MINSTERIAL RESHUFFLE : Those Who Will Hang On

Dr Omane Boamah, Minister of Communications

By Ekow Mensah.

There are very strong indications that President John Dramani Mahama is just about to reshuffle his Ministers.

 The reasons for the reshuffle are not so clear.

 While some sources have said that the reshuffle is meant to demonstrate that the President is in charge, others have said that its primary objective is to inject dynamism into the Government machinery.

 The Insight’s investigations have confirmed that the reshuffle has been completed and could be announced before the end of the week.

Ministers who would not be affected by the reshuffle include MS Hannah Tetteh, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Kofi Buah, Minister of Energy, Professor Jane Naane Opoku Agyemang Minister of Education and Dr Omane Boamah, Minister of Communications.

 Insiders say that even some big names at the Flagstaff House are likely to fall in the reshuffle which would be announced piece meal.

The exit of Lt. Col. Larry Gbevlo–Lartey was meant to send a signal that no one can be safe in the impending reshuffle.

The message was simple, if Larry can go then any and everybody too can go.

Editorial

RESHUFFLE

News of an eminent ministerial reshuffle is flying all over place.

Media houses which have been carrying the news were given a jolt of credibility when government confirmed the exit of Lt. Col. Larry Gbevlo-Lartey as the National Security Co-ordinator.

Given the current state of the economy and other sectors of the National life, it is normal for the President to want to reshuffle his team to bring in new ideas and energy.

If properly handled, a ministerial reshuffle can turn things around and make it possible to refocus on meeting the needs and aspirations of the people.

On the other hand, a reshuffle for its own sake would be absolutely useless.

The reshuffle must not take place only to show that the President is powerful enough to appoint and disappoint.

The point is that if the reshuffle fails to bring about significant policy changes, the current problems will persist.

In our view reliance on the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is largely responsible for the current mess.

Policies which facilitate the looting of national resources by  the giant companies of the West and the policies of full cost  recovery and automatic adjustment of prices and tariffs ought to change alongside the ministerial reshuffle .

The people of Ghana expect the Mahama administration to do more than just a ministerial reshuffle to reduce poverty and hardship.

We are waiting.

Obama’s GMO problem 

The Obama Administration’s feverish cheerleading for genetically modified crops is being put to the test with growing evidence that the technology is unpopular with consumers, causing problems in the field and facing increasing rejection in the marketplace.

The state of Vermont is set to become the first in the country to require mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods. Maine and Connecticut have also passed mandatory labeling bills, but they require neighboring states to also pass such bills before they come into law. More than 25 states have GMO labeling laws working their way through state legislatures and ballot initiatives. Hawaii, a major testing ground for new GMO crops, has become another battleground as several counties now require greater disclosure and tougher regulations for GMO plantings.

This is a big deal and the biotech seed industry knows it. The industry has already spent millions to defeat ballot initiatives and state-based bills. Its next line of defense against the states is litigation, where it will likely sue states’ requiring labeling for violating the interstate commerce clause (restricting trade between states).

As it fights back state labeling efforts, the biotech industry is pushing a national bill for voluntary GMO labeling, which is not actually about voluntary labeling at all (voluntary labeling, as the term suggests, is already allowed). Instead, the bill would firmly establish the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as the sole decision-maker on GMO regulation, not the states, thus overturning all efforts for mandatory labeling at the state level, including prohibiting, retroactively, Vermont’s legislation.

The biotech industry’s backdoor strategy is to codify weak regulations over GMOs at the international level through trade agreements. The U.S. trade office has long targeted what it deems as unnecessary regulatory oversight of GMOs in other countries. In a new trade agreement with Europe, GMOs are on the bargaining table once again. The USTR and the biotech industry want to lower Europe’s tougher standards that require labeling and incorporate the precautionary principle—meaning the weaker U.S. standards would become the new global standard for GMO regulation.

While the Obama Administration continues to carry the water for the biotech industry, there are increasing signs that the industry is in trouble. The non-GMO market is one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. food industry. China’s decision to reject U.S. GMO corn has cost U.S. companies at least $427 million and counting in lost exports. The rapidly growing pest and weed resistance associated with the use of GMO crops is creating problems for farmers around the country. Further, new study finding elevated glyphosate (also known as Roundup and linked to GMOs) levels in the breast milk of U.S. women is raising additional health questions.

New, innovative efforts to reclaim control of seeds are also gaining momentum. Last week, public and private plant breeders, through the Open Source Seed Initiative, released their first round of open source seeds, which seek to place seeds in the global commons to protect them from being patented by Monsanto and other biotech seed firms. Another report last week from the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance tracks the growing number of initiatives to save and protect traditional seeds in the U.S.

Despite increasing pressure to change course, the Obama Administration’s support for the technology blindly marches on. Earlier this month, President Obama sent a letter to the granddaughter of Norman Borlaug repeating the dubious narrative that biotechnology helps feed the world. Federal agencies are fast tracking new approvals for genetically modified crops linked to even more toxic herbicides, like 2,4-D. All told, the administration seems more devoted to serving the interests of a few biotech seed companies than the rest of us, despite clear signs that citizens around the world want nothing to do with these crops, and that’s a problem.

Christianity, Guilty as Charged!

Jesus the Christ

By Milan Kohout

In ancient eras and in modern times, Christianity has been deeply and negatively involved in almost all the chapters of history, in the most despicable manner.

It came out in full support of colonialism, slavery and racism, and then it collaborated with, and endorsed Nazism in Germany, Mussolini’s fascism in Italy, General Franco in Spain, and the ‘fight against Communism’ in Eastern Europe.

Adolf Hitler was inspired by Christianity, and by its hate for everything from secularism to Communism, from ‘pornography’ to homosexuality.

In 1936 he declared: “Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell… And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech our almighty God that He may bless us, that He may give us the strength to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the peace of our people. So help us God.”

He had it all very clear two years earlier:

“National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity… For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life…These are Christian principles!”

And of course, a part of Christianity has always been ‘charity’. After massacring millions of innocent men, women and children, or after robbing entire nations of all that they possessed, the Christians happily gave back. If it took 90%, it gave 10%, or much less than 1% (in case of the United States, when it comes to foreign aid). Again, to quote Adolf Hitler, a Christian:

“With a tenth of our budget for religion, we would thus have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakable loyalty.”

Even before Hitler, those German genocides against the Herero and Nama tribes in and around of what is now Namibia, came with the clear blessing of the clergy.

Perhaps in the most intense genocide of the 20th Century, the rule of the Belgian King Leopold II took approximately ten million lives, or roughly half of the population of the “Congo Free State”, according to investigations by the anthropologist Jan Vansina and others. After his death, King Leopold II was interred in the royal vault at the Church of Our Lady of Laeken, in Brussels.

No wonder the King supposedly argued “bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation…” Ten million people mutilated and burnt alive is clearly nothing too scandalous for Christian sensitivities, as long as it helped to spread true teaching to those ‘barbarians’, in the ‘heart of darkness’.

Of course, most of the Latin American dictators were deeply religious and ‘moral’, including General Pinochet, who reigned brutally with the determined support of the United States, Opus Dei, and other extremist Christian clans.

In Argentina, Christianity was one of the pillars and justifications of the terror administered by Jorge Rafael Videla and his military junta. He used to say: “We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: It is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.” He also periodically clarified his deep and compassionate inclinations: “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure.”

One of the most brutal men of the 20th century, Francois ‘doc’ Duvalier, went even one step further, and declared that he is part of God and Jesus Crist. His posters used to declare: “Papa Doc: One with… Jesus Christ and God himself”.

The Western Christian demagogues and propagandists implanted a fear of secularism and atheism, to many regions of the world, with mostly horrifying results: Jihadist cadres were financed and introduced into Afghanistan during the war with the Soviet Union. The 1965 US-backed military coup in Indonesia which took between one and three million lives (mainly atheists and secular intellectuals, murdered by the military, Muslim cadres, but with the clear involvement of other religions) was one of the most horrific orgies of terror from which Indonesia has never recovered, and gradually degenerated into a religious and thoroughly unproductive, ignorant archipelago of environmentally plundered and devastated islands. The British Empire used the “divide and rule” strategy, which led to the awful ‘Partition’ of the sub-Continent.

And this is just to name few of the deadliest religious implants, orchestrated by the Christian West.

***

In today’s world, Christians are siding with the most appalling regimes, supporting the most dreadful oppressions.

I spoke to several priests and believers in Cairo, not long after the brutal pro-Western military coup of al-Sisi and his clique, which, on July 3rd 2013, overthrew the democratically elected moderate Islamic government. All of them were staunch supporters of the coup d’état that killed several thousand people in just a few weeks.

Even Time admitted: For Egypt’s 8 million Christians… the coup seemed little short of a miracle. Some hailed al-Sisi as a messiah…

In Africa, most of the extreme violence has religious, Christian connotations. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has lost, since 1995, between six and ten million people, some of the most brutal militias fall into the bracket of Christian fundamentalists.

A close ally of the West and one of the most brutal dictators in Africa, Yoweri Museveni, responsible for millions of lost lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in his native Uganda, and a self-proclaimed crusader against homosexuality, has been for decades, a staunch Christian and is associated with the American fundamentalist Christian organization, “The Fellowship” (also known as “The Family”).

And there is, of course, The Lord’s Resistance Army, originally from Uganda, but operating in the entire region. It uses child soldiers; it has been accused of committing numerous crimes against humanity; “including massacres, abductions, mutilation, torture, rape, and uses forced child labor as soldiers, porters, and sex slaves”. Its commander, Joseph Kony, proclaims himself the spokesperson of God and a spirit medium, primarily of the “Holy Spirit”.

One of the most brutal actors in the Congolese genocide, former warlord Laurent Nkunda, is an ordained Christian preacher and an ordained minister. Most of his troops had been followers (not that they had much choice). His men are responsible for some of the most horrible crimes in modern history, including mass rapes in the city of Bukavu. The Motto of his militia is: “Rebels for Christ.” He is a Seventh-day Adventist. He also claims to receive help and guidance from American “Rebels for Christ” who visit the Congo spreading Pentecostal Christianity.

Christianity still plays some of the most negative roles in both Africa and Oceania (Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia), where it is responsible for the physical (mostly sexual) and mental abuse of both children and adults, for defending oppressive family structures and the status quo in the society, as well as for spreading disinformation and ignorance. It is also extracting funds from the congregation, rich and poor, financially ruining its members.

Outrageous financial extractions are also common in countries such as the Philippines, as well as in several Christian pockets of Indonesia, where Christianity is corrupt to the extreme, siding, for decades, with the most extreme ‘free-market’ dogma, and heartless business practices. There, it actually forms the ‘Fifth Column’ – it is helping to plunder the country on behalf of foreign companies – mostly those that, of course, come from the Christian West.

It goes without saying that places that have recently undergone pro-Western and ‘anti-people’ ‘reforms’ and ‘uprisings’, are witnessing increasing religious, often Christian zeal, most cases implanted and supported from abroad. This is true of Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela, to name just a few.

The Ukrainian fascists, who overthrew the elected government in Kiev, are now giving speeches in Maidan Square, surrounded by huge crucifixes and a statue of the Virgin Mary. Both the Orthodox Church and Protestants (I was told that the present leaders explained that true global power is in the hands of Western Protestants, which resulted in quick conversions) are gaining power.

But the Empire is the one that performs most of the crimes against humanity. These crimes are habitually committed in the name of Christianity.

That very Empire is mainly governed by deeply religious, dedicated Christians, mostly Protestant (all 41 Presidents of the United States have been Protestants, except for J.F. Kennedy, who was a Roman Catholic).

‘Exceptionalism’, is a deep belief that the West has been given some sort of mandate “from above” to govern, judge and police the world – it all comes from the fundamentalist Christian faith.

Coming back full circle to the original point that this essay is making, almost all the horrors this planet has experienced, actually come from that intolerant, racist and ‘exceptionalism’ belief, clearly propelled by Christian faith, and by, other less influential, monotheist religions.

This belief is encoded in Christianity and in the Bible, and has been put to work by all the generations and almost all Christian theoreticians. It is not, as so many naïve people say: That bad people kidnapped an excellent idea and faith.

According to this belief, nothing really matters much, as long as the ruling Christian culture stays in power, as long as the Christian West continues to rule over the world. As in the middle ages, no human sacrifice is high enough, as long as the system is upheld. As long as the victims are ‘the others’ – Arabs, Jews, Southeast Asians, Chinese, Pacific Islanders, Chinese or Japanese (and the system uses collaborators from the ranks of these ethnic groups, as well. The carrot consists of; making them think, that by serving the West through Christian religion and business, they are actually gaining an exclusive status, that of local ‘elites’).

The sacrifice of ‘the others’ is expected, even welcomed: Seven or even ten million people in Indochina – not a big deal. Three million in Indonesia – it is irrelevant. Ten million in Congo – who cares, they are Christians, but in reality some second rate niggers, just to borrow the vocabulary of the British Christian Prime Minister Lloyd George. Tens of millions all over Africa, from Somalia to Mali – who are they? Un-people, just filthy Muslims! Millions of broken lives all over Latin America – good for them! They were mainly Communists, and atheist hordes. Twenty million Soviet people died fighting and defeating Nazism – they were mainly white, but their atheism made them worse than those niggers!

Christian ‘logic’ was clearly implemented in all the colonialist adventures and genocides of modern days; in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, to name just a few.

As has always been reflected by the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ – the US has the right to determine the fate of people and nations all over Latin America.

Such a belief has also been easily detectable in all former and present colonialist expansions, in the slave trade, and in the extermination of entire nations. As is evident in how the West is treating two enormous nations: China and Russia.

Many analysts and thinkers were naively waiting for some glimpse of real logic, based on facts, morality, and international law… They waited in vain. The Empire acted religiously. The Empire IS religious! It demanded total obedience and faith. It was ready to burn millions of those who were prepared to resist- even question – metaphorically and in real terms.

That is, naturally, nothing new! Many have noticed that the West is in fact a fundamentalist Christian entity. Its people are mainly secular (except in the United States, the most religious industrialized country on earth) – they don’t care much about practical religious aspects, about visiting churches or about symbolism. But their brains, minds and tolerance to the brutality committed by their societies, are conditioned by Christian dogmas and by the ‘theories of exclusiveness’, by the profound belief that they, and only they, have the right to hold the fate of this planet in their hands.

***

On one of the many Internet sites dedicated to the crimes committed by Christianity, young people mainly, are compiling the list. In simple terms, saying the same thing that is being argued in this essay.

“Mental and Physical abuse of children”, writes one.
“Ignorance”, jumps in another writer.
“…Mental abuse of children and adult alike, murder, torture, sexual abuse of children and adult alike, several hundred years of stupidity and the humiliation of other nations and ethnicities (including the slavery of Africa and the creation of the idea that “black is inferior”), actual killing and righteousness… for degrading black people, homosexuals and Jews… demonizing people for being an individual with critical thinking…”
“The crusades…”
“The delusions, fears and wasted lives of billions of followers.”
“Remember the crusades? There was a children’s crusade. It was pretty nasty. Christianity never had a problem with killing babies in the name of their vicious god. That’s why it’s so ironic that they’re always screaming about being ‘pro life’.”
“Those nasty pretend nice women who maltreat everyone else who is not like them, and teach their children to do the same.”

And so on. The list of grievances is endless.

***

The Last Supper, which is one of the main symbols of Christianity, has most certainly been relived worldwide, in the countries battered by the Western ideological dogma, based on the Christian views of the world.

But those millions, who were metaphorically crucified (they most often died a much worse death than that caused by crucifixion), were not sons or daughters of a god or the God; destined to be resurrected at a later date. They were simple men and women who were taken to terrible prisons or camps, in order to be exterminated… or simply shot to death like stray dogs. They were raped and then cut to pieces, they had heart attacks and strokes from electric shocks, they had their bones crushed, and they were burnt by cigarettes, and often, later, burnt to death, alive.

They were resistance fighters struggling against Christian-backed dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, and so many other unfortunate corners of the globe. Or they were simply free-minded men and women, unwilling to live those dreadful lives, under Christian hypocrisy and its dismal dictates.

They had their last meals with their loved ones, before the bell rang, before the door was kicked open, before they were taken away, before they were never resurrected, before they never returned home.

I propose a toast, to those hundreds of millions of victims of Christian terror. And especially to the millions of those who resisted it, and died with honor and great dignity, fighting for humanity!

I salute the men and women of the Western Hemisphere who fought the European invaders; those who have always come armed with their deadly weapons, crosses, and terrifying visions of total doom, and hell.

Claiming that it brings love, Christianity offers fear and suffering to the planet. Enough! Truly, enough!

They advise us to offer our other cheek? Yes, they do. OUR cheek, of course, not theirs. If you slap them, they will machine gun you down, blow you to pieces. If they come and rape your children in front of you, as they have been doing for centuries, you are supposed to serve them dinner, afterwards.

Their charity, too! It is like their foreign aid. Loot everything, and then give 0.02%!

And their last, and final dogma: “It is not really religion, which is bad. It is the ‘people’ who kidnapped it.”

This is the worst, the wildest lie – the most predictable, the cheapest, and the most insulting of lies. Insulting to logic, and insulting to all those victims of Christianity!

It is the religion! It is their priests, preachers, dogma and theories; it is even, sometimes, those simple, ‘good’, singing, brainwashed followers.

First of all: People created that Christian religion. And it has been serving fatefully, their desires and their urges. In the Christian religion, there is plenty of violence and injustice; it is all encoded. In fact, so much violence and injustice, that for millennia, each and every brutal ruler, cardinal, priest and crusader found enough ‘inspiration’ and ‘justification’ for his terrible deeds.

And the Empire is still feeding on that dogma and on the Bible, it keeps finding endless justifications and excuses for the terror that it is spreading all over the world. As all Christian Empires, for the last two thousand years, has been spreading fire and pain, reducing nations and people to pitiful slaves, and this planet, gradually, to… to what you know it is now!

As put brilliantly by G. W. Foote and J. M. Wheeler in their book “Crimes of Christianity”: Both Catholic and Protestant have to face the fact that the triumph of Christianity was the triumph of barbarism, and that the doctrine of salvation by faith, is in each Church, the logical basis and sanction of persecution.

It is Christianity, the religion, not just the individuals. Christianity is guilty as charged!

***

I salute the men and women of the Middle East who fought the Crusaders.

I salute the African people, who did not allow themselves to be slaughtered and enslaved, shackled, and instead opted to die standing, than to live (or die anyway) on their knees.

I salute the revolutionaries of my beloved Latin America!

You kept our humanity alive. Thanks to you, I am still writing this essay! Thanks to you, countries like Venezuela and Cuba are standing, defiant and proud. Thanks to you, people all over the world are now waking up!

And I salute Christians, all over the world, who have realized that their religion is, always was and always will be, synonymous with crime, rape and plunder, even with countless genocides, and who have proudly divorced themselves from the Church and its ‘heritage’!

This is my Easter salute! To the victims of Christian terror, and to those who have fought this the most fundamentalist, gloomy and destructive ideology on Earth, one that is closely associated with fascism, colonialism, racism and imperialism!

This is my Eastern celebration. Today I celebrate the lives of the heroes of the resistance against Christian terror!

And rest assured: “No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten!”

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His discussion with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism is now going to print. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. He has just completed the feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

Chinese Dominance Isn't Certain

Chinese President Xi Jinping

By Jacqueline Newmyer

FEARS OF CHINA’S RISE ARE GROWING. Only a decade ago, most experts insisted that the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas ambitions were limited to Taiwan. Now that Beijing has begun to adopt a more assertive posture abroad, the conventional wisdom has changed from dismissing the China threat to accepting it fatalistically. But must Washington and its Asian allies defer to Chinese expansionism? Can we really have jumped from one world to another so quickly?

Not a chance. Two new books provide a corrective to the lately fashionable gloom-and-doom analysis. Each is by a crack journalist. The first, Geoff Dyer’s The Contest of the Century, addresses the U.S.-Chinese relationship through the prism of China’s military, political, diplomatic and economic development. The second, Robert Kaplan’s Asia’s Cauldron, focuses on the competition between China and the states around the South China Sea—the central route for shipping between the Middle East and East Asia, and the site of disputed claims to resource-rich maritime territory.

Certainly the fresh attention to China’s aspirations is a good thing. As late as 2006 the defense correspondent Fred Kaplan (no relation to Robert) was belittling the Pentagon’s attention to Chinese military modernization in its annual congressionally mandated report on the subject. In an article called “The China Syndrome,” Kaplan wrote:

“At present,” the report states, “China’s concept for sea-denial appears limited to sea-control in water surrounding Taiwan and its immediate periphery. If China were to shift to a broader ‘sea-control’ strategy”—in other words, if it were seeking a military presence farther away from its shores—“the principal indicators would include development of an aircraft carrier, development of robust, deep-water anti-submarine-warfare capabilities, development of a true area anti-aircraft warfare capability, acquisition of large numbers of nuclear attack submarines,” etc., etc. The point is: The Chinese aren’t doing—they’re not even close to doing—any of those things [Kaplan’s italics].

Just eight years later, the Chinese have made substantial progress on all of these fronts, and Beijing has embarked on a path of military-backed assertiveness across the region that has already provoked shifts in U.S. military operations. In January 2013, the U.S. chief of naval operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, admitted that China’s new capabilities have caused the U.S. Navy to change its deployment patterns “inside the first island chain” (China’s term for the major archipelagoes from Japan and Taiwan to the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia that form the outer boundary of the East and South China Seas). Last November, China tried to unilaterally impose an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) covering airspace over Japanese and South Korean territory just before an East Asia tour by Vice President Joe Biden. Before Biden departed, the United States defied the ADIZ with an unannounced transit of two unarmed B-52s, and while the vice president was on his first stop in Tokyo he assured his hosts that the United States would go further and directly confront Beijing on the issue. During his subsequent stop in Beijing, however, Biden failed even to mention the ADIZ in public. We need to confront Chinese assertiveness with a stalwart refusal to bend, but we are in danger of conceding too much and disheartening our allies. Our lack of firmness may convince Beijing that it can get away with pressing even harder.

While there’s plenty of room for debate about the scope of China’s blue-water ambition, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has now completed sea trials of, and deployed, its first aircraft carrier, with an estimated four to six additional hulls under construction, as Robert Kaplan notes. He stresses that in addition to focusing on its surface navy, China has been expanding its fleet of nuclear ballistic-missile and attack submarines capable of deploying into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Dyer and Kaplan both point to China’s construction of a new submarine base in the South China Sea, and Kaplan also highlights China’s investment in aerial refueling to enable the projection of air power toward that sea’s southern reaches. He might also have mentioned China’s deployment of new Type 052D destroyers with state-of-the-art radars and a vertical launch system capable of firing advanced surface-to-air missiles against enemy aircraft, including anti-submarine-warfare aircraft, enabling the destroyers to defend other PLAN surface ships and submarines.

Dyer lucidly sets out the context in which these developments have been occurring. He traces the rise of the PLAN to China’s obsession with the late nineteenth-century American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan saw sea power in general, and the ability to exert control over commercial sea-lanes in particular, as essential to the well-being of trading states. “Neglected at home,” Dyer writes, “Mahan has become deeply fashionable over the last decade in Chinese intellectual circles, including translations of his books, academic articles on their importance, and conferences on his ideas.”

If the PLAN’s new aircraft carriers and destroyers are suited for engaging in Mahanian sea-control missions, this would be a step beyond the impressive suite of largely land- and air-based forces that China has acquired to keep adversaries from entering or operating within its near abroad. More than the carrier, these “anti-access/area-denial” (A2AD) capabilities (e.g., precise ballistic and cruise missiles, along with the complex of sensors and guidance technologies that allow them to find and prosecute moving targets) have implications for the U.S. position in the Asia-Pacific region because they raise doubts about our ability to protect our allies. Since the late 1940s, the United States has played a key role in tamping down potential conflicts between regional actors. In Dyer’s words, “America has defined its vital interest as preventing any one power from dominating the other main regions of the world and turning them into a private sphere of influence.”

For more than half a century the United States has guaranteed Taiwan’s independence, and our security commitment to Japan has made it possible for successive generations of Japanese leaders to maintain relatively modest defense investments. Thanks to China’s buildup of A2AD capabilities, Tokyo may now question whether Washington would send forces to protect Japan from Chinese aggression in the East China Sea, where China has been challenging Japan’s administrative control over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. The same question may apply equally to the Philippines, another U.S. treaty ally, which has recently succumbed to Chinese military-backed expansionism over disputed land features in the South China Sea.

HOW DID WE GET HERE? Here are three specific explanations. First, China’s military rise was difficult to see because it proceeded very slowly for a long time before suddenly yielding a spate of new capabilities, and these capabilities were not the ones most Americans would have expected. The high-tech electronic and sensor systems that form the backbone of China’s A2AD force took years, if not decades, to develop, and the shape of this new force may not have been observable until China actually began to test highly accurate missiles. Compounding the intelligence challenge, China did not pursue military modernization parallel to the U.S. model. As both Dyer and Kaplan note, Beijing didn’t try to build a navy like ours; rather, the PLAN has become a kind of anti–U.S. Navy, centered around submarines; small, fast attack craft armed with antiship cruise missiles; and, most recently, drones. China has adopted an asymmetric approach, using relatively cheap weapons to prevent very expensive American platforms like aircraft carriers from entering the theater. Dyer cites an estimate by U.S. Navy captain Henry Hendrix that puts the cost of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) carrier-killer missiles at $11 million each, compared with a $13.5 billion price tag on a new U.S. carrier.

To be sure, not everyone missed the flash. In 1992, Mark Stokes, a U.S. Air Force deputy attaché, traveled around the Chinese countryside and gathered evidence that, together with what he was reading in Chinese military journals, indicated a major investment in medium- and long-range missiles. But he was largely ignored. As Dyer recounts:

Back in 1992, plenty of people in the Pentagon dismissed the analysis of people such as Stokes, rejecting the idea that a country as poor as China would have such clear-cut military ambitions. Others argued that China’s ability to contest Asia’s seas with the U.S. was heavily constrained by its dependency on the global economy.

At the end of the 1990s, as Chinese defense budgets continued to increase by double digits, the evidence was getting harder to ignore, but then the September 11 attacks occurred, diverting U.S. attention from East Asia to Central Asia and the Middle East for the next decade. 9/11 is thus the second reason we are only just now confronting the seriousness of China’s challenge to the post–World War II order in Asia.

A third reason is that until recently, Chinese rhetoric and behavior worked to mask the ambition behind the PLA’s modernization. Dyer cites the work of journalist Joshua Kurlantzick, who chronicled how Beijing used China’s wealth and a carefully crafted image to embark on a “charm offensive” across the world from the mid-1990s through 2007. China often presented itself as the anti–United States, providing capital in the form of investments and loans with no requirements for good governance. Meanwhile, in discussions with the West, Chinese Communist Party leaders offered assurances that the PLA was not seeking an aircraft carrier, nor would it militarize space, while business delegations were wooed with promises of exposure to a gigantic market of potential Chinese customers—as long as they provided investment in China’s research-and-development sector and transferred critical know-how. Then, in January 2007, China tested an antisatellite missile, and in 2008 the global financial crisis supplied an opportunity for Beijing to trumpet its brand of state capitalism as an alternative to the faulty Western market-based system. Testing of China’s antiship ballistic missile, runway images of a Chinese “fifth generation” aircraft and sea trials of the first Chinese carrier coincided with or directly followed these events. By March 2009, as Dyer recounts, a flotilla of ten Chinese ships saw fit to confront the USNS Impeccable, an American naval survey vessel, in the northern part of the South China Sea.

Even now, there is reluctance to identify China as a competitor, perhaps born of difficulty conceiving of this possibility. Unlike our last major competitor, the Soviet Union, China is also a major trade partner, and China continues to represent a market opportunity in the eyes of many Western business interests. So we are tempted to jump from denial to defeatism. Not Dyer. In his view:

Whether they have come to praise or to warn about China’s rise, most authors on China subscribe to an almost linear transfer of wealth and influence from West to East, from a U.S. in decline to an irrepressible China. There is an air of inevitability in the way China is presented. Yet the roots of American power are deeper than they seem and hard to overturn.

IN DIFFERENT WAYS, Dyer and Kaplan provide reasons for hope. Where Dyer argues that we are likely to prevent China from succeeding in its effort to dominate Asia, Kaplan predicts that we will engage in a sustained naval competition, but at least the “stopping power of water” (a term borrowed from University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer) will keep the contest from devolving into outright war. By following commonsense rules—striving to maintain a balance of power in the region—we can prevail in what is likely to be a long-term competition. What’s more, both authors maintain that the United States should stay economically and militarily engaged, with Kaplan making the case that the two are linked: “It is only by enmeshing itself further into the region’s trade that the United States will remain self-interested enough to continue to guard the sea lines of communications in the Western Pacific.”

So Dyer and Kaplan agree on the diagnosis and even on the general prescription, with both, again, recommending that the United States aim to preserve a balance of power. Here’s Dyer: “Washington’s objectives should be to maintain a favorable balance of power and to provide clear defensive arrangements against any potential aggressors.” In Kaplan’s formulation, “It is the balance of power between the United States and China that ultimately keeps Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore free.” And again a few pages later: “For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is often the best preserver of freedom.”

Aiming for a balance of power sounds unobjectionable, but what does this mean in practice? Kaplan distinguishes between the past American dominance and the future balance that he envisions:

The balance of power in Asia requires American military superiority, in order to offset China’s geographic, demographic, and economic advantage. One does not necessarily mean the crushing American superiority of recent decades. In fact, the American military position in Asia can afford to weaken measurably, to take into account future budget cuts, so long as the American military retains a clear-cut advantage in key areas over the Chinese military. It is that edge which will preserve the balance of power.

Unfortunately, Kaplan does not specify how much “edge” will suffice. Nor does he proceed even to adumbrate which “key areas” he has in mind. One might think of the undersea domain as an area of traditional American strength. Kaplan points out the challenging bathymetry around China’s coast for the detection of hostile submarines, implying that the U.S. advantage in this area might be neutralized. In fact, what this means is that stealthy U.S. submarines should be able to penetrate up to China’s shores, while American sonar and other detection measures can be maintained along the choke points through which Chinese submarines would have to pass to exit China’s near seas and deploy out into the blue water of the Pacific. So the undersea domain does indeed seem to count as such a key area of U.S. advantage.

But more than U.S. submarines will be required in order to preserve a balance of power. Submarines are supposed to be imperceptible. But to maintain their nerve and stand up for themselves in the face of Chinese coercive pressure, China’s neighbors will require visible evidence of the U.S. commitment to their security. On the diplomatic side, Dyer is clear: “The endgame in Asia for Washington is . . . to forge a robust and stable set of rules and institutions laced with American values of openness and political pluralism which will be resistant to Chinese pressure,” and he cites Burma as a test case. On the military question of how to deter China from challenging the balance, he is sensible but vague:

If the basic objective is to convince Chinese hard-liners that there is no path to a quick win in the western Pacific and to defend its allies, then U.S. strategy should be built around finding ways to raise the costs so that China’s leaders would never be tempted even to consider such a proposal—and to do so in ways that are politically and economically realistic and which are not hugely provocative toward China.

The trouble is that the existence of China’s A2AD force means that to ensure access the United States must possess the ability to prevent Chinese missiles from finding their targets. This would seem to require not only shipboard air-defense systems but also the ability to penetrate China’s own air-defense network to eliminate the elements of China’s complex of sensors and guidance systems that enable the PLA to precisely target American platforms. The U.S. military has begun to think through such an approach under the rubric of “Air-Sea Battle,” but Dyer rules out this response as overly provocative toward China because it implies strikes against targets on the mainland. As an alternative, Dyer suggests a distant blockade to target China’s economy, acknowledging that its imposition would entail “plenty of strategic difficulties.” He also outlines an approach centered on arming regional powers and developing a network of positions from which to interfere with PLA power projection. The upshot is that the United States has a range of options to deter Beijing.

THOUGH BOTH KAPLAN AND DYER CHOOSE to foreground military issues, their books are at their best when reporting local details or relying on deep historical research—material that should inform the development of U.S. strategy. If the authors are correct that the fate of the Asia-Pacific region will depend on whether the United States can maintain a balance of power in the face of China’s rise, then knowledge of conditions on the ground across the region will prove critical. This local knowledge will help Washington work with the countries of the region, and potentially even embed them in an alliance-like architecture (if not a formal alliance such as NATO) to keep Beijing at bay.

Kaplan’s virtuoso reportage and historical sensitivity seem at odds with his insistence on the primacy of geography and structural factors. The first chapter of Asia’s Cauldron begins: “Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” It is as though geography determines everything. But prior to this opening, Kaplan offers a prologue called “The Ruins of Champa” that vividly conveys India’s enduring cultural influence in Vietnam:

I am in My Son, in central Vietnam, forty miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea. Flowers and grass grow out of every nonvertical surface of each monument where altars, lamps, and lingas used to be placed, swimming in incense and camphor. . . . A lichen-coated linga, the phallic symbol of Shiva’s manhood, stands alone and sentinel against the ages.

So history and culture matter, too. The message of the prologue is that one must “never lose sight of the vividness of India’s presence in this part of the world” even “at a time when China’s gaze seems so overpowering.” In chapters covering not only Vietnam but also Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Taiwan, Kaplan offers a richly textured account of how each country approaches its relations with the great powers in its midst.

We learn how Mahathir bin Mohamad modernized Malaysia using Islam as the glue to unite its variegated peoples, and that the country is, after Singapore, the most reliable military partner of the United States in the South China Sea, having not forgiven China for its support of ethnically Chinese Communist insurgents through the 1970s. Kaplan similarly details the perspective of Lee Kuan Yew, father of modern Singapore, on the Vietnam War, which in his eyes bought time for the other states of Southeast Asia to strengthen their economies and thereby ward off the Communist challenge. And regarding the Philippines, we learn that internal threats are so dominant that the army there is three times bigger than the navy, even though the Philippines is an “archipelagic nation,” and thus the country is desperate for U.S. help in the face of China’s “creeping expansionism” in the South China Sea.

Finally, Kaplan covers Taiwan, offering a new perspective on Chiang Kai-shek and conveying the importance of Taiwan’s position between the Japanese archipelago and the northern reaches of the South China Sea: “Taiwan is the cork in the bottle of the South China Sea, controlling access between Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.”

Furthermore, if China were to annex Taiwan, then all of the assets currently focused on “reintegrating” (in Beijing’s parlance) that island would be freed for other missions.

Kaplan points out that Chiang created a Chinese alternative to Mao’s Communist “People’s Republic” on an island where even today, 70 percent of the population has “aboriginal blood, which is ethnic Malay in origin,” cementing the connection to the South China Sea realm. To counter Chiang’s reputation as a corrupt failure, Kaplan cites the work of the contemporary historians Jonathan Fenby and Jay Taylor, who show that Chiang’s forces fought much harder than has been appreciated against the Japanese invaders in the World War II period, as Mao’s Communists “were pursuing the very strategy Chiang was accused of: avoiding major military entanglements with the Japanese in order to hoard their strength to later fight the Nationalists.” Drawing again on Fenby and Taylor, Kaplan’s review of Chiang’s early policies on Taiwan assigns him credit for putting the country on the path to its current prosperous democracy.

Kaplan also visits Taiwan’s Pratas Islands in the northern South China Sea, which provokes him to reflect on the origins of Beijing’s current “nine-dash line” claim to most of that maritime realm. The original line had eleven dashes and was developed by the Nationalists on Taiwan. When the mainland Chinese inked an agreement with Vietnam over the Gulf of Tonkin in the 1950s, two of the dashes were dropped. Kaplan lands on the main island and finds only enough to occupy him for an hour. This inspires him to reflect:

Because there was nothing here, these so-called features were really just that—microscopic bits of earth with little history behind them and basically no civilians living on them. Thus, they were free to become the ultimate patriotic symbols, more potent because of their very emptiness and henceforth their inherent abstraction: in effect, they had become logos of nationhood in a global media age. The primordial quest for status still determined the international system.

This move into the realm of theory does not serve Kaplan well. He is closer to the mark earlier in the book when defining the importance of the South China Sea in terms of its centrality to trade, its resources and the fact that disputed land features within it are being used as the basis for claims to control traffic through its waters: “Domination of the South China Sea would certainly clear the way for pivotal Chinese air and naval influence throughout the navigable rimland of Eurasia—the Indian and Pacific oceans both. And thus China would become the virtual hegemon of the Indo-Pacific.” Regional hegemony, not symbols or logos, is what is at stake.

But Kaplan returns to more solid ground in an epilogue that, like the prologue on Vietnam, offers visceral impressions of his visit to the jungle-enclosed eastern Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. He concludes on a fittingly humble note: “What if the future of the South China Sea is not just about newly strong states asserting their territorial claims, but also about a new medievalism born of weak central government and global Islam?”

Dyer’s historical research and reportage are impressive and illustrate how Beijing squandered the gains of its aforementioned “charm offensive” in the last decade by reverting to form. Dyer cites the Singapore-based scholar Geoffrey Wade to establish that despite the image of peaceful exploration that China trumpets, the Ming-era voyager Zheng He was actually a colonial gunboat diplomat at the helm of a well-armed armada. In the fifteenth century Zheng intervened with military force in civil conflicts in Sumatra, Java and even modern-day Sri Lanka, and he established a semipermanent Chinese garrison at Malacca to control traffic through the strait. Dyer also offers a revealing quote from the Chinese international-relations expert Yan Xuetong: “Ancient Chinese policy will become the basis for much Chinese foreign policy, rather than Western liberalism or Communist ideology. . . . It is easier to teach common people why they are doing certain things if it is explained in these terms.”

Putting aside his implication that “common people” are primitive, Yan’s statement sheds light on some otherwise puzzling developments of the past few years. In a range of incidents China has alienated regional powers by according them treatment more befitting traditional Chinese vassals than independent states. For instance, in 2009 Japan voted out the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been in power for fifty years, and installed a new government that favored closer ties with China at the expense of relations with the United States. Yet in September 2010, the captain of a Chinese fishing boat rammed a Japanese coast-guard vessel in the vicinity of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. While the captain was detained in Japan, huge anti-Japanese protests erupted in China, and Chinese shipments of rare-earth metals critical for Japanese high-tech manufactures started to decline. “At one stage,” Dyer reports, “the Japanese ambassador was hauled in to receive a formal complaint in what the [official Chinese] Xinhua News Agency gleefully described as ‘the wee hours’—the fourth such dressing down he had received.” From a strategic perspective, China’s conduct seems counterproductive. Why antagonize a potentially well-disposed Japanese government over fish? “Beijing had a game-changing opening to weaken American standing in the region,” Dyer notes. “But, rather than driving a wedge between the U.S. and its most important allies, China has managed to push them much closer together.” The explanation must involve China’s sense of its status and impatience to establish a new order in which the region defers to Beijing. At the same time, the onus is now on Washington to work more closely with Tokyo.

TURNING TO SOUTH KOREA, the other major U.S. ally in Northeast Asia, Dyer recounts that several months before the fishing-boat incident a North Korean minisubmarine had fired a torpedo at a South Korean naval vessel, sinking the ship and killing forty-six sailors. At this point economic ties between China and South Korea were “booming,” thanks in part to a fact that Dyer uncharacteristically omits: China backstopped the South Korean economy during the 2008 global financial crisis. But following the sinking, China blocked the UN Security Council from punishing Pyongyang and generally failed to convey a sympathetic response to Seoul. South Korea’s disappointment was reinforced in October 2010, when then vice president Xi Jinping gave a speech on the fiftieth anniversary of China’s intervention in the Korean War eulogizing the conflict as “great and just.” A month later, North Korea struck again, shelling a South Korean island and killing four inhabitants. “Under pressure to rein in its ally,” Dyer explains, “Beijing decided to call for a meeting of the so-called six-party talks.” Seoul would of course have been loath to participate without an apology from Pyongyang, but China was counting on the gesture to “deflect some of the blame for the standoff onto South Korea.” China’s heavy-handed approach at such a difficult moment with South Korea can only be explained by a historically informed sense of primacy.

“With no formal warning, Dai Bingguo, the senior Chinese foreign-policy official, turned up in Seoul to discuss the proposal.” This account is not footnoted; perhaps an outraged South Korean diplomat provided Dyer with the full scoop:

He did not have a visa, so South Korean Foreign Ministry officials had to rush out to the airport to get him into the country. Dai insisted on meeting with President Lee Myung-bak that evening, even though he did not have an appointment. And even though he asked that the meeting be off the record, he brought a group of Chinese journalists along with him. Lee told him that Seoul would not agree to a meeting involving the North Koreans, but Dai went out and announced the proposed summit anyway.

In the course of a few months, China thus went a long way toward undoing the goodwill that it had built up with South Korea in the past decade. Dyer attributes this to Chinese fear of a North Korean collapse, but we can also speculate that, having supported South Korea’s economy through the 2008 crisis, Beijing may have felt entitled to more deference than Seoul was willing to offer. Back in the era of Zheng He, after all, South Korea would have been sending tribute missions to the Chinese capital.

In the same vein, Dyer reports that the South China Sea states consider China to be pursuing a strategy of “talk and take” in an attempt to bully them into accepting a new status quo that favors Beijing. China’s ambition and presumptuousness color even its relations with long-standing U.S. ally Australia. According to Dyer, a Chinese defector revealed that “senior officials in Beijing were openly suggesting that Australia could come to play a role somewhat similar to France’s—still part of the Western alliance, but detached from America and willing to take its own path on important issues.” Dyer also provides colorful background to the outburst by Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi at the 2010 Asia-Pacific Summit in Hanoi. “China is a big country,” Yang ranted to an audience including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “and you are all small countries. And that is a fact.” Before delivering this diatribe, Dyer tells us, Yang was apparently spotted pacing “in the corridor beforehand rehearsing lines.” So we now know that his remarks were not spontaneous. Why would China behave in such a heavy-handed way?

Both Dyer and Kaplan explain that China feels entitled by history to project its authority onto smaller states in its region. The authors liken Beijing’s position to that of Washington in the era of the Monroe Doctrine and compare the South China Sea to the Caribbean. But as Dyer points out, unlike China’s current power-projection efforts, “The Monroe Doctrine was not imposed on an unwilling hemisphere: in much of the region, it was welcomed.” And as Kaplan reports:

One high-ranking official of a South China Sea littoral state was particularly blunt during an off-the-record conversation I had in 2011, saying, “The Chinese never give justifications for their claims. They have a real Middle Kingdom mentality, and are dead set against taking these disputes to court. China,” this official went on, “denies us our right on our own continental shelf. But we will not be treated like Tibet or Xinjiang.”

Dyer and Kaplan are thus at their strongest when they are explaining conditions on the ground in the region and drawing on history to offer context for today’s competition. But Dyer stumbles when he jumps on the anti-arms-race bandwagon, warning:

Toward the end of the Cold War, the arms race ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union before the pressures of high defense spending began to seriously undermine the U.S. But if a deeper arms race were to develop between China and the U.S., it is not at all clear that Washington would be starting from a stronger financial footing.

In fact, the Pentagon’s strategy in the Cold War was not to provoke ever-greater Soviet defense expenditures across the board but rather to try to stimulate the Soviets to spend in particular areas that were relatively less threatening to us and likely to be less productive for them. Of course Washington can’t hope to drive the Chinese bankrupt through defense expenditures and wouldn’t want to because increased Chinese defense spending—in the abstract, at least—is a frightening prospect. What we can try to achieve through our own behavior is to influence the investments that China makes in response. But to formulate a cogent strategy toward Beijing will require avoiding defeatism or alarmism, something that these two contributions should help to accomplish.