by NICK OTTENS

Poor Susan Rice was exasperated last week. The American ambassador to the United Nations saw the first step toward international intervention in Syria go up in smoke over the weekend when China and Russia blocked a Security Council resolution that would have urged President Bashar al-Assad to resign.

The two veto wielding powers were quick to point out that Arab states and NATO last year exceeded their United Nations mandate to protect civilians in war-torn Libya by putting special forces on the ground and providing air cover for the rebels who were thus able to tear down the tyranny of Muammar Gaddafi.

Even if Western powers aren’t looking for another military intervention, they would like to see Assad go. Because it’s in the American and European interest to topple his regime, the “responsibility to protect” the Syrian demonstrators is invoked to legitimize international action.

The Chinese and the Russians are suspicious. As they see it, the West only raises humanitarian concerns when it suits its interests to be perfectly quiet about human rights abuses in allied Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia.

The reality, as the conservative Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano put on RT’s Crosstalk Friday, is that “humanitarian interventions are really no different from any other foreign policy decision.” The responsibility to protect doctrine “can be used to go after your enemies,” he said and is “pretty vacuous and empty.” Because it is so ill-defined, he predicted that it would end up on “the ash heap of history” soon.

Read the rest at the Atlantic Sentinel.

USS Carl Vinson and USNS Yukon. Navy photo.

by NICK OTTENS

President Barack Obama’s planned reductions in defense spending have earned him considerable criticism from the right. One of his potential Republican challengers, Mitt Romney, laments that the United States Navy “is smaller than it’s been since 1917.” Other conservatives claim that the cuts in military spending will put the nation at risk.

The “cuts,” worth nearly $900 billion over the next ten years, won’t necessarily reduce spending from today’s $671 billion defense budget. Rather, they will reduce projected increases in spending. Part of the reduction will happen if America winds down its engagement in Afghanistan in 2014. For 2012, the Pentagon has requested $118 billion for overseas military operation, the bulk of which is to finance the Afghan war.

Former defense secretary Robert Gates identified some $400 billion more in savings, largely in organization and procurement. He capped production of the new F-22 fighter jet for instance, much to the dismay of national security hawks in Congress.

Yet it’s because of Congress’ failure to find cuts elsewhere that the Defense Department faces an additional half a trillion dollars worth of reductions.

In budget negotiations last year, Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on a plan for long term fiscal consolidation. As a result, some $500 billion in automated cuts was enacted.

Defense secretary Leon Panetta, Gates’ successor, had forecast “doomsday” if the sequester cuts were to come into effect. The American military would be reduced to a “paper tiger,” he said, one that “invites aggression.”

Read the rest at the Atlantic Sentinel.

Hans Hillen. Via Atlantic Sentinel.

by NICK OTTENS

The Dutch Government is reportedly contemplating huge cuts in defense spending. As part of a total €18 billion worth of austerity measures, the liberal-conservative coalition has planned some €1 billion in budget cuts to the defense department which could force the resignation of up to ten thousand service personnel.

While the government won’t announce its full plans until Friday, public broadcaster NOS reported on Wednesday that as part of the austerity operation, the Dutch military might have to give up all of its tanks, four out of ten minesweepers as well as its seventeen Eurocopter AS532 Cougar helicopters which were scheduled for an upgrade two years ago.

Dutch armed forces currently operate eighty-two Leopard 2A6 main battle tanks and recently acquired nearly two hundred Swedish Stridsfordon 90 infantry fighting vehicles. It wasn’t clear whether the latter would be scrapped as well.

Five Alkmaar class minesweepers were previously sold to Latvia while the Cougar was already slated for replacement with twenty NHI NH90s. The European built helicopter has proven too heavy for use in combination with Dutch frigates however.

Defense Minister Hans Hillen is further set to cut deeply in supportive services which altogether would make it nigh impossible for the Netherlands to single handedly mount a Orūzgān scale operation in the future.

Nearly two thousand Dutch soldiers were stationed in the Afghan province between 2006 and 2010 as part of the International Security Assistance Force. Two months ago, the Dutch legislature approved another Afghanistan mission to support the training of Afghan policemen.

Because of the involvement in Afghanistan, the Netherlands raised defense spending in recent years, from €7.7 billion in 2007 to €8.5 billion in 2009.

Originally published at Atlantic Sentinel.

Bahrain. Photo via Atlantic Sentinel.

by NICK OTTENS

A month after Bahraini Shiites first took to the streets to protest against their Sunni dominated government, the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) agreed to deploy troops to guard energy facilities and infrastructure in the country. Opposition members characterized the move as an “occupation” if not “a declaration of war.”

According to one Saudi official, “the force will work under the directions of the Bahraini Government and protect vital facilities like oil and power.” The kingdom is the GCC’s largest member along with Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

With a total GDP of more than $1 trillion, together the six members of the Persian Gulf’s economic union are estimated to hold 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves and they account for a quarter of all oil exports.

The move came on the very day parliamentarians asked Bahrain’s king to impose martial law after protesters had blocked main highways and riots erupted on a university campus. Approximately one hundred demonstrators were reported to have blocked access to the Bahrain Financial Harbor in the capital, in effect shutting down the commercial district.

Inspired by the toppling of longtime dictators in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year, young Bahraini Shiites launched their own anti-government movement in February.

Although Bahrain’s Shī’ah population is sizable, a Sunni minority has dominated national politics since the country gained independence in 1971. As Daniel DePetris put it last month, “the Bahraini Government is the definition of nepotism, with the ruling Al Khalifa family controlling all of the country’s power.”

Saudi Arabia too has a large Shiite population, concentrated in its oil rich east, near Bahrain. The kingdom has seen relatively minor outbursts of dissent in recent weeks but a ban on demonstrations coupled with an increase in welfare spending would appear to have defused unrest.

Iran, which is one of few other countries with a Shiite majority, urged Bahrain not to instigate violence against civilians on Monday. Its foreign minister told Iran’s state news agency that he expected “the Bahraini Government to be wise in responding to the demands of protesters and respecting their rights.”

According to official figures, seven Bahrainis have died in confrontations with security forces in past weeks. More than five hundred were wounded.

Originally published at Atlantic Sentinel.

Via Atlantic Sentinel.

by NICK OTTENS

A devastating tsunami triggered by the biggest earthquake on record in Japan probably killed more than a thousand people along the country’s northeastern coast on Friday. A wall of water of up to thirty feet high swept across rice fields, engulfed towns, dragged houses onto highways, tossed cars and boats like toys, reaching as far as six miles inland in Miyagi Prefecture.

Thousands of residents were evacuated from an area around a nuclear plant north of Tokyo after fears of a radiation leak but officials said problems with the reactor’s cooling system were not at a critical level.

Underscoring grave concerns about the plant, the United States Air Force, which has three bases in Japan, delivered coolant to the facility, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Other nuclear plants and oil refineries were shut down while one refinery was shown ablaze on Japanese television. The intense fire in the waterfront area near Sendai could not be reached by firefighters because of the heat. An irrigation dam was reported broken in Fukushima Prefecture, north of the capital.

Auto plants and electronics factories closed while millions of homes and businesses were without electricity. Several airports, including Tokyo’s Narita, and all sea ports suspended operations while rail services halted. At least one bullet train carrying hundreds of passengers in the Miyagi region was missing

Japanese politicians pushed for an emergency budget to fund relief efforts after Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked them to “save the country.” Eight thousands troops were dispatched to aid in the recovery and the government asked the United States military for assistance. Several tens of thousands of American soldiers are stationed in Japan.

President Barack Obama told the Japanese prime minister that his country would assist in any way. Five US Navy ships were en route for Japan; two were already docked in the country. China announced that rescuers were standing by to help with quake relief.

Japan is already one of the most heavily indebted nations in the world. The long term effects of repeated short term government interventions in the private sector during the “lost decade” of the 1990s have resulted in a huge public debt that exceeds GDP twofold.

Trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of deflation, the economy has contracted significantly despite being one of the world’s largest. Last year, Japan experienced 5 percent negative growth.

As a result of its high standards of living, the country is also coping with a large aging population and mounting financial pressure on its public pension system.

Japan’s financial sector and infrastructure are well developed but remain subject to political interference. Last year, to prevent the soaring currency from impeding a fragile recovery, the government began to pursue an active monetary policy to protect the competitiveness of Japanese exports.

Originally published at Atlantic Sentinel.

Hillary Clinton. Via Atlantic Sentinel.

by NICK OTTENS

As tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Egypt’s major cities again on Sunday, the United States is wondering what impact the unrest and possible regime change could have on American foreign policy in the region. For 30 years, Egypt has been a factor of stability in the Middle East and it continues to play an instrumental role in both advancing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and containing Iran.

President Barack Obama responded to the demonstrations after speaking with his Egyptian counterpart by phone on Friday night. He said that the Egyptian people are entitled to determine their own destiny and he denounced the violence. “Violence will not address the grievances of the Egyptian people,” he said:

And suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. What’s needed right now are concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people: a meaningful dialogue between the government and its citizens and a path of political change that leads to a future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the Egyptian people.

The United States has much at stake in Egypt. Every year, Washington invests several billions of dollars in the country, much of which is allocated to sustaining Egypt’s armed forces, which are among the strongest in the region.

The protests thus pose a dilemma for Washington where officials are unsure whether to embrace them as the rising of a democratic vanguard or signs of temporary unrest that will eventually be suppressed by the regime.

The situation is complicated by the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is Egypt’s largest opposition movement despite being officially banned. Some observers believe that the organization has moderated in recent years but formally, it continues to support the implementation of Islamic law.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded to such worry on Fox News Sunday where she professed that the United States “want to see an orderly transition so that no one fills a void” of political power. “We don’t want to see some takeover that would lead not to democracy but to oppression,” she added.

While Clinton noted that the United States have been urging reform for decades, she wouldn’t condemn President Hosni Mubarak outright. His role in the peace process, she said, may have saved many lives, including Egyptian lives.

The secretary similarly recognized Mubarak’s contributions to regional stability on NBC’s Meet the Press but “much more has to be done,” she said.

On the same program former Middle East peace negotiator and ambassador to Israel for President Bill Clinton, Martin Indyk, noted the possible similarities with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. “We do not want to be on the wrong side of history like we were with the shah,” he said. America’s strong support for the monarch was partly responsible for the alienation that occurred between Iran and the United States once the ayatollahs took power.

Indyk wasn’t optimistic about the 82-two year old president’s chances. “The contact with his people has been broken,” he said. It cannot be put together again.” Indyk urged the military leadership as well as the former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, whom Mubarak appointed vice president yesterday, to tell the president to resign and announce elections within six months.

Former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei, who was placed under house arrest immediately after he returned to Egypt two days ago, agreed that the country needed “a government of national salvation, in coordination with the army.” He told ABC’s This Week that the United States should abandon Mubarak and “side with the people” instead.

According to ElBaradei, the Muslim Brotherhood is not an extremist organization. “They are no way using violence,” he said. “They are not a majority of the Egyptian people. They will not be more than maybe 20 percent of the Egyptian people.” ElBaradei believes that they have to be included in a future political arrangement nevertheless, like evangelic groups and religious orthodox are in other countries.

Originally published at Atlantic Sentinel.

Via Atlantic Sentinel.

by NICK OTTENS

Cold War in East Asia? Japan is literally moving forces from defending against a Soviet invasion to monitoring today’s communist superpower. China thinks Tokyo’s attitude is “irresponsible.”

For 65 years, the close to a 150,000 soldiers of Japan’s Northern Army have been gazing across disputed waters from the island of Hokkaidō. A little over 800 miles to the northeast, the Russians kept similar watch on the Kuril Islands, the southernmost of which Japan claims as its own. But the Russians won’t be coming anymore. “It is unthinkable that an invasion of Hokkaidō would take place now,” a Ministry of Defense official was quoted as saying in several Japanese media last week. The focus is moving south, to China, which is simultaneously building up its armed forces and becoming more assertive in East Asia.The cabinet of officially pacifist Japan recently approved the National Defence Programme Guidelines which identify China as the foremost threat to Japanese security. “China is rapidly modernizing its military force and expanding activities in its neighboring waters,” according to the new guidelines. “Together with the lack of transparency on China’s military and security issues, the trend is a concern for the region and the international community.”

China and Japan are among each other’s foremost of trading partners but since China overtook the latter as the world’s second largest economy this year while Japan remains mired in recession, an economic balance would appear to have translated into increasing political discord.

Several maritime border disputes have frustrated relations for decades. In the East China Sea, which is estimated to contain some seven trillion cubic feet of natural gas and up to 100 billion barrels of oil, Japan has proposed that an equidistant line from each country should separate their exclusive economic zones but China claims drilling rights virtually up to the coast of Japan.

The two also dispute possession of the uninhabited Senkaku Islands northeast of Taiwan. Japan controlled these islands from 1895 until 1945 when they were transferred to American administration. In 1972, the islands were returned to Japan but both China and Taiwan have claimed them since.

The ownership dispute has implications for maritime boundaries between the three countries involved which became evident in September of this year when a Chinese fishing trawler collided with two patrol ships of the Japanese Coast Guard some eight miles northwest of the islands.

The Japanese detained the captain of the fishing trawler which prompted the Chinese to cancel a series of diplomatic meetings. China also cut off its export of rare earth minerals to Japan which are vital to Japanese high tech industries. Beijing denied a connection between the two events but the Japanese subsequently released the trawler captain without charge.

The United States consider the Senkaku Islands Japanese territory and both its secretary of state, Hillary Clinton and secretary of defense, Robert Gates affirmed American support for Japan in the event of a conflict after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had threatened further action against Japan unless the trawler captain were released.

Considering ongoing border disputes in the South China Sea which do not involve Japan but are testament to China’s mounting assertiveness in the region, Japan’s new military guidelines underline a clear shift of focus to counteracting China as a naval power.

Under the new plans, Japan will increase its submarine fleet from 16 to 22 and modernize its fighter jets. Some 400 and artillery pieces will be scraped at the same time. Japan will boost its ground, air and naval forces on the far southern Nansei islands that take in Okinawa, a major base for American forces, and are closer to remote flashpoint islands near Taiwan.

Japan also intends to enhance security ties with Australia, India, South Korea and other countries in Southeast Asia to “promote confidence and cooperation with China and Russia.” This risks worsening China’s sense of encirclement which largely inspires its military strategy. From Japan to Taiwan to Indonesia to India, the Chinese face a chain of American allies with armed forces evermore explicitly aimed at them. Even Vietnam prefers the United States as an ally but economically, the entire region remains dependent on China’s growth.

Despite rising tension, East Asia is far from on the brink of war. As Johan Wahlström suggested last year the region’s arms race is not just a contest in military capacity but one of prestige as well. “Aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines are highly visible symbols of a country’s power,” he wrote. “For a region that is finally gaining recognition as a world powerhouse and not just a source of cheap goods, this is crucial.”

Originally published at Atlantic Sentinel.

Photo via Atlantic Sentinel.

by NICK OTTENS

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited different countries in Central Asia to push for improved political freedoms in the former Soviet republics and affirm their role as security partners of the United States. As the war in Afghanistan drags on, these countries, many of which are battling internal disorder, remain significant as part of America’s supply routes.

Clinton attended a summit of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe in Kazakhstan Wednesday where she also spoke with the country’s president and foreign minister. She thanked Kazakhstan for cooperating with the West in the realm of nonproliferation. Earlier this year, she pointed out during a press conference, along with the United Kingdom, Kazakhstan and the United States secured over ten metric tons of highly enriched uranium as well as three metric tons of weapons grade plutonium. “That is enough material to have made 775 nuclear weapons,” she said. “And now we are confident it will never fall into the wrong hands.”

The secretary visited Kyrgyzstan next which has been site to considerable political upheaval in recent months. This spring, violence in the small Central Asian republic forced its president to flee to Belarus while the interim government subsequently struggled to hold on to power. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced as a result of the unrest.

After meeting with Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva, Clinton praised her for forming a coalition government two months after the country held parliamentary elections. “There are many who say parliamentary democracy, true parliamentary democracy, cannot work in Central Asia or in many other places in the world,” said Clinton. “We reject that and we think Kyrgyzstan has proven that it can.”

Neighboring Tajikistan has also witnessed waves of armed rebellion in recent months. As the central government appears unable to suppress the uprising, Joshua Kucera at The Diplomat warns of a “power vacuum in a part of Tajikistan that borders northern Afghanistan and southern Kyrgyzstan, both of which are themselves becoming more and more unstable.”

Despite the mounting instability in the region, the United States are preparing a range of strategic construction projects throughout Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The largest project entails the construction of an anti-terrorism training facility in southern Kyrgyzstan.

Currently, the only American base in operation in the region is the transit center at Manas, near the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek and close to its border with Kazakhstan. Last year, the now ousted president attempted to close the air base with parliament’s approval. Only the intervention of American and Russian diplomacy managed to reverse that decision in June 2009. In return for continuing to operate the Manas facility, the military increased rent payments from $17 to $60 million a year to the Kyrgyz government.

Clinton’s last stop in the region was Uzbekistan, the most populous republic in Central Asia but also its least republican. The country has never held an election judged fair by international observers while the executive wields most actual power. Dissidents are persecuted. Opposition parties are not allowed to exist and foreign media have been driven out of the country. Clinton urged the president, Islam Karimov, who has been in power since 1990, “to demonstrate his commitment through a series of steps to ensure that human rights and fundamental freedoms are truly protected.”

The State Department has defended Clinton’s visit to Uzbekistan as a chance to promote political reform but it is also an opportunity to affirm security cooperation. Uzbekistan is one link in what the United States call their Northern Distribution Network which brings supplies to Afghanistan through Russia and the different states of Central Asia.

The increased American presence risks exacerbating what some observers have dubbed the “New Great Game” which sees China, Russia and the United States competing for influence in Central Asia—very much like Russia and the United Kingdom used to quarrel over the region during the original Great Game in the nineteenth century.

There is moreover a danger of straining relations with Iran whose strategic orientation has shifted northward since the collapse of the Soviet Union. “In the past 15 years,” according to Dario Cristiani of World Politics Review, “Tehran has been particularly active in trying to create a deep net of institutional and economic links in the region, in part to counter the increasing reach of Turkey, perceived as an American proxy, and of Pakistan, historically an enemy of Iran.” This, he pointed out, explains the strong attention paid by Tehran to nearby Afghanistan and Tajikistan, “which represent cornerstones of the Iranian strategy in the region.”

Iran’s ultimate goal is to become a technological and economic power in the region, and to this end, Tehran is supplementing its cultural and historical links with a more resolute economic presence, including investments in massive infrastructure projects.

Besides the dangers of geopolitics, Central Asia is a tar pit filled with confusing micro-nationalities, borders arbitrarily drawn without regard for ethnic divides, and a geography that is bound to frustrate any attempt at military intervention.

Up to the early twentieth century, Central Asia had no real borders. Rather the region was one large frontier separating the Russian Empire from the British Raj in India. With the emergence of the Soviet Union however and its aggressive attempts at spreading communism abroad, the former khanates of Central Asia were quickly absorbed and divided into neat little socialist republics. Neat, except that their borders were drawn with the express purpose of keeping the populations there divided lest they rise up against the Soviet usurpation.

The borders were redrawn several times during the 1920s and ’30s, prompting violent demarcation disputes after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Separating the five newly independent states are Soviet borders; linking them are Soviet era roads, pipelines and electricity grids.

The Russian influence continues to pervade up to this very day. Kyrgyzstan for instance is desperately divided, with an Uzbek minority living in the west near the Uzbekistan border while north and south seem different countries altogether. The north, around the capital of Bishkek, is more developed, with some industry and a semblance of Russian culture. The south, largely agrarian and more Islamic, is cut off by a mountain range through which just two usable roads traverse.

When north and south clashed most recently, the country’s interim president asked Russia to intervene but so far, even Moscow hasn’t shown a willingness to submerge itself in this quagmire.

Originally posted at Atlantic Sentinel.

Photo via Atlantic Sentinel.

by NICK OTTENS