Reply With Quotethat Asian Pivot is going to be fun
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China flew nuclear-capable bombers over Taiwan before Trump call by Taiwan President
Less than a week before President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Taiwan’s president over the phone, China flew a pair of long-range nuclear-capable bombers over Taiwan for the first time, two U.S. officials revealed to Fox News.
On Nov. 26, two Chinese Xian H-6 bombers, along with two escort planes, a Tupolev Tu-154 and Shaanxi Y-8, around the island of Taiwan from mainland China, taking off and landing from two separate Chinese military bases.
The escort jets were used to collect radar information and conduct other surveillance on American allies such as Japan, Fox News is told.
At different points of the flight, Chinese J-10 and Su-30 fighter jets performed escort duties for the Chinese strategic bombers.
Japan scrambled eight F-15 fighter jets to intercept the Chinese flight at one point in the skies somewhere northeast of Taiwan, according to the officials.
A high-ranking official from Taiwan’s defense ministry commented on the Chinese military flight Monday.
"This was the first time that Chinese aircraft circled around Taiwan," Deputy National Defense Minister Lee Hsi-ming said, adding that China has said similar flights would occur in the future according to Focus Taiwan News Channel.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/12...president.html"China has steadily built up a massive military capability in the area around Taiwan. This isn't simply a matter of flying bombers. Understand that technically, we can't object to flying bombers near Taiwan if we are flying combat aircraft and reconnaissance aircraft near China. This is simply legal under international law," Anthony H. Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. "Taiwan faces a much more serious Chinese challenge than it has ever faced before."
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that Asian Pivot is going to be fun
U. S. NAVY Veteran
The pertinent words being "before Trump call by Taiwan President" and obviously on Obamas watch.....note also that the Russians are alsoOriginally Posted by anatta
sticking it in the face of this President pretty regularly too.....
If there should be issues in the future, remember this shit started under Obama when Trump was but a wet dream in the minds of conservatives.....un-electable....
Put blame where it belongs
ATF decided it could not regulate bump stocks during the Obama administration.
It that time," the NRA wrote in a statement. "The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations."
The ATF and Obama admin. ignored the NRA recommendations.
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Taiwan has come a long way from its days as the unsinkable aircraft carrier against Maoist-style communism. It’s now a full-fledged democracy, led by President Tsai Ing-wen, the only woman who is not part of a political dynasty to ever be elected as the leader of an Asian nation. Her victory this year marked the third peaceful transfer of power from one party to the other in Taiwan, a sign of the maturity of Taiwan’s political system, its robust civil society and raucously independent media.
In praising Trump’s call with Tsai, Trump supporters have noted that Trump’s use of the term the “president of Taiwan” marked a welcome dose of reality to a relationship that has been hamstrung by diplomatic euphemisms. “If a little courtesy to a democratic friend and a little truth about Taiwan could really threaten peace in the Pacific,” wrote Stephen Yates and Christian Whiton, who served respectively in the White House and at the State Department under George W. Bush, “then we need to reevaluate our defense and come up with something better.” Other Republicans, like Jon Huntsman, the Mandarin-speaking former ambassador to China, said Trump is right to seek stronger relations with Taipei.
But the fact is that U.S. policy on Taiwan has already evolved significantly since the Nixon administration opened America to China in 1972.
While researching my new book on U.S.-China relations, I found that both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter privately promised Chinese officials that the United States would step aside as China united with Taiwan. Nixon sought China’s help to end the war in Vietnam and both he and Carter wanted to use China as part of the global competition against America’s biggest foe — the Soviet Union. Contemplating the abandonment of Taiwan was made easier by the fact that Taiwan’s government — then still run by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek — was an authoritarian state.
Carter’s rush to normalize relations with China concerned Congress. In 1978, influential senators asked the administration to keep Congress apprised of any changes to America’s mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. But the White House ignored the request and established ties with China on Jan. 1, 1979. A month later, a bipartisan congressional coalition pushed back and proposed the Taiwan Relations Act. Spearheaded by Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, the act put China on notice that the United States might respond to an invasion of Taiwan and directed the president to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons and technology. As with the current moment, there was a lot of hand-wringing in the media and the White House that challenging China on Taiwan was unwise and that China was going to be angry. In March 1979, the act passed both houses of Congress by a veto-proof margin. Carter had no choice but to sign it into law. China blasted the legislation as “an unwarranted intrusion” into its internal affairs.
As time passed and China failed to live up to American expectations that China’s system would become more like America’s, U.S. presidents also began to distance themselves from the private assurances of Nixon and Carter. In the summer of 1982, President Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to Taiwan’s president Chiang Ching-kuo, which was read to Taiwan’s leader by U.S. diplomat James Lilley. In the letter, Reagan promised among other things that the United States would not let China tell it what weapons it could sell to Taiwan and that the United States would never push Taiwan to negotiate with China. In that light, Trump isn’t the first president or president-elect since 1979 to have communicated directly with a president of Taiwan.
Throughout the 1990s, not only were U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan not reduced, they were enhanced. Officials serving at the American Institute in Taiwan, the department’s diplomatic post, no longer needed to leave the State Department to work at AIT. While it stood aside in 1971 as Taiwan was turfed from the United Nations, the United States helped Taiwan gain observer status at the World Health Organization. In addition, China’s unwillingness or inability to help the United States confront North Korea’s nuclear program might have played a factor in the U.S. turn away from Beijing. Today no senior member of the Democratic or Republican foreign-policy establishments would favor unification between China and Taiwan under the current configuration of the Chinese Communist Party. The Obama administration publicly praised Tsai’s election as an example of real democracy in action.
I worry that Trump’s call and the media reaction could complicate these warming ties by encouraging China to punish Taiwan, which could then touch off a cascading series of moves and counter-moves leading to more tension in Asia and, in the end, more problems for the people of Taiwan, China and the United States. Nobody really wants to replay 1996, when the Clinton administration dispatched two aircraft-carrier battle groups near Taiwan to put China on notice that a series of mock invasions and missile tests were out of line. I also worry that the new administration, seeking a breakthrough in North Korea, is reopening the Taiwan issue only to get Beijing’s attention and will drop the Taiwan bargaining chip once China gets the message.
After the phone conversation Friday, the eruption of criticism was deafening. The fear of a Chinese response was palpable. To defend himself, Trump tweeted that Tsai “CALLED ME” and groused that it was “Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.” But the hyperventilation and Trump’s placing responsibility for the call on Tsai’s shoulders play into China’s hands. On Saturday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi sounded statesmanlike when he dismissed the phone call as “just a small trick by Taiwan” and said that he believed it would not change U.S. policy toward China.
Emboldened by the American media’s reaction to Trump’s gambit, China’s next step will be to punish Taiwan. Beijing has already greeted Tsai’s election by slashing the number of tourists approved to travel to the island. Last year, 3.4 million Chinese tourists visited Taiwan; this year, that number is down 30 percent. More penalties will be in store. I sure hope that after his feel-good call with Tsai, Trump has a plan to help her out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.d33c678852d0
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