We're looking at one busy world stage in late February 2019

There is today's second summit between Kim and the VSG:

Although many experts are skeptical Kim will give up the nuclear weapons he likely sees as his best guarantee of continued rule, there was a palpable, carnival-like excitement among many in Hanoi as the final preparations were made for the meeting. There were also huge traffic jams in the already congested streets.
Officials in Hanoi said they only had about 10 days to prepare for the summit — much less than the nearly two months Singapore had before the first Trump-Kim meeting last year— but still vowed to provide airtight security for the two leaders.
“Security will be at the maximum level,” Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Hoai Trung told reporters.
The ultra-tight security will be appreciated by North Korean authorities, who are extremely vigilant about the safety of Kim, the third member of his family to rule the North with absolute power. Kim’s decision to take a train, not a plane, may have been influenced by the better ability to control security.
Vietnam is eager to show off its huge economic and development improvements since the destruction of the Vietnam War, but the country also tolerates no dissent and is able to provide the kind of firm hand not allowed by more democratic potential hosts.

Tensions flare between India and Pakistan in the wake of the recent car-bombing death of 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir. The latest:

Pakistan’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen Asif Ghafoor, said Indian planes crossed into the Muzafarabad sector of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. He said Pakistan scrambled fighters and the Indian jets “released payload in haste” near Balakot.
India’s foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, told reporters in New Delhi that Indian fighter jets targeted Jaish-e-Mohammad camps in a pre-emptive strike after intelligence indicated another attack was being planned.

There will surely be more elucidation regarding this development:

The resignation of Iran’s most famous diplomat and the man often seen as the foreign face of Tehran [foreign minister Muhammad Javad Zarif], has plunged Iran’s highest levels of government and media into a momentary sense of bewilderment and lack of certainty. It illustrates not only the differences within the regime but also the ability of news organizations in Tehran to gather news with some levels of independence, more than in other totalitarian regimes. The Iranian Students News Agency, for instance, provides a discussion about various “sources” close to Zarif and President Hasssan Rouhani’s office.

US Vice President Mike Pence met with the Venezuelan president that the US recognizes, Juan Guaido, in Bogota, Colombia yesterday.  Pence announced more sanctions against the on-the-ropes outlaw regime of Maduro, as well as aid for neighboring countries dealing with an influx of desperate Venezuelans.

This is a welcome development:

Britain said on Monday it plans to ban all wings of Hezbollah due to its destabilizing influence in the Middle East, classing the Lebanese Islamist movement as a terrorist organization.

In a world such as this, it behooves post-America to have its wits about it. We shall see if it is up to the task. We certainly have some good folks on the case. I do wish Nikki Haley was still officially involved, but I think the tone she set will still drive policy to some degree.

A Yale professor who doesn't think much of Ken Burns's Vietnam documentary

Scott Johnson of Power Line got in touch with Charles Hill for his view, and got a blunt response:

I wrote Yale’s Charles Hill. Professor Hill is diplomat in residence and lecturer in International Studies at Yale as well as a research fellow of the Hoover Institution. 

Before he alighted at Yale, Professor Hill had an incredibly distinguished career in the State Department. In the course of his career in the government he served in Saigon during the climactic period of the Vietnam War (1971-1973). Among the roles he served was that of mission coordinator in the United States Embassy. Molly Worthen covers Professor Hill’s work in Vietnam in chapter 6 of her precocious 2005 biography, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill. 

Professor Hill watched the documentary with intense attention. I asked Professor Hill if he would comment on the documentary, however briefly. He responded:

The most repulsive sub-theme starts at the very outset when a veteran says: “I was scared. I hated them. I was SO scared!” This quaking fear of American troops is repeated throughout the 18 hours, often silently with just quick photos of US soldiers with expressions of fear.

In a separate message he commented on the documentary’s depiction of the war after 1968:

When the US and South Vietnamese cause turned the war on the ground in a sharply different direction and began actually to win it (I was there), the cultural elite of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock, promoted by the media, simply stopped reporting on the war so that the astonishing South Vietnamese victories over the invading North Vietnamese Army on three international fronts in 1972 was barely mentioned. Burns’s aim is to make sure the annoyingly christened (sic) “Millennials” will be locked into the leftist narrative of his own formative years -– to him, the real “Greatest Generation.”

I think we are beginning to get somewhere. 

In a subsequent post, Johnson has linked to the takes of several more dissenters from the Burns narrative.

Vietnam and China may sport posh hotels and joint ventures with US companies, but they are still ruled by God-hating Communist regimes

From Vietnam:

Officials at a Vietnamese prison are torturing a pastor for violating an order to keep silent to U.S. officials about they ways prison officials previously abused him.

Pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh, father of five, met with officials from the U.S. consulate in Ho Chi Minh City in May and told them that prison officials had beaten him, put him in stocks, put glass in his food, and humiliated him, according to UCA News Tuesday.

Chinh’s wife, Tran Thi Hong, who was also beaten and imprisoned for two months and continues to suffer harassment, told UCA News that prison officials put Chinh in solitary confinement in a small space immediately after his meeting with U.S. officials. Prison officials warned Chinh the day before the meeting that he was not to speak of the abuses they inflict on him.

“I am very concerned about his poor health in solitary confinement because he is suffering severe sinusitis and high blood pressure,” Hong said.

The Vietnamese government arrested Chinh in 2012 on the charge of “undermining government solidarity” for criticizing how religious expression is limited in Vietnam and sentenced him to 11 years in prison, according to Jackie Wolcott from the U.S. Commission of International Religious Freedom.

Chinh has been abused for six years for refusing to admit wrongdoing, despite prison officials’ attempts to make him confess. Vietnamese government officials attempted to break Chinh earlier this year by lying to him that his wife, Hong, had been unfaithful.

From China:

Along the valleys and mountains hugging the East China Sea, a Chinese government campaign to remove crosses from church spires has left the countryside looking as if a typhoon had raged down the coast, decapitating buildings at random.
In the town of Shuitou, workers used blowtorches to cut a 10-foot-high cross off the 120-foot steeple of the Salvation Church. It now lies in the churchyard, wrapped in a red shroud.
About 10 miles to the east, in Mabu township, riot police officers blocked parishioners from entering the grounds of the Dachang Church while workers erected scaffolding and sawed off the cross. In the nearby villages of Ximei, Aojiang, Shanmen and Tengqiao, crosses now lie toppled on rooftops or in yards, or buried like corpses.
On a four-day journey through this lush swath of China’s Zhejiang Province, I spoke with residents who described in new detail the breathtaking scale of an effort to remove Christianity’s most potent symbol from public view. Over the past two years, officials and residents said, the authorities have torn down crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 churches, sometimes after violent clashes with worshipers trying to stop them.
“It’s been very difficult to deal with,” said one church elder in Shuitou, who like others asked for anonymity in fear of retaliation by the authorities. “We can only get on our knees and pray.”

It's mainly limited to one province at present, but strong signals are coming from the central government:

In a major speech on religious policy last month, Mr. Xi urged the ruling Communist Party to “resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means,” and he warned that religions in China must “Sinicize,” or become Chinese. The instructions reflect the government’s longstanding fear that Christianity could undermine the party’s authority. Many human rights lawyers in China are Christians, and many dissidents have said they are influenced by the idea that rights are God-given.
In recent decades, the party had tolerated a religious renaissance in China, allowing most Chinese to worship as they chose and even encouraging the construction of churches, mosques and temples, despite regular crackdowns on unregistered congregations and banned spiritual groups such as Falun Gong.
Hundreds of millions of people have embraced the nation’s major faiths: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and Christianity. There are now about 60 million Christians in China. Many attend churches registered with the government, but at least half worship in unregistered churches, often with local authorities looking the other way.
But Mr. Xi’s decision to convene a “religious affairs work conference” last month — the first such leadership meeting in 15 years — suggested that he was unhappy with some of these policies. People familiar with the party’s discussions say it intends to apply some lessons from the campaign in Zhejiang to rein in religious groups across the country.

Yes, you can have a nice vacation in, or business trip to, these nations, but behind the welcoming facade is Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which tolerates no god besides the state.

 

 

 

Wednesday roundup

Michelle Malkin sticks it to Jimmy Kimmel for using his show's monologue to employ his newborn son's congenial heart defect as a way to launch into a falsehood-riddled diatribe about health care policy.

Great interview with Rick Hess, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who focuses on education policy. A taste:

 . . . it’s important to recognize that the center in education is two standard deviations to the left of the American public. People in and around education think they have the whole spectrum covered: there is, after all, a fierce conflict between the “reform” camp and teachers unions. But this clash has primarily existed within the Democratic Party. The “reformers” have mostly been Great Society liberals who believe in closing “achievement gaps” and pursuing “equity” via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been staunchly Democratic teacher unions and their allies.

Unfortunately, many in education spend so little time talking to or engaging with anyone on the right that they sometimes seem to conclude that no reasonable person would be on the right. Expressing mainstream conservative concerns about federal overreach or the problems with race-based policy can be enough to get you called a clueless reactionary.

A core difference between the two camps is that progressives tend to see social policy in terms of structural inequities—particularly race, class, and gender—while conservatives are more prone to see things in terms of individual responsibility. But those things are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, American education has always been about combatting structural inequity and cultivating personal responsibility, so there should be lots of room for cooperation. Education can open the doors of opportunity and give all students a more equitable start. These are things that we all want. And we all want every child to attend schools that fire their imaginations, impart knowledge, teach critical skills, equip them to be responsible citizens, inspire joy, and prepare them for success. Our disagreements are usually over how to do all this.

Donald Trump is not a great president, and Roger Kimball, an erudite and incisive fellow who seems to have swallowed the Kool-Aid,  is either mistaken or being disingenuous when he says he is (and glosses over the stuff enumerated in the linked Bloomberg article).

In discussing a documentary about the mid-1970s period in US-Vietnam relations, Kyle Smith at NRO spells out the shameful truth:

Last Days in Vietnam, the Oscar-nominated 2014 film by Rory Kennedy (the youngest child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who died before she was born) is available for streaming on Netflix. It’s a devastating counterpunch to the anti-American propaganda Hollywood and the rest of the leftist culture have been spewing about Vietnam for more than four decades. Kennedy’s film should make us angry only that America didn’t go far enough. South Vietnam could have been another South Korea if our cultural-political resolve had just remained steadfast at the crucial moment. It’s as if we spent years painstakingly building a billion-dollar palace, then let termites destroy it rather than spending money on an exterminator.

Mixing in interviews with, among others, Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage, who was then a Special Forces adviser, as well as astonishing archival footage of the events of 1975 in Saigon, the film explains that the North Vietnamese were “terrified” of President Nixon in 1974. The Paris Peace Accords had sparked a full withdrawal of American troops, and Nixon had warned in writing that the U.S. would “respond with full force” if the North failed to abide by the ceasefire terms. But after Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974, says then-CIA analyst Frank Snepp in the film, “Hanoi saw the road to Saigon as being wide open.” In the spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese army scythed through South Vietnam with astonishing force. Five thousand or so Americans and their families were all that remained of the U.S. presence, and when President Ford asked Congress for $700 million in new military aid, he was scorned, to the undying shame of the lawmakers in question. Democratic senator John McClellan of Arkansas said, “I think it is too late to do any good. Further military aid could merely prolong the conflict and perhaps postpone briefly the inevitable — a Communist victory.” 

The danger in the Abbas visit to the White House lies in Squirrel-Hair's zeal to be seen as  a deal-maker.

Thursday roundup

The Most Equal Comrade is a real piece of work. Now he's had himself awarded the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Public Service. Talk about a Dear Leader level of creepiness.

Yet another jihadist attack in Turkey, this time a car bomb and shoot-up at a courthouse in Izmir.

By now you've heard about the horrific capture / torture / racial taunting of the mentally challenged white guy in Chicago, the live video of which was posted on Facebook. CNN's Don Lemon - he of the New Year's Eve drunken on-camera subjecting of himself to an ear-piercing - says it wasn't evil.

Bookworm is on a trip of some sort to Vietnam and is blogging about sites she's visiting and insights it's giving her into US involvement in that land when the then-sovereign nation-state of South Vietnam was trying to stave off conquest by the Communist north.

Four days ago, we visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, which is the Viet Cong version of the war. It’s factually accurate, although slanted to show the Americans as mass slaughterers — which is to be expected, because to the victors belong the narrative. Of course, the word “victors” in this case is one I choose carefully, because the US won the war on the ground but, as it has since the Vietnam War, abandoned the fight in the court of public opinion and, therefore, effectively lost the war anyway.

One of the interesting things that the museum admitted was that the Viet Cong violated the Paris Peace Accords because of Watergate. Back in 1973, when Kissinger negotiated a Korea style peace treaty with the Viet Cong and the democratic (and painfully corrupt) South Vietnamese, the museum says that the VCs intended to abide by the agreement because they were scared of Nixon. That is, they expected rough treatment if they violated the Accords.

According to the museum, all that changed when Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal. The VCs (correctly) assessed Ford as weaker than Nixon, and that was the green light they needed to invade South Vietnam and conquer the country. The lesson I drew from that is that, as we’ve seen with Obama and the Middle East is that weak presidents are dangerous to peace. Bad guys need to be afraid of the good guy, not comfortable walking all over him.

The second interesting thing was that our guide admitted that the VCs lost the Tet Offensive, adding that the Americans lost the war anyway because “the political climate changed.” His statement led me back to something I wanted to explain to the Little Bookworm who’s on the trip with me.

Wars, I said, are often won and lost, not on the battlefield, but amongst the civilians. That’s why Sherman’s march through Georgia was what was needed to end the Civil War. As long as Southern civilians supported the war, their soldiers would just keep fighting until they could fight no more.

In the 1960s and 1970s, although the battles took placer in Vietnam, the real war was between America, on the one hand, and the Russian Soviets and Chinese Communists on the other hand. While the bloody military battles themselves barely reached America’s civilians, the communists were able to do something that Americans were unable to do: namely, wage psychological war against the American population.

My parents, who were no fools, never doubted that the entire anti-war, hippie, drug scene originated with the communists. As Ion Mihai Pacepa explains in Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, my parents were correct. The Vietnam War was a two-front war and the anti-war movement was the second front.

Quinn Hillyer at NRO says that if you want substantiation that Jeff Sessions is no racist, there are several black Democrats you can ask.

East Asia pivots away from post-America

The fruits of world-stage planned decline:

Under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the U.S. “pivoted” to Asia. Unfortunately, Asia seems now to be pivoting away from the U.S.

As noted here, the Philippines, under its president Rodrigo Duterte, has turned away from America and towards to China. Duterte explained:

America has lost now. I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow. And maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way.

Malaysia seems to agree. Calling himself “a true friend of China, its prime minister Najib Razak arrived in China yesterday promising significantly closer defense ties with the Asian giant. Indeed, he is set to sign a major naval with China, said to be the first significant military agreement between the two countries.

Duterte may be overstating things when he says “American has lost,” but there’s no doubt that, under Obama, America is losing. From the Middle East to the South China Sea, the Malaysian leader sees the same weakness Duterte perceives.

Other Asian nations perceive it too. Vietnam, unwilling until recently to tilt towards China, is seeking new ties with its old enemy. The Vietnamese prime minister visited China in September. And Thailand’s military government is buying submarines from China. 

Then there's this east Asian nation, which clearly feels no post-American constraints on its strategic aims.

Rethinking Diem

In the course of an article about the Most Equal Comrade's current visit to Vietnam and how it is of a piece with his entire record of overseas behavior since becoming ruler of post-America, Paul Kengor at The American Thinker discusses the perspective put forth in a book published late last year that sets the record straight on Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam from 1954 to 1963.

First, to set the table, Kengor's establishing of the proper context for viewing the MEC's trip:

Barack Obama has an exquisite sense of timing with things communist.

In March, he caught a ballgame in Havana with Raul Castro, where the national pastime since 1959 has been less baseball than bean-balling dissidents and destroying a beautiful country 90 miles south of Florida. As Barack and Raul bantered, Belgium burned while ISIS claimed victory in another terror attack -- the very ISIS enabled by Obama’s outrageously bad decision to prematurely pull U.S. troops from Iraq.

In September 2009, Barack went to Poland where, stunningly, he cancelled plans for a joint U.S. missile-shield with a former Soviet Bloc country that has been one of our closest post-Cold War allies. This was merely one of Obama’s craven pro-Putin accommodations. He did it -- as every Pole noticed -- on the 70th anniversary of the date (September 17, 1939) that Stalin’s Red Army invaded Poland in compliance with the Hitler-Stalin Pact that started World War II and launched a 50-year totalitarian occupation of Poland.

And now, a week before Memorial Day, when Americans honor (among others) the 58,000 boys who died in Vietnam, Obama flew to Hanoi to make amends and “move on” (as John Kerry put it) with another communist regime. There, our president discussed the glories of lifting the long-held U.S. arms embargo against Vietnam.

It is truly a new era, folks, with our President of Fundamental Transformation lifting embargos on old communist enemies from the Western Hemisphere to Southeast Asia.

There were those of us who warned incessantly of the pitfalls of electing our first Red-Diaper Baby president, the product of pro-communist parents and a literal card-carrying member of Communist Party USA who mentored him. But we were told by liberals that none of this mattered. Nah, this was mere McCarthyite red-baiting, a witch-hunt smear against this impressive “progressive” president.

And alas, here we are: we are treated this week to the image of a smiling Obama shaking hands in Hanoi with the president of communist Vietnam in front of a large bust of a grinning Ho Chi Minh poised in front of a big red flag with a star, outdone only by the image of Obama standing proudly, head up, ramrod straight, with the communist leadership in front of a giant mural of Che Guevara in Havana in March.

What’s next? A beer at the DMZ with Kim Jong-un?

Now, on to what Kengor - actually, historian Geoffrey Shaw, author of the book in question - has to say about Diem. It was eye-opening stuff for me. I'm an academically trained historian as well, and I didn't realize how skewed by view of Diem was.

The book is a superb work by author Geoffrey Shaw, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam (Ignatius Press).
If you do not know the full story of Diem, and just how badly the Kennedy administration blew it by allowing for his assassination, then you need to read this book. The Kennedy team sanctioned the November 2, 1963 coup d’etat against Diem. Ironically, Diem was assassinated the same month that Kennedy himself was assassinated, and both men were strong anti-communists. The deaths of each man allowed for successors who wildly escalated the violence in Vietnam. One more irony: Kennedy was, of course, America’s first and still-only Catholic president. Diem himself was not merely Roman Catholic but a remarkably devout Christian who would have preferred a monastery to the leadership of Vietnam. He was better suited for the priesthood than presidency. Quite profoundly, Diem was at Mass the morning he was killed. That was typical, as he was up for Mass at 6:30 every morning. This particularly fateful day happened to be All Souls’ Day, and he was seized on church grounds and killed. The United States either approved or set up (or at least sanctioned, as scholars still debate this) the assassination.
Diem was not only a devout man, but a man of principle and character and an unusually honorable politician as well as patriot, despite how he was vilified by detractors in the United States. The communists in Vietnam knew that the respect that he rightly earned from the populace was their greatest obstacle. After his killing, everything would spin out of control.
Shaw’s book sickeningly chronicles the slow, steady abandonment, demonization, and betrayal of Diem by certain elements in the United States, thus leading to his martyrdom. And yes, many Vietnamese consider it martyrdom. To be sure, Diem had his supporters, from the likes of William Colby and Dean Rusk to two excellent ambassadors, Frederick Nolting in the United States and Robert Thompson in Britain. Nonetheless, they were no match for a relentless anti-Diem campaign led by the New York Times (reporters like David Halberstam) and most egregiously by Kennedy adviser and esteemed liberal “wise man” Averell Harriman. It was Harriman who led the cabal to do in Diem, and he pulled it off.

“The actions of these men led to Diem’s murder,” Shaw grimly concludes. “And with his death, nine and a half years of careful work and partnership between the United States and South Vietnam was undone. Within a few weeks, any hope of a successful outcome in Vietnam -- that is, of a free and democratic country friendly toward the United States -- was extinguished. Truly, in order to solve a problem that did not exist, the Kennedy administration created a problem that could not be solved.”

And if you go to the Amazon page for the book, you'll find this edifying reader review:

As a veteran of the Vietnam War who spent 32 months in that war-torn country as a combat Marine, I found Dr. Shaw's book both profound and refreshing. I say this because when I went to Vietnam I was influenced by what I read in the national press, especially the New York Times, about President Diem. I was lead to believe that he was an Asian mandarin, a religious zealot, a Roman Catholic who oppressed the Buddhist majority in his country, and a puppet of the US who had to be removed from office if democracy and freedom would prevail. However, in Vietnam I came to a very different conclusion, based upon my interviews with dozens of enemy POWs and political cadres, and my Vietnamese friends who were Buddhists. I found that President Diem was respected by the communists and loved by the Buddhists. One southern communist political leader I interviewed even told me that he thought the greatest gift the Americans had given to the Viet Cong was the murder of President Diem since he "was a true Vietnamese nationalist who was loved and respected by people in both North and South Vietnam." Several Buddhists told me that they supported President Diem because he had built many new Buddhist temples and repaired even more that had been neglected during the French colonial period. These comments and others made by my Vietnamese colleagues and friends led me to change my mind about President Diem and see him as a national leader who truly enjoyed the respect and love of his countrymen. This well-researched and brilliantly written book lays bare the many myths and falsehoods concerning President Diem and clearly explains why the American government sought to remove him from power.

No one disagrees with the view that it was one of our nation's worst tragedies that 58,000 young American men lost their lives in the Vietnam war. Were they wasted? I hesitate to characterize it thusly, but I also saw the North Vietnamese tanks smash through the gates of of the presidential palace in Saigon on television in April 1975 - and, of course, the desperate people trying to grab the runners of the helicopter lifting off from the US embassy roof.

And a much different course could have been taken twelve long years earlier, a course that might have made for a far more favorable set of circumstances for Vietnam, the US and the world that grim spring.

And China smells the weakness

John Hinderaker at Power Line says that the younger generation of Vietnamese are enthusiastic about Americans but are pretty uniformly disdainful of the Chinese.  (Ironically, modern-day Vietnam sounds a lot like modern-day China - a nominally Communist oligarchy keenly interested in foreign investment - with the difference being that it lacks the regional-hegemony aims of its large neighbor to the north.)  This disdain is so strong that it's led to riots at Chinese-owned factories.

David Archibald at The American Thinker explains why China is focusing its efforts to challenge its neighbors territorially on Vietnam first:

Zhongye Island is the Chinese name for Thitu Island.  The Philippines has a mutual defense treaty with the United States; Vietnam does not.  That is the advantage for China in starting with Vietnam first.  If the United States, and perhaps Japan, does not assist Vietnam in its coming war with China, then China is likely to decide that it can scrape the Filipino bases off their islands with impunity.

Vietnam understands what is at stake in the South China Sea.  China claims 90% of the South China Sea as part of its city of Sansha.  Once enforcement is established, ships and aircraft wanting to cross the South China Sea would have to ask China’s permission first.  Vietnamese ships sailing from Haiphong would have to hug the Vietnamese coast almost all the way down to the equator before heading east to avoid the zone.  It would add 3,500 km to the shipping distance between Haiphong and Japan, for instance.  What was open ocean to their east will become a Chinese lake.  It will be a great insult and impediment to the Vietnamese people.  That is the precise intention.

After Vietnam will most likely come Japan.  Rig HD-981, China’s “mobile national territory,” will be moved to a site in Japan’s EEZ north of the Senkakus, equidistant between the Chinese Shuimen airbase and the Japanese and US airbases on Okinawa.  This will be an intolerable insult to the Japanese, but a certain US president might decide that, as no land area is involved, the United States-Japan mutual defense treaty does not apply.   China will wear down the Japanese forces and then invade the Senakaku and Yaeyama Islands.  If successful in taking them, China will then extend its ADIZ to at least 300 km east of the Yaeyama Islands, isolating Japan from the rest of Asia. 

All the countries of East Asia know that once Vietnam is defeated, their turn will come.  They will effectively become vassal states under the Chinese jackboot. 

And this is all underway because the Most Equal Comrade's big "pivot to Asia" is as much smoke-blowing as his policies regarding  Iran, Sunni jihadism, or Russia.