Washington’s new pacts with three island states will establish a second island chain of attack as a complete sphere of influence in breach of international law and its own interpretation of freedom of navigation
Claims by US over central Pacific now rival those of Beijing in South China Sea
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Macron rejects ‘confrontation’ as he relaunches Asia strategy
“We don’t believe in hegemony, we don’t believe in confrontation, we believe in stability,” Macron said.
…
Macron said a coordinated response was needed to tackle the overlapping crises facing the international community — from climate change to economic turmoil triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Our Indo-Pacific strategy is how to provide dynamic balance in this environment,” he said.
“How to provide precisely a sort of stability and equilibrium which could not be the hegemony of one of those, could not be the confrontation of the two major powers.”
The Indo-Pacific Strategy doesn’t sound as innocent as Macron makes it out to be:
The new US Indo-Pacific Strategy document released in February has two interesting components, one overt and one covert. The document overtly declares the US is an “Indo-Pacific power.” Covertly, its aim is to “tighten the noose around China.” Arguably, minus the military might, China’s nearly a decade-long “Belt and Road Initiative” cannot be perceived as a grand national strategy aimed at controlling Eurasia or the Asia Pacific or any region for that matter. Yet the BRI is mythologized into such a geostrategic game-changer that it has rattled the US and its allies in the Asia Pacific. The BRI, at best, is nothing more than a mere geopolitical overland and maritime “chessboard” based on trade and investment.
BRI and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ Strategy: Geopolitical vs. Geostrategic
A 2018 independence vote in New Caledonia resulted in 43.3 percent in favor, with 56.67 percent opposed. On September 6, 2020, New Caledonia will hold another referendum. Independence for the French territory in the Pacific is prejudiced by the number of wealthy French Europeans who reside in the territory and outside political and intelligence influence by Australia. A similar independence referendum for the island chain of Chuuk in Micronesia is scheduled for March 2020. In August 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the first visit by a Secretary of State to Micronesia, a former U.S. Trust Territory. On the agenda was U.S. militarization of the region, as well as firm opposition to the impending Chuukese independence referendum. That same bellicose attitude by the Pompeo State Department has resulted in postponed status referenda in the Danish territories of the Faroes and Greenland, where U.S. militarization of the Arctic is high on the Trump administration’s agenda
— Read on www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/02/27/breaking-up-is-so-very-hard-to-do/
Can MIC just leave shit alone?!
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 