India is deploying a naval task force of four warships this month that will transit the South China Sea and participate in naval exercises with the US, Japan, and Australia in the western Pacific. The four countries make up the group known as the Quad, which is viewed as a potential foundation for an anti-China military alliance in Asia.
During the two-month deployment, the Indian warships will also hold drills with countries located in the South China Sea, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. The region has turned into a potential flashpoint between the US and China, with Washington rallying allies to challenge Beijing’s claims to the waters.
Other Western countries are following the US in stoking tensions with Beijing in the region. Last week, a British aircraft carrier strike group entered the disputed waters. Earlier this year, French warships transited the South China Sea, and Germany has deployed a warship that is expected to sail into the sensitive area in December.
The Biden administration is focusing on bolstering the Quad as part of its strategy against China. The four countries will participate in Indian-led drills known as the Malabar exercises. Last year’s Malabar was held off the coast of India and marked the first time since 2007 that all quad countries held military exercises together.
In previous years, India had been hesitant to let Australia participate in the Malabar for fear of sending the wrong message to China. But relations between New Delhi and Beijing have soured in recent years, and Canberra was allowed to join its Quad partners for a show of force in the Bay of Bengal, where last year’s Malabar was held.
The World Court at the Hague ruled that China doesn’t have any exclusive rights to the South China Seas several years ago. Why would you characterize free passage though international waters as provocative? Being anti-war to the exclusion of any action to stop an aggressor is a recipe for dictatorship and world domination by China.
World domination by China ?, which country said it wants full spectrum dominance , who controls the worlds finances ? , what country planned to over throw every government in the M.E , who invaded Iraq on lies , who invaded Libya , Afghanistan , who caused the coup in Ukraine , who is now occuping Syria ILLEGALLY ? , i can tell you this it ain`t CHINA.
CCP troll responding to something I didn’t write. Why don’t you address what I wrote, propagandists?
China would answer to a politicized ‘Europe-First’ court because…?
The Euros are putting on a show but its America that’s expected to be the pretend leader of the exercise, and do any of the real heavy lifting.
Control of the South China Sea is critical to any aggression against China. There is no reason to aggress China except for the usual historical reasons of extortion; for now, China is the future of the world economy. Western Euro-centric financial oligarchs are trying to secure their place at everyone else’s expense.
While the U.S. has little stake here, and America First should be building the U.S. economy back to real dominance, Western European imperialism needs to squander their competitor’s resources – American and Chinese resources – in pointless conflict.
There’s no other way for Europe to remain on top except to come up the middle of the more natural geopolitical giants.
While believing they are fighting for an American Empire and American pride, the U.S. military are just very big dogs of war at foreign command.
Hell, U.S. cities are even conveniently crumbing into authoritarian kennels, thanks to Europe-First Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dumb, neocon progressivism.
Another CCP troll who won’t respond to the point I made in my post. Wants to attack everyone for being against CCP China’s power grab of claiming the entire South China Sea. Distract Much, propagandist?
What point would that be? I would assume you yourself are the propagandist, given the immediate default to psychological projection of your motives on the ‘other’.
China never challenged the passage of legit civilian vessels through the South China Seas, only the passage of threatening military vessels and potential threats disguised as civilian.
Sailing military vessels through sensitive waters is ALWAYS a provocation. China’s military position in the SCS is defensive but empty posturing; in a hundred years those fortified islands would be under water.
Its a tossup as to whether or not China’s SCS buildup forestalls war or will start one. They could never withstand a first attack in the present, but do have to be removed first to attack China.
They cannot be used to attack any Western nation first, only as a pretext for the Euro-West globalist neocon deep statists to attack China.
They are hardly needed against any of China’s local neighbors, except to discourage them from becoming platforms to attack China.
A Russian warship off U.K. shipping lanes in international waters, or a Chinese warship off a U.S. Pacific coast by shipping lanes, would likewise be seen as threatening actions by the respective Western nations.
The CCP is a millstone on China, riddled with Europe-First sympathizers, empowering the oligarchal heirs of the Opium Wars era.
Marxist-Leninism and Nazi Totalitarianism are European inventions, just like one-child-per family Malthusianism.
What China never did is not the point. What China is doing is the point. By what right does China have the power to challenge ANY vessels traveling through seas that don’t belong to it? In 2016, the Hague Tribunal ruled that China’s claims of historic rights in the South China Sea lacked legal foundation, China’s actions in the region infringed on the rights of the Philippines, and features in the Spratlys are not entitled to EEZs or territorial zones. The reason you refuse to address the point is because China has NO right to restrict anyone or anything in territory it does not own. China and you just saying so does not make something a fact. Another question is, “Will China abide by International Rules or not?”. So far, the answer is NO.
I have addressed the point – by what right does Europe First Western imperialism maintain a dominant and overwhelming armed threat in the South China Sea?
You don’t get that the era of gunboat diplomacy is over now. China is only challenging the passage of Western NATO warships.
The West does not realize, the era of gunboat diplomacy is over. Did you really think sailing military vessels in a Chinese-dominated civilian shipping lane would just be let go?
China is responding to the longstanding threat to cut off China from the South China Seas, a waterway of immense economic importance to China. It only bugs the West that they didn’t seize and fortfy the best strategic islands first.
Again, China is not challenging civilian shipping, only military shipping.
The Hague, is not an Asian entity. It is a Western European one. They aren’t the law there anymore, and morally, never were. SCS trade predates the Western takeover during the Age of Discovery.
China is willing to work with regional players who have a direct stake in those waters. Neither the U.K., the U.S. or any Western NATO state presuming to parade warships through the South China Seas are SouthEast Asian nations.
Nice of you to stand up for the poor Philippinos, but they can look after themselves just fine and don’t need to be pawns in a Western proxy war with China.
You call taking over coral reefs in other countries’ territorial waters and building them into fortified islands “challenging Western NATO warships”? China is a huge aggressor and without Indian, Australian, British, US, German, French, et al warships, China would restrict all shipping. It’s a lot bigger than NATO who is concerned with Chinese plans to conquer the world which is their publicly stated goal. You are either grossly ignorant or a Chinese propagandist.
Why would China restrict civilian shipping when they need that civilian shipping for their own economy and the regional economy the Chinese economy ultimately depends on?
You’re projecting Western Europe-First ambitions on the Chinese, a return to the ‘good old days’, the 19th century immediately following the Age of Discovery when the Pacific was a Western lake.
China could barely conquer Taiwan militarily, never mind the rest of the world. They lack the sea power for that kind of force projection and always will.
The U.S. is leagues ahead of China in every metric that matters in real war, its just that the U.S. can’t hold what they could take in a Pacific war of aggression.
If the U.S. can’t conquer China right now, China will never come close to conquering the world.
GFY!
China is actively trying to steal territory from India, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan and Japan and has threatened an invasion to colonize Taiwan—a peaceful democracy. Understand that Xi Jinping detests human rights, he is an authoritarian building a war machine that can destroy several neighboring countries. US war criminals should be taken to the ICC and prosecuted, yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that China is hostile and getting more belligerent by the year. Don’t defend a country that steals everything from everyone, annihilates the Tibetan and Uyghur cultures, has territorial conflicts with multiple neighbors whose territory it wants to control, suffocates the rights and freedoms of its own people, and has also threatened an illegal war of aggression against a state that is no threat to it. Just because the US has committed crimes, it doesn’t mean China should be allowed to. They all must respect the laws.
You’re blind. We’re being set up for a pointless war with China within a couple of decades, as the Euros through the U.S. military-intelligence complex seek to remain on top of the Eurasian century.
Such a war would be ultimately be fought on Chinese and U.S.-Canadian territory using EMP nukes, the safest way to fight an all-out war between the U.S. and China.
The Anglo-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, are already rolling out and testing wartime authoritarianism measures via COVID-1984 restrictions.
Just how well will North America’s new ‘green economy’ – massively electrified – fare in an EMP nuke war? At least right now we have the extensive legacy gasoline infrastructure and civil liberties to pick up and power through a Carrington Event.
Trudeau’s Canada has committed to banning sales of ICE vehicles for civilians by 2035; a triple-whammy destroying Canada’s resource-based economy, the middle class civil rights that supported, and leaving Canada open to EMP disaster.
Wasn’t that long ago scientists were sounding the alarm about a solar EMP, and militarist alarmists were warning of a North Korean EMP.
Now, that’s gone quiet, and the official story is, in order to save the world from climate change we need to massively mine and process rare earths for batteries and fully electrify everything. Does that make any sense?
Back in 2010, the UN moved with amazing haste to ban open deep ocean iron fertilization to absorb carbon with phytoplankton, which would have also restored fisheries worldwide. At the time this ‘only’ seemed like a buffalo-kill tactic to starve down the developing world the way imperialist early America starved out the Plans Aboriginals, but it seems the climate crisis is interwoven into overt war plans as well.
Sad to see India, who was occupied by the west for many many decades join forces with those same occupiers that also violently occupied China for decades and now are doing their best to stop the progress China has made lifting their people out of poverty. China has played by our rules and has out worked us and we just can’t face the fact that we are not the exceptional people that we thought we were.