Play The Diplomat’s Quiz: December 20, 2015 Edition

Last week, in a move that was shocking despite the cooling U.S.-Thailand relationship, the Thai government announced that the U.S. ambassador in Bangkok, Glyn Davies, was being investigated on suspicion of having insulted King Bhumibhol Adulyadej. Davies had spoken to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand in late November. During his talk, according to the New York Times, Davies criticized the “long prison sentences handed to some of those found guilty of criticizing [the] king” under Thailand’s lèse majesté laws, generally considered the harshest in the world. (This past weekend, Human Rights Watch warned that one prominent critic of the junta had disappeared after being questioned on lèse majesté charges.)

While China’s foreign policy has traditionally relied on economic leverage and “soft power” diplomacy as its primary means of power projection, Beijing has also been actively exploiting concepts associated with strategic information operations as a means to directly influence the process and outcomes in areas of strategic competition.

In 2003, the Central Military Commission (CMC) approved the guiding conceptual umbrella for information operations for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – the “Three Warfares” (san zhong zhanfa). The concept is based on three mutually reinforcing strategies: (1) the coordinated use of strategic psychological operations; (2) overt and covert media manipulation; and (3) legal warfare designed to manipulate strategies, defense policies, and perceptions of target audiences abroad.

As The Diplomat reported recently, the Obama administration just notified Congress of a $1.83 billion arms sale package for Taiwan. The arms sale – headlined by two Perry-class frigates – had been expected for months and none of the content came as a surprise. However, Beijing, as usual denounced the arms sale as an act that “severely undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests.”

In addition to the usual diplomatic anger that follow such arms sales – warnings that it will harm U.S.-China ties, particularly military relations – Beijing made a new announcement. According to Xinhua, when Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang summed Kaye Lee, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, Zheng warned that “China has decided to take necessary measures, including imposing sanctions against the companies involved in the arms sale.” The major companies represented in the arms deal are Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

It’s been a rough year for China-Russia relations, especially on the economic front. Thanks to China’s economic slowdown, plunging global oil prices, and Russia’s struggles with Western sanctions, bilateral trade over the first six months of 2015 dropped by 30 percent year-on-year. That’s despite a 15 percent increase in Russian oil exports to China over the first six months of 2015 compared to the same period of 2014 – a clear sign of how decimated oil prices are affecting the trade relationship. Bilateral investment between the two countries has also declined sharply, down by 20 percent year-on-year. In 2011, Medvedev (then Russia’s president) and then-Chinese President Hu Jintao set a goal of doing $100 billion in bilateral trade by 2015; financial and economic realities have destroyed any chance of reaching that mark.

India’s upcoming decision to adopt Japanese high-speed rail (HSR) system could be a threshold for railway diplomacy in South Asia.

New Delhi’s first HSR project of 505 km between Mumbai and Ahmedabad would operate with a Japanese HSR system at a top speed of 320 km/h. Such characteristics would likely be passenger-only services, because mixing freight trains with passenger lines would lower the operating speed due to greater friction on the tracks, potentially affecting the stability of the HSR train. The length of this line is in the optimal range, between 200 to 1000 km, in terms of competition with aviation and automobiles. About half of the expenditure will be met with the help of a Japanese loan.

On December 14, the BBC ran a story chronicling reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes’ attempt to fly near some of China’s artificial islands in a Cessna. The piece is fascinating in its own right – not least for its implication that Wingfield-Hayes was basically conducting his own mini-freedom of navigation operation. When Chinese radio broadcasts warn the aircraft away, Wingfield-Hayes convinces his pilots to ignore the warnings: “We are not breaking any laws, the Chinese are not going to shoot us down. You must hold your course, and you must respond to them and tell them we are a civilian aircraft flying in international airspace.”

But toward the end of the piece is an inadvertent scoop by Wingfield-Hayes. While flying over the South China Sea, his plane’s radio picks up a broadcast from another source:

China Navy, China Navy. We are an Australian aircraft exercising international freedom of navigation rights, in international airspace in accordance with the international civil aviation convention, and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – over.

Though Wingfield-Hayes says his aircraft was warned away repeatedly (and aggressively) by the Chinese navy, he didn’t catch any Chinese response to the Australian broadcast. Details released later provided a specific date for the radio transmission (November 25) and identified the aircraft as an RAAF AP-3C Orion.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 12. As Abe concluded his short two-day visit to India the end of their meeting, the two leaders issued Japan-India Vision 2025 Special Strategic and Global Partnership. In this document, Abe and Modi agreed on expanding bilateral cooperation in a wide range of issues from investment, disaster risk management, and people-to-people exchange. They also acknowledged that stability of the Indo-Pacific region to be “indispensable” to their respective national security and prosperity, calling for a more robust cooperation in security issues.

This month, the Philippines is receiving 114 armored vehicles from its ally the United States as the Southeast Asian state seeks to modernize its military.

According to a statement by the U.S. embassy in Manila, the U.S. government transferred 77 units of M113A2 Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on December 9. A second shipment with the remaining units was scheduled to arrive later in the month.

The APCs are being transferred via the Excess Defense Article (EDA) program, which grants excess military equipment from the United States without cost to qualified allied countries. Manila did have to pay 67.5 million pesos ($1.4 million) to cover transport costs, however.

According to recent reports, Pakistan is now part of a Saudi Arabia-led Islamic military alliance of 34 countries fighting terrorism in the Muslim world. Foreign Office spokesman Qazi Khalilullah confirmed this on Thursday, December 17, telling reporters, “Yes, we’re part of it.” Saudi Arabia announced the anti-terror allianceon Tuesday.

This news comes after initial confusion regarding the purpose and extent of this alliance, including in Pakistan itself. On Wednesday, just one day before Pakistan declared it was part of the Saudi alliance, its officials said otherwise, declaring that they had not been consulted by anyone in Saudi Arabia. Aizaz Chaudhry, Pakistan’s foreign secretary, told reporters on December 16 that he had asked his ambassador in Riyadh to discover how the “error” was made. By the next day however, these two diverging narratives were reconciled, with Khalilullahdenying that Pakistan was “surprised” about its inclusion in the alliance, and insisting that Chaudhry had earlier “only said that Pakistan was ‘ascertaining details’ about the announcement.”

Since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkmenistan has occupied an obscure position in the international system. On December 12, 1995 it was granted the status of “permanent neutrality” by the UN. This year is very important for the Central Asian state as it marks the 20th anniversary of the official designation.