As the Olympic games in Rio draw to a close, another set of games will begin: military exercises between the United States and South Korea to prepare for a possible armed conflict with North Korea.
Let the Peace Games Begin
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Beijing
China and the U.S. are Approaching Dangerous Seas
It’s not just the chilling rhetoric. In the past five months, warships from both sides have done everything but ram one another.
Superpower Conflicts Are Driving Tensions in the South China Sea
The Philippines won a huge legal victory against China on a long-running territorial dispute. But Manila’s alliance with Washington may make it all for nothing.
Support Taiwan’s Democracy
Neville Chamberlain famously excused the abandonment of Czechoslovakia at Munich by calling the victim “a faraway country of which we know little.” His infamy is not totally deserved. Britain had no treaty ties to Prague, nor did it have the military capacity to take on Germany at the time, and Chamberlain on his return immediately kick-started British rearmament.
America’s Rogue Ally
For years, dealing with Pyongyang has been the most difficult diplomatic endeavor for Beijing. This was the case even before the outbreak of the Korea War when Kim Il Sung, father of the current North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, worked out a war plan with Soviet leader Stalin and then sold it to Mao. The day after the North attacked the South, President Truman ordered the 7th Fleet back to the Taiwan Strait and hence the Mainland lost Taiwan. During the three-year conflict, China bore the brunt of the fighting and suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. The post-war North Korean official propaganda, however, scarcely acknowledged China’s role. Last October, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) tested its nuclear device despite China’s warning and efforts to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully. Now, after years of China’s hard work to host many rounds of six-party talks, a North-South summit early this month in Pyongyang went as far as to suggest that China may not be a party “directly concerned” with a “permanent peace regime” on the peninsula.