Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / Daniel Case) Source- Eurasia Review Author- Michael Lelyveld A steep drop in China’s oil investment may make it more dependent on imports than ever and more determined to advance its interests in the South China Sea, recent data suggests. So far this year, China’s growth in fixed-asset investments (FAI) like buildings and machinery has fallen short of forecasts with a major decline in the petroleum sector, according to official reports. While overall FAI, outside rural households, rose 10.5 percent in the first four months of the year, investment in the oil and gas sector plunged 27.5 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The sharp cutback is a reaction to low crude prices and profit pressures on China’s state-owned oil companies, analysts say. The result was a 5.6-percent dip in domestic oil production to 16.6 million metric tons in April, or an average of 4.04 million barrels

Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / USN Source- The National Interest Author- Sam Bateman Recent months have seen a continuing increase in military activities in the South China Sea, particularly by the United States and China, but also by ‘bit players’ like India and Japan. These activities only serve to heighten tensions in the region at a time when the priority should be to demilitarize the area. In the most recent serious incident, on May 17, two Chinese fighter jets intercepted a US Navy EP-3 intelligence and surveillance aircraft about 50 nautical miles east of Hainan Island. This incident could have violated agreed upon procedures between the United States and China to manage such encounters. It follows earlier incidents when Chinese jet fighters intercepted US P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft over the South China and Yellow seas. The United States recently conducted its third freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in the South China Sea since China star

Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / StellerD Source- Eurasia Review Author- Giorgio Cafiero It should come as no surprise that China is making its way to Qatar, particularly with respect to the establishment of the Silk Road Initiatives. Despite China leading the initiatives, it is impossible for Beijing to do everything alone; international participation and contributions are needed. By Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat and Giorgio Cafiero* Last month at the China-Arab Cooperation Forum in Doha, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi postulated that Qatar should take part in the realization of China’s Silk Road Initiatives. Considering Qatar as a key partner to promote the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) project, which Chinese President Xi Jinping initiated in 2014, Yi said that the initiative shares common cooperative opportunities with the Qatar National Vision 2030, a future development roadmap launched by Doha in 2008. To this end, China hopes to strengthen bilateral relation

Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / USN Source- The National Interest  Author- Michael Peck Like an urban dweller fearful of muggers around every corner, the U.S. Navy is now contemplating a grim future where no neighborhood is safe. Whether it operates in the South China Sea, the Baltic or the Persian Gulf, the Navy has to reckon on salvos of deadly antiship missiles. When even an organization like Hezbollah can get its hands on ship-killer missiles, it's a signal that world's oceans are a dangerous place. But seventy-two years ago, the U.S. Navy faced a similar threat. By late 1944, the U.S. Navy was the mightiest fleet on Earth. The Nazi U-boat threat had been mostly vanquished, the Japanese surface fleet decimated, and Japanese airpower a shadow of its former glory. Yet four months later, U.S. sailors were terrified. Japan had unleashed the kamikazes, the "divine wind" of suicide aircraft that over the next ten months would sink more than fif

President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe ( Source- Wikimedia commons / USAF) Source- The Diplomat Author- David Volodzko “Let me be a Hitler tenfold,” President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe said in March 2003 to opponents of his racist campaign against whites. The opposition party led a national strike that week, and Mugabe set the dogs on them. Patricia Mukonda, a opposition secretary, said they broke into her home, beat her, raped her with a baton, and forced her six-year-old son to watch. The United States condemned the attacks, saying they were “directly attributable” to Mugabe’s Hitler remarks, and froze the assets of 77 Zimbabwean officials, including Mugabe, while also working to get food supplies to Zimbabwe’s people. Less than a year later, Fu Ziying, China’s deputy commerce minister, signed an agreement strengthening trade relations between China and Zimbabwe. After meeting with Mugabe, Fu said, “It’s apparent that his Excellency has been very good.” Mugabe’s

Credits- Internet Image Source- War is Boring Author- Robert Beckhusen Coast guards around the world are often overlooked. Their missions — law enforcement and search and rescue — make them perhaps less bellicose than navies, although coast guards are often formal military branches in their own right, as in the United States. China’s coast guard is more muscular than most. Even combative. And China’s coast guard has one especially combative ship — the CCG3210, formerly known as the Yuzheng 310. CCG3210 has influenced politics in the South China Sea, of which China lays claim to virtually the entire territory. In a recent example from May, the Indonesian destroyer Oswald Siahaan-354 shelled the stern of a Chinese fishing trawler intruding in Indonesian waters near the Natuna Islands. That Indonesia found it appropriate to deploy a heavily-armed destroyer to intercept a fishing boat is partly because of a more aggressive approach by Jakarta to counter Chinese in

Image credits- VOA Source- The Diplomat  Author- David Gitter As many have written about recently, China is facing many difficulties as it seeks to enforce its territorial claims over vast areas of East Asia, including the South and East China Seas and Taiwan. In reality, all of these struggles reflect China’s longstanding desire to have the country’s periphery free from powers that have the potential to threaten it. What is new, however, is Beijing’s bold and seemingly impatient strategy to secure its periphery at the considerable expense of its neighbors. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has shown an increased tolerance for regional tensions as it vies for domination on all fronts simultaneously. This may in part be the outward reflection of Xi’s “strongman” personality, which requires near-total control domestically. More likely, China’s dash for dominance reflects a leadership consensus that the country must quickly exploit Beijing’s self-conceptualized period

Image credits- Brahmos Source- Russia & India Report Author- TASS Work to develop a hypersonic version of the joint Russian-Indian BrahMos missile will begin around the year 2022, and a prototype is likely to be ready in 2024, TASS learned from Praveen Pathak, marketing director of the BrahMos Aerospace company. “This will be a completely different missile, with a flight speed of about Mach 6,” Pathak told TASS at the KADEX-2016 Exhibition. Over the next three to four years, the company is planning to “speed up” the current supersonic version to Mach 4, he said. Pathak said the preliminary design is now being developed. In Russia and India, they are simultaneously considering different options for the shape of the future missile. This stage, according to the BrahMos Aerospace representative, will require “at least five or six years” to complete, and then, roughly in 2022, the development work will begin, and two years hence – the first “iron” sample should app

Image credits- Indian Navy Source- The National Interest Author- Vivek Mishra Recent developments in the Indian Ocean have been a witness to India’s mustering enough political will to advance its regional interests through actionable deliverables, visibly in opposition to mere notional assertions of the past. As India reorients its Indian Ocean policy, a tripartite transformation is underway—a regional outlook that ties together India’s Act East policy, its Look West policy and, most noteworthy, its cooperation with the United States in the regional maritime domain. Acting East The transformation from a Look East to an Act East policy has been at the center of India’s maritime recalibrations in the past few years. Such an approach has been accompanied by an improvement in relations with not just the individual countries to its east, but with strong regional organizations such as ASEAN. Countries of specific focus for India have recently included Vietnam, Brunei, T