There's something happening here. What it is ...... is very very clear. John Jay spoke of it in his essay here - nature hates a vacuum. And Obama is creating that vacuum -
"where the sun recedes. the United States navy will disappear from the Indian ocean and the china sea. The first result of this will emerge in conflict between China and Taiwan, with Taiwan exposed to missile fire from the Chinese mainland. soon, the red Chinese will surmount the obstacle of a 40 miles stretch of ocean, and will invade and occupy Taiwan. Who or what is to stop China from doing this. In the absence of an American navy in the Indian ocean and the South China seas, a power vacuum exists, into which will step a militarily resurgent Japan, and expansion minded China and India. China and India are planning the laying of many “bottoms,” which to you lubbers, means that they are going to build blue water navies. with the presence of the American navy upon the high seas, with over 200 years of warfare and strategic experience, these countries might have been expected to be prudent in their expansion: a country and military force does not step into that sort of context with impunity or without caution, especially given the aggressive posture for battle always exhibited in the U.S. navy, from John Paul Jones to Bull Halsey to Chester Nimitz. where once there would have been every caution exercised, there will only be “irrational exuberance” as the Chinese and the Indians rush in to fill the vacuum."
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon charged Monday that five Chinese ships shadowed and maneuvered dangerously close to a U.S. Navy vessel in an apparent attempt to harass the American crew.
Defense officials in the Obama administration said the incident Sunday followed several days of "increasingly aggressive" acts by Chinese ships in the region. The incident took place in international waters in the South China Sea, about 75 miles south of Hainan Island.
U.S. officials said a protest was to be delivered to Beijing's military attache at a Pentagon meeting Monday.
The USNS Impeccable sprayed one ship with water from fire hoses to force it away. Despite the force of the water, Chinese crew members stripped to their underwear and continued closing within 25 feet, the Defense Department said.
"On March 8, 2009, five Chinese vessels shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity to USNS Impeccable, in an apparent coordinated effort to harass the U.S. ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters," the Pentagon statement said.
In other developments in the perceived American weakness:
JJ wrote, "and, though they have neither the foresight nor the intellectual capacity to understand it, they give up the peace won by the blood of patriots the world over, to an inevitable worldwide conflict as new balances of power and influence and strategic dominance are worked out and resolved. nature abhors a vacuum, and the same may be observed of politics and geo-politics especially, and into the vacuums formerly occupied by the formidable presence of the United States"
Back in November, Victor Davis Hanson gave an unforgettable speech at Restoration Weekend ...
It seems to me that what we're all worried about is what does Barack Obama think about the world at large—when he says that Iran is a small threat, and then he corrects himself and says it's a large threat—when Georgia is invaded by Russia and he tells us first that each side is of equal blame and then he suggests Georgia prompted the entire crisis and then suggests the UN should adjudicate it and then he suggests that when an authoritarian country like Russia tries to destroy a democracy its because of the precedent of an American democracy trying to destroy an authoritarian regime in Iraq.
It's hard to make sense of all this. All I can make sense of is, he has a very different view of the world. This view is anti-platonic. And I say that, not to be condescending, but Plato said that the natural order of the world was chaos, it was war—peace was a parenthesis, it had to be achieved and worked at. I think in the Obama view that men like him that are charismatic, articulate, they can change the world because it's naturally a peaceful thing until people like George Bush rush in and through their stubbornness—"smoke 'em out dead or alive" vernacular—destroys it, but the fact of the matter is the only reason there is any semblance of peace and tranquility in the world today is because in places as diverse as the Aegean, planes over-flying in Greek airspace daily, where there's near fighting on Cypress, or whether we are talking about the Korean Sea and the Philippines and Taiwan and South Korean democracies not going nuclear because the United States is there, or whether Russian ships keep out of Norway every hour—all of that is predicated on the presence of the United States.
To be frank, or to put it a different way, Vladimir Putin doesn't give a damn that Barack Obama is African American. And the Chinese autocrats do not hear very well "hope" and "change"—it doesn't translate to Chinese very well—and the Europeans don't care if he has a nifty jump shot. All they want to know is half the world are vying to try to take advantage of regional opportunities if the United States is not there to stop mold, and to stop rust, which is the natural organic order of the world. They take advantage of it and our friends are there waiting to see which side to join. All of our friends in Europe know that, and Australia and South America. They don't have deities. Nations don't have deities like Barack Obama, they have interests. And their interests are predicated on who is going to win and who is going to lose. Into that void comes Barack Obama.
UPDATE: Martin at National Terror Alert points out the Russian bombers that flew along the Canadian coastline right before Obama's visit. There is no doubt we are being tested. There is no doubt we are being tested.
