Asia-Pacific region to become the stragegic and economic center of gravity in the 21st century, China renewing its military, new plans for US Navy in the Pacific, the cold war was not what it appeared to be, major players being manipulated towards a major conflict, we need to find the hands controlling the puppets on the stage.
Broken clocks are right twice a day, and sometimes even propaganda can reveal a truth. And although I would be the last person on the planet to recommend Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton as a source of information on any subject, she was nonetheless on the mark in her address to the East-West Center in Honolulu in November of 2011:
“It is becoming increasingly clear that in the 21st century, the world's strategic and economic center of gravity will be the Asia-Pacific, from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas. And one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decades will be to lock in a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise – in this region.”
All of this is undeniably true. Forget all the rest of her warm and fuzzy claptrap about “democracy and human rights” in the region and helping to “settle disputes before they escalate.” That's the usual diplomatic doublespeak intended to elicit polite applause and provide safe soundbites for the six o'clock news. The goal in the region is in fact two-fold. At the first level it's about domination, subversion, exploitation, conquest, and plunder. On the more nuanced level, crisis in the region is being deliberately manipulated to bolster the creation of regional entities like ASEAN, trade pacts like the TPP, and globalist institutions of various stripes. And assets are already being deployed in the region to make this happen.
U.S. military strategy has long envisioned China crossing the Taiwan Strait as one potential catalyst for the next major theatre war. For decades, the idea that China would even attempt such a move was laughable. Implicitly protected by the Taiwan Relations Act and the US desire for a maintenance of the status quo in China-Taiwan relations, Beijing has long known that an outright attempt to take Taiwan would be tantamount to a suicide pact. The PLA has simply never had a chance against the American military. That is gradually changing, however.
China famously surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy in 2010 and last year they spent an estimated 2% of their GDP or $143 billion on their military. That military has been quietly upgrading its capabilities for years now.
Last year, China began sea trials of its first aircraft carrier, which is slated to be commissioned later this summer. It's Luyang-II class guided missile destroyers are equipped with land attack cruise missiles. Beijing is ramping up drone deployment on its Navy fleet, increasing cyber espionage efforts to gain information on the American UAV program, and reportedly working with Iran and Russia to reverse engineer the downed RQ-170 Sentinel that “somehow or other” landed in Iran last December. Just this week, new reports emerged of the DF-21D, the world's one and only anti-ship ballistic missile—a two stage, land launched weapon with a 3000 kilometre range that is supposedly capable of sinking an aircraft carrier with a single shot. The Chinese submarine program, meanwhile, has been growing steadily more sophisticated and potentially deadly, including the Song-class diesel-electric attack submarine and the Shang-class nuclear-powered attack submarine expected to be launched in the near future.
Last year, the not-so-secret cold war between the US military and the Chinese PLA heated up some when the Pentagon released its annual assessment of the Chinese armed forces. Noting China's progress on the anti-ship ballistic missile, its aircraft carrier program, its stealth fighter prototype development, and its increasing cyberwar capabilities, the report noted that Beijing's military is on track for full modernization by 2020. And with a billion plus population from which to fill the ranks of that military, there's no question that a Chinese military at technological parity with America would leave the US at a distinct disadvantage.
This fear is reflected in the Pentagon's battle plans. Long sure of its position as the dominant naval power in the Pacific, in 2009 US defense officials began beating the drums for a new Air Sea Battle plan that seeks to counter China's increasing naval assertiveness in the South China Sea and other strategic areas. Although still somewhat nebulously defined, the plan would coordinate the Navy and Air Force in countering China's anti-access / area denial strategy in the Pacific. Under the plan, the Navy and Air Force would work together to destroy enemy firepower and degrade their C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence) and surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. Although less of a detailed strategy than a defense department buzzword, the plan is seen to be chilling the already frigid Sino-American relations at sea.
Adding to the mistrust is the recent American announcement of a new Marine deployment in Darwin, Australia, a contingent of 2,500 that indicates America's growing military interest in the Asia-Pacific. Pacific Command is also openly lusting after more technologically sophisticated drones to be deployed in the region, with General Atomics reportedly working on lengthening the Reaper's wingspan to allow it to fly further and higher (and thus theoretically out of reach of an increasingly sophisticated Chinese arsenal). Australia has already indicated it may be willing to use its territory as a staging ground for American UAVs, including the Cocos Islands off the country's northwest coast.
China, for its part, has been increasingly flexing its naval muscle in the South China Sea and adopting an overtly threatening stance against the Philippines. Last week, China's Central Military Commission authorized the deployment of PLA troops to the disputed Spratly, Paracels and Macclesfield Bank Islands, which are also claimed by Vietnam. Meanwhile, China and the Phillipines have been engaged in a stand-off for months over Scarborough Shoal. Tensions are once again flaring after an ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting in Phnom Penh failed to issue a joint communique after their consultations for the first time in their 45 year history.
Perversely, all of these tensions are great news for the self-same military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about 51 years ago. Back then it was the Red scare in the dark days of the cold war, and the Pentagon essentially had a blank cheque in fuelling the war machine. After all, only the maintenance of the largest military in the history of the world could protect the public against the ever-present threat of the Soviets. After the fall of the Soviet Union, and now in the wake of the crumbling of the War on Terror paradigm, the next enemy that Washington can use to justify its defense budget appears to be the Chinese and the growing threat to American domination of the Western Pacific.
But just as the cold war paradigm was secretly engineered by the banksters behind the scenes in the 20th century, so too does this growing conflict of the 21st century show all signs of being staged. As researchers like Antony Sutton painstakingly documented in works like Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, the Soviet regime was established and aided with significant material help from Wall Street banking interests, including funds transfers facilitated by Morgan executives and technology transfers facilitated by American, European and Japanese companies. When Joe McCarthy stopped chasing the Commies out of Hollywood and started to realize that the Communist infiltration of America was in fact a working relationship between the Soviets and some of the highest ranking officials and high-powered businessmen in America, then-Secretary of the Navy (and soon to be first Secretary of Defense) James Forrestal told him: “McCarthy, consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.” Forrestal ended up committing “suicide” by jumping out a 16th floor window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and McCarthy's name was disgraced. For his work uncovering the documentation of this behind-the-scenes cooperation, Sutton was forced out of his research fellowship at the Hoover Institute and remained an obscure, unheralded academic.
The cold war was not what it appeared to be. At the lower levels, both the Americans and the Russians genuinely believed that they were involved in a struggle of ideologies that they were intended to win. At the higher levels, there was a game being played to foster collectivist ideologies in the hopes of ensuring a monopoly acquisition of wealth. To some extent, the same two-level game is being played out right now with China in the 21st century struggle over the Asia-Pacific.
In January 1969, shortly after taking office, Richard Nixon met with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller’s chief underling, and got word that the establishment desired the “normalization” of relations with China. Immediately, Nixon abandoned years of hard-line anti-communist rhetoric and began working toward the historic 1972 visit and the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The year before that visit Kissinger had secretly visited China to soften the way, and the year after Rockefeller himself visited as Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank to establish the first U.S. correspondent bank to the Bank of China. Time Magazine wrote an article about that visit that noted that Chase had also become the first U.S. bank to open an office in Soviet Russia earlier that same year, noting that “the Communists, who like to deal with the topmost people, are captivated by the very name of Rockefeller.”
When Rockefeller visited Chinese President Jiang Zemin in the wake of 9/11, he called the U.S.-China relationship “the most important bilateral relations in the world” and the Chinese press noted that Zemin “expressed appreciation for Rockefeller’s contributions to Sino-U.S. relations.”
In the 1990s, even as the international trade agreements that would see the rise to dominance of China were being hammered out, the Clinton Administration helped a Chinese-owned shipping company in its bid to lease the old U.S. Naval base in Long Beach, California, a deal that Congress nixed. Clinton also personally approved the transfer of radiation-hardened chip sets to China in 1996, advanced technology that could be used in nuclear warfare.
Throughout the decade, as the Chinese economic juggernaut continued to grow, international financiers like George Soros began promoting it as the economic model for the rest of the world. And a full decade and a half (at least) after tax breaks and other perks helped to incentivize the outsourcing of jobs from the industrialized world to China, a new study has just “discovered” that America has lost most of its jobs to China.
To this day, the globalist hand can be seen behind the scenes, manipulating the players in the current conflict like pieces on a chessboard. The International Crisis Group has just released a new report on the stand-off in the South China Sea. The report is the result of two years of study, analysis, and interviews with key members of the leadership of all sides, including high-ranking officials in Beijing. It concludes that, though China's vagueness over its claims in the region and its assertiveness at sea are contributory to the tensions, all sides are to blame for the recent escalation in the crisis. The report concludes, predictably, that the crisis is ultimately due to “ineffective” multilateral institutions and regional policy agreements. The report is being breathlessly quoted and taken as gospel by the New York Times and other mainstream mouthpieces.
So who is the International Crisis Group? It presents itself an independent, non-profit NGO committed to crisis resolution, but it's funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Open Society Institute and a plethora of other globalist institutions, and its International Advisory Council is a who's who of the corporatocracy, including a suspicious number of international oil conglomerates from BP to Chevron to Shell. Exactly how such an organization can present itself as an independent arbiter of such crises, or be taken seriously as such, is a complete mystery...until one realizes that it's just the same group of financial controllers playing both sides of the crisis to present their desired solution: tighter regional integration as a stepping stone to world government. If any further demonstration of the point were necessary, this week the Council on Foreign Relations released their own analysis of the situation concluding (surprise!) that ASEAN needs more power, a stronger secretariat, a more prominent secretary-general and more resources. And so the build-up of the regional governmental system continues apace.
Clinton is right, then: the Asia-Pacific is looking increasingly like the center of gravity of 21st century economics and politics. What she neglects to mention is that this theater, like all others before it, will be exactly that: a theater whereby the actors will be puppeteered behind the scenes to manipulate the crises in order to promote the same old globalist solutions. Our only hope is to stop concentrating on the puppets and focus on the hands that are directing them.