Gordon G. Chang's Blog, page 19
November 5, 2013
Putin the Powerful?

Last week, Forbes named Vladimir Putin the world’s most powerful person. The Russian president edged out the American and Chinese leaders. Barack Obama came in second and Xi Jinping third in the magazine’s fifth-annual list.
So congratulations to President Putin. Yet his perch at the top could be short-lived. It’s true, as Steve Forbes explained, his publication ranked people and not countries, but Putin’s fortunes and influence, no matter the strength of his personality, will diminish as his country’s accelerating economic decline and irrelevance continue, as seems inevitable today.
Those problems will become even more apparent as we draw closer to the opening ceremonies next February of the troubled Winter Olympics in Sochi. Already, news organizations have begun their countdown stories to what could end up as the most controversial and expensive ($50 billion or so) installment of the games to date.
Putin is able to stage a monumental show because the country has been blessed by oil and gas, more or less the only products, other than perhaps vodka and caviar, the country can sell abroad.
Yet Sochi may well prove the high-water mark for Russian extravaganzas, given the grim outlook for Russia’s economy. Analysts blamed the unusually wet weather for the low growth of gross domestic product in the third-quarter of this year—1.2 percent on a year-on-year basis—but it is not the rain that is Russia’s structural economic failing. The fundamental problem is that Putin has failed to diversify Russia’s economy during his three terms as president and one as prime minister, leaving the country dependent on revenues generated by oil and gas exports. Global prices for gas are tumbling, and oil will surely follow. Already, Russia is feeling the effect.
Putin had promised 5.0 percent growth for this year, but that figure is well beyond reach. The official forecast is now just 1.8 percent expansion, but even that is considered high. The IMF, for instance, is predicting 1.5 percent growth. And long-term outlooks foresee continued stagnation. The Moscow-based firm Renaissance Capital suggests that Russian annual growth will not exceed 2 percent over the next decade.
The failure to meet what was once spoken of as an achievable goal will have domestic and, ultimately, geopolitical consequences. Putin has said Russia must grow at or near his target if it is to achieve its rightful place in the world.
As it is, “the Russian economy is starting to retreat behind the former Iron Curtain” writes Daniel Graeber of Oilprice.com. Europe is finding new sources of natural gas, and Asia is turning to North and South American sources. Some predict the US will become the next Saudi Arabia of energy production.
All these unfavorable trends have pushed Russia’s big energy companies, needing revenue, to come to terms with Beijing in recent months. In October, state-owned Rosneft signed a “breakthrough” deal with China National Petroleum Corporation by agreeing to China’s demand for an equity stake in a lucrative oil field in Eastern Siberia. This partnership agreement followed September’s announcement, made during Putin’s meeting with the Chinese president, of a contract between the Russian energy company Gazprom, also state-owned, and CNPC to supply natural gas to China.
This deal will help Putin out of a jam, but the Russian president nonetheless finds certain economic signs “alarming”—a word often heard these days in Moscow. If energy prices do not recover soon—unlikely, given the US-led shale boom, which could depress prices for decades—Putin could suffer electoral setbacks in spite of his government’s capacity for rigging elections. He will lose support among core constituencies if the economy is not strong enough to support his generous spending—and giveaway—plans. There are elections for Moscow’s Duma in 2014, the State Duma in 2016, and the presidency in 2018.
When people talk about Russia as the next Greece, we can guess that Putin could lose altitude fast. And not just in the Forbes power rankings.
Photo Credit: www.kremlin.ru
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October 29, 2013
State Department Opposes New Iran Sanctions

“We think that this is a time for a pause, to see if these negotiations can gain traction,” said Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman to Voice of America on Friday, explaining why she wants Congress to defer passing additional sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Senate Banking Committee has been considering a measure passed by the House in July to impose even stricter punitive measures on the country for its refusal to stop the enrichment of uranium, as demanded by the UN Security Council.
At the moment, the P5+1, the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany, are negotiating with the government of newly installed Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The next session of the talks is scheduled for early next month in Geneva.
“I thought it was a very positive statement,” said Reza Marashi of the National Iranian American Council, referring to Sherman’s call to Congress. The State Department evidently believes the Iranians will reciprocate a gesture of friendship, as do others. “A train doesn’t really run on two tracks,” Marashi, a former State Department official, explained. “If you’re pursuing a policy that moves down the sanctions track, how can you really truly be pursing diplomacy as well?”
Actually, diplomacy often works best when crippling sanctions are in place and are being tightened. Americans are particularly susceptible to the appealing notion that all others return gestures of friendship, but that’s not always the case. We get what we want when general secretaries, dictators, and assorted other autocrats have no choice but to agree to our terms.
And we fail when we, as a show of good will, prematurely lift coercive measures. In 2005, the Bush administration effectively cut North Korea off from the global financial system by designating Banco Delta Asia, the Macau bank the regime used, a “primary money laundering concern” under the Patriot Act. The measure was so successful that Pyongyang, in order to transmit money abroad, had to turn its diplomats into mules by putting cash into their suitcases.
The Kim regime then began what has been termed a “charm offensive,” which worked its wonders on Washington. In 2007, State Department negotiators convinced the Bush White House to lift the designation so as to coax the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons program. Once the designation was lifted, however, Pyongyang pocketed the concession and shortly after walked away from the six-party denuclearization negotiations for good.
One of the reasons the Iranians are now talking in Geneva is that President Rouhani was elected in June to improve the economy and he knows he cannot do that without the international community removing sanctions. He’s undoubtedly right: American and European measures imposed in 2011 are said to have reduced Tehran’s oil exports by more than a million barrels of day.
The Obama administration opposed the enactment of the 2011 measures because it wanted to engage the Islamic Republic, and now it is pressing the Senate Banking Committee not to pass a sanctions bill. Some commentators privately say the president wants to be remembered as the one who brought the Iranians into the mainstream of the international community, just as Nixon convinced the Chinese to reconcile themselves to the world. That would be a worthy achievement to be sure, but the best way to accomplish that is to convince the ayatollahs that they cannot continue to defy the UN by continuing to enrich uranium.
Mr. Obama should remember how the multi-decade struggle with Moscow concluded. Yes, there were handshakes all around in the early 1990s, but they were preceded by Ronald Reagan’s steely determination to end the Soviet Union, not to come to terms with it. As the Gipper said to Richard Allen in 1977, “My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose.”
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October 17, 2013
Former Chinese Leader Hu Jintao Indicted

On October 10th, Spain’s top criminal court indicted former Chinese leader Hu Jintao “as part of an investigation into whether the Chinese government tortured and repressed the people of Tibet as part of an attempted genocide,” in the words of one news report. Hu presided over a bloody crackdown in 1989 while serving as Communist Party secretary of the region, and his tenure as president of the country was also marked by harsh rule there. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, has already been charged by the same court with related crimes.
Tibet’s relations with China have been uneasy for centuries. Beijing claims the region is an “inseparable” part of the Chinese state, but many Tibetans want independence, and from time to time they have governed themselves. The last episode of self-rule ended abruptly when the People’s Liberation Army forcibly annexed the region in 1950. The current Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, fled to India after a failed uprising in 1959.
Is Hu actually guilty of “genocide”? No one claims the Chinese are actually trying to exterminate the Tibetans, but many have in fact been killed and the Dalai Lama has long spoken of “cultural genocide.” The International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington-based advocacy group, talks about “a climate of terror.”
Chinese rule in the so-called “Tibet Autonomous Region” is extremely unpopular, and Beijing is able to maintain control of the area only through a large army and police presence. A sustained campaign to assimilate Tibetans by eradicating their culture, especially their religion, has been mostly counterproductive. Since February 2009, 122 Tibetans have set fire to themselves in desperate protest. Most of them have died.
The self-immolations have had little effect on Western leaders, who largely accept Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Worse still, many of these leaders ignore Beijing’s systematic abuse of the Tibetan people, who do not consider themselves “Chinese” and who do not share religion, culture, or language with those who claim the right to rule them.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying issued angry words about the Spanish case, but they were in a sense unnecessary. Retired Chinese leaders almost never travel outside their country. Consequently, the chances of extradition are next to zero, and no one actually thinks Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin will ever see the inside of a Spanish jail.
So what is the point of the case?
The world has been far too accepting of the Communist Party’s behavior, both domestic and foreign. The action of the Spanish court, therefore, is a necessary corrective, helping to delegitimize Beijing’s control of Tibet and its treatment of its citizens. “The person who began the year as president of China, embraced by heads of state, kings, and ministers of the economy throughout the world, is since yesterday the Number One accused of genocide in Tibet,” said Alan Cantos, president of one of the plaintiff organizations in the suit. And in a message to me this week, Cantos wrote, “This is also a step in the right direction for the Spanish judicial system and our democracy, choosing to side with the law and basic principles rather than economic and political submission, as tends to be the case when seeking accountability of the powerful states of the UN Security Council.”
Cantos recognizes that China’s prominence on the world stage has essentially given its leaders immunity to act as they please at home, whether with regard to minorities like the Tibetans or even the Han, the ethnic group comprising 92 percent of the population of the People’s Republic. So the Spanish court was right to rule as it did. As José Elías Esteve Moltó, professor of international law at the University of Valencia and a drafter of the suit, wrote to me, “We trust that this fight against impunity will benefit the Tibetan people and all the Chinese citizens persecuted by a government they did not choose.”
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October 16, 2013
Is China Turning Up the Heat on Taiwan?

“Increasing mutual political trust across the Taiwan Straits and jointly building up political foundations are crucial for ensuring the peaceful development of relations,”said Chinese leader Xi Jinping to the Taiwanese envoy Vincent Siew on October 6th, according to remarks paraphrased by Beijing’s official Xinhua News Agency. “Looking further ahead, the issue of political disagreements that exist between the two sides must reach a final resolution, step by step, and these issues cannot be passed on from generation to generation.”
The words, the first public indication that Xi wants to settle the Taiwan issue during his tenure as China’s leader, raised concerns among some in the Taiwan-watching community. “Xi is pushing Taiwan hard into a corner,”noted Gerrit van der Wees, editor of the Washington-based political journal Taiwan Communiqué. And last Wednesday, Stephen Yates, former deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs, said on the John Batchelor radio show that he thinks the Chinese leadership, which was once content to accept the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, is turning up the heat. One cannot help but ask if Beijing is running out of patience and wants to soon absorb the self-governing island as its 34th province.
Some hope that Xi Jinping made his comments simply because he saw them as obligatory for any ruler of the People’s Republic and that there has been no change of policy in the Chinese capital. Yet Yates, now CEO of DC International Advisory, rejects the notion that Xi’s words were “a standard formulation” or a careless misstatement of existing policy. “It was very, very doubtful this was an accidental statement by Xi Jinping, so they must have thought about and they must have deliberately put forward a change of tone and a change of substance,” he said on the nationally syndicated radio program. “This is very, very different, about saying, ‘Okay, peace in the Taiwan Strait and accommodating economic relationship, open and peaceful dialogue—that’s not good enough. We need to move to the obviously unsolvable issue of politics and you need to concede on this ground now. That’s quite different.’”
At first glance, it looks as if there is no reason for Xi to force this shift. The Chinese civil war, the struggle between Xi’s Communist Party and Taiwan’s ruling Kuomintang, has been going on since the late 1920s. In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek, China’s president, lost a full-scale military struggle to Mao Zedong and the Communists. Mao established the People’s Republic at the same time Chiang fled to Taiwan and continued his Republic of China on Taiwan. Then, as well as today, both Beijing and Taipei claim to be the legitimate government of all of “China.”
As a practical matter, the Communist Party rules the Chinese state and the Kuomintang, the organization Chiang once led, is the governing party on what is referred to as “Taiwan.” Leaders in Beijing talk about “reunification” of the two parts of the country. The term, however, is misleading because in fact the People’s Republic has never exerted effective sovereignty over Taiwan, a group of islands scattered across the intersection of the South China and East China Seas.
Xi’s pronouncement at the meeting with Siew, the representative of President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan, took most observers by surprise. Until the beginning of this week, most assumed that Beijing was content with the generally warming ties across the Taiwan Strait. Ma, now in his second four-year term, has devoted himself to fostering economic integration with the People’s Republic by getting behind a series of trade deals and other arrangements with Beijing.
Those agreements, unfortunately for Ma, have become increasingly unpopular, as many claim that Taiwan’s economy has not benefitted much from the pacts. The latest of them, the Cross-Strait Agreement on Trade in Services, is stuck in the unicameral Legislative Yuan, which Ma’s party controls. In order to win ratification, Ma tried to purge the speaker of the body, who resisted the pact, but the president’s move didn’t have sufficient support and it appears now to have failed.
According to recent polls, Ma’s popularity has fallen to 9.2 percent, which is, perhaps coincidentally, about the same percentage of Taiwan’s population that wants immediate unification with Mainland China. On the other hand, most of the island’s citizens consider themselves “Taiwanese,” not “Chinese,” according to poll after poll.
Apart from the issue of self-identification, democracy—more precisely the lack of it—is the big stumbling block to unification. Taiwan’s people paid a high price in blood fighting for their democratic way of life, and they are not about to accept authoritarian rule, especially from a communist state in a faraway capital.
Some are concerned that China’s leadership may think the window for full political integration between China and Taiwan is closing. As Yates observed in his Batchelor show interview, citizens of Taiwan are not nearly as friendly toward the idea of strengthening relations with the People’s Republic as they were ten years ago, and this “anti-China” attitude is gaining popularity.
And now, given Ma’s sinking poll numbers and his party’s declining prospects for the 2016 presidential election, Beijing worries that a less friendly administration will prevail in Taiwan. Therefore, it’s likely that Beijing sees Ma’s remaining time in office as its last chance to absorb Taiwan without force.
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October 3, 2013
In Nuke Talks with Iran, Learn from North Korea

“We have to test diplomacy,” President Obama said in the Oval Office on Monday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side. The American leader was hopeful that the historic 17-minute phone call with Hassan Rouhani, his Iranian counterpart, on Friday signaled the Islamic Republic’s intent to come to terms with the international community over its controversial nuclear program.
Netanyahu, in his Tuesday speech to the UN General Assembly, delivered a direct attack on the Islamic Republic, which he accused of trying to build an atomic arsenal. The Israeli leader also issued a warning that diplomatic efforts might worsen the situation, and in this regard talked about the world’s less-than-impressive efforts to stop North Korea.
North Korea shows what can go wrong with diplomacy. Kim Il Sung, the first leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, started trying to weaponize the atom in earnest in the late 1970s. The regime detonated its first device in October 2006, a quarter century later. During that period, there were many opportunities to stop the nuclear program, but at most every turn the North, one of the weakest states on earth, was able to best the United States, the most powerful nation in history, and its many allies in the international community.
How did that happen? It almost goes without saying that successive administrations made every possible mistake. Perhaps the principal one is that Washington failed to maintain a consistent policy. Its mish-mash approach ensured that the effect of coercive tactics—the only ones with any chance of succeeding against a militant regime determined to possess nukes—were undermined by agreements. Those deals gave the ruling Kim family the space to continue its nuclear program at crucial moments.
As a statement from Netanyahu’s office declares, “a bad agreement is worse than no agreement at all.” The Agreed Framework, the landmark 1994 deal, highlights much of what was and remains wrong with bargains America makes with weaponizing rogues in general and Pyongyang in particular. That year, Bill Clinton had skillfully managed to orchestrate one of those rare moments of unity when most of the world—including China—agreed to impose tougher measures on North Korea for its renegade nuclear program.
Pyongyang was livid and was threatening war, but Clinton was not blinking. But just as the international community was within days of finally taking decisive action against the Kim regime, in walked an itinerant peacemaker. Jimmy Carter, on his own initiative, flew to Pyongyang in June to broker a deal with the ailing Kim Il Sung. The proposed arrangement Carter devised, unfortunately, dissolved the global unity for sanctions that could have convinced Kim to come to terms with Washington.
We now know that the Kim regime was on the ropes at that time , and it was even more fragile when the dictator died of a heart attack in July. Yet the signing of the Carter deal in October, which became known as the Agreed Framework, rescued the North at a critical moment. It provided an economic lifeline and, more importantly, signaled to the Pyongyang elite America’s acceptance of Kim family rule when succession to Kim’s son, Kim Jong Il, was in doubt.
The US and the world arrived at many agreements with the Kims—father, son, and grandson—about their nuclear program. Every one of the bargains solved the moment’s crisis yet none of them provided a lasting solution. Each of them could be seen as sensible in its time yet damaging in the long run , postponing the resolution of critical issues to a future when North Korea would be stronger and better-armed. If there is one thing that analysts agree, it is that time now favors a North Korea that is expanding its arsenal as the years pass.
So as Netanyahu tells us, it may not be a good idea to sign a deal with an Iran facing severe difficulties. Too often we see agreements as progress when they prove to be injurious to the interests of the world by buying precious time for proliferators. The road to today’s nuked-up North Korea is, unfortunately, littered with well-intentioned but ill-advised treaties, accords, and understandings.
Will President Obama sign another one?
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September 25, 2013
China’s Leaders Ignore Dissent at their Peril

On September 22nd, the Intermediate People’s Court in Jinan found Bo Xilai, once China’s most charismatic politician, guilty of bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
No sooner was the stiff term handed down than we began seeing assessments that the Communist Party had finally put behind it a troubled chapter in its history. Perhaps a Guardian headline said it best when it announced that “China hopes to move on after Bo Xilai life sentence.”
Yet it’s clear that Bo has not been the party’s main problem. For instance, the Financial Times, two days before the verdict and sentencing, reported that at the Party School of the Central Committee, in Beijing, talk of the failure of the country’s political system has been the hot topic of late.
The school, according to the article, is the only place in China where discussion of the party’s failure can take place “without fear of reprisal.” That may be true, but the institution, “an intellectual free-fire zone” and the training ground for elite officials, is not the only place where the matter is under discussion.
It is, after all, obvious that there is something very wrong in China at the moment, and there is no greater indication of impending troubles than the Maoist rantings of the country’s new leader, Xi Jinping. Many analysts try to explain his words away by telling us he is merely attempting to placate the extremist supporters of Bo or that he is talking “left” before moving “right,” but these assessments look like wishful thinking. “The more pessimistic, and frankly more realistic, interpretation is that Xi has no fresh ideas so he just quotes Mao and tries to hold on tight to power,” said one reformist Chinese to the Financial Times. “If that is the case, then China has no hope and eventually the anger in society will explode into a popular uprising.”
Can China really explode? Xi’s prolonged attack on civil society—crackdowns, one right after the other—is only increasing the pressure in the country, and that is occurring while the tolerance of the population is decreasing. The fundamental problem for China’s Communists is that, from all we can tell, most Chinese do not believe a one-party system is appropriate for their country’s modernizing society. Simply stated, they want much more say in their lives and demand institutional restraints on their rulers.
This does not mean they are ready to take to the streets. It does mean, however, that people are dissatisfied and may not support their government when forced to choose. And the consequence of this state of affairs is that it probably will not take much to topple the system, which will celebrate its 64th anniversary in power on October 1st.
An incident—of which there are many possibilities—can spiral out of control. We have seen, in the past few years, small crowds in China push around local officials, on issues of both local and national import.For instance, it took only a little over a thousand demonstrators this July to scrap the Heshan uranium-processing plant in Guangdong Province.
The Chinese people are losing their fear of the party and are becoming emboldened by getting what they want through street protest. Senior leaders, in these circumstances, can hold on to power only if they adjust. “Xi Jinping and this administration provide the last chance for China to implement a social transformation that comes from within the party and within the system,” says Shen Zhihua of the East China Normal University. “Without these reforms there will certainly be a social explosion.”
What in fact is Xi Jinping’s answer? “Our red nation will never change color,” he said early this summer. His demand for “ideological purification”—made in August—sounds off-key to a population that cares little for theory, especially of the Maoist variety.
Xi’s problem is that citizen dissatisfaction is increasing and that he does little to address it. Chinese leaders, from Xi down, obsess over the breakup of the Soviet Union, and their view is that Mikhail Gorbachev’s lack of ideological rectitude was the driving cause. Having misinterpreted the reasons for the USSR’s disintegration, rulers in Beijing ignore popular concerns at their peril.
In reality, the Chinese want many things, but the most fundamental is far more say in their lives, and that is the one thing Xi Jinping is not prepared to grant them. In a time of turmoil in society, a time when most anything can happen, the detention of Bo does nothing to address the fundamental divide between a restless people and an intransigent government.
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September 17, 2013
Steam Signals from Pyongyang

Steam rising from the complex containing North Korea’s plutonium-producing reactor is a signal from Kim Jong Un to the international community.
Satellite imagery from August 31st clearly shows the emissions from the Yongbyon facility. The dominant view is that the North’s technicians are about to restart the Soviet-era reactor, put in operation in 1986 and dormant since 2007. As Kim Min Seok, a South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman, asked, “Would there be smoke without fire?”
Perhaps the answer is “yes.” Some experts privately say the steam could actually be a contrivance, arguing the North is trying to get us looking in the wrong direction, away from its far more important uranium weapons program.
Yet whether or not the steam is a clever head-fake, Kim, the youngish dictator, reminds us that his family has been trying to weaponize the atom for decades. Kim Il Sung, who founded the North Korean state, was obsessed with building an atomic arsenal and made his initial moves in the 1950s, soon after the end of the Korean War. His efforts went into high gear no later than the late 1970s, and his grandson, Jong Un, is now enriching uranium. If the emitting steam is not a ploy, the regime will be back in the business of reprocessing plutonium from the aging Yongbyon reactor.
We should not be surprised that the world’s most militant state wants the world’s most destructive weapons. We should, however, be taken aback that the most powerful nation in history is letting North Korea do so.
For decades, the United States of America has watched the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea repeat the same deceptive tactics and failed to enforce international rules against weaponization. As a result of Washington’s feeble policies, the young Kim, in about three or four years, will be able to hit the continental US with a nuclear-armed ballistic missile, according to comments made in January 2011 by then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Once a North Korean missile reaches the upper atmosphere, there will be little we can do to stop it.
So if we want to protect ourselves from Kim’s missiles, we should stop them before they leave the pad, and the best way to do that is make sure the regime cannot afford them in the first place. Yet Marshal Kim, as Dennis Rodman calls his new best friend, is now getting the other Korea to fund his weapons.
Seoul has thrown Pyongyang a financial lifeline by permitting 123 South Korean businesses to resume operations in the Kaesong Industrial Complex after Kim abruptly closed it this spring as a part of his campaign to intimidate the international community. At the moment, Park Geun-hye, the South Korean president, is even trying to talk Kim into expanding Kaesong, which lies just about six miles north of the Demilitarized Zone and accounts for perhaps as much as 2 percent of the North’s gross domestic product.
If this were not bad enough, Seoul last month proposed to reopen the Mount Kumgang tourist resort, also just north of the border. There is growing concern that payments from South Korea to the North in connection with Kumgang would constitute “bulk cash” transfers, violating the UN sanctions put in place in March after the regime’s third nuclear test, on February 12th.
Cash, in bulk form or otherwise, is fungible. Every dollar from South Korea—or anywhere else for that matter—means Kim Jong Un can devote one less buck to lowland agriculture and one more to plutonium production. Therefore, every investment from outside the country can be said to subsidize the development of Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.
So as the Kaesong and Kumgang money-spinners reopen, Seoul indirectly funds North Korea’s weapons programs, like the one now producing steam in Yongbyon. What, I wonder, does Washington have to say about that?
Photo Credit: Gordeev20 / Shutterstock.com
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September 9, 2013
Chinese, Russian, and NATO Warships Maneuver Off Syria

The Jinggangshan, a 689-foot-long warship, has just cleared the Suez Canal and is now patrolling the eastern Mediterranean. Unconfirmed reports place other Chinese vessels in the area.
Beijing says its ships are heading to Syria’s coast merely to “observe” American and Russian vessels, but a less benign interpretation is that the Jinggangshan is there to augment the Russian fleet and intimidate the US Navy. This sleek-looking Chinese amphibious-landing vessel can carry a battalion of marines and was used earlier this year to stare down the smaller nations surrounding the South China Sea, an area Beijing is trying to close off to other countries.
Each day brings new reports of warships converging on the eastern Mediterranean. US ships are now backed up by French and Italian ones and face the Russian and Chinese navies.
Everyone assumes Russian President Vladimir Putin is just posturing, but his words are increasingly confrontational. He is now saying Russia will back Damascus if the US attacks. “Will we help Syria?” he asks. “We will.”
That help is taking on a military dimension. Along with all the current Russian deployments revealed in the last several days, there was an announcement that Moscow will be sending its only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to Syrian waters in the next few months. When it arrives, Russia’s carrier will be the largest combatant in the eastern Mediterranean.
Most everyone assumes the Russians and Chinese will be content to watch the US Navy and other NATO forces pound their ally Syria into rubble. Yet there could be more to this. Increasingly nationalistic leaders in Moscow and Beijing must sense President Obama is indecisive, and that could tempt them to try to push him around. Autocrats often pounce when they perceive democracies to be weak. You can, for instance, almost draw a straight line between John F. Kennedy’s disastrous summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961 to the Soviet adventurism that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in the following year.
Are we now hearing sound and fury signifying nothing? For many, it is inconceivable that the world’s major powers could get tangled up in conflict, but as Enoch Powell, the British politician, told us, “History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.”
This time, unfortunately, has striking parallels to 1914. Then, like now, the structure of the international system was extremely complex and the situation on the ground especially confusing. There are, as then, too many variables for national leaders to manage well. For instance, it is not clear how nations will align themselves in the event something goes wrong. We could see, as happened 99 years ago, alliances come together unexpectedly and then clash. The Chinese and the Russians seem to be acting in concert on Syria and may end up forming a durable partnership.
The precondition for war is the marshalling of military assets, and that, unfortunately, is now happening in the waters off Syria.
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September 5, 2013
Xi Jinping, China's Strongman in the Making?

On Tuesday, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that Jiang Jiemin was removed from his post as head of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
The report follows Sunday’s announcement that the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection was investigating Jiang for “serious disciplinary violations,” Beijing’s code for graft. The corruption probe is thought to be the first initiated by Xi Jinping, China’s new leader, against a ministerial-level official.
Xi inherited investigations of various officials, especially Zhou Yongkang, the former internal security czar. Zhou, Jiang, and virtually all other recent high-level targets either have or had some connection with China National Petroleum Corporation, China’s largest oil company, raising speculation that Xi is conducting a purge of the “Petroleum Faction.” Zhou, for instance, once was head of CNPC, as the oil giant is known.
In November, Zhou stepped down from the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of political power in China. The investigation of this intensely disliked figure breaks an unwritten rule, honored since the end of the Cultural Revolution and the trial of the Gang of Four, that no Standing Committee member can be held accountable for misdeeds.
Most analysts believe these developments show Xi is boldly consolidating power. He became China’s top leader in November when the party named him general secretary. Since then, he has been eliminating rivals through prosecution and marginalizing dissenting views with increasingly repressive tactics and various Maoist and Marxist campaigns.
Even if this view is correct, it also appears that the unprecedented prosecution of Zhou is upending the political system and perhaps ending the period of stability that permitted China to recover after Mao Zedong’s disastrous Cultural Revolution.
In fact, the rule against prosecution of Standing Committee members was an important element in restoring calm after Mao’s zany, decade-long campaign. The theory was that if leaders knew they would not be hunted down, as they were in the Cultural Revolution, they would be willing to withdraw gracefully after losing political struggles. In other words, Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s crafty successor, reduced the incentive for political figures to fight to the end and tear the Communist Party apart.
Xi Jinping, however, is reversing the process and upping the stakes, something evident in the tribulations of Bo Xilai. Once China’s most openly ambitious politician, Bo will surely be found guilty of various crimes after his high-profile show trial, which concluded at the end of last month, and sentenced to a long term, perhaps 15 years. The widespread use of criminal penalties, evident in the probe of Zhou and other Petroleum Faction figures, is a sign that China is returning to a period that many thought was long past. Xi, a strongman in the making, appears capable of resurrecting the Communist Party’s ugly history.
Zhou is thought to have amassed a fortune when he was CNPC’s chief, and the other figures under investigation have undoubtedly enriched themselves. Yet they are not being prosecuted for graft by independent prosecutors. They have, from all appearances, been targeted by Xi in a show of political force. The story is that China’s new supremo is willing to break conventions in his quest to bolster his personal political position—and possibly trigger a long descent into turmoil.
Last year, then Premier Wen Jiabao warned that China could descend into another Cultural Revolution. Observers at the time thought he was being melodramatic. Maybe he wasn’t.
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August 28, 2013
Punishing Assad's WMD Supplier

One week ago, Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people in Ghouta, near Damascus. Doctors Without Borders put the death toll at 355, with another 3,600 showing “neurotoxic symptoms.”
Where did the Syrian regime get its large stores of chemical weapons? There are many sources spread across the world, but the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea seems to be Assad’s main supplier. Moreover, North Korea’s ally, China, looks like it also has had some role in the deadly trade, at least behind the scenes. The international community needs to begin asking questions of both Pyongyang and Beijing.
Syria’s program is by no means homegrown. North Korea built at least two chemical weapons factories in Syria, according to Bruce Bechtol, the author of a trilogy of books on the North’s military and its proliferation activities.
Pyongyang is also providing “after-sales services” to Assad, even putting its personnel close to the front lines. North Korean officers, for instance, have been spotted around Aleppo. The location is significant because in mid-March allegations of chemical weapons use near that northern city surfaced.
Pyongyang has been sending chemical weapons experts to Syria since the mid-1990s.
The North has supplied parts, such as vacuum dryers, and technical expertise, especially in connection with synthesizing chemicals and fabricating warheads. Along with other states, North Korea has, in all probability, sold chemical precursors as Syria lacks the capability of producing many of them.
Occasionally, nations have intercepted the North’s shipments to the Assad regime. This week, for instance, Turkish authorities seized gas masks on their way to Syria.
In November 2009, Greece found four shipping containers with 13,000 protective suits in a Liberian-flagged vessel en route to Syria. Damascus claims that the garments were for agricultural and research purposes, but they were also designed for handing chemical weapons. And if there were any doubt about the purpose for the suits, there were 23,600 gas detectors in the containers.
The garments were identical to those confiscated the preceding month in Busan, in South Korea, on a Panamanian ship that left Nampo, North Korea, for Latakia, Syria’s principal port. The UN believes the two incidents are related.
The Panamanian-flagged vessel actually stopped in Dalian, a Chinese seaport near Nampo, through which much of the North’s sensitive cargoes pass. Beijing has, for years, allowed the North Koreans to use Chinese port facilities and airfields for shipments of missiles and WMD items. Given the close relationship between the armies in both states, it is extremely unlikely that Chinese authorities were unaware of the nature of the shipments passing through their ports.
“There has been a significant uptick in North Korea’s supply of important weapons to the Syrians in the past year,” said Bechtol to Forbes’s Claudia Rosett. The North Koreans have been selling missile components and providing equipment and expertise for Syria’s nascent nuclear weapons program, so it should come as no surprise that they are participating in Assad’s chemical weapons efforts as well. Pyongyang’s participation raises the specter of China’s involvement, because Beijing has almost always had a hand in North Korea’s proliferant activities in one way or another.
The international community, through decades of inattention and inadvertence, has allowed North Korea to widely proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Last week the world saw the consequence of failing to act. As the US and its partners get ready to impose consequences on Assad’s regime for gassing its own people, it’s time to remember there are other culprits deserving punishment as well.
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