Then There's China.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, one of my favorite pundits, is musing today on the situation with China talking about dumping U.S. bonds in response to the sale of U.S. arms to Taiwan. He is, as usual, quite right about the potential of China using economic efforts as a military tool. The other consideration worth noting, is that like Iran today, this should not really have come as much of a surprise.

Let's preface the discussion by pointing out the fact that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are nothing new. This is part of an on-going effort. Between 2001 and 2008, Taiwan received $7.7 billion in arms shipments from the United States. China has never been thrilled about it, having stalled the North Korean nuclear negotiations in 2008, partly at least, in response to previous arms sales to Taiwan, according to CNN.

So China has balked in the past, why are they now ramping up the threat meter? It's mainly because of the confluence of two points; (1) they see the President as having less resolve than his predecessor (i.e. he's weak) and (2) right now they know that they have a lot of leverage in the current U.S. financial situation because they own so much U.S. debt. The U.S. economy right now is the soft underbelly of the superpower. They know it and they're seemingly willing to use it.

But take a look again at those two points. Both of those points have Obama failure written all over them. Weakness is neither feared nor respected. Obama's bowing, and apologizing and diminishing of the United States may have won him admiration from the Nobel Committee for another Peace Prize, but it isn't causing adversarial states to treat the U.S. with any respect. It has diminished America in the eyes of the world - friend and foe alike. 

China has observed President Obama's retreat on missile shield deployment in eastern Europe as a result of Russian bellicosity on the issue.  They've simply applied a little bit of a different, clever, spin on the same approach and are expecting the same type of result that Russia got.

The other point is the debt owed to China. China owned $713 billion in U.S. debt in November 2008. It's not all Obama's debt, but since coming to office, his prodigal spending ways have ballooned the number even more.  the debt was over $800 billion at last count, and it could conceivably grow multiple-fold if Obama had his way. The Chinese might have a convenient excuse to put the brakes on Obama's spending and borrowing by using the Taiwan situation as the rationale. Shanghai Daily hinted at Chinese concern last December;

The same fears took hold almost one year ago when the US government said it would issue up to US$2.56 trillion of US Treasury bond debt to stimulate the economy to get through the recession.

This time the budget deficit is larger. The Obama administration on Monday proposed a budget of US$3.83 trillion for fiscal year 2011 with a forecast deficit of US$1.56 trillion in 2010.

The planned fiscal deficit is 10.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) - up from a 9.9 percent share in 2009 - the largest deficit as measured against GDP since World War II.

The President is following an unsustainable spending path, and the Chinese are starting to want no part of it, despite the growth boost it gives their own economy.  Whether that's the reason, or the Taiwan issue is the reason, or both, China feels it is safe for it to flex it's muscle because they aren't intimidated by, or enamored of, President Obama. Welcome to the club, China.

SOTU 3: Arms Reduction Redux

This is almost too easy. My third piece on President Obama's State of The Union address, revisits his reference to nucleasr disarmament.

During the State of the Union, a mere 5 days ago the President had this important, 70's hippy flashback moment.

Even as we prosecute two wars, we are also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people – the threat of nuclear weapons. I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them. To reduce our stockpiles and launchers, while ensuring our deterrent, the United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades. And at April’s Nuclear Security Summit, we will bring forty-four nations together behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

Disarmament. At least he was not espousing unilateral disarmament, as I half expected him to do. Arms reduction isn't really a hot button issue these days the way say, terrorism is, but there it was. The President in full on 1970's peacenik mode.

In yesterday's U.K. Daily Mail the following was reported;

President Obama is planning to increase spending on America's nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them.

In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to maintain the U.S. arsenal - £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year.

The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security.

The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
And it flies in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.

Oh, well then. Never mind all that peacenik commentary. I'm sure the President has managed to yet again befuddle the collective braintrust at the Daily Kos.