Driving the drumbeat are strategic concerns shared with Washington, with possibly some personal ambitions thrown in for good measure. Canberra is seen responding to approaches by Washington to its allies in the Pacific, principally Japan and Australia, to add their weight more openly to the US deterrent…
Read Here | Asia Times
They’ve been dubbed China’s “Little Blue Men,” an allegedly Beijing-controlled maritime militia that analysts say could be hundreds of boats and thousands of crew members strong.China doesn’t acknowledge their existence and when questioned, refers to them as a “so-called maritime militia.”
Read Here | CNN
The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is now the largest navy in the world. This development, announced in the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2020 annual report on the Chinese military, appears to demonstrate a determined strategy in Beijing to develop a powerful blue water fleet.
Read Here | WarOnTheRocks
An initially more modest Asian NATO might start with a budget of less than $1 billion, a small secretariat based in Japan or Australia, and naval-only forces committed on a purely rotational basis. It would send a strong message to China without being explicitly directed against it.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
The Quad was conceived in an August 2007 meeting in Manila, held on the sidelines of ASEAN Regional Forum… It was widely perceived as a security forum to rein in the Chinese belligerence in the Indo-Pacific and re-establish a rule-based international order.
Read Here | The Diplomat
The People’s Republic of China operates the largest state-subsidized fishing fleet in the world. The questionable practices of the hundreds of Chinese vessels operating off the west coast of South America illustrate the extent to which competition with an ascendant China is already underway in the maritime domain — and far beyond the South China Sea.
As India and Australia prepare for a virtual summit next month between prime ministers amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, a possible strategic initiative could involve the cooperative use of their respective island territories in the Indian Ocean for strategic purposes. India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands are well positioned to offer significant advantages for both countries.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin may be the world masters of the tactic, but Boris Johnson also understands the appeal of diversionary foreign policy. He made a career out of picking fights with the European Union — winning validation in the 2016 Brexit referendum and, very likely, in soon becoming his party’s choice to succeed Prime Minister Theresa May. Now, however, Johnson stands to inherit a foreign policy crisis that makes an already difficult job a lot harder.
The Andaman Sea is flanked by the Andaman and Nicobar chain of islands in the West, Myanmar to the north, the Thai-Malay peninsula to the east, and the Sumatra island to the south. It funnels into the Straits of Malacca that connects the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The large amount of shipping that enters the Andaman Sea from the east heads to Singapore, from where it turns the Pacific Ocean. Long seen as a political backwater, the Andaman Sea is rapidly regaining its strategic salience.
