Apparently the age old game of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is afoot in the realm of Asia. China and Russia, according to CNN, are performing a joint military exercise.

I thought it was specifically interesting the choice of the word separatism in their justification, given each countries issues with the matter (Chechneya and Taiwan, to be more specific).

Questions for debate:
1. Besides the overt language used by both countries, should the U.S. read anything more into a joint military exercise between a former superpower and a potential one? If yes, how should the U.S. respond?

2. Should CIS (specifically Chechneya) states or Taiwan interpret these exercises as having any special significance?

3. Should the U.S. or NATO protest arms sales from Russia to China?

1.) Well, I am not one to see conspiracy theories everywhere, but something is rotten in Denmark... er: Asia. I think both countries have a parasite country latched onto them that they want to eliminate and/or totally incorporate and have been doing a poor job by themselves so they are adopting the old mantra "misery loves company."

2.) Yes.

3.) I am not sure we have any legal grounds on which to do so, arms sales from one nation to another do not endanger America or American interests. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

The US did respond...""We are following the exercises," US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said this week.

"We expect that they will be conducted in a manner that supports some mutual goal of regional stability shared by the United States, China and Russia." "



I would also agree that this is more specifically aimed to Chechneya. They claim this little event was for the aim of regional stability which I would agree with. Russia and China are hardly the best of friends and so I have a really hard time imagining them as strong allies. Yet Chechneya is an ever increasing mess. It is now claimed that Chechneya is the new breeding ground of terror. So I can easily imagine Chechneya as a focus for regional stability for many but Taiwan really is a more personal issue between China and the US and I just don't view these two conflicts as the same or as having the same broad appeal to others..who wants to get involved with that? I certainly doubt Russia does!


I am sure they US will as she always does..she has a arms ban on China. Yet the UN does not so I see no reason they would.

Do you know how many joint military exercises the U.S. conducts in East Asia each year? If you enjoy frolicking on your neighbor's front lawn, don't be surprised when he does the same. Analogies aside, the exercise was more of a way for Russia to showcase weapons that it wants to market to China than anything else.



First of all, Chechneya is not an independent sovereign state, nor is Taiwan. Should they read into this? No, because the chances of Chinese troops fighting in Chechneya or Russian troops fighting in Taiwan is nil.



It would be hard to get NATO to protest such sales, since the EU itself is pondering lifting the arms embargo to China. And protests really don't mean much anyway, China had protested U.S. arms sales to Taiwan forever and nothing has changed. And FYI, Taiwan's air force has drawn up plans to blow up the Three Gorges Dam with the "defensive" F-16 fighters the U.S. provided to them. Way to go, Bush Sr.!

-- edited for typos --

Yes, indeed. China has informed Taiwan that it will invade if it takes steps toward independence...actually that was if it "doesn't take steps toward reunification", so Taiwan hopes that presenting a credible threat in response will deter Chinese military coercion. Your own quote works well here: "Don't think he's the first to say "if you mess with my mama, i'm gonna shove a sharp object up your ---." So yah, you can call that a threat."


Per the arms sales protest question, China has been buying Russian arms and military technology for a long time...billions were spent in the 1990s, so that isn't new. If the UN hasn't protested yet it won't. I don't recall us protesting this (formally) either. I might be wrong, but obviously it didn't work in the past if we did.

So it makes it okay to attack civilian targets? What, then, is the difference between this "democratic" government and Al-Qaeda?

What the Chinese leadership had always said is "we will pay any price to prevent Taiwan independence", never was a threat made on a particular landmark or on the civilian population.



Billions were spent AFTER the U.S. sold Taiwan 150 F-16s and France sold Taiwan 6 La Fayette Stealth Frigates and 60 Mirage2000s. Not to say that China doesn't share part of the blame for fueling the cross-Strait arms race, but hey, let us not be the proverbial kettle and pot here.

The above is a rather fanciful thing to say, considering the quote I obtained from you was regarding the threat of total nuclear annihilation of American cities.


I didn't indicate that these sales were "wrong", only that they happened. Those sales to Taiwan were spurred by China's move to upgrade its military hardware. The Taiwanese government signed an agreement to buy the F16s on November of 1992 (they didn’t obtain them that month, they started production), whereas China and Russia set up their military-technical cooperation commission in August 1992. The handwriting was on the wall.

Data on weapons exchanges



Regarding your earilier assertion that Russia would never involve itself in Taiwan…. doesn't the Good-Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation involve a mutual obligation to provide military support if either party considers itself the subject of military attack or “blackmail”? The Russian military exercises of February 2001 involved the simulated use of its conventional and nuclear forces to attack US forces in the Pacific in the context of a Taiwan scenario. Whether they would actually come to Chinese aid in such a case is speculative, but the message is clearly there, and the message didn’t just happen with the recent 2005 joint military exercises.

Link

There is a difference between an individual and a government making it a policy. Yes, Zhu advocated the use of nuclear weapons if Chinese cities are attacked, but that is his personal view, and more than one person on that thread has provided links of official disapproval from the Chinese government. Whereas the Taiwanese threat on the Three Gorges Dam and population centers like Shanghai and Hong Kong are from the government. It's even on the 2003 report on the PRC by the Pentagon.

Now, are you trying to tell me that there is no difference between a hot-headed general expressing his personal view and a government making targeting civilians its policy?



I truly hope that you don't believe arms deals are like ordering a pizza, where you make one phone call and it's done. The fact is the negotiation for the sale of those F-16s had been going for quite some time before that agreement was signed. I'll try to hunt down articles on when the negotiations for the F-16s were initiated, but I remember vividly that these started when Reagan was still in office and the US wanted to sell Taiwan the F-5E instead of the F-16s initially.

My point from my previous post is that hostility and the arm race are fueled by both sides.




I ate 10 bananas today, Satuday, but I didn't eat any from Sunday to Friday. So it's fair to say I ate 10 bananas this week, but does it mean I ate a banana on Monday? No.

It is fair to say that Mainland China spent billions in the 1990s on Russian weapons. But prior to the mid-90s, the only large purchase by the Mainland is 24 Su-27s, while Taiwan is negotiating for the purchase of 150 F-16s and 60 Mirage-2000s.

Again, my point is that it was a tit-for-tat thing.

As for the Washington Times report that you quoted, I don't know, I just don't trust Washington Times as a credible source with unnamed officials citing classified reports and all.

I read through that thread three times and couldn't find those links. I am interested in reading one if you have it. From what I've read, the Chinese government refuses to retract those statements. High-ranking Chinese Generals seem to have a predisposition for saying these types of things. Back when China fired six ballistic missiles into an area about 40 miles from the capital of Taiwan in 1995 and we mentioned potential US military action if Taiwan was attacked, Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai (deputy chief of China's general staff) said, "No, you won't. We've watched you in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, and you don't have the will. In the 1950s, you three times threatened nuclear strikes on China, and you could do that because we couldn't hit back. Now we can. So you are not going to threaten us again because, in the end, you care a lot more about Los Angeles than Taipei."

I apologize, though, because I was incorrectly reading your response to the (first) General's quote as an indirect endorsement of his statement, which doesn't seem to have been your intent. Suffice it to say I don't support the targeting of civilians as a policy for any government.

Okay, maybe not explicit disapproval, but certainly something like "that's his personal view, not our policy." Here's a link from BBC for ya.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4688471.stm

Well, I have to admit test-firing those missiles was a stupid move. It has given the Taiwan-Independence movement more ammunition than any other event. With that said, the missiles had dummy payloads, were fired into international waters, and the test-firing was announced well ahead of time (I knew because my flight was diverted to avoid the area). And FYI, the test was designed to demonstrate that even without an adequate number of all-weather fighters, the PLA can interdict Keelung (not Taipei as your other source indicated) and Kaohsiong, the two major ports of Taiwan. And I am almost certain that the 40 miles figure is wrong, because Taipei is not on the coast, and Keelung is at least 40 miles northeast of it and the area designated for impact was in international waters, a good distance from the coast. I'll try to find something on the designated areas. You gotta be careful with some of the stuff provided by pro-Taiwan-Independence sites. There is one site of a pro-TI organzation that claimed the NY Times published an article saying that America should support Taiwan Independence, and it turns out it is a half-page ad that same organization took out on page A4, LMAO

For more background on the 1995 missile "crisis", check out this essay:

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/2000...1RP15.htm#china

As for Xiong's comment, I have heard a variant of this, but my interpretation is that his comment was strictly about the prospect of retaliation when facing a threat of nuclear strike. One should also consider the fact that he never got promoted after that incident, I think that it is fairly clear whether what he said represented official policy.




And I should apologize for not making myself more clear on that thread. My point there was that boys would be boys, which is why having a civilian government is a good thing.

Questions for debate:
1. Besides the overt language used by both countries, should the U.S. read anything more into a joint military exercise between a former superpower and a potential one? If yes, how should the U.S. respond?

I’m a little new at this debate thing and I’ve noticed everyone is referring to really sophisticated sources but I’ve stumbled on to a less authoritative website with a frightening answer to this question and I thought I’d share it with you.

The author argues rather extensively that China and Russia may be in the process of forming some kind of alliance against the US. I know this sounds really absurd and I didn’t find her arguments entirely convincing. But on the other hand after reading the whole thing I can’t dismiss it off hand. This quote in particular caught my attention:

“Obviously there has been no overt aggression from China directed towards America, so the assumption that there is a problem is only speculations on my part. My greatest concern though, is that America has a tendency not to notice problems until it’s too late to fix them. But if there ever was a perfect time to challenge America for global dominance it is now. The country is already exhausting itself by fighting two wars, more or less on borrowed money. Within a few years the American population will have grown so battle tired that it will be extremely difficult to generate the energy necessary to fight a brand new war, especially against an army far greater than anything this earth has ever seen.”

I’ve highlighted the part that made me jump. She also argues that the US is unaware of its effects on the world and that we have a “warped sense of reality”. I like to think I have fairly good understanding of the world but what bothers me is that if I didn’t would I know that I didn’t? If China did decide to “challenge America for global dominance” would other countries defend us and join us in defeating China as they did with Germany and Japan? After reading her assessment of our rather short list of allies I’m not so sure.

On top of everything else she doesn’t think the US is a democracy. At first I found it extremely offensive. Our country has sacrificed more for democracy than any other. If I had thought it had been some terrorist that said it I would have shrugged it off, but this woman is from Sweden and I always thought of the Swedes as level headed people. She used as one motive for her statement that only half of the American population votes. I’m not sure if that’s true but as one of those who didn’t vote last time it did freak me out a bit. I didn’t vote because quite frankly I didn’t trust either candidate but it never occurred to me that my not voting could lead people to distrust my country. And if people in Sweden don’t even think we are a democracy maybe we are in worse trouble than our government wants us to believe. I mean lets face it, the odds that Bush would be honest with us about something like this is probably nil.

Well, the first question one has to answer is whether American dominance over the world is a good thing for the rest of the world, assuming that it is a good thing for ALL Americans. With a population of under 4% of the world's total population, America consumes 40~50% (depends on which source you use) of the world's resources. Not to say that there is anything wrong with this arrangement, but somewhere in the world, someone might be starving because of this. After all, the Bud Light you are drinking could have been a day's worth of food for a kid in Ethiopia.

Next, one must get one's definition of "against America" straight. Both Russia and China are advocating for a multi-lateral world as oppose to a world where only America has a say. Whether or not one wants to call it an alliance is up to oneself, and don't forget, on the Iraq War issue, both Germany and France, in addition to Russia and China, opposed the war. Can one say that they acted against America?

One thing is for sure though, in the near future, China's army is not going to fight Russia's war and the same can be said about Russia's army. Not to mention that China is investing heavily into U.S. Treasury Bonds, being the second largest holder of the T-note and all. Now, would YOU be lending money to someone whom you perceive to be an enemy?



Ah, the allegory of the cave, would you know that you are in the cave if you are in the cave? But don't worry, no one can claim that they know ALL about the world. The important is knowing what is in YOUR best interest.



Well, depends on your definition of "global dominance". Does it mean that the U.S. can topple any government it wants and install a government that it approves anywhere in the world? Does it mean that the U.S. can consume 90% of the world's resources and dictate how the remaining 10% is distributed? Does it mean that everyone else in the rest of the world needs to pay $1 to America whenever they go to the restroom? Most countries do not have a problem with America being the leader of the world or being the world's policeman as long as their own interests are not hurt in the process.

Plus, even if China did decide to “challenge America for global dominance”, it would not start with an all-out war with America. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was its worst move in the entire World War II.




Well, in the strictest sense, the U.S. is not a Democracy, but a Representative Republic. If the United States were a Democracy, Al Gore would have won the 2000 election since he won the popular vote, and the Iraq War would probably have never happened.

And don't worry about the not voting thing, even in a Democracy in its strictest sense, you have a right, not an obligation to vote.

Finally, I would have to say that you have to be skeptical and keep an open mind when reading someone else's comment about countries in which she has not spent a significant amount of time.