Monday, May 5, 2014

Obama makes South China waves — RT Op-Edge

Pivoting and pivoting like a widening gyroscope, to paraphrase Yeats, US President Barack Obama’s current tour of Northeast and Southeast Asia hides an invisible dragon in the cockpit: China.

It’s all about China, whose “trade bullying” and “military belligerence” a benign US empire swears to protect its Asian allies from.

After eating hopefully non-Fukushima radiated sushi in Tokyo with nationalists/militarist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Obama – quite undiplomatically – took no time to favor Japan over the serious Senkaku/Diayou islands dispute, referring to a dodgy security treaty which allows the US to aid Japan in case of a foreign attack.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s response was swift – identifying the treaty as “a product of the Cold War era” that “cannot be aimed at a third party and ought not to harm China’s territorial sovereignty.”

News agency Xinhua’s response was characteristically blunt: this is all part of “a carefully calculated scheme to cage the rapidly developing Asia giant” (referring to China).

In Japan, Obama’s focus was essentially on the corporate-negotiated (in secret) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which, any way one looks at it, is all about US Big Business finally opening the heavily protected Japanese market. Abe did tout the TPP as the “third arrow” of his economic revival of Japan. It’s more like the arrow of death. Still, there’s no way for TPP to happen without a previous, bilateral US-Japan pact – and here problems remains intractable.

Complete story at - Obama makes South China waves — RT Op-Edge

CC Photo by Flickr User donkeyhotey Subject is Obama

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