Sina Delenda Est

China’s smear campaign against a U.S. admiral backfires
By Josh Rogin 

The commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Harry Harris, testifies before a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 26. 

The Chinese government is denying reports that its ambassador to Washington asked the Trump administration to fire Adm. Harry Harris, the head of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) and a strong voice inside the U.S. government calling for a tough China policy. 

This may mark the end of Beijing’s not-so-subtle campaign against Harris, which has been going on for years.
During the presidential transition, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner established a secret channel for communication with the help of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. 

On May 6, the Japanese newswire Kyodo News’s Beijing bureau reported that Cui requested Trump get rid of Harris, before last month’s summit between Trump and Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, offering unspecified help to solve the North Korean crisis. 

“A source close to U.S.-China ties” told Kyodo that the Trump administration likely rejected the request.

One White House official told me today that Cui never requested to Kushner that the Trump administration fire Harris. 

But a Trump transition official who was briefed on the Cui-Kushner meetings told me that Cui did raise the issue during the transition, but no promises were made.
Regardless, Harris’s allies in Congress are ready to take up his cause if the Chinese effort against Harris continues or if the Trump administration tries to throw the admiral overboard. 

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the Kyodo report was “outrageous” if true.
“I hope the Trump administration will reject such an inappropriate and presumptuous demand with the ridicule it deserves,” he said. 

“The fact that the Chinese government would make such a request only confirms that Admiral Harris is the right leader for Pacific Command.”
Pacific Command’s chief spokesman Capt. Darryn James told me that the story could be just another attempt by the Chinese government to smear Harris, as it has been doing for a long time.
“I don’t know anything about alleged conversations, but for years there’s been a lot of Chinese propaganda directed at Admiral Harris that we don’t pay much attention to,” said James. 

“Admiral Harris’s focus remains on protecting America’s interests in his area of responsibility.”
China’s Global Times, which often writes in support of the Chinese government, blamed the story on the Japanese media in a May 7 op-ed, accusing Japan of making up stories to thwart the warming of U.S.-China relations. 

The op-ed also claimed that China was fine with Harris being PACOM commander.
“Beijing has become more and more confident about developing ties with a Trump-led US,” it said. “China is able to keep normal interaction with the US Asia-Pacific command led by Harris. We do not count on any senior US official to take a pro-China position and we can cope with any who take a hard stance toward China.”
That’s a big shift from what the Chinese media has been saying about Harris since he became PACOM commander in 2015. 

Harris has been a strong voice inside the U.S. government for tougher measures to confront all manners of Chinese aggression, including its militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea. 

It was Harris who famously coined the term “Great Wall of Sand” to describe Beijing’s effort to expand its control in the Western Pacific.
The Chinese government singled out Harris for attacks early on because it recognized his influence, said Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“They realized he was going to be an effective commander who was going to be able to marshal support for a tougher stance vis-a-vis China,” she said. 

“Harris has been willing to speak truth to power.”
China’s official and unofficial news agencies have been attacking Harris for years, often accusing him of being Japanese, in order to question his motivations. 

In fact, Harris’s mother was Japanese and his father was a U.S. Navy chief petty officer stationed in Yokosuka, Japan.“Some may say an overemphasis on the Japanese background about an American general is a bit unkind,” China’s official state media outlet Xinhua wrote last year.
“But to understand the American’s sudden upgraded offensive in the South China Sea, it is simply impossible to ignore Admiral Harris’s blood, background, political inclination and values.”

Beijing’s long campaign against Harris seems to have backfired. 

The shift in China’s tone suggests a realization that the more Harris is attacked by Beijing, the safer he may be in his job.
If Trump dumps Harris now, it will look like yet another concession to China that undermines U.S. and regional security in exchange for promises of future help on North Korea that may never come.

China’s Anschluss in the South China Sea

Beijing is seizing all the territory it can -- while it can
By Arthur Herman

Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938

China’s seizure of an American underwater drone in international waters in the South China Sea has grabbed the headlines — for good reason. 

It’s not often that China commits an aggressive, provocative act like this, in full view of the U.S. naval vessel that launched the drone (although China has seized U.S military gear before, as in 2001 when a Navy surveillance aircraft was forced down on Hainan Island after it collided with a chicken-playing Chinese warplane).
But China’s thievery, and our humiliation in doing nothing about it except uttering feeble protests and politely waiting for them to return the drone, is only part of a much larger strategy China has been unveiling over the past seven years. 

In effect, China is annexing the entire South China Sea and eliminating any claim by other countries — including the United States to navigate its waters or fly through its airspace without China’s permission. 

It’s essentially an Anschluss of the South China Sea, analogous to Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938.
The centerpiece of this effort was also revealed last week, even though it was overshadowed by the drone story. 

Satellite pictures show that China has built a series of air strips and hardened structures for military aircraft on three islands in the contested Spratly Islands where just three years ago there were no islands at all: Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef, and Subi Reef. 

China’s on-going dredging operations to build its Great Wall of Sand on those sites have now created enough space for full military installations. 

Also, on four other nearby artificial island, China is putting antiaircraft batteries and close-in-weapons systems that can target and shoot down cruise missiles.
Those weapons can serve as the future centerpiece of a Chinese network of mobile surface-to-air missile systems installed in the Spratlys. 

In sum, China will probably be able to keep anyone China doesn’t like — particularly the United States — out of South China Sea airspace.
None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who have been sounding the alarm bells about China’s increasingly aggressive moves in the South China Sea. 

Nor is the Obama administration’s feeble and completely inadequate response to these moves a surprise. 

It’s an administration whose specialty has been letting the United States be humiliated, whether it’s by Iran, in the Hormuz Straits, where it grabbed our sailors and made a display of their surrender; or by Russia, in Crimea and Syria; or by China, in the South China Sea. 

After eight years, the whole world knows that Obama lacks the will to halt those powers that are bent on twisting the rules of the global order to their advantage.
In September, I warned that as Obama’s time in office winds down, Russia, China, and Iran will look for opportunities to seize what they can get before a new president takes office on January 20 — one who will take a very different approach to being bullied and humiliated.
That’s exactly what’s happened in the South China Sea Anschluss. 

China’s hope is that its military assets there will now make it impossible for anyone to propose de-militarizing the Spratlys — the first sensible move toward defusing the international tensions there — and gradually force its neighbors to accept as a fait accompli China’s claims to sovereignty over the South China Sea.

But China will be dealing with a very different customer in Donald Trump — and also in Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, who, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was willing to incur the wrath of China when he partnered with Vietnam to develop its offshore natural reserves in the South China Sea. 

China had scared off other big energy companies from Vietnamese waters. 

Tillerson, however, doesn’t scare so easily — and neither does Donald Trump.
In 1938, Adolf Hitler was lucky that he had Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax to deal with — not Winston Churchill — when it came to his takeover of Austria. 

So far, China has been lucky as well, in dealing with an American president and secretary of state who were ready to trade away virtually anything to get China’s cooperation on climate change.
Beijing’s luck is about to run out. 

President Trump suggested that the Chinese keep the drone they stole. 

They returned it, but perhaps they should have followed his advice. 

They may not get another chance to get something for free from the United States for a very long time.

Beijing’s South China Sea island buildup for military purposes

America’s satellite spy chief Robert Cardillo rejects China’s claim that the land reclamation projects are commercial or tourist-related
By BILL GERTZ,

The head of one of America’s secret spy agencies recently disclosed that China is seeking to control the South China Sea through the covert development of military facilities on thousands of acres of reclaimed islands.
Robert Cardillo, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), told a recent US congressional hearing that spy satellites and aircraft have been closely monitoring the island-building program by Beijing.
The NGA, is a little known Pentagon spy service whose motto is “Know the earth, show the way, understand the world.” 

It provides imagery intelligence based on spy satellites and aircraft and explains what the pictures show. 

The agency works closely with another spy agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, that builds and operates intelligence satellites.
One of its specialties is identifying strategic camouflage, concealment and deception designed to fool foreign intelligence services regarding covert activities — like the South China Sea island-building program.
In rare public testimony, Cardillo stated that the NGA is playing a key support role for the Pentagon’s diplomatic and military pivot to Asia that involves increased intelligence-gathering in addition to moving military forces to the region.
“We’ve embarked on activity-based intelligence, which will use the big data analytics and methodologies to find adversarial threats inside the noise and the volume of these disparate data streams,” Cardillo stated.
On the South China Sea, Cardillo said his agency is closely watching Chinese military developments there and disputed Beijing’s contention the buildup is peaceful.
Asked by a members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence what’s behind China’s “warlike” militarization of some of the 3,200 acres of new islands, Cardillo said one of the key questions his agency has sought to answer is what China’s intentions behind the program are.
“Part of the Chinese narrative has been that they’re commercial, even tourist-related, etc., and we have identified indications that there is more to that story,” he said.
“And the more that we’ve identified are military-related structures and equipment that at least gives the Chinese the option to permanently post military forces in and on these islands,” Cardillo said.
“So our job, obviously, is to warn about that possibility, and of course, identify it when we see it.”
Cardillo said a key question for NGA imagery analysts has been to discern the motives behind the island dredging operations that the commander of the US Pacific Command has dubbed China’s “Great Wall of Sand.”
NGA has debunked the Chinese claim that the new islands are purely commercial and concluded they are being built for future military operations.
“We’re able to use more specific and explicit capabilities to say, ‘Ah, that feature is associated with this mission set,’” he said.
“One could be safety of navigation. Think aircraft control, etc. But another [is] weapons handling, aviation fuel storage. It’s those kinds of indicators that you should count on this agency to be able to say what’s behind the development. And so we take both the geography and those indicators to create an assessment.”
Commercial imagery showing the buildup on the Paracels in the northern part of the sea and the Spratlys in the south has allowed Cardillo to discuss the more secret aspects of the Chinese island-building program, like China’s intentions behind the activities.
“We’re able to put the framework on the table that says, ‘Here are the facts on the ground. Here’s what’s happened over time. Here’s who’s being most aggressive or most provocative in the development.’ And then one can have a more informed debate about what’s the purpose behind that island.”
The NGA’s work is supporting military analysts who regard the Chinese island-building campaign over the past decade as a new form of modern warfare that uses information warfare tools, such influence, cyber attacks and deception to achieve strategic objectives.
The Pentagon’s annual report on China’s military for the first time this year published extensive NGA photographs and maps showing the Chinese military buildup in the South China Sea and other regions that were described as Chinese “low-intensity coercion.”
Over the past year, air defense missiles, anti-ship missiles and fighter aircraft have been deployed to some of the islands. 

China recently held large-scale military exercises in the sea with Russian naval and marine forces.
“When complete, these outposts will include harbors, communications and surveillance systems, logistics facilities, and three airfields,” the Pentagon report said. 

“Although artificial islands do not provide China with any additional territorial or maritime rights within the South China Sea, China will be able to use its reclaimed features as persistent civil-military bases to enhance its presence in the South China Sea significantly and enhance China’s ability to control the features and nearby maritime space.”
The testimony is an indication that an intelligence and information conflict is underway in the South China Sea between China and other states in the region, including the United States.