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IPFS News Link • WAR: About that War

Countdown to War in the South China Sea

• https://www.lewrockwell.com

On July 12th, 2016 the UN arbitration decision against China's claim of territorial islands based on "historical rights" ruled in favor of the Philippines, serving as the latest international war machine's ratcheting up imminent all-out war. The Rockefeller financed United Nations as a globalist extension of American Empire's dominance over the rest of the world is just another engineered US machination designed to instigate further conflict and tension as the latest face of Obama's announced 2011 Asian pivot, pushing, prodding and provoking a high-risk military showdown against re-designated cold war enemy China being potentially pinned in on all sides by US attempted aggression.

A recent example is Defense Secretary Ashton Carter's April trip to secure a military alliance with India, exploiting the strained Beijing-New Delhi relations over their mutual border dispute. Moreover, a visit last month to Washington by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi cemented the US-Indian military alliance in preparation for war against China. But with both the Asian pivot and the TPP stalling during this election year, a number of Asian countries are moving towards increased neutrality rather than buckling under to US Empire's mounting pressures to align with the United States against China.

Over this weekend the ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met at a conference in the Laos capital to decide how to respond to The Hague slamming China over the South China Sea dispute and, with nearly half the ASEAN members also contesting islands with China, aside from the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam, the meeting ended up deadlocked. It's being reported that Laos and Cambodia are unwilling to take a stand against China having been given recent Chinese aid and loans. And similar to Carter's April India visit, John Kerry is opportunistically flying into Vientiane on Monday morning to apply his undue superpower persuasion pressing ASEAN to also formally back the UN's decision against China.

With the Western elitist influenced UN proclamation rendering illegal China's reformation claims in the South China Sea, the tribunal's stiff ruling is being heralded as a much-needed victory for the globalists and US Empire. The relentless assault on China in recent years simultaneously combined with the same propaganda war tactics and militarized threat being used against China's prime allied partner Russia is producing an outcome that recklessly endangers every human life on our planet. The US-NATO-UN's divisive agenda is a driving force racing us towards World War III against the two Eastern nuclear powers.

After ruling last year that it held jurisdiction despite China's objections, the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration earlier this month ruled that China does not possess any legitimate claim over dozens of contested islands in the South China Sea and that specifically the islands in the Scarborough Shoal located 140 miles (225km) from the Philippine coastline do not belong to China due to its deemed violation of UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS). UNCLOS stipulates a 22km (near 14 miles) maritime boundary and legal access to economic resource development within 370km (230 miles). The Hague tribunal flatly rejected China's "nine-dash line" map that carves up the vast bulk of the disputed sea waters claimed as China's historical precedent. The panel's decision is non-binding and in fact illegal since arbitration requires both conflicting parties to voluntarily seek resolution. China never chose to participate. Thus in response to the ruling, the Chinese ministry claims, "The award is null and void and has no binding force."

The Hague ruling charges China's reclamation efforts as "causing severe harm to the coral reef environment," violating the UN Convention. Funny how the UN never criticizes the US for wreaking total environmental havoc and destruction in the Pacific islands still under colonial rule in Okinawa Japan or the Marianas or Guam where the native populations and ecological habitats are being poisoned and wantonly degraded by Empire's total disregard for local life and health carrying out its massive military operations. Again, the US and UN exceptionalism and double standard hypocrisy rule supreme every time. And true to hypocritical form, while the US is busily admonishing China for its unwillingness to follow the Permanent Court of Arbitration's finding, the US itself refuses to ratify the Law of the Seas Convention.

Though the legal challenge contesting China's regional island claims were initiated in 2013 by the Philippines, actually it was the United States throwing its full weight around the globe despite its ocean's width away. Not one Filipino attorney was a member of the legal team that filed the lawsuit to the arbitrator – all American lawyers from a high rolling Boston legal firm other than a small British contingent. Long before this month's decision, China asserted that it would not comply with the UN ruling due to never recognizing the UN's jurisdiction over sovereign maritime matters. China has consistently called for bilateral negotiations between China and Philippines as the only viable sovereign resolution to the territorial dispute. Even the recently elected Philippine president concurred that a bilaterally reached agreement is the most judicious option available to resolving the controversy. Under the previous Aquino administration in 2012, Philippine's former US naval base at Subic Bay was reoffered the US Empire after the Philippine Senate in 1992 had ordered it off-limits to US military due to repeated rape and murder cases of underage Filipina girls.

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