Wednesday 3 September 2014
Photo, above: UKIP party leader Nigel Farage celebrates his local election results with a pint of beer. See two segments, 11:30 to midnight, below.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com.
Hour One
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Harry Kazianis, managing editor, National Interest, & nonresident senior Fellow at the China Policy Institute, in re: Spearhead, NATO's rapid-reaction unit, and activities in Ukraine. Nuclear weaponry. US & NATO trying to put together a strategy to deal with all this. Putin has done a good job of organizing and strategizing his side. The Ukrainian economy was a tinderbox even before all this started. Pres Obama said that there's no military solution here; Putin doesn’t necessarily agree. The Russian military is now very much back in the equation, largely thanks to Putin's redevelopment of it over he last decade. $755 bil plan over the next years: hundreds of every kind of instrument, plus advanced nukes, incl underwater. Now they can sell new stuff worldwide (China, DPRK, Pakistan, etc.) to bring in money. NATO needs to look in the mirror: most members are barely funding their own militaries and are visibly incompetent in many basic functions, NATO is badly caught off-guard in this crisis. London? Paris? Rome? Berlin? - will any of these pay for this? That leaves the Baltics and Poland. Putin threatens nuclear war.
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Bruce Bechtol, Angelo State University, & author, North Korea and Regional Security in the Kim Jong-un Era, in re: the North Korean security services are deeply paranoid and unreliable. One American is in prison for having a Bible in his hotel room; another, for trying to defect to North Korea. Pyongyang reaches out to Tokyo, Moscow, and even CNN. A new few steps. Fascinated by the China-DPRK break of the last few months. China cuts back on heating fuel. Pyongyang moves troops north. Beijing may be seeing regime instability that he rest of us don't. When we saw the Number-Two guy there executed, that was a sign of a big shift. . . . Failure to consolidate power in the military – this is a structural problem. Kim Jong-eun has not yet fully consolidated his power, which is dispositive. Nukes: weapons (warheads, missiles) , plus research institutes. Used both to answer to Kim Jong-il; no clear that they do to the son. Last year's nuke test was three times larger than any previous. North Korea according to CNN
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: X37B. Battle of th Bands: Two giant firms - return t Earth on a vertical landing for re-use; Bezos has a patent to do that and land in the ocean; SpaceX challenges that in court as being not a new idea. Musk vs Bezos The competition heats up: SpaceX is challenging a patent issued to Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for landing the first stage of a rocket vertically on a floating platform. “The ‘rocket science’ claimed in the ‘321 patent was, at best, ‘old hat’ by 2009,” says SpaceX in one of two challenges, filed last week with the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board following the approval of the Blue Origin patent in March. SpaceX cites prior work by researchers and scientists who proposed techniques similar to those in Blue Origin’s patent. If the patent holds, it might force SpaceX to pay Blue Origin for the right to bring its Falcon 9 first stage back safely. Hayabusa 2. ("This is the narrative of the Andromeda Strain.") . . . Photon satellite M4, regrettable death of geckos.
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Jay Ranade in Delhi, former additional secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat of India; based in China during the Tiananmen massacre; in re: Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe. The Three-Headed Monster Challenging Obama’s Foreign Policy – shock: the Times puts Xi Jin-ping, Vladimir Putin and Baghdadi together as the three monsters. Modi will try to manage relations with China to avoid problems getting out of control, esp borders and economy. China's aggression in the South China Sea, East Sea, Yellow Sea: China is explicit in having laid claim to all three million sq km. Chinese mil website speaks of . . . Two-fold objective with Japan: high tech, plus build a compatibility between the Indian and Japanese militaries; possibly including the US. Xi Jin-ping's aggression mixed with neo-Maoist: since 1997. Focus of India's defense policy: have been aggrandizing the army, and big-ticket purchases on the way for both. Reports of Chinese cyberattacks on govt activities in India. Private companies haven’t made the effort to trace the origins of the attack.
Hour Two
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Alan Tonelson, independent economic policy analyst blogs at RealityChek, tweets at @AlanTonelson, in re: China has been using obscure laws to harass foreign companies for a long time; has the US just awakened to that? The Chamber has taken an awfully long time to notice the threat to its members. Its rationale for continuing to invest in China was , "If we’re just patient enough, they'll see the error of their communist ways and work even harder to become just like us." New report is not a full-throated attack on the problem, but at least the Chamber's alert level has gone from yellow to bright orange. . . . Bribery and antimonopoly laws: no prosecutions of Chinese companies that have acted visibly worse than have foreign firs. Result is a big benefit for Chinese firms, and US companies are at a competitive disadvantage. Clearly Beijing disagrees with American assertion that trade and investment constitute a win-win arrangement; rather, have been working for years to create [threat] to US activities. US needs to respond in a very smart way; first, we need to deny China access to the US economy, on which China desperately depends. $318.4 billion was China's trade surplus against he US. WE can mfr elsewhere, but they can’t sell anywhere as valuable, Also, national security: the staggering enormous profits they’ve gained have been ploughed into building a huge Chinese military cult. Vladimir Putin, al Baghdadi, Xi Jin-ping in Times photo.
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Ho-fung Hung, Johns Hopkins, in re: Occupy Central is a movement inaugurated by several professors, bldg up a civil disobedience movement against Beijing's failure to make good on its promise to allow democracy in Hong Kong. Beijing announced that it would pick officials by a Beijing-controlled nominating committee, they=us obviating any real utility in general voting. Occupy Central said it would mobilize the citizenry in favor of actual one man-one voting process. A widespread, informal vote this summer brought in 700,000 plus votes: most said a nominating committee is fine if it includes a citizens' nominating committee. Occupy Central in Hong Kong. Beijing crushing Hong Kong's democratic hopes.
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block C: David Feith, WSJ Hong Kong, in re: Editorial @WSJopinion: ISIS in Southeast Asia--Australia, Indonesia end their intell rift, as jihadi recruiting grows Estimate that ISIS has gathered 350 Australian Muslims, both immigrants and converts. One was circulating online photos of his seven-year-old son in Syria holding up a severed head. . . . Jemaah Islamiya has been considerably weakened by Indonesian, Australian and US actions. Meanwhile, its imprisoned leader has declared fealty to ISIS. Countervailing, many leaders have condemned ISIS for humiliating Muslims with its horrible deeds. . . . telecom providers to keep two years' worth of metadata, plus will keep Internet transmissions. For the past nine months, Australia ad Indonesia have been feuding over Snowden info: Australia tried to tap the phones of senior Indonesia leaders (immediately after some Indonesian bombings). Feud now alleviated, but it was intense even as ISIS was arriving grotesquely on the world scene. In Indonesia, new president to be sworn in in October. ISIS loyalists in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, around Southeast Asia. David, are you surprised at he New York Times's grouping Putin, Xi and Baghdadi? "It was only a matter of time."
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block D: Joseph Sternberg, WSJ Asia editorial board, in re: Occupy Central – sit-in in the central commercial district in order to gum up commerce in favor of democracy. Beijing issues a very hard-line document; Hong Kongnese think of rejecting "fake democracy." Benny Tai shifts his stand; has he been blackmailed? Needn't be that dramatic; could be that he and others thought the very threat of civil disobedience would in effect mollify Beijing and, now that it hasn't, they got cold feet. You know that Beijing will pick a stooge who won’t represent the people of Hong Kong. "Become" ungovernable"? I’d argue that in some ways it already is. No one elected these guys. Beijing, in declaring the existence of constitutional reform and thinking it's solved the issue, is naïve at best. Abenomics and Cabinet reshuffle. The Three-Headed Monster Challenging Obama’s Foreign Policy – it's widely understood in Asia that China's territorial ambitions are dangerous.
Hour Three
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block A: John Nicolson, Scots journalist and broadcaster, in re: Seven hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. The discussion on independence is an internal one, and has been good-natured. . . . Initial polls suggested Scots would vote "no," but over months it's now on a knife-edge. Alistair Darling, the [front-man] for no independence. Alex Salmond took apart each of Darling's arguments: NATO, EU, oil, pensions. Huge number of new registrations. Pollsters unable to guess. Advert of a Scottish housewife noodling around on how to vote: she's an idiot, and has badly damaged the No campaign. The Harry Potter author gave No a million pounds, which they’ve poured down the drain. Scottish Everywoman, sits at a kitchen tale with a cuppa, says to camera that she's glad her husband is out so she can "have a think." Says it’s difficult while she's washing the floor and cleaning and tending children, She ponders for two minutes then picks No. Subtitles suppose that Scots are too ignorant to understand a Scottish burr– one says, "I'm too stupid to google, so I'm just going to vote No." It’s astounding. . . .
Scottish independence: £2m of bets placed on vote Scottish independence: Debt threat ‘chilling’ - PM “YES” Keep saying it: Salmond's economic plans won't work Supporters of the No campaign must hammer home the message that separation is a leap into the unknown, writes Alan Cochrane (2 of 2)
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block B: John Nicolson, Scots journalist and broadcaster, in re: Seven hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. London: Tory MP balance. Scots haven't much say in the govt it gets since England is ten times a large. A massive shame for Cameron if he presided over the loss of Scotland – 40% of the landmass, almost all of the oil, 10% of the population – England might lose its seat at the UN Security Council. Since half of Scotland will be disappointed, is this vote permanent? Some call it the Never-end-um. Salmond has invited his opponents to join him in an amicable negotiation with England if there's a Yes vote. If there's a No vote now, there'll probably be another election in a few years because the momentum now is for Yes.
Scottish independence: £2m of bets placed on vote Scottish independence: Debt threat ‘chilling’ - PM “YES” Keep saying it: Salmond's economic plans won't work Supporters of the No campaign must hammer home the message that separation is a leap into the unknown, writes Alan Cochrane (1 of 2)
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Nigel Farage, UKIP, in re: Betrayed, derided, discarded. A sad lament for the man Nigel ... Nigel Farage and Douglas Carswell. 'Pledges count for nothing, friendships disappear, years of good work are wiped out in an instant.
Farage on Friday: Clacton by-election will see the tides of change ... (1 of 2)
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block D: Nigel Farage, UKIP, in re: Betrayed, derided, discarded. A sad lament for the man Nigel ... Nigel Farage and Douglas Carswell. 'Pledges count for nothing, friendships disappear, years of good work are wiped out in an instant.
Farage on Friday: Clacton by-election will see the tides of change ... (2 of 2)
Hour Four
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block A: Monica Crowley, Fox, in re: Eric Cantor takes job on Wall Street Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is moving to Wall Street, taking a job with investment bank Moelis & Co., the firm said. Tea Party Patriots Gloat As Eric Cantor Cashes In on Wall ... .Joni Ernst to visit Waterloo on Tuesday kwwl.com Joni Ernst, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, has announced that she will be in Waterloo on Tuesday to attend a roundtable discussion ...
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block B: Matt Kaminski, WSJ, in re: Putin: Outline of Cease-Fire Is Reached with Ukraine Russia's Putin said he and his Ukrainian counterpart agreed to the outlines of a cease-fire plan calling for the separatists to end their offensive and Kiev to pull its forces back, a move that could amount to a serious setback for embattled Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block C: Paul Gregory, Hoover & Forbes, in re: Putin Demands Federalization for Ukraine, but Declares It Off-Limits for Siberia
Wednesday 3 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block D: Anatoly Zak (@RussianSpaceWeb), in re: #Roskosmos: #FotonM4 after landing. All #geckos onboard were lost, flies alive: russianspaceweb.com pic.twitter.com/H4GfRF15EP
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EUROPE | NEWS ANALYSIS | The Three-Headed Monster Challenging Obama’s Foreign Policy By DAVID E. SANGER New York Times SEPT. 3, 2014
President Obama faces challenges from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; an ascendant China, led by President Xi Jinping; and the ambitions of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
WASHINGTON — In vowing in Estonia on Wednesday to defend vulnerable NATO nations from Russia “for as long as necessary,” President Obama has now committed the United States to three major projections of its power: a “pivot” to Asia, a more muscular presence in Europe and a new battle against Islamic extremists that seems very likely to accelerate.
American officials acknowledge that these three commitments are bound to upend Mr. Obama’s plans for shrinking the Pentagon’s budget before he leaves office in 2017. They also challenge a crucial doctrine of his first term: that a reliance on high technology and minimal use of a “light footprint” of military forces can deter ambitious powers and counter terrorists. And the commitments may well reverse one of the critical tenets of his two presidential campaigns, that the money once spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would be turned to “nation-building at home.”
But the accumulation of new defensive initiatives leaves open the question of how forcefully Mr Obama is committed to reversing the suspicion, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, that the United States is in an era of retrenchment. In his travels in Europe this week and a lengthy tour of Asia planned this fall, the president faces a dual challenge: convincing American allies and partners that he has no intention to leave power vacuums around the globe for adversaries to fill, while convincing Americans that he can face each of these brewing conflicts without plunging them back into another decade of large military commitments and heavy casualties.
“There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior national security official as the war with Iraq loomed a dozen years ago. “If you add up the resources needed to implement the Asian pivot, recommit to the Middle East and increase our presence in Europe, you can’t do it without additional money and capacity. The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago.”
It is not a world that requires, at least for now, the kind of deployments that marked the Cold War, when the United States kept roughly 100,000 troops in Europe and only slightly less in Asia. But the prospect of drastically shrinking the military after the post-9/11 era, in which total national security spending more than doubled, now seems highly unlikely. And at a moment when Mr. Obama is still answering critics for saying last week that, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he now needs to articulate several strategies, each tailored to problems that in the last year have taken on surprising complexities.
In facing the more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, he must find a way to confront a different kind of terrorist group, one determined to use the most brutal techniques to take territory that the backwash from the Arab Spring has now put up for grabs. The American bombing campaign against ISIS targets in Iraq does not approach the costs of invading and occupying that country, but Pentagon officials say the weapons, fuel and other expenses of taking on the Islamic extremists are running up bills of about $225 million a month, a figure that will rise if Mr. Obama has to take that fight into Syria. ISIS “is not invincible,” Matthew G. Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a talk at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, and ISIS does not yet pose the kind of direct threat to the United States that Al Qaeda did before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is “brutal and lethal,” he said, and defeating it will require a long-term commitment of a kind Mr. Obama clearly did not anticipate earlier this year.
In the Russia of President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Obama faces a declining power, afflicted by a shrinking population, a strident nationalism and an economy vulnerable because of its extraordinary dependency on oil exports. Washington is betting that while sanctions are having little effect now, over time they will hollow out Mr. Putin’s poll ratings. But the short term is more complex. For months now, arguments inside the administration have been over how directly and where to draw the line. In Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, on Wednesday Mr. Obama drew it at NATO’s own boundaries. The question is whether Mr. Putin believes him.
In China, the president faces the opposite challenge: a rising power with growing resources and a sense that this is China’s moment to reassert influence in Asia in a way it has not in hundreds of years. Here, the surprise to Mr. Obama has been the aggressiveness shown by Xi Jinping, China’s president, in embracing efforts to press territorial claims against Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, rather than focusing on the domestic economy.
“We didn’t see this coming,” one former member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said this summer, “and there’s a lot of debate about how to counter it.” The statement could be true for each of the challenges confronting Mr. Obama. It explains why the administration is having difficulty explaining how this combination will affect its future plans. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was put in his job in part to find ways to shrink the military, on the assumption that America’s Iraq commitments were over and as the official combat mission in Afghanistan ends this year. But Mr. Hagel has been either unable or unwilling to articulate the long-term implications of the new commitments.200NTS
“There is a chronic disconnect, not just in this administration, between the policy, the budget guidance, and the classified strategies,” said Shawn Brimley, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, who served as the director of strategic planning at the National Security Council during Mr. Obama’s first term. That is what Mr. Obama needs to do for a “lasting legacy” of rethinking America’s defenses, Mr. Brimley said, but “if you don’t do it in the next six months, it’s too late.”
So far, the administration has twice delayed the publication of its second term report, “National Security Strategy of the United States” — events have overwhelmed it. There are still plans afoot to shift the American presence to the Pacific over the next six years, aiming toward the moment when 60 percent of America’s forces abroad are in the region. But many Asian leaders question whether Mr. Obama and his successor will carry through. Many Europeans and Middle Eastern leaders see those efforts and shudder.
Mr. Obama floated several American-led efforts to deter Russia in his speech in Tallinn, from NATO’s impending “rapid response” forces, to increased training missions, to “investing in capabilities like intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance and missile defense.” The last was an interesting allusion, because in the past Mr. Obama was always careful to say that missile defense is all aimed at deterring outlier states — clearly meaning Iran — rather than nuclear powers like Russia. This time, he made no such disclaimer.