Daniel DePetris: A belligerent China is bringing out East Asia’s resolve

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In less than two weeks, President Joe Biden will greet Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Washington for the first trilateral summit of the three leaders. According to the White House, the summit seeks to boost economic cooperation, advance alternative supply chains and ” further peace and security in the Indo-Pacific and around the world.”

But make no mistake about it. This summit is really about one thing and one thing only: China.

The Asian superpower has been flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety. Chinese and Philippine vessels have engaged in numerous unarmed clashes in the key waterway, with the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, coast guard obstructing Philippine ships from resupplying sailors based on the Second Thomas Shoal, less than 200 nautical miles west of the Philippines’ main island of Palawan.

On March 23, Chinese ships used water cannons on a Philippine ship traversing the waterway, injuring three crew members. This was the fourth time since November Beijing employed water cannons, and it was serious enough from Washington’s perspective for the State Department to declare that any armed attack against Philippine ships anywhere in the South China Sea could compel the U.S. to invoke the Mutual Defense Treaty on behalf of Manila. Chinese officials, meanwhile, predictably blame the Philippines for sailing into its territorial waters — an assertion everybody but China rejects.

For Marcos, China’s repeated provocations are a reaffirmation that shifting toward the U.S. was the right call. His predecessor, the pugnacious and curse-happy Rodrigo Duterte, was far more interested in getting closer to Beijing, betting that a better relationship with the Asian powerhouse would boost the Philippines’ economy. Duterte’s flirtations didn’t pay off. Marcos came into office in 2022 and tore up the playbook, placing his chips into bettering Manila’s 73-year-old alliance with Washington.

Since then, the U.S.-Philippines alliance has gotten deeper and more interconnected, driven by a mutual antagonism toward China’s assertiveness. In February 2023, Marcos signed a defense deal with Washington that gave the U.S. access to four more bases in the Philippines, one of which is in Luzon, which sits directly south of Taiwan and could presumably be used in the event of a conflict on the island. U.S. and Philippine naval exercises are now common.

Manila is also taking its own initiative. A few months ago, Marcos’ administration pledged to spend an additional $35 billion over the next decade on weapons systems and naval platforms designed to defend its maritime claims in the South China Sea.

The Philippines is hardly the only country in East Asia boosting its defense spending. Japan, for instance, will increase its defense budget by 16% this year, bringing it to $56 billion– the highest ever. Japan’s Kishida has followed in the footsteps of the late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and in some respects exceeded Abe’s ambitions.

Japan is developing what Japanese military officials refer to as counterstrike capabilities, or medium-range missiles that could place Chinese and North Korean military targets at risk. The Japanese military is strengthening its presence on the southern island of Yonaguni, which is a little more than 100 miles away from Taiwan.

Tokyo has also become far sterner in its language on the Taiwan issue; true or not, Japanese officials are increasingly concerned that a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan could presumably pave the way for Chinese aggression against Japan’s smaller islands to the south or even the Senkakus, a chain of uninhabited islets claimed by both Beijing and Tokyo.

Japan and the Philippines are improving bilateral relations as well. China is the glue that holds the budding ties together. In December, Japan delivered a radar system to Manila, with two more expected. Japanese and Philippine officials are in the middle of negotiating a reciprocal access agreement, which would allow forces of both nations to enter each other’s territories for joint military exercises and relationship-building. This isn’t the first access agreement for Japan, which finalized similar deals with India in September 2020, the United Kingdom in January 2023 and Australia in August 2023.

The U.S. is no doubt a key influencer of these events. The Biden administration has stated in a robotic-like fashion that China is its biggest competitor. The Pentagon has referred to China as its “pacing threat,” a phrase that suggests that it’s Washington trying to keep up with Beijing rather than the other way around.

All of the latest developments will bring a smile to the faces of U.S. officials.

But we shouldn’t overstate U.S. influence either. In a way, today’s middle powers in Asia are doing what middle powers have done for centuries: taking stock of the security dynamics in their own region and doing what they can to ensure the balance of power continues to be favorable. Or, at the very least, stable. Most of the time, this translates into building relations with regional states holding similar threat perceptions, pouring more resources into the defense budget and ensuring military capabilities are in place if the absolute worst happens.

Some foreign policy commentators and China hawks are deathly worried about Chinese hegemony in Asia, particularly if the PLA took Taiwan by force. But the actions of Japan, the Philippines and other countries such as Australia, India and even Vietnam suggest that Chinese hegemony — assuming Beijing even has the capacity to attain it in a region with such challenging geography — won’t be the cakewalk so many make it out to be.

Nations typically don’t roll over when they’re facing an aspiring hegemon. They defend what’s theirs.

The more belligerent China becomes, the more resistance it will likely confront.

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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Bioma Reviews (Exposed) Bioma Health Probiotics Weight Loss Scam Or Legit? Shocking Report!

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Farah Stockman: Is this the Silicon Valley of Latin America?

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SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — Americans used to think of China as a place to do business, and Latin America as a place to vacation. More recently, our neighbors to the south are seen as the source of desperate migrants. That mindset led us to the mess that we are in now. Today, the American economy is far too dependent on China for critical supplies, while imports from countries in our hemisphere, aside from Canada and Mexico, are lagging, experts say. Our influence in our own neighborhood is waning.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I saw evidence of that in Costa Rica, a stable democracy that is vying to become the Silicon Valley of Latin America — with active support from the United States.

Reducing U.S. dependence on China

Costa Rica is crucial to the gargantuan U.S. effort to reduce dependence on microchips from China, which plays an outsize role in packaging and testing the tiny gadgets that run everything from smartphones to fighter jets. More than 40% of the chips the U.S. Department of Defense uses for weapons systems and infrastructure rely on Chinese suppliers. More than 90% of advanced chips are produced in Taiwan, a self-governing island claimed by China.

Now, Costa Rica is positioning itself to become a major hub outside Asia for packaging and testing microchips. In the 1990s, Intel built a factory near San Jose to do just that. That opened the door to more factories and industries and, as a result, an increasingly tech-oriented workforce. Today, Costa Rica’s biggest category of exports is no longer coffee or bananas but medical devices.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, in a hotel ballroom outside the capital, San Jose, President Rodrigo Chaves touted tax incentives, regulatory reforms and a 99%-renewable-energy grid as he rolled out a national strategy to expand the industry. “Welcome to Costa Rica, a country where thou shall not face red tape,” he boomed.

His audience — which included U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo; Gen. Laura Richardson, the four-star who leads the U.S. Southern Command; and top executives from Intel — enthusiastically applauded.

Allies closer to home

“We need allies closer to home,” Raimondo told me. She is in charge of doling out tens of billions in subsidies to bring the industry closer to home, an effort that is crucial to ensuring that Americans stay on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and other critical technologies in the future.

This great reshuffling of the U.S. supply chain could be the key to building better relationships in Latin America at a time of rising isolationism in the United States, when both parties have grown skeptical of free trade and frustrated by record numbers of migrant arrivals.

While the CHIPS and Science Act is best known for its billion-dollar subsidies to build facilities on U.S. soil, it also provides modest funding for our allies. Costa Rica and Panama have received money to beef up their workforces and their infrastructure. The Dominican Republic looks poised to be next in line.

It’s no accident that “building resiliency” for supply chains is a main goal of the Americas Act, the new bipartisan bill that would revamp relations with friendly neighbors and put them on a path to join the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade agreement that replaced NAFTA.

I was a vocal critic of NAFTA, a view I came to while writing about American factory workers who lost their jobs when their plant moved to Mexico. Exporting our industrial base hurt American workers and U.S. national security. But the USMCA, which passed overwhelmingly in Congress a few years ago, has gone a long way toward addressing workers’ concerns. It’s popular. Why not expand it? And if more trade with Latin America will build up an industrial base that would have otherwise gone to Asia, it could make our region stronger, not weaker.

Nations that trade the most with their nearest neighbors get the biggest benefits from trade while minimizing the dislocating job loss that can come with it, as Shannon O’Neil argues in the recent book “The Globalization Myth.” Europe and Asia are mastering that. America is not.

A counter to ‘Belt and Road’

When America turned to Asia for low-cost labor, that left a void in our own backyard, as Karina Fernandez-Stark and Penny Bamber noted in a recent article in The Wilson Quarterly. China is filling it, becoming the most important trade partner and investor in much of Latin America. Twenty-two countries in the Western Hemisphere have signed onto China’s Belt and Road initiative. Chinese companies are building a deep-water port in Peru, a bridge across the Panama Canal and a deep space ground station in Argentina.

We can’t blame our Latin American friends for turning to China to make investments that we won’t provide. While we’ve been off trying to run the world, we’ve been elbowed out of our own hemisphere.

Supply chain diplomacy can help. Until now, Costa Rica has hedged its bets, signing onto Belt and Road while lobbying for the chance to join the USMCA. But the chance to be a microchip hub seems to have tipped the balance. Chaves abruptly excluded Chinese vendor Huawei — alongside others — from building the country’s 5G network, angering China.

“Sometimes you need to make difficult decisions,” Chaves told his audience. “We’re not imagining the future; we are building it, with those with whom we share values.”

It’s smart, both geopolitically and economically, to nurture that sense of shared destiny. It won’t be a quick fix to the region’s many problems, but it can help turn the tide over time. Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic are relatively small countries with limited influence. But if their economies are booming, they can provide more opportunities to those fleeing crisis-ridden places like Haiti and Nicaragua. Fewer migrants will arrive at our doorstep.

Team up with friendly neighbors

Like any policy, supply-chain diplomacy has its risks. We could be building up our future competitors. I couldn’t help but notice that San Jose seems better poised for the digital age than rural Ohio. Some technical high schools already teach an AI curriculum, a senior Intel executive in Costa Rica told me. The industry attracts top talent and fierce loyalty. At Intel’s plant near San Jose, one factory manager told me that he “bleeds blue” — the color of the company logo.

But this factory wouldn’t be competitive in the United States. Even in Costa Rica, it has struggled to compete with the low labor costs of Asia. Intel closed the plant in 2014 and sent its work to Malaysia, leaving a skeleton crew doing research and development. The factory reopened in 2020, after the pandemic set off a chip shortage. Intel has been expanding ever since, gobbling up space that used to be a cafeteria. Demand for chips will only increase with the rise of AI.

How we navigate the challenges posed by AI — and a far more powerful China — will determine our future. We have a choice: face those challenges by ourselves, or with friendly neighbors.

Farah Stockman writes for the New York Times.

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Bret Stephens: The appalling tactics of the ‘Free Palestine’ movement

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Last week, Susanne DeWitt, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who later became a molecular biologist, spoke before the Berkeley, California, City Council to request a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. After taking note of a “horrendous surge in antisemitism,” she was then heckled and shouted down by protesters at the meeting when she mentioned the massacre and rapes in Israel of Oct. 7.

At the same meeting, a woman testified that her 7-year-old Jewish son heard “a group of kids at his school say, ‘Jews are stupid.’” She, too, was heckled: “Zionists are stupider,” a protester said. At the same meeting, others yelled, “cowards, go chase the money, you money suckers” and “you are traitors to this country, you are spies for Israel.”

Protest movements have an honorable place in American history. But not all of them. Not the neo-Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978. Not the white supremacists who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at their Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

And not too much of what passes for a pro-Palestinian movement but is really pro-Hamas, with its calls to get rid of the Jewish state in its entirety (“from the river to the sea …”), its open celebration of the murder of its people (“resistance is justified …”) and its efforts to mock, minimize or deny the suffering of Israelis, which so quickly descend into the antisemitism on naked display in Berkeley.

How did this happen?

It wasn’t a response to the human suffering in the Gaza Strip in recent months. A coalition of Harvard student groups issued a statement on Oct. 7 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Pro-Hamas demonstrations broke out worldwide on Oct. 8. A Black Lives Matter chapter posted a graphic on Instagram of the Hamas paragliders who murdered hundreds of young Israelis at the Nova music festival. A Cornell professor said he found the massacre “exhilarating,” and demonstrators rallied in his support.

Nor is it a matter of seeking a Palestinian state — another fact the demonstrators openly avow. Among the popular chants at many protests is “We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” — all of what had been Mandatory Palestine before the creation of Israel. Israeli soldiers and settlers vacated Gaza almost 20 years ago. The towns and kibbutzim that Hamas invaded on Oct. 7 are only “occupied” if one believes that all of Israel, in any kind of border, is a form of occupation.

In other words, the central, animating sentiment behind much of the protest movement is neither humanitarian nor liberationist. It’s eliminationist. And it expresses itself routinely in the tactics adopted by so many of its leading activists and followers.

Tactics like the grotesque and routine removal or defacement of posters of Israelis kidnapped to Gaza. Or holding a loud and aggressive demonstration outside New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer hospital (“Make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows,” said one of the protest leaders), apparently because the hospital has collaborated with Israeli medical institutions. Or forcing a Jewish teacher at a public school in Queens to flee her classroom for safety as hundreds of teenagers rioted through the school, some waving Palestinian flags. Or shouting down Rep. Jamie Raskin at the University of Maryland for being “complicit in genocide” when he came to the campus to give a talk on democracy and “the threat to reason in the 21st century.” Or surrounding a theater at the University of California at Berkeley that was supposed to host a talk by an Israeli lawyer, smashing windows, breaking through locked doors, spitting on and grabbing at least one student by the neck and forcing Jewish students to flee through an underground exit.

This is only a partial list. But it reveals the bullying mentality at the heart of the pro-Hamas movement.

It isn’t enough for them to speak out; they must shut other voices down. It isn’t enough for them to make a strong or clear argument; they also aim to instill a palpable sense of fear in their opponents. American civil libertarians of the past once understood that inherent in the right to protest was the obligation to respect the right of people with differing views to protest as well. That understanding seems to be wholly absent from the people who think that, say, heckling Raskin into silence is also a form of democracy.

In this sense, critics of Israel who claim that American Jews must choose between Zionism and liberalism have it backward. The illiberals aren’t the people defending the right of an imperfect but embattled democracy to defend its territory and save its hostages. They are the people who, like former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, want Israel wiped off the map and aren’t ashamed to say so.

Not surprisingly, they also seem to share Ahmadinejad’s attitudes toward dealing with dissent.

It’s true that in nearly every political cause, including the most justified, there are ugly elements — the Meir Kahanes or the Louis Farrakhans of the world. But the mark of a morally serious movement lies in its determination to weed out its worst members and stamp out its worst ideas. What we’ve too often seen from the “Free Palestine” crowd is precisely the opposite.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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