Linky Friday: Meanwhile, Elsewhere

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

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4 Responses

  1. DensityDuck says:

    LF16: Hardly surprising, since Africa is the only continent left with a large population, a lot of land, and the kind of desperate poverty that leads governments to permit industry to work cheap (meaning, dirty).

    The reason that China has gotten so grabby with rock piles off its coast is that it wants to be able to extend its claims of territorial waters (and, therefore, the internationally-recognized right to free navigation.) There’s a future-war scenario where the UN condemns human-rights violations by Chinese corporations in Africa, and orders inspection of all goods traveling from African ports to Chinese ones. What China wants is to have enough sea claims that it can say “Chinese-flagged vessels are traveling in Chinese waters for the entire trip, therefore any interference with those vessels would be an act of war.”Report

  2. Kolohe says:

    LF5 – this is one of those cases where I’d like to hear ‘the other side’, as absent any real knowledge of the subject myself, I could still see the case for the Somali government making this play. But Rubin has a primae facie case himself.

    I am curious why Michael Rubin has had a burst of articles on Somalia in the past few weeks. (It’s not generally his thing, per his own bio)Report

  3. Kolohe says:

    Lf8 – to me, this is still a ‘so what’. Trying to play the traditional empire game is vast money sink in the 21st century with very limited upside. Plus even if Russia gets port call rights, it’s military is very limited in the way of ‘expeditionary’ (as is everyone else’s but the USA). Intel gathering can be done quite easily (and really more easily) without substantial presence, and it’s not like any ship can ‘sneak’ past the Suez anyway.

    And most of all, as the article mentions, China is trying to do all of this already, and has a lot more resources in multiple domains to edge out Russia in this game.Report