Friday, August 30, 2024
Under USA behest the Philippines under Marcos Jr is continuously provoking China in the S.C.Sea
How Manila stages a ridiculous soap opera twisting the South China Sea truth
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OPINION / OBSERVER
How Manila stages a ridiculous soap opera twisting the South China Sea truth
By Global Times
Published: Aug 30, 2024 12:57 AM
Illustration: Chen Xia/GT
Illustration: Chen Xia/GT
The Philippines has truly mastered the art of twisting the truth. It stirs up trouble in the South China Sea, escalates the situation, pushes it to the international stage, and then calls China the "biggest disruptor." It's like watching a ridiculous soap opera unfold before our eyes.
Over the past week, maritime tensions between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea have further intensified. On August 19, two Philippine Coast Guard vessels illegally intruded into waters adjacent to Xianbin Jiao of China's Nansha Qundao without the permission of the Chinese government. On Sunday, an official vessel of the Philippines' Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources insisted on intruding into the adjacent waters of Xianbin Jiao despite China's firm opposition and repeated dissuasion. However, the Philippines' Defense Minister Gilberto Teodoro claimed that China is "the biggest disruptor" of international peace.
Any clear-minded person would recognize that the Philippines is the one causing disturbances.
The fact is that whether it be on August 19 or August 25, it was the Philippines that sent Coast Guard vessels and official vessels to intrude into the waters adjacent to Xianbin Jiao, attempting to send supplies to the Philippine vessel that has been illegally anchoring in the lagoon of Xianbin Jiao since April. The Philippines' move seriously infringes on China's sovereignty, violates the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, and threatens the peace and stability in the South China Sea. Thus, the label of "disruptor" definitely shouldn't be pinned on China.
The reason why the Philippines dares to openly stage various provocations and spread rumors to defame China is largely because it is supported by the US.
US Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo's remarks on Tuesday brought the South China Sea tensions to another climax. He said the US could escort Philippine ships on supply missions in the South China Sea. However, Paparo added that this "entirely reasonable option" required consultation between the treaty allies.
This "escort" proposal by Washington will only escalate tensions in the South China Sea. Can the Philippines really benefit from this? Or is it simply being used as a pawn in the US' geopolitical game? The US often claims to support the Philippines under the guise of providing security assurances, but in reality, it is to protect its own strategic interests. As Paparo stressed, "consultation" between treaty allies is still needed. This raises doubts about whether the US is once again making empty promises to the Philippines.
What is even more worrisome is that Paparo is also known for the idea of turning the Taiwan Straits into an "unmanned hellscape." This rhetoric demonstrates the extreme stance of the US toward the rise of China.
The Philippines' provocations in the South China Sea under the incitement of the US will inevitably aggravate regional tensions. When can Manila realize that it could end up being the most costly sacrifice in this scenario? While the Philippine government appears to bask in US' "support," it may actually be wading deeper into trouble. In this South China Sea drama, the role the Philippines plays is comical, because it seems too naive to believe the sweet words of an "old friend" in the game of international politics. Will Manila realize that it is simply a pawn at the end of the play? And how much price will the Philippines pay for this farce out of gullibility? Only time can tell us the answer.
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USA has convinced Marcos and Philippines to die for US world hegemony
29.08.2024 Author: Brian Berletic
How is the US Convincing the Philippines to Destroy Itself?
How is the US Convincing the Philippines to Destroy Itself?
As China rises, Asia rises with it. The Southeast Asian state of the Philippines stood to rise alongside the rest of the region until relatively recently as the United States successfully convinces the Philippines to do otherwise.
Before the current administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office, China was working with the Philippines to build badly needed modern infrastructure. Now, rather than working and trading together with China, the Philippines is pointing missiles at China. It has “invited” the United States, the Philippines’ former colonial master, to build new military facilities across its territory, using semantics and legal loopholes to sidestep the Philippines own constitution and undermine its sovereignty in the process.
Instead of rising with the rest of Asia, the Philippines continues to escalate toward a conflict that could set the entire region back decades or more.
Just as the United States politically captured Ukraine in Eastern Europe in 2014 and transformed it into a geopolitical battering ram against neighboring Russia at the expense of Ukraine’s population, economy, sovereignty, and possibly even its existence, it is repeating the same process with the Philippines vis-à-vis China.
How has the United States convinced a nation of over 115 million people to forego economic progress and development in exchange for an escalating confrontation with its own largest trade partner? What are the mechanisms Washington uses to convince an entire nation to race toward conflict and self-destruction?
A Vast Network of Propaganda
There is growing awareness of the means by which the US interferes politically in targeted nations through the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and adjacent organizations, agencies, and foundations, compromising a nation’s leadership and reshaping national policies to serve Washington at the expense of the targeted nation.
The NED does this through targeting every aspect of a nation-state, from its political system, to academia, from its courts and legal system to a nation’s information space.
Philippine information space, like many nations around the globe, has been targeted by a vast media network built up by the US government as well as corporate money funneled through intermediaries including foundations and endowments, to poison the Philippine people not only against China specifically, but against the Philippines’ own best interests in general.
Part of this vast network are so-called “fact-checking” projects the US government together with the largest names in Western media as well as US-based tech giants like Google uses to paradoxically reinforce US government disinformation and attack and undermine people and organizations working to inform the public – including the Philippine public – of what the US is really doing and why.
In the Philippines, this network includes PressOne. Its “fact-checking” activities have repeatedly targeted those exposing US interference in the Philippines’ internal political affairs and undermining Philippine sovereignty.
PressOne has falsely “fact-checked” claims regarding the building of US military bases across the Philippines using semantics to argue that while the US is certainly building military facilities for its own use in the Philippines, technically the Philippines retains ownership over these facilities.
PressOne outright lied claiming, “President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. has denied that the facilities were intended to be military bases.” The Reuters report PressOne cites does not deny the facilities are indeed military bases, it simply claims the bases are not meant for “offensive action” against any country – another example of semantics.
In another example, PressOne conducted a smear against this author citing US and Philippine government claims, as well as through the use of a number of logical fallacies including guilt by association.
PressOne’s task is to convince those reading its content that a US-led effort to transform the Philippines into a Ukraine-style proxy against its largest trading partner, China, is not taking place, but if it were, it is somehow in the Philippines’ best interests.
It should then come as no surprise that PressOne’s “fact-checking” activities are the result of US government funding to stand-up such projects. At the bottom of each “fact-check” article on PressOne it claims, “PressOne.PH is a verified signatory of the Code of Principles of the International Fact -Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter.”
Poynter in turn discloses it is funded by the US government through the NED along with corporate-funded foundations connected to the Omidyar Network as well as the Google News Initiative, itself a partner of the US State Department as well as other US-allied governments.
All of this, in turn, is part of an influence operation targeting China the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars on every year.
Funding Disinformation Hundreds of Millions a Year
In 2021 the US Congress introduced the “Countering Chinese Communist Party Malign Influence Act.” It, along with other legislation and funds, seeks to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to, “counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally.”
In practice, however, such legislation only seeks to reinforce the US’ actual malign influence.
As Reuters revealed earlier this year in an investigative report, “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic,” the US government “aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China.” Reuters, quoting a senior US military official, wrote, “we weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
The same Reuters report admitted that, far from an isolated instance, the US has a myriad of such programs run out of “psychological operations” centers engaged in systematic propaganda. Thus, while the US government was certainly “countering” China, it wasn’t because China was wielding “malign influence,” it was because China was undermining America’s own malign influence.
A Long-Run Policy to Contain China
In addition to lying about public health, the US seeks to convince the Philippine public to give up trade, economic development, and infrastructure projects with China and instead invest public funds into military spending ahead of what will likely be a Ukraine-style proxy war against China.
The centerpiece of Washington’s political capture and exploitation of the Philippines is the “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement” (EDCA) it uses to build military facilities across Philippine territory it uses to base troops, equipment, weapons, and ammunition. The facilities contribute toward a wider regional strategy of militarily encircling and containing China, a foreign policy objective pursued by Washington since the end of World War 2.
Published by the US State Department’s own Office of the Historian is a 1965 memorandum from then US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to then US President Lyndon B. Johnson titled, “Courses of Action in Vietnam” which admitted that US military operations in Southeast Asia only “made sense” if they were “in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China.” The same memorandum identified 3 fronts along which the US sought to contain China, including East Asia, Pakistan and India, as well as Southeast Asia where the Philippines is located.
Today, this policy of encirclement continues through mechanisms like the EDCA. Despite clearly running in contradiction to the Philippine people’s best interests, the well-funded propaganda campaign the US runs worldwide including in the Philippines (including the above mentioned PressOne) is attempting to convince the Philippine people that China is a threat, that the Philippines’ former colonial masters are their “allies,” and that buying US weapons and fighting Washington’s wars alongside US troops is the path forward toward a brighter future.
Considering the pile of ashes and bones the US is transforming Ukraine into even as this same process gains momentum in the Philippines, it is clear that along this path, there is no future at all for the Philippines. This unfortunate transformation and the deep socio-political scars it is creating within the Philippines serves as yet another warning about the importance of treating a nation’s information space as it does its physical domains and the importance of protecting this domain as well or better than a nation protects its land borders, shores, and air space. Only time will tell if other nations heed this warning, or simply follow Ukraine and the Philippines into self-destruction.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
Tags: Disinformation, Geopolitics, infonews war, International politics, Philippine, Puppets of the USA, USA
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Russia-Africa: The power of attraction
Due to high demand, we are glad to offer a digital version of our latest book “Africa-Russia: the power of attraction”
The book provides a wide-range of perspectives of the prominent Russian and African diplomats, politicians, journalists and experts on the flourishing relationship between Africa and Russia. It also explains why Western neocolonial approach to the Global South will definitely fail.
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Thursday, August 29, 2024
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
US - China relations nosedive : Salman Rafi Sheikh
20.04.2024 Author: Salman Rafi Sheikh
US-China Ties All Set to Nosedive
US-China Ties All Set to Nosedive
As I recently wrote, US-China ties, following Biden’s recent call to Xi, are unlikely to see any major improvement and progress from what has been a tit-for-tat trade war for the past several years. In fact, the recent visit of the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has done more than anything else to prove the fact that the US-China ties, regardless of who occupies the White House, will continue to be shaped by great power competition, a competition that is less about the two countries’ economic interests but more about where they stand vis-à-vis each other and in the global political hierarchy and how shifts in that hierarchy are driving tensions. In addition to this, China’s specific economic realities are also driving policymakers in Washington crazy. In fact, during her visit to China, Yellen revealed this craziness quite, obviously.
Yellen’s charge sheet, for instance, included an American fear about Chinese foray into “new” industries. To quote Yellen:
“China has long had excess savings, but investment in the real estate sector and government-funded infrastructure had absorbed much of it. Now we are seeing an increase in business investment in a number of “new” industries targeted by the PRC’s industrial policy. That includes electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar…
China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity. Actions taken by the PRC today can shift world prices. And when the global market is flooded by artificially cheap Chinese products, the viability of American and other foreign firms is put into question”.
This statement obviously shows Washington feels it is unable to compete with what Yellen called China’s “excess capacity” and “cheap” Chinese products. More importantly, since the Chinese have the money, it is beyond comprehension as to why Beijing would not use this money to invest in “new” industries. Washington wants the Chinese to leave that industry only to the West to exploit, although it remains that the reason why the West is unable to compete with China in this “new” industry is that the US itself has underinvested in it. The Chinese might simply be out-investing the Americans.
According to recent findings, only two of 44 vehicle assembly plants in the US were dedicated to making only electric vehicles in 2020. China, on the other hand, accounted for about 44% of electric vehicles manufactured, with about 4.6 million units in both production and sales during the decade, between 2010 and 2020. Biden promised more investment in this industry. The original plan was to invest US$174 billion. However, only US$15 billion has made it to the industry.
Because Washington is finding it extremely hard to compete with China, the best the former can do is push China into military conflicts. This is why we see Washington pumping more and more weapons into Taiwan as a means to entice China. Recently, China sanctioned two subsidiaries of the US military contractors General Atomics and General Dynamics for their arming Taiwan against China. Senior executives of these entities have been banned from entering China and their assets have been frozen. A statement from Beijing said that this militarization of Taiwan amounts to “seriously interfering in China’s internal affairs and undermining China’s sovereignty and integrity”.
The key reason why China has retaliated is that it understands the US’ inability, or unwillingness, to keep the issue of economics separate from military conflicts. Beijing understands that the US continues to arm Taiwan to create a Ukraine-like scenario where a continuous push for making Ukraine a NATO member – and thus enhance its military capacity vis-à-vis Russia – drove Moscow’s military operation. Subsequently, the US and NATO forces became involved in the conflict that they see as their best shot at pushing Russia back to the margins of global politics. Policymakers in Washington, by arming Taiwan, are also pushing China into a corner where it might be forced to take military measures to protect its vital national interests.
While it is possible that China, using non-military means, might succeed in frustrating US attempts to ignite an actual military conflict, there is little denying that Washington simply does not have the capacity to block China’s ability to dominate the global market of “new” technologies. Surely, for instance, China’s exports to the US have declined due to excessive tariffs, but China continues to be the single largest producer of electric vehicles. Who’s buying them? Granted that China’s exports to developed markets (the US, Europe, Japan and Australia) have not significantly risen during the past few years, it is also a fact that Chinese exports to the Global South (including Russia, the Persian Gulf States, Central Asia, South Korea and Taiwan) have roughly doubled in the same time period. That is an unprecedented shift in world trade patterns. How can the US reverse this pattern, that is, if it can do this at all?
A key mechanism driving China’s domination is the trade infrastructure it has built in the last decade or so. Riding on the wings of its massive Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), China has spread its presence across the globe – something the US was and still is unable to match, primarily because it does not have, and has failed to come up with, a comparable trade plan to compete with China. In the past decade or so, Washington has developed some plans. But some of them, like the TPP, collapsed due to Washington’s withdrawal and some others, such as the India-Middle-East-Europe Economic Corridor, are yet to take off. This failure has nothing to do with what China has been able to achieve in the last two decades or so.
Washington now finds itself unable to reconcile with this deficiency, which is why policymakers in the US see China as a permanent adversary that will inevitably establish its dominance at their country’s expense. This zero-sum mentality can only drive conflict and not normalisation.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
Tags: China, Economic cooperation, Geopolitics, International politics, USA
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Russia-Africa: The power of attraction
Due to high demand, we are glad to offer a digital version of our latest book “Africa-Russia: the power of attraction”
The book provides a wide-range of perspectives of the prominent Russian and African diplomats, politicians, journalists and experts on the flourishing relationship between Africa and Russia. It also explains why Western neocolonial approach to the Global South will definitely fail.
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Professor Wang Hunning on US VS US and US VS the rest of the World
28.08.2024 Author: Ricardo Nuno Costa
America versus America and the right path of China
America versus America and the right path of China
In 1988, a young professor of international relations at Fudan University in China travelled the length and breadth of the USA for half a year. He wanted to understand that great country in depth, at a time when the Soviet Union was coming to an end, Japan was challenging the US for the status of the world’s leading economy and the latter was intensifying its neoliberal process begun in the 70s.
Wang Huning, the ‘Chinese Tocqueville’, as he has since become known, warns in the preface to his ‘America against America’ (published in 1991) that ‘obviously, I have studied and seen the United States as a society, more as an observer than as a researcher’.
A Nation of Contradictions
This is an honest testimonial from someone who has managed to perceptively grasp many of the characteristics of the social reality of a diverse country at a particular historical moment. Probably inspired by the film Kramer vs Kramer (1979) – to which he makes a small reference – the drama of a child who sees his parents divorcing and going their separate ways could be a criticism of the extreme individualism of that society.
This is a sociological document of great interest, timeless even though it was written almost four decades ago. It praises the many virtues of a country steeped in contradictions. Wang wants to absorb the good examples into China: entrepreneurship, a pragmatic spirit, respect for tradition, a compulsion for modernity, a symbiosis that is not always easy to understand.
Right at the start of the book, the author recognises that although Marxism was correct in its analysis of capitalism, it was wrong in its focus. ‘For a long time, driven by the reinforcement of ideology, there was a total rejection of capitalism, which was influenced by dogmatism, which prevented people from judging capitalist society objectively and scientifically.’ To this self-criticism, he adds that under “left-wing ideology”, which took the class struggle as its outline, our perspective of the whole world was disturbed and people were prevented from learning from the advanced experience of other countries’.
But he also sees in the American society of the 80s the seeds of a social disaster to come: ‘In a commodity economy, the power of money is irresistible. Without a force to guide it, people will orientate themselves towards profit. This will eventually lead to serious social problems.’ Any doubts about the accuracy of his prognosis?
In his retrospective of the evolution of what was then the world’s largest economy, the author talks about the paradoxes that American society has experienced since the Mayflower arrived at the shores of New England. From the debate about the primacy of freedom over equality, to the then growing crises of values, poverty, extreme inequality, crime and drugs, Wang provides a frank critique of the dubious reality of the USA at the end of the 80s.
The growing power of lobbies with ramifications in academia, the public service linked to the two-party system that controls everything, the large corporations, the lack of authority, the breakdown of nuclear institutions like the family. None of these are examples to be followed, but they are worth reflecting on.
It doesn’t mention a number of other factors that have led to the current limit situation, such as financialisation, the plague of weapons, both internal and externally, endless wars or corruption, but it is a comprehensive and very descriptive text. Simple, but engaging.
As far as international relations are concerned, Wang warned that ‘for a long time, the Americans didn’t want to recognise Japan’s success […] I think they will face a similar situation again’ and that it will be ‘then that the Americans will really reflect on their politics, economy and culture’, warning that ‘if we want to surpass the Americans, we have to do one thing: surpass them in science and technology.’
A Timely Reflection on Global Power
Almost four decades later, China is now the leader in 37 of the 44 critical technologies covering defence, space, robotics, energy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials and the main areas of quantum technology, as well as being by far the country that produces the most STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates each year.
The author seems to criticise the decadent path taken by the US on the left, with capitalism and liberalism as its foundations. A path inversely parallel to the one China had already embarked on at the beginning of the 70s. He critically mentions the ‘growth of egalitarianism, nihilism and relativism in contemporary American culture’ and predicts the country’s decadence due to these germs.
Wang is today one of the main figures in the Chinese system. A man very close to and considered one of President Xi Jinping’s top ideologues, and before Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. He is often described in the Western press as the ‘éminence grise’ of the CCP, the ‘man behind the curtain’.
Given the current geopolitical moment in which China’s rise coincides with a clear resizing of US global power, ‘America against America’ has attracted renewed interest from the Western public, particularly in the US. At the time of the pandemic, numbers of the original edition could be found on eBay for up to $3,500. Fortunately, new editions have been published so that we have access to this great testimony, which partly explains the complexity of relations between the world’s two largest economies today.
On the eve of the US elections, at such a critical moment in international relations, this is an extremely well-timed book to understand much of what motivates the US to be in the situation it is in. ‘It can be said that Japan was only the first nation to challenge the United States. In the next century, more nations are likely to challenge the United States as well. That’s when the Americans will really reflect on their politics, economy and culture,’ he foreshadowed.
In a kind of Hegelian dialectic, Wang’s book-experience has certainly helped to add to the Chinese journey that began in 1949, a correction of a traditionalist, conservative, but above all pragmatic slant, also absorbing for itself the best of the American experience. This is how the People’s Republic has been steering its unequivocally socialist path, but on the right side. Only those who don’t want to can’t see the outcome.
Ricardo Nuno Costa ‒ geopolitical expert, writer, columnist, and editor-in-chief of geopol.pt, especially for «New Eastern Outlook»
Tags: China, Economic development, Geopolitics, Global development, modern society, Multipolar world, USA
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18+
E-mail: info@journal-neo.su
Network edition New Eastern Outlook 2010-2024
Republishing of the articles is welcomed with reference to NEO.
The views of the authors do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the editorial board.
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