sabotage of the Blinken visit, but China experts mostly say that is unlikely. They warn that the incident will distract from efforts to stabilize bilateral ties to deal with future potential crises in Taiwan, the South China Sea.

"There were expectations that early 2023 would be a window of opportunity for Washington and Beijing to get to work on building the guardrails for the relationship that both sides recognize are vital for preventing confrontation,” said Patricia Kim of the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Washington has spoken of building guardrails or setting a floor on ties, which have deteriorated over longstanding disputes like Taiwan, as well as trade and technology, amid ideological competition between Washington and Beijing.

Highlighting the broader battle of ideas in his a State of the Union speech on Feb. 8, President Joe Biden waxed passionate.

“In the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracy has grown weaker, not stronger: Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping,” he said. “Name me one.”

Last year, Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met and agreed to resume high-level talks that had largely stalled during China’s COVID-19 lockdown and friction over trade, security and human rights.

“With more information coming out about China's vast surveillance balloon program, and Beijing having dug in its heels that this was a  civilian weather vessel and that the U.S. overreacted by shooting it down, it's hard to see the restoration of the moderate diplomatic momentum we saw following the Biden-Xi meeting at Bali anytime soon,” Kim told Radio Free Asia.

With presidential election season approaching in both the United States and Taiwan, also looming in 2023 is a potential visit to Taiwan, a self-governing island claimed by Beijing, later this year by U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

China experts warn against letting the balloon episode distract from bigger, more dangerous issues.

“This incident is unlikely to escalate further or fundamentally alter the trajectory of U.S.-China relations,” says David Sack, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“But it offers an important window into the fragility of the relationship between the world’s two largest economies and the difficulty they would have in managing a real crisis as leaders in Washington and Beijing would seek to protect their political flanks,” he wrote.

The spy balloon incident argues against holding the hope that Xi Jinping, fresh from being appointed to a third term as China’s top leader, would temper his approach to diplomacy after a decade of his assertive, authoritarian rule has ruffled feathers with much of the outside world.

Xi’s abrupt abandonment of his failing zero-COVID policy amid street protests early this year inspired conjecture that other problematic policies—support for Russia in Ukraine, military incursions near Taiwan and aggressive actions in the South China Sea—might be modified by a comfortably entrenched Xi.

But nothing like that has happened so far.

“I don't see like anything in Xi Jinping's rhetoric or behavior that suggests that they're thinking about playing it nice. If anything it was more of like a temporary pause,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

“They recognize that the situation has gotten worse for them, but they tend to blame outside forces outside of their control. And this balloon incident’s no different,” she told RFA.

China’s widespread spying is not a shock to retired British diplomat Charlie Parton, who argues the U.S. should have sent Blinken to Beijing to “put all the blame on the Chinese” by raising the balloon case at every level.  

“Of course China is doing this sort of thing, all forms of spying and surveillance. When hostility to the U.S. is the basis of all foreign policy­—by 2049, trying to reduce America to number two status, with China becoming the number one—” that’s what you do,” said Parton, of the British think tanks Rusi and Merics.

“Is (the balloon episode) a rupture or a hiccup? Frankly, it’s more of a hiccup in the sense that relations between the two countries ain't never going to be good with the current regime.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Paul Eckert for RFA.

In a memo dated Feb.1 but sent Friday and leaked on social media, U.S. Air Force general Mike Minihan ordered officers under his command to prepare for “the next fight.”

“I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command (AMC) which oversees transport and refueling for the Air Force, wrote.

“Xi secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022,” the general reasoned.

“Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason. United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025,” he wrote.

Gen. Minihan ordered Air Force commanders to make efforts to build “a fortified, ready, integrated, and agile Joint Force Maneuver Team ready to fight and win inside the first island chain.”

The First Island Chain is a chain of main archipelagos surrounding the East Asian continental mainland, including Japan and Taiwan.

 ‘Aim for the head’

Minihan became AMC Commander in 2021. Before that, he served as the deputy commander of Indo-Pacific Command from September 2019 to August 2021.

The general’s energetic internal memorandum urged AMC troops to hone their marksmanship during February and “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.”

“Aim for the head,” it said.

Minihan, who commands around 50,000 personnel and 500 planes, said that his “expectations are high and these orders are not up for negotiation.”

He requested that the force’s commanders report to him on their preparation by February 28.

The memo was later confirmed by Defense Department officials, who also said Gen. Minihan’s comments “are not representative of the department’s view on China.”

U.S. military leaders have been forecasting different timelines for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

U.S. Asia-Pacific commander Adm. Philip Davidson told Congress in 2021 that a Taiwan invasion would take place by 2027, the year the Chinese People’s Liberation Army celebrates its centenary and China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping comes to the end of his third term.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday said last October he “can’t rule it out” that a conflict could occur as soon as 2022 or 2023.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said last month that there’s “some very provocative behavior on the part of China’s forces and their attempt to re-establish a new normal.”

“But whether or not that means that an invasion is imminent,” said Austin, “I seriously doubt that.”

Worst-case scenario

“The timings are different but they all point to the consistency of the U.S. military's view of Beijing's use of force,” said Su Tzu-yun, Research Fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Strategy Research (INDSR), a government think tank.

“This also shows the readiness of U.S. military leaders to prepare for war, demonstrating the U.S. commitment and will to defend Taiwan,” said Su, who heads INDSR’s Division of Defense Strategy and Resources.

“But Taiwan will take responsibility for defending its own democracy,” he added.

Beijing sees self-ruled Taiwan as an inalienable part of China and vows to take it back, by force if necessary. 

In recent months China has intensified military drills around Taiwan, as well as incursions into the island’s air defense zone. Yet Taiwanese analysts say they think the probability of an imminent invasion is low. 

“Military professionals often take worse case scenarios when assessing the challenges they might encounter,” said Alexander Huang, professor at Tamkang University in Taipei and former deputy minister at Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council.

“2025 marks the 10th year since Xi initiated his ‘deepening defense & military reform’ in 2015,” said Huang, adding that on this occasion the Chinese military may “conduct theater-level military exercises to verify training outcomes.”

“There is an ‘AIP principle’ - anything is possible. But politically we’ve yet to see the absolute necessity for a kinetic war over Taiwan between the two nuclear powers so far,” the professor added, warning that “escalation control is a serious and difficult task” for all parties involved.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

China offers a threatening alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and non-colonial. As such, it undermines the West’s neocolonial domination of the Third World and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment of subverience and exploitation.
— K.T. Noh¹

If the United States were to posit that it could eliminate the economic challenge from China by launching an atomic war, there is no evidence that the U.S. would not do so.
— John Ross²

A Sino-American war is no longer unthinkable. As we approach a very dangerous period, possibly including WWIII and nuclear catastrophe, I fully expect a rise in frenzied sinophobia, threat inflation, vile lies about China, and further efforts to limit advanced technology to Beijing.

Here, I’m fantasizing that if blessed with the talent to write a dystopian, geopolitical, political thriller (with an edge-of-your seat movie to follow) I’d pitch a prospectus along the following lines:

In the not too distant future, the fears of the U.S. bourgeoisie are borne out when a multipolar, poly-centric international political system takes shape. China has become a global economic player, its Belt & Road Initiative won massive appeal throughout the global South and Beijing’s call for respecting the rights of all people to choose their own economic and political system has won many friends. A formidable Front of the South is clearly on the horizon. China has also taken the lead in fighting climate change and despite the U.S. best efforts, its computer chips are among the best in the world. In short, “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” will has proven its superiority to neoliberal capitalism.

As K.T. Noh writes, “China has demonstrated that it has developed an alternative, non-Western, capitalist, model of development without wars, invasion, colonization, slavery, regime change, primitive accumulation — that the world can emulate and follow.”¹ Clearly, the U.S. ruling class cannot allow this 21st century threat of a good example to come to fruition and will use any means available to prevent it.

A win-win world future is inconceivable to the ruling class. They are unwilling for the United States to become just another normal country even though that would be inestimably better for ordinary citizens. As background, a two-pronged strategy emerged: first with Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 and then, in 2014, the U.S. manipulated coup d’etat and Minsk agreement in Ukraine which overthrew a democratically elected president and installed a puppet regime. Washington then baited and provoked Russia into military intervention in Ukraine in 2022.³

U.S. military planners pursued their medium term objective of weakening and even dismembering Russia in order to deny China its key geopolitical ally and force it to face the US on its own. The proxy war that the U.S. launched against Russia in Ukraine and fought to the last Ukrainian and mercenary, showed the world that Washington was willing to engage a Great Power — but the conflict ended in a stalemate. As the Pentagon anticipated, Russia was weakened but regime change was not achieved and Putin remains in power. China, even with its extended Covid pandemic, pledged a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination” with Moscow.

Given its military supremacy and with a vast array of bases and well over 100,000 military personnel encircling China, Washington is sorely tempted to use its military to compensate for its inexorable economic decline and to halt China’s development — before it’s too late. An ominous unknown is what Russia will do if a war with China should “go nuclear.”

American officials publicly accuse China of repeatedly violating the “ruled-based international order” but behind the scenes these same officials are heard to say, “We are an empire, albeit a benign one, and this is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve us as a global hegemon.” She added that the rules protect US interests as its power wanes relative to China.” Besides, as another official candidly explains, “This is not about nations following rules but the one indispensable nation is making and imposing certain rules on behalf of safeguarding the free world.”⁴

The mass media begins amping up its China bashing and accuses the Chinese president of being evil incarnate, another Hitler. Slowly by slowly this drumbeat of propaganda succeeds in manufacturing consent for a war on China.

The likely flashpoint for military confrontation is the South China Sea and a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident is concocted by the CIA and the Pentagon. This is followed by U.S. B21’s and anti-ship missiles destroying a substantial portion of China’s maritime shipping assets. Because the U.S. is overextended in terms of military supply lines, its efforts to block Chinese trade routes and disrupt oil imports are only partially successful but U.S. submarines do manage to sink several ships attempting to sneak in and out of Chinese ports. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) retaliates by attacking American warships and bases in Guam, South Korea and Okinawa, causing tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel to perish.

A protracted military conflict ensues and in the fog of World War III, a “red line” is crossed when the Washington initiates the use of battlefield tactical nukes. The national security establishment counts on Beijing not having a survivable nuclear deterrent after absorbing a U.S. first strike. Thus, Washington’s credible nuclear threat (6,500 warheads) will prevent further escalation and compel China’s subjugation to U.S. global supremacy. However, due to hubris and miscalculation, a thermonuclear exchange results in which cities in both China and the United States are vaporized. Firestorms cause radioactive fallout unfurling in a massive plume extending some 60 miles from the blast sites. Both sides lose this geopolitical conflagration and in Washington, the long knives are out and recriminations begin.

India, which steadfastly refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, turned to Moscow as its largest oil supplier and rejected a Western world order, ascends to global leadership.

Bearing the above in mind, we know my book proposal will remain stillborn. However, that was not the fate of a speculative fiction novel appearing last year with the intriguing title, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis (New York: Penguin Press, 2021). It quickly rose to New York Times Bestseller list and received generally positive reviews across the mainstream political spectrum. Efraim Habers, former head of Israel’s Mossad, praised the book and described China as a “Great Threat” to the United States. And both former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General James “Mad Dog” Mattis call the book a “realistic cautionary tale for our times.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the Netflix film is already in the casting stage.

As you’ve undoubtedly surmised, here the wily, arrogant Chinese Communist Party instigates war with the United States. Beijing uses its vastly superior cyber warfare dominance to lure an American battleship into an ambush. China then sinks a flotilla of 37 US warships in order to gain a goal “generations in the making,” — unfettered control of the South China Sea. Meanwhile, Iran seizes an F-35 out of the sky — again, using superior technology — and the pilot is taken hostage. China then sets about annexing Taiwan.

As long as Beijing refrains from engaging with ICBMs, the U.S. president orders a “limited,” multi-pronged attack on the Chinese mainland including striking the Chinese port of Zhanijing with a 150 kiloton “tactical” nuclear weapon. A “red line” is crossed. China responds by creating radioactive wastelands of San Diego and Galveston and the US president (a female) retaliates by vaporizing Shanghai in a mass murder (not other term suffices) of 30 million people. The authors write that the devastation in Shanghai “exceeded capacity for comprehension.” The book ends with India intervening as the peacemaker with the New Delhi Peace Accords. The price of the war had been staggering to both countries and in its wake, India becomes the world’s ascendant political and economic juggernaut and Iran also emerges in a highly advantageous position.

Dr. Sandeep “Sandy” Chowdhury, the US deputy national security adviser, despairs that Reagan and Kennedy’s vision of a “city on a hill” might now perish but reassures himself with the thought that “America was an idea and ideas very seldom vanish…” American was a nation of “freemen” and he fervently hopes that this spirit of America has “yet to abandon the place.”

The authors blame defeat of the storied “city on a hill” on enormous deficiencies America’s technological war fighting readiness which must be shored up before its too late. The fact that the U.S. does not prevail is meant to rattle readers (and officials) out of their complacent stupor. And related, the question hangs in the air whether the U.S. can vanquish the China threat without resort to nuclear weapons? The authors also muse whether the U.S. public will waver in its support for war after hostilities begin?

It would never occur to the authors, publishers, reviewers or indeed, the American people, that the US would be the aggressive party and initiate military conflict with China. As one of book’s characters muses, “American didn’t use to start wars. It used to finish them.” And in a recent interview, the book’s authors reveal their American exceptionalism bias when they assert that “The history of America is us striving to create a more perfect union — to hit that ideal… the essence of America is that enduring ideal, and worth investing in and it has brought us much more good than harm to this world.”⁵

In the novel, China is portrayed as seeking to replace the U.S. as the globe‘s most powerful country. In testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March of 2021, Admiral Phil Davidson echoed this message when he said that China might attempt a military takeover over Taiwan in the next six years and this is “just one step along the way to supplanting the United States and its leadership in a rules-based international order.” Taiwan only bookends a larger war. Davidson added that China will militarily “attempt unilaterally changing the status quo.”⁶ And the Pentagon’s 2022 China Military Report to Congress, meant to convince that body to grant the largest defense budget ever, warns that China may challenge the U.S. in the global arena.

In lieu of a final conclusion, I think of a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein that “The world is dangerous not because some people do evil but because some people see it and do nothing” and bookend it with Howard Zinn’s that our problem is too much civil obedience.

However, I’m not sanguine about enough disobedient forces rising up in the United States in time to take up the gauntlet of Einstein’s “something.” And I must confess that, at times, I find myself on the edge of despondency as I sense the morbid symptoms in our midst that foreshadow WWIII, even before the climate Apocalypse.

Along with others on the left, I’ve often cited Gramsci’s injunction about “pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will” as the only answer for those committed to struggle for justice in the world.

That is, I’m convinced that we must look at the United States as it actually exists, with no illusions about the future. Noam Chomsky terms this RECD or “really existing capitalist democracy — which in its basic nature is a death sentence.” In the face of this reality, Chomsky has consistently reminded us that a moral person has only two choices: To do nothing to stop evil in the form of our belligerent warmongers who are bent on initiating war with China. This choice guarantees the worst will occur. Or we must do whatever we can to stop the Merchants of death “which is not much of choice, so we should be able to easily make it.” This course may not prove cathartic but it will put us more in touch with our humanity and that’s no small thing.

1. K.J. Noh, “The U.S. Is Set on a Path to War with China. What is to be Done?”
2. John Ross, “What is Propelling the United States into Increasing International Military Aggression,” Monthly Review, April 24, 2022. And see, Wi Yu, “What the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Know About China,” Common Dreams, Dec 20, 2022; Deborah Veneziale, “Who Is Leading the United States to War?”
3. Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022).
4. Paraphrased from quote by the invariably astute political analyst Kim Petersen, “What is the Rules-Based Order.”
5. Ethan Rocke, “‘2034’ Authors talk about World War III, Nuclear Conflict and America’s Future,” Coffee or Die, April 14, 2022. 2034: A Novel of the Next War. The authors are Elliot Ackerman, author of several novels, spent eight years in the Marine Corps and was with elite covert CIA units in the Middle East and southwest Asia, including Afghanistan and Iraq. Retired Admiral James Stavridis former supreme commander of NATO and former Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
6. USNI News, March 9, 2021.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

The 90-minute discussion, held ahead of an ASEAN defense ministers meeting, was the second face-to-face talks between them this year. Austin and Wei met in person for the first time as defense chiefs in June at a regional security forum in Singapore.

Before the meeting, Cambodia’s Prime Minister and host Hun Sen said he hoped his country could be “a place of reconciliation” between China and the U.S.

The two sides have been seeking to open a clearer and more regular communication channel between themselves in order to avoid miscalculations and mishaps. 

A press statement from the Pentagon said Secretary Austin “emphasized the need to responsibly manage competition and maintain open lines of communication” to Gen. Wei.

Austin also raised concerns about what he called “the increasingly dangerous behavior” by Chinese military aircraft in the Indo-Pacific region, reiterating that the U.S. “will continue to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows.”

U.S. ally Australia said a Chinese fighter aircraft dangerously intercepted an Australian military surveillance plane in the South China Sea in May, a charge denied by Beijing.

Chinese flyovers and naval patrols around Taiwan, in the East and South China Sea, are also posing challenges to the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy.

Washington blames Beijing’s growing assertiveness and changing military postures for increased tensions in the region.

The Chinese defense ministry in its readout of the Wei-Austin meeting said: “The responsibility for the current situation in Sino-U.S. relations lies with the U.S. and not with China.”

Core interests

“China attaches great importance to the development of relations between the two countries and the two militaries, but the U.S. must respect China's core interests,” the Chinese ministry of defense said.

A large part of the talks focused on the Taiwan issue which Beijing said “is the core of China's core interests and the first insurmountable red line in China-U.S. relations.”

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province that shall be reunified with the mainland at any cost.

“The Chinese military has the confidence and ability to resolutely safeguard the unity of the motherland,” Wei was quoted as saying. 

“No external force has the right to interfere,” he added.

For his part Austin reiterated that the U.S remains committed to its longstanding One China policy but emphasized the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. 

He underscored his opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo and called on the Chinese military to “refrain from further destabilizing actions toward Taiwan,” the Department of Defense’s statement said.

Austin and the Chinese minister also discussed other international and regional issues, the crisis in Ukraine, the South China Sea and the situation on the Korean Peninsula.

The U.S. and its allies also remain worried about a security deal China signed with the Solomon Islands and its involvement in a naval facility in Cambodia, where China is building a facility its military can use, but it’s unclear whether Wei and Austin discussed these topics during their meeting.

Rong Chhun, a Cambodian political observer and union leader, told RFA Khmer that the fact the Cambodian government is getting closer to China and fails to honor its policy of neutrality as required by the constitution, especially over the Ream Naval Base, is a source of great concern.

“If Cambodian leaders don’t show a clear stance on this [Ream] issue, it will not benefit our country and Cambodian citizens,” he said.

The Association of Southeast Asia Nations Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus is an annual security forum between ASEAN defense ministers and the bloc’s eight Dialogue Partners - Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Russia and the United States.

It is hosted by the rotating chair of the ASEAN. This year’s ADMM-Plus takes place on Wednesday.

RFA Khmer contributed to this story.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

The 90-minute discussion, held ahead of an ASEAN defense ministers meeting, was the second face-to-face talks between them this year. Austin and Wei met in person for the first time as defense chiefs in June at a regional security forum in Singapore.

Before the meeting, Cambodia’s Prime Minister and host Hun Sen said he hoped his country could be “a place of reconciliation” between China and the U.S.

The two sides have been seeking to open a clearer and more regular communication channel between themselves in order to avoid miscalculations and mishaps. 

A press statement from the Pentagon said Secretary Austin “emphasized the need to responsibly manage competition and maintain open lines of communication” to Gen. Wei.

Austin also raised concerns about what he called “the increasingly dangerous behavior” by Chinese military aircraft in the Indo-Pacific region, reiterating that the U.S. “will continue to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows.”

U.S. ally Australia said a Chinese fighter aircraft dangerously intercepted an Australian military surveillance plane in the South China Sea in May, a charge denied by Beijing.

Chinese flyovers and naval patrols around Taiwan, in the East and South China Sea, are also posing challenges to the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy.

Washington blames Beijing’s growing assertiveness and changing military postures for increased tensions in the region.

The Chinese defense ministry in its readout of the Wei-Austin meeting said: “The responsibility for the current situation in Sino-U.S. relations lies with the U.S. and not with China.”

Core interests

“China attaches great importance to the development of relations between the two countries and the two militaries, but the U.S. must respect China's core interests,” the Chinese ministry of defense said.

A large part of the talks focused on the Taiwan issue which Beijing said “is the core of China's core interests and the first insurmountable red line in China-U.S. relations.”

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province that shall be reunified with the mainland at any cost.

“The Chinese military has the confidence and ability to resolutely safeguard the unity of the motherland,” Wei was quoted as saying. 

“No external force has the right to interfere,” he added.

For his part Austin reiterated that the U.S remains committed to its longstanding One China policy but emphasized the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. 

He underscored his opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo and called on the Chinese military to “refrain from further destabilizing actions toward Taiwan,” the Department of Defense’s statement said.

Austin and the Chinese minister also discussed other international and regional issues, the crisis in Ukraine, the South China Sea and the situation on the Korean Peninsula.

The U.S. and its allies also remain worried about a security deal China signed with the Solomon Islands and its involvement in a naval facility in Cambodia, where China is building a facility its military can use, but it’s unclear whether Wei and Austin discussed these topics during their meeting.

Rong Chhun, a Cambodian political observer and union leader, told RFA Khmer that the fact the Cambodian government is getting closer to China and fails to honor its policy of neutrality as required by the constitution, especially over the Ream Naval Base, is a source of great concern.

“If Cambodian leaders don’t show a clear stance on this [Ream] issue, it will not benefit our country and Cambodian citizens,” he said.

The Association of Southeast Asia Nations Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus is an annual security forum between ASEAN defense ministers and the bloc’s eight Dialogue Partners - Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Russia and the United States.

It is hosted by the rotating chair of the ASEAN. This year’s ADMM-Plus takes place on Wednesday.

RFA Khmer contributed to this story.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

After three hours of talks at a resort hotel on the Indonesian island of Bali on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit, Biden said he and Xi were "very blunt with one another," while a Xi spokesperson described the meeting as "in-depth, candid and constructive."

Those phrases--diplomatic speak for airing sharp differences—came after both leaders, in their first face-to-face meeting since Biden took office nearly two years ago, acknowledged global expectations that the superpowers keep the numerous U.S.-China disputes from deteriorating into conflict.

“The Biden-Xi meeting exceeded low expectations, with both leaders clearly expressing a desire to manage differences and work together on urgent global issues,” said Patricia Kim of the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

The White House said Beijing and Washington also "agreed to empower key senior officials to maintain communication and deepen constructive efforts” in areas like climate talks and other global issues, including resuming long-frozen discussions by joint working groups.

“The fact that the two sides agreed to reinitiate working level discussions in transnational challenges including climate change, public health and food security is quite promising,” Kim told Radio Free Asia, adding that much hard work remained.

Although Biden and Xi go back more than a decade to when they were both vice-presidents, they have spoken only by phone since Biden took office. Face-to-face talks between the leaders of the two powers have value in themselves.

“This was the first face-to-face meeting between President Biden and President Xi in about five years, and it occurred at a tense time in the US-China relationship,” said Sheena Chestnut Greitens, the Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

“In my view, the buildup in Chinese military and nuclear capabilities, combined with a relative lack of dialogue to understand China's intentions and lack of robust crisis management mechanisms, pose significant risks to stability in the U.S.-China relationship,” she told RFA.

Among other useful opportunities, Biden was able to size up Xi just weeks after he was reappointed for a norm-busting third term as leader at Chinese Communist Party.

“I didn’t find him more confrontational or more conciliatory,” Biden told reporters after their summit. “I found him the way he’s always been, direct and straightforward.”

The U.S. president added: “I am convinced that he understood exactly what I was saying and I understood what he was saying.”

Among contentious issues Biden raised with Xi were concerns over China’s crackdown since 2019 in Hong Kong, harsh policies against minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, trade and Russia invasion of Ukraine, the White House said.

Although there were no expectations of big policy breakthroughs and there was no joint statement, Biden appeared to make headway in winning oblique Chinese criticism of Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats against Ukraine. Xi is an ally of Putin in a relationship that undercuts China's claim to be neutral in the Ukraine war.

“President Biden and President Xi reiterated their agreement that a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won and underscored their opposition to the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” the White House said. Chinese statements excluded mention of this.

“While this particular line did not appear on the official Chinese readout, the fact that the White House readout clearly noted that both leaders affirmed this statement was significant and a critical communication of redlines to Putin,” said Kim of Brookings.

Looming largest was Taiwan, the self-ruling island democracy that Beijing views as an inalienable part of China and a domestic affair that no other country has the right to interfere in. Washington has longstanding security ties with Taipei, even as it officially recognizes only the government in Beijing under a one China policy.

On Taiwan, Biden told Xi that the U.S. had not changed its one China policy, and “opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side,” the White House said.

Biden “raised U.S. objections to (China’s) coercive and increasingly aggressive actions toward Taiwan, which undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the broader region, and jeopardize global prosperity,” it said.

Xi described Taiwan as “the core of China's core interests,” and “the first insurmountable red line in U.S.-China relations,” and called for the U.S. leader to stick to his commitment in not supporting Taiwanese independence.

Beijing has repeatedly accused Washington of giving support to “separatist forces in Taiwan” and retaliated by freezing climate talks and sharply increasing military activities around the island after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited in August. 

Biden’s denial that there has been any change in U.S. policy follows his statements that Washington would help Taiwan defend itself and comes amid moves by American lawmakers to increase military assistance to Taiwan and expedite current arms contracts.

To Beijing, such U.S. actions raise doubts about Washington's commitment to the status quo, said Chang Teng-chi, head of political science at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

“Ultimately ... there is no trust between the two sides, so all they can hope to do is dynamic crisis management,” he told RFA.

Monday’s meeting in Bali nonetheless left the U.S. “in a better position now than we were before,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, Center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

“It's a good thing that the two leaders met and it's important to continue the dialogue,” she told RFA.

“However, the fundamental issues that are causing conflict between the two sides, in particular the Taiwan issue, there's been no progress made on those.”

 Reporting by RFA Mandarin and Cantonese. Translation and editing by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Paul Eckert for RFA.

As military tensions mount between the United States and China over the Solomon Islands' decision to pursue a security pact with Beijing, former Pacific Island nation leaders on Friday reaffirmed that rising sea levels driven by climate change—not great-power geopolitical jostling—is the region's biggest threat.

"These nations have done very little to address their own greenhouse gas emissions."

The Pacific Elders Voice Group—whose members include the former leaders of the Marshall Islands, Palau, Kiribati, and Tuvalu; a Fijian ex-minister; and a former congressional delegate from the U.S. colony of Guam—issued a statement saying it "reiterates that the primary security threat to the Pacific is climate change."

"The growing military tension in the Pacific region created by both China and the United States and its allies, including Australia, does little to address the real threat to the region caused by climate change," the group asserted. "These nations have done very little to address their own greenhouse gas emissions, despite statements of intent."

According to The Guardian:

Climate-induced migration has already begun from the Pacific, with people across the region forced to leave a number of island groups that are disappearing or becoming uninhabitable due to rising sea levels.

Last year's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global heating above 1.5°C  would be "catastrophic" for Pacific Island nations and could lead to the loss of entire countries due to sea level rise within the century.

The former leaders' statement comes amid increasingly tense relations between the United States, Australia, and other allies on one side and China on the other over the latter's recent signing of a bilateral security agreement with the Solomon Islands.

While insisting that Ukraine has the sovereign right to pursue closer ties with NATO and the West, the United States has refused to rule out an invasion of the Solomon Islands if its leaders allow China to establish a military base there.

Meanwhile, as Australian media amplify calls to bomb and invade the Solomon Islands, right-wing Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week threatened that a Chinese base on the archipelago would constitute a "red line."

Firing back at Australian objections to a perceived lack of transparency surrounding the security agreement, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said Friday that, "I learnt of the AUKUS treaty in the media," a reference to the new trilateral treaty between the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

"The AUKUS treaty will see nuclear submarines in Pacific waters," said Sogavare. "One would expect that as a member of the Pacific Family, Solomon Islands... would have been consulted," he added, referring to Australia's oft-derided description of regional relations, in which Canberra plays the dominant role.

Numerous analysts say AUKUS—which Beijing denounced as a return to a "Cold War" mentality that would "undermine peace and stability" in the region—was the main impetus for the China-Solomon Islands pact.

"The security and future of the Pacific must be determined primarily by Pacific Island countries and not by external powers competing over strategic interests within our region," the Pacific Elders Voice Group said in its statement. "We call on all nations to respect the sovereignty of all Pacific Island countries and the right of Pacific peoples to develop and implement their own security strategies without undue coercion from outsiders."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.