horse of george

"... ah... not shocking a Chinese official crying foul on Obama's putative Asia pivot... this article is just full of misstatements and untruths, it's propaganda and nothing more... well, actually, it's tactically nuanced propaganda... for China to get what it wants in the Pacific its main weapon will be economic coercion backed with implied military threats and this strategy can only work if America is out of the picture... everything China says and does is geared towards making that vacuum a reality... China knows Obama's pivot is political charade meant to cover his exit from the Mideast and a drawdown in American power in general, which Obama disingenuously may deny but is very much a part of his uber liberal DNA regardless... but for the pivot strategy to work as proponents have imagined it would require the investment of a heck of a lot of money and there's no way Obama will do that and so the pivot is by and large just rhetoric and Kabuki... but that doesn't mean China still can't use the threat of it to try and intimidate the weak willed in America into backing off even further... again, China needs to be able to rely on economic coercion to get what it wants because the use of military force would invite a huge backlash against them in the region creating trouble they lack the wherewithal to contain ... and alternatively soft power is quite simply not an option for them... as long as the Japans et al can use US power to hedge against the risk of economic coercion China will be checked, which is why China wants America out of the picture, which is why they want to give the impression that some phony Obama Asia pivot represents the advent of a dangerously new dynamic..."