#1 Article: China has developed close ties to the military regime in Rangoon and turned a nation wary of China into a "satellite" of Beijing close to the Strait of Malacca, through which 80 percent of China’s imported oil passes. China is building naval bases in Burma and has electronic intelligence gathering facilities on islands in the Bay of Bengal and near the Strait of Malacca. Beijing also supplied Burma with "billions of dollars in military assistance to support a de facto military alliance," the report said.
This is why sanctions on Burma are a bad idea. All of these countries we're giving a hard time about human rights are becoming China's allies. This kind of thing is why we adopted a policy of non-interference with those regimes that weren't aligned with the Soviets during the Cold War. If we're going to start peeling some of these countries away from Beijing, we need to start being a little less assertive about human rights with respect to friendly countries. |