Politics: With Friends Like These
An interesting conflict is brewing. The U.S. has asked Israel (for the second time in as many years) to halt a sale of military equipment to China. The U.S. is committed to Israel, but we're also committed to Taiwan, and we've set up (understandably) a fairly rigid standard for selling arms and whatnot to China which could be used to threaten Taiwan. This little tiff is effectively a growing pain in what will be the long road to normal relations with China.
I'm a fan of pointing out that U.S. policy towards China is duplicitous because if they didn't have a billion potential customers, and if every U.S. corporation wasn't salivating wildly at the prospect of selling them billions of lattes and khakis and hard drives and logo-imprinted performance fleece pullovers, they would just be regarded as another Communist country (read: Cuba) and would be embargoed and maligned in the press, etc, etc. This is because they have a lot of human rights abuses, religious persecution, et al. However, they do have a billion potential customers, so we treat them with kid gloves.
So when our best friend in the world Israel wants to sell them some weapons systems, we're in a bit of bind. However, since broad media attention is conveniently focused elsewhere, this will probably slip by and Israel will be 'encouraged' to forgo the sale, like last time. Nevertheless, as this article states, Israel is enjoying its role as a commercial partner for military hardware with China (the US is forbidden from selling these products to China now, though we may be able to later). That could cause problems in the future.
One more mild irritant: the United States and Ukraine are on the cusp of a serious falling out because we believe that Ukraine sold radar systems to Iraq. Look for Ukraine's U.S. international aid portfolio to drop in the years ahead. Ukraine's president, Leonid Kuchma, is regarded largely as a bad man (oppressing student demonstrations, more human rights violations), but it took a radar system for the U.S. to cut him off. Of course, the military equipment Israel was going to sell to China in the deal that was halted two years ago? Radar systems.
An interesting conflict is brewing. The U.S. has asked Israel (for the second time in as many years) to halt a sale of military equipment to China. The U.S. is committed to Israel, but we're also committed to Taiwan, and we've set up (understandably) a fairly rigid standard for selling arms and whatnot to China which could be used to threaten Taiwan. This little tiff is effectively a growing pain in what will be the long road to normal relations with China.
I'm a fan of pointing out that U.S. policy towards China is duplicitous because if they didn't have a billion potential customers, and if every U.S. corporation wasn't salivating wildly at the prospect of selling them billions of lattes and khakis and hard drives and logo-imprinted performance fleece pullovers, they would just be regarded as another Communist country (read: Cuba) and would be embargoed and maligned in the press, etc, etc. This is because they have a lot of human rights abuses, religious persecution, et al. However, they do have a billion potential customers, so we treat them with kid gloves.
So when our best friend in the world Israel wants to sell them some weapons systems, we're in a bit of bind. However, since broad media attention is conveniently focused elsewhere, this will probably slip by and Israel will be 'encouraged' to forgo the sale, like last time. Nevertheless, as this article states, Israel is enjoying its role as a commercial partner for military hardware with China (the US is forbidden from selling these products to China now, though we may be able to later). That could cause problems in the future.
One more mild irritant: the United States and Ukraine are on the cusp of a serious falling out because we believe that Ukraine sold radar systems to Iraq. Look for Ukraine's U.S. international aid portfolio to drop in the years ahead. Ukraine's president, Leonid Kuchma, is regarded largely as a bad man (oppressing student demonstrations, more human rights violations), but it took a radar system for the U.S. to cut him off. Of course, the military equipment Israel was going to sell to China in the deal that was halted two years ago? Radar systems.
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