I called out Charles Krauthammer the other day, wondering if he could bring himself to praise President Obama for his strategic work on his Asian trip. Krauthammer did so today, so a salute to him.

Meanwhile, Reidar Visser (as usual) produces the best analysis I've seen of the state of Iraqi politics. He notes that the way the deal works out, the Sadrists are in line to pick up the governorship of several provinces.

For my Korean War research I re-read the terrific memoir The Last Parallel: A Marine's War Journal, by Martin Russ, and was struck this time by his mini-essay on the beauty of watching a good point man on a patrol.

The point man is way out in front of the others. It is his responsibility to detect any signs of an enemy ambush… When a point man sees something that really worries him, he will merely drop down flat on the ground, and everyone behind him will do the same.

The strain on a point man is constant and he is usually exhausted by the end of the patrol. Always volunteers. There are some men, like Van Horn, who are great at it and feel obligated he offer their services often… It may sound phony, but -- to me -- being a good point man requires talent. It is a beautiful thing to watch a good one at work.

… The usual method of locomotion is not merely to walk or step. The idea is obviously to move as quietly as possible. In an ideal sense, a man will support himself on one leg and with the other free foot he will poke gently at the ground in front of him. When he finds a spot that is free of twigs or leaves, he will put his weight on that foot and continue the process through the entire patrol. I have never seen Van Horn move any other way. The pace is dreamlike… In three minutes I had taken twenty-six steps -- not quite nine steps a minute.

Something I've noticed: When I told people in conversation that I was deep into World War II in my research, they generally seemed mildly interested. But mention that I am deep into the Korean War and watch them start edging away… I think their message is, a normal person can be interested in World War II, but you have to be kind of around the bend to be interested in the Korean War.

If you saw the news item the other day that China, in a huff over some oceanic turf claims, was threatening to cut off the export of certain rare minerals to Japan, I bet you shrugged and turned the page.

But Business Week offers up the intelligence that U.S. smart bombs also rely on neodymium, an essential part of magnets on the fins that guide smart bombs. Guess who dominates that market? "The Pentagon has been incredibly negligent," Peter Leitner, a former trade adviser at the Defense Department, reassuringly tells BW. "There are plenty of early warning signs that China will use its leverage over these materials as a weapon."

Interested now? Good. My CNAS colleagues Christine Parthemore and Will Rogers run a blog titled "Natural Security" that specializes in issues like this. Minerals, energy and the political effects of climate change -- it's a growth market.

I was surprised to see in reading about the Korean War that South Korean President Syngman Rhee gave the United States government the same kind of fits that Afghan President Hamid Karzai does now.

At one point in the spring of 1951 Rhee was demanding that the U.S. give him enough weaponry and other gear to equip 10 divisions -- which, by coincidence, was approximately the amount of equipment that the U.S. calculated South Korean troops had abandoned in running away from North Korean and Chinese forces. At the same time Lt. Gen. James A. Van Fleet, then the senior U.S. commander on the ground in Korea, wrote this (quoted in Clay Blair's terrific The Forgotten War) about local security forces in that war:

The primary problem in the Republic of Korea is to secure competent leadership in their army. They do not have it, from the Minister of Defense on down, as is clearly evidenced by repeated battle failures of major units. This is the chief and basic responsibility of the President of the Republic in the military field. Until we get competent leadership, there is little reason to expect any better performance of ROK troops, or any higher degree of confidence than presently exists....

Until competent leadership is secured and demonstrates its worth, there should be no further talk of the U.S. furnishing arms and equipment for additional forces.

A few months later, in an internal cable, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea accused President Rhee of trying to "blindly.... sabotage" armistice talks. 

Interesting comment on US-China relations from Defense Secretary Gates in Singapore over the weekend:

Last fall, President Obama and President Hu made a commitment to advance sustained and reliable military-to-military relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China.  The key words here are "sustained" and "reliable" -- not a relationship repeatedly interrupted by and subject to the vagaries of political weather.

Regrettably, we have not been able to make progress on this relationship in recent months.  Chinese officials have broken off interactions between our militaries, citing U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as the rationale.  For a variety of reasons, this makes little sense:

• First, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are nothing new.  They have been a reality for decades and spanned multiple American administrations.
• Second, the United States has for years demonstrated in a very public way that we do not support independence for Taiwan.  Nothing - I repeat, nothing - has changed in that stance.
• Finally, because China's accelerating military buildup is largely focused on Taiwan, U.S. arms sales are an important component of maintaining peace and stability in cross-strait relations and throughout the region."

Zakaria has more on Beijing's new arrogance.

(HT to AD)

It looks like the crazy NoKos did indeed sink the South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors. Anyone have a good idea how Seoul should respond to this? I wonder if a year-long international ban on all North Korean ship traffic, including merchant ships, might be the way to go.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, following Bob Kaplan's lead, takes note of the growing role of the Chinese navy. It notes "a considerable change in the navy's strategic thinking." Among other things, the navy is looking further afield, " a substantial change from previous doctrine." It continues:

The new focus is now on 'long-range maritime training' in order to ‘protect national maritime sovereignty'. Senior PLA Navy officers have also called for the ‘formation and [maintenance] of lasting long-range combat capabilities.'

Significant progress has been made towards achieving China's objective of building a fully fledged blue-water navy by 2050. Substantial new funding has allowed it to evolve rapidly from a coastal defence force to a navy capable of limited power projection."

I didn't realize that the Chinese government might see possible advantages in the melting of the northern icecap. But apparently it does, and the foreign ministers of some of the colder nations are discussing what to do about the panda bear's interest in going polar.

"Earlier this month, a Chinese rear admiral asserted that the Arctic belongs to all peoples," writes Michael Byers, a professor at the Univ. of British Columbia who wrote Who Owns the Arctic?

Over the weekend I finished The Vagrants, a terrific novel by Yiyun Li about China in the late 1970s, in the ebb tide period after the Cultural Revolution but before the economic opening. I think this is the richest novel I've read in a year or more. Anyone curious about China at all would enjoy it, as would anyone who simply likes a good novel.

It is perhaps the most scathingly anti-revolutionary book I've ever read, except perhaps for Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit. At one point the wisest (and most broken) character in the book asks,

... what is a revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive? Let me tell you -- history is, unlike what they say on the loudspeakers, not driven by revolutionary force but by people's desire to climb up onto someone else's neck and shit and pee as he or she wants.

But it is more than a political novel, it is a great story, beautifully written. It begins in March 21, 1979, with the execution of a young woman who had been a fanatical Red Guard but had lost her faith in Communism and become a determined counterrevolutionary. As she is paraded before being killed, it becomes clear that her vocal cords have been cut, to prevent her from making a final statement. We also learn that one possible reason for her being sentenced to death is that a Party official needs new kidneys, and hers are extracted before she is put to death. It ends about five weeks later, on May Day.

Postscript: Life goes on. After I wrote this item, I went shopping at the Pentagon City Costco. In the cashier's line I stood behind what looked to be a group of visiting Chinese officials, looking very FOB. They were buying tons of bottles of Rogaine and One A Day multivitamins.

Lizzie Threlkeld's idea of a good time is attending a meeting of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Here is her thoughtful report:

By Elizabeth Threlkeld
Best Defense deputy chief East Asian finance bureau

Could China use its U.S. debt holdings to squeeze us on foreign policy?

That's unlikely, at least in the short term, according to most of the witnesses who testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission last week. Beijing's role as our banker does give it significant influence in Washington. But what's often lost is the fact that China relies just as much on the U.S. as a destination for its investments. To avoid a jarring shift in this so-called balance of financial terror, Washington should do two things. First, to remain a credible borrower, we need to tackle the deficit. Second, we should lead a multilateral effort to confront China on its trade practices and currency valuation, a cause many countries worldwide can get behind. It also would reduce the chances of Beijing converting its economic influence into outsized foreign policy power. 

Currently, the New York Fed puts China's holdings of U.S. Treasury Securities at $755 billion, making it our second largest foreign investor, just behind Japan. But the real figure could be closer to $1 trillion when you add in Hong Kong's $153 billion and possible offshore investments through third parties. As for foreign currency reserves, Beijing holds around $2.4 trillion, according to the People's Bank of China.

Fears that China might dump much of that debt -- and trigger an international sell-off -- are unfounded. For one, Beijing would suffer considerable losses on its U.S. holdings (although Cornell Professor and Brookings Senior Fellow Eswar Prasad argued, Beijing would lose less than most analysts believe). More fundamental, though, is another issue: If not here, where? There is simply no other market deep enough to absorb all of the capital China has invested. As Dr. Derek Scissors of the Heritage Foundation put it, China has two options for its money: "buy U.S. bonds or build a really big mattress." And since China's foreign currency investments are what allow it to keep the renminbi pegged artificially low against the dollar, the mattress idea won't get much bounce.

On the flip side, we do rely heavily on Chinese investment to finance everything from stimulus spending to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Beijing were to try to use its creditor status to pressure Washington, we could push back with trade sanctions and potentially find other lenders. Neither is an attractive prospect, however, as China would no doubt match our sanctions with those of its own, and our growing deficit could make the search for alternative sources of financing difficult. For the short term, at least, it seems we're coming to state of mutually assured economic destruction; both countries need each other and neither is likely to risk any serious damage to the relationship.

As a result, the U.S. has more leverage than you might think, both in economic and foreign policy. Tufts' Fletcher School Professor and FP blogger extraordinaire Dazzlin' Daniel Drezner criticized the supplicant attitude the Obama Administration adopted early on towards China when Secretaries Clinton and Geithner both seemed to plead for continued lending. He sees our more recent decisions like the sale of arms to Taiwan as a needed adjustment of this misguided course. Right now, he argues, China's economic clout has given it more autonomy and a greater ability to resist U.S. pressure. But Beijing remains unable to force Washington's hand on various economic and foreign policy decisions.

China's influence is much stronger in many of the developing countries where it's heavily invested. These nations depend on Beijing for significant financial and technical assistance and don't offer enough in return to balance their relationships. China is cultivating various suppliers of raw materials from the developing world, ensuring individual countries are easily replaceable should they refuse to kowtow to Beijing. As a result, Chinese economic investment will likely translate into political returns from such countries -- an outcome that could pose serious challenges to U.S. foreign policy goals, especially in the longer term.

Indeed, the greatest threat China poses to the U.S. is over the long term. If another reserve currency were to emerge that could absorb Chinese investment, the U.S. would no longer be China's only option. Beijing has recently shown interest in either internationalizing the renminbi or in using IMF-issued Special Drawing Rights, although a Chinese economist reportedly dismissed the latter as "the Esperanto of international reserve currencies." But such alternatives might look more attractive if the U.S. is unable to get its economic house in order and tackle the skyrocketing deficit. Granted, China, too, has domestic concerns. Prasad explained that much of the bluster we see from China is in response to instability within the country where nationalism is seen as a safe channel for political expression. If nationalism grows too strong or loses its effectiveness as a safety valve, all bets are off.

To try to rein in China's economic and foreign policy reach, most of the witnesses suggested the U.S. take advantage of the fact that we're not the only country frustrated with Beijing's trade and currency policies. ASEAN countries, the EU, and various developing nations are all suffering from Chinese economic controls, and working with these partners to pressure China on trade and its exchange rate would be a useful step. India, in particular, as a powerful country not closely bound to China, might prove a key ally. Nearly all of the panelists advocated using the G20 as a mechanism to address these concerns multilaterally. But the general feeling was that Washington is just going to have to get used to the fact that, after twenty years alone on the world stage, the U.S. is no longer pulling all the strings.

Incidentally, a couple of times during the hearing, Commissioner Larry Woertzel citied this Defense News article as evidence that the recently released QDR intentionally softened its tone on China for fear of angering our banker in Beijing. I don't see much support for that in the article itself, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has insights into that question.

I've been around the block enough to have seen predictions of a North Korean collapse come and go. But this comment from proven provider John McCreary got my attention:

During the weekend, foreign diplomats, accredited in Pyongyang, claimed that large spontaneous rallies protesting the currency devaluation and replacement have been breaking out in the North Korean capital and other major cities. The Army has been put on a heightened state of alert in case of mass acts of disobedience.

yeowatzup/Flickr

Remember yesterday I mentioned David Wood as a good defense reporter? He has a terrific column today about what is going wrong in Afghanistan. I'll summarize it here, but only if you promise to click on this link and read the whole thing.

Wood begins with a good strong "lede" that manages to combine action and policy:

When a warning crackled over the radio of a suspected ambush ahead, Lt. Col. Rob Campbell swore softly and ordered his three armored trucks to a halt. What happened next illustrates why the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is failing, why commanders here are asking for more manpower -- and why they are pleading for more time.

Then his main character strides into the picture, along with a succinct statement of the problem:

Leaping out with his M-4 carbine, Campbell, a tall cavalry officer with sandy hair and freckles, strode through the empty, sun-baked fields flanking the road while his men fanned out, checking the ground for IEDs, sweeping the fields for snipers. The Afghan police assigned to patrol this stretch of road? Nowhere in sight.

Campbell comes off as a good, thoughtful officer doing well, but conscious that time is running out. Anyway, read the whole thing -- one of the best things I've read on Afghanistan in awhile.

Meanwhile, NATO aircraft hit some hijacked fuel tankers in northern Afghanistan, killing a bunch of people. Some of them were insurgents, some of them children and other civilians trying to get the fuel the Taliban was distributing from the trucks for free. The total is somewhere between 50 and 90, it appears. My question: Does this air strike  pass the Petraeus test, which I saw him apply in Mosul back in 2003-2004: Before taking any action, consider whether it will create more opponents than it stops. Anyway, this makes me wonder if NATO forces got snookered into the attack.

Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

I was surprised when I saw this Financial Times chart passed along by the ever-inquisitive Nirav Patel. (Use the Y axis slider to move it from 1999 to the present-and watch the rise of Asian banks.) I was surprised to see how the relative size of American banks has shrunk.