In the aftermath of the Solomon Islands-China Security Agreement, Radio Free Asia staff quoted a think tank expert as saying: “I think now that the security agreement has been officially signed, there is little the US or Australia can do to reverse it. The key question now is how fast will China move to establish a permanent presence, leading to a base, in the Solomon Islands.”
When the media report this kind of statement, they really need to take the time to provide their readers with the conceptual framework necessary to make sense of China’s overseas military posture.
This not only includes the ability to grasp the concepts of overseas military agreements, overseas military forces and overseas military footprints, it also includes the ability to understand a related set of higher-level and lower-level concepts.
Problematically, these concepts are not commonly known outside of a few epistemic communities.
Among the NATO allied and partner militaries, the overseas military posture of a sovereign state is commonly understood as the overseas agreements, forces and footprints of its military. These are outlined in US Department of Defense Instruction 3000.12, which defines the above concepts respectively as the agreements and arrangements that set the agreed upon terms of a military’s presence within the territory of another country; the forward deployed and/or stationed forces, military capabilities, equipment and units of the military; and the locations, infrastructure, facilities, land and prepositioned equipment of the military that exist in overseas and/or foreign territories.
At a lower level, these concepts are commonly understood as being composed of different kinds. These are described in Overseas Basing of U.S. Military Forces as follows: overseas military agreements include overflight and in-transit rights, status of forces agreements, basing and access agreements and mutual defense treaties; overseas military forces include temporary deployed forces, rotationally deployed forces and permanently deployed forces; and overseas military footprints include prepositioned support infrastructure, en route support infrastructure, command and control infrastructure, access facilities, expansible facilities and primary facilities.
Armed with this conceptual framework, one not only has the knowledge required to make sense of claims made by experts in China’s overseas military posture, one also has the power to uncover the presence of ambiguity, generalization, vagueness and contestation in those claims.
University of Colorado Boulder professor Michele Moses said: “The media have a responsibility to help educate a citizenry so that it is adequately prepared for well-informed deliberation.”
If one accepts this premise, then it seems to follow that the Radio Free Asia staff not only had a responsibility to tell their audience that a security agreement has been signed between the Solomon Islands and China, and an expert in the subject is concerned that it could lead to a permanent presence in the region; it also had a responsibility to empower its audience to respond with follow-up questions regarding what kind of security agreement and what kind of permanent presence was being discussed.
Taiwanese should demand more from those who cover China’s overseas military posture, even if Radio Free Asia is a US government-funded news service.
Michael Walsh is an affiliate of the Center for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The views expressed are his own.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) is expected to be summoned by the Taipei City Police Department after a rally in Taipei on Saturday last week resulted in injuries to eight police officers. The Ministry of the Interior on Sunday said that police had collected evidence of obstruction of public officials and coercion by an estimated 1,000 “disorderly” demonstrators. The rally — led by Huang to mark one year since a raid by Taipei prosecutors on then-TPP chairman and former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) — might have contravened the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法), as the organizers had
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
RSS