/06

The U.S. Can’t Afford to Demonize China – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/29/the-u-s-cant-afford-to-demonize-china

The relationship between Beijing and Washington is collapsing fast, to everyone’s detriment.

The United States and China’s lengthy track record of constructive engagement is disintegrating at an alarming rate, requiring a major correction by both sides. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s occasional talk of his “truly great” connection with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Xi’s constant references to “win-win” outcomes all round, recent policies and actions — especially on the U.S. side — have created an enormously destructive dynamic in the relationship.

In the case of the United States, this dynamic is most clearly driven by excessively critical, often hostile, authoritative U.S. strategy documents such as the recently issued National Security and National Defense Strategies, similar statements by senior U.S. officials, and U.S. economic policy shifts — including grossly ill-conceived tariffs — that all envision Beijing as a “revisionist” power that threatens all Americans hold dear.

American journalists reinforce this dim view of U.S.-Chinese relations. Almost daily, pundits unveil new aspects of China’s perfidy, ranging from Chinese attempts to undermine intellectual freedom at U.S. universities to China’s sinister debt traps designed to ensnare and control developing countries.

This steady drumbeat of criticism assumes that every Chinese gain comes at American expense, and that past U.S. policymakers and experts have long overlooked the hostility of the Chinese regime. These critics conclude that any cooperation with China must take a back seat to the imperative of pushing back against the growing threat through all means possible. This hyperbole often reaches stratospheric heights, as Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote last December:

Washington is waking up to the huge scope and scale of Chinese Communist Party influence operations inside the United States, which permeate American institutions of all kinds. China’s overriding goal is, at the least, to defend its authoritarian system from attack and at most to export it to the world at America’s expense.

Three Months After U.S. Freeze, Syrian Recovery Stuck in Limbo – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/29/three-months-after-u-s-freeze-syrian-recovery-stuck-in-limbo-isis-tru

Short on funding, U.S. and European programs designed to help rebuild after the Islamic State are faltering.

Nearly three months after the White House froze roughly $200 million earmarked to help fund recovery in Syria, U.S. and European officials trying to stabilize the country’s north are scrambling to plug the gaps left by the near-complete withdrawal of American assistance.

Critical programs meant to restore power and clean water and to clear land mines out of urban areas have been disrupted, and the much-needed networks of local assistance are melting away without funding. Other countries are reluctant to cover the difference while Washington is missing in action.
[…]
“People are very upset in Raqqa because everything is destroyed and there is no help,” said Fabrice Balanche, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who visited the region this year. “They say, ‘You came here to expel [the Islamic State], you destroyed everything, and you don’t rebuild anything and you don’t help us.’”

The #Belt_and_Road_Bubble Is Starting to Burst – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/27/the-belt-and-road-bubble-is-starting-to-burst

China’s hasty international investments are beginning to drag down its own economy.

Autre article de fond. Les énormes – et risqués – investissements chinois en Afrique vont peser (pèsent…) sur l’économie chinoise.

L’exemple de la #Sicomines (Sino-Congolaise des Mines) en RDC, République démocratique du #Congo.

#OBOR #OBOR_Bubble

Mattis’s Last Stand Is Iran – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/28/mattiss-last-stand-is-iran

As the U.S. defense secretary drifts further from President Donald Trump’s inner circle, his mission gets clearer: preventing war with Tehran.

Long point de vue de Mark Perry (The Pentagon’s Wars). Après avoir décrit l’état d’usure et de fatigue des différentes forces armées états-uniennes, puis décrit en détail une attaque en règle de l’Iran,…

At the end of the air campaign, Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities would be in ruins. But the worry for senior military war planners is that the end of the U.S. campaign would not mark the end of the war, but its beginning. Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and a former professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program (and one of the Army’s most sophisticated strategic thinkers), argued that a conflict with Iran would not be confined to a U.S. attack — or Iran’s immediate response. Tehran, he said, would not surrender. “We should not go into a war with Iran thinking that they will capitulate,” he argued. “Al Qaeda did not capitulate; the Taliban did not capitulate. Enemies don’t capitulate. And Iran won’t capitulate.” Nor, Dubik speculated, would the kind of air campaign likely envisioned by U.S. military planners necessarily lead to the collapse of the Tehran government — a notion seconded by Farley. “There is very little reason to suppose that anything other than an Iraq-style war would lead to regime change in Iran,” Farley said. “Even in a very extensive campaign, and absent the use of ground troops in a major invasion, the Iranian regime would survive.” That is to say that, while Iran’s military would be devastated by a U.S. attack, the results of such a campaign would only deepen and expand the conflict.

“Shaping and executing an exit strategy after an attack is likely the most difficult task we will face,” [John Allen] Gay [the co-author of the 2013 book War with Iran] said. “While an overwhelming airstrike may end the war for us, it will not end it for Iran. Our conventional capabilities overawe theirs, but their unconventional capabilities favor them. Assassinations, terror attacks, the use of Hezbollah against Israel, and other options will likely be used by them over an extended period of time. All of this has to be factored in: Even if we destroy their nuclear capabilities, we will have to ask whether it will be worth it.”
[…]
In truth, the unease over any future conflict goes much deeper — and is seeded by what one senior and influential military officer called “an underlying anxiety that after 17 years of sprinkling the Middle East with corpses, the U.S. is not any closer to a victory over terrorism now than it was on September 12.”

#sprinkle_the_Middle_East_with_corpses
#parsemer_le_Moyen-Orient_de_cadavres …