US blames Canada for G7 fiasco, says Trudeau 'stabbed us in the back'

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US blames Canada for G7 fiasco, says Trudeau 'stabbed us in the back'
By: AFP 6-10-18
RE: https://www.afp.com/en/news/205/us-b...k-doc-15r1sg13

The US blamed Canada on Sunday for the disastrous ending to the G7 summit, saying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "stabbed us in the back," while American allies held Washington responsible.

Just minutes after a joint communique, approved by the leaders of the Group of Seven allies, was published in Canada's summit host city Quebec, US President Donald Trump launched a Twitter broadside, taking exception to comments made by Trudeau at a news conference.

"He really kinda stabbed us in the back," top US economic advisor Larry Kudlow said of Trudeau on CNN's "State of the Union."

"He did a great disservice to the whole G7."

"We went through it. We agreed. We compromised on the communique. We joined the communique in good faith," Kudlow said.

US trade advisor Peter Navarro, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," reinforced that message.

"There's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door," he said.

"That's what bad-faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That's what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did."

Kudlow sought to tie Trump's reaction to the upcoming summit with Kim Jong Un, saying the North Korean leader "must not see American weakness."

Trump -- who has a history of hair-trigger responses to slights -- landed in Singapore on Sunday for the Tuesday summit meeting with Kim.

Before his departure from Canada the previous day, he tweeted: "Based on Justin's false statements at his news conference, and the fact that Canada is charging massive Tariffs to our US farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our US Reps not to endorse the Communique as we look at Tariffs on automobiles flooding the US Market!"

- 'Insulting' -

"PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that ... he 'will not be pushed around.' Very dishonest & weak," Trump said in his tweet.

Trudeau had told reporters that Trump's decision to invoke national security to justify US tariffs on steel and aluminum imports was "kind of insulting" to Canadian veterans who had stood by their US allies in conflicts dating back to World War I.

"Canadians are polite and reasonable but we will also not be pushed around," he said.

Trudeau said he had told Trump "it would be with regret but it would be with absolute clarity and firmness that we move forward with retaliatory measures on July 1, applying equivalent tariffs to the ones that the Americans have unjustly applied to us."

After Trump's angry tweets, Trudeau's office issued a brief response: "We are focused on everything we accomplished here at the G7 summit. The Prime Minister said nothing he hasn't said before -- both in public, and in private conversations with the president."

The outburst against Trudeau, and by association the other G7 members, is only the latest incident in which Trump has clashed with America's closest allies, even as he has had warm words for autocrats like Kim and Russia's Vladimir Putin.

- 'Throwaway remarks' -

French President Emmanuel Macron's office reacted Sunday by saying that "international cooperation cannot be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks."

Reneging on the commitments agreed in the communique showed "incoherence and inconsistency," it said in a statement.

And German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas tweeted Sunday that Trump had partly "destroyed" Washington's trusting relationship with Europe by pulling out of the joint communique.

When Trump left Quebec, it was thought that a compromise had been reached, despite the tension and the determination of European leaders Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to push back against the US president's protectionist policies.

Officials from European delegations quickly leaked copies of the joint statement, and it was published online moments before Trump tweeted.

On board Air Force One, an AFP reporter was told that Trump had approved the agreement, only to be told later of the tweets. A senior US administration official said that Trump had been angered by Trudeau's comments.

- 'The gig is up' -

The joint communique that was thrashed out over two days of negotiations vowed that members would reform multilateral oversight through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and seek to cut tariffs.

"We commit to modernize the WTO to make it more fair as soon as possible. We strive to reduce tariff barriers, non-tariff barriers and subsidies," it said, reflecting the typical language of decades of G7 statements.

But Trump had already said he would not hesitate to shut countries out of the US market if they retaliate against his tariffs.

"The European Union is brutal to the United States... They know it," he insisted in his departing news conference. "When I'm telling them, they're smiling at me. You know, it's like the gig is up."

European officials said Trump had tried to water down the language in the draft communique on the WTO and rules-based trade. In the end, that language stayed in and it was only on climate change that no consensus was reached.

Written by: burs-dc-co/wd/bbk

Other notes that were posted:

a. The joint communique that was thrashed out over two days of negotiations vowed that G7 members would reform multilateral oversight of commerce through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and seek to cut tariffs

b. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Trudeau told reporters that Trump's decision to invoke national security to justify US tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum was "insulting" to Canadian veterans

c. US President Donald Trump left the G7 summit early en route for Singapore and a historic nuclear summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, only to take exception to comments made by Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a news conference

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US Response:

Larry Kudlow: Trudeau "betrayed" Trump at G7, "should have known better"
By: Emily Tillett - CBS News 6-10-18
RE: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/larry-k...-known-better/

President Donald Trump's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow says Trump pulled out of backing the G7 communique in reaction to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's statement criticizing the United States.

Following a dramatic end to the G7 summit in Quebec this weekend, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow says Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "betrayed Trump" and "should have known better" than to slam Mr. Trump and U.S. tariffs just after leaders signed a joint communique embracing the spirit of the summit.

"To be honest with you, Prime Minister Trudeau, I respect. I've worked with him in good faith getting through a good communique on Friday and Saturday. So he holds a press conference -- the president is barely out of there on the plane to North Korea, and he starts insulting us, he starts talking about the U.S. is insulting Canada," Kudlow said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

Transcript: White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on "Face the Nation," June 10, 2018
"In general, it was an attack on the president," Kudlow claimed.

In a press conference Saturday after a contentious G7 meeting, Trudeau said that Canada had been insulted by the Trump administration's tariffs and that his country would go ahead with its own retaliatory measures by July 1.

Following Trudeau's statements, Mr. Trump retracted his endorsement of the final statement from the G7, tweeting on Air Force One on the way to Singapore that he had instructed U.S. representatives "not to endorse" the missive. He blamed Trudeau's statement that Canada will not be "pushed around" on trade.

On Sunday, Kudlow said that the president had "no alternative" than to pull out of the communique after Trudeau "betrayed Trump and betrayed the whole G7" by "attacking" Mr. Trump.

Kudlow placed the spat with Trudeau in the context of Mr. Trump's historic summit with North Korea, saying there's "no way this president is not going to stand strong, number one, he's not going to allow for other people to suddenly take pot shots at him hours before that summit."

"If you attack this president, he's going to fight back," Kudlow added.

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China’s Master Plan: A Global Military Threat
By: Hal Brands - 6 June 10, 2018, 9:00 AM CDT
RE: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...ilitary-threat

From the East China Sea to Africa, Beijing is flexing its muscles.

(This is the first in a series of columns on China's effort to supplant the U.S. as the world's pre-eminent geopolitical power.)

I wrote a column recently about how a longstanding assumption of America’s China policy -- that economic integration between the two countries is an unalloyed good -- has now been overtaken by events. But this isn’t the only area in which China’s rise is forcing a re-evaluation of old beliefs.

Now, as the first in a series of columns on this phenomenon that Bloomberg Opinion will publish in the coming days, I'll delve into another issue with enormous implications for U.S.-China relations and American interests: the rise of China as a more globally oriented military power.

For years, most experts believed that China’s military challenge to the U.S. was regional in nature -- that it was confined to the Western Pacific. After decades of tacitly free-riding on America’s global power-projection capabilities, however, Beijing now is seeking the capabilities that will allow it to project its own military power well outside its regional neighborhood.

The fact that China is building up its military strength is hardly news, of course. The 1995-96 Taiwan crisis, during which the U.S. responded to Chinese intimidation of Taiwan by sending two carrier strike groups to the area, underscored to the Chinese leadership that America's military dominance gave it the capability to intervene at will even in China’s own backyard.

Since then, Beijing has been developing the capabilities -- advanced fighter jets, anti-ship ballistic missiles, and stealthy diesel-electric attack submarines among them -- meant not just to give it leverage over its East and Southeast Asian neighbors, but also to prevent the U.S. from intervening effectively in their defense.

This effort to build what are known as “anti-access/area-denial” capabilities has borne fruit, and the U.S. will now face high and continually growing obstacles to defending Taiwan or other partners and allies in the event of conflict with China.

This is just one of the many paradoxes of the U.S.-China relationship. Washington has underwritten the economic rise of its greatest long-term strategic rival by protecting the global commercial flows that have made that rival so wealthy. China, for its part, has been a free-rider on America’s provision of global stability even while challenging the U.S. ever more sharply in the Asia-Pacific.

This situation could not last forever, though, because it represented a vulnerability that a rising China would not tolerate indefinitely. After all, if the U.S. can secure the global commons, then it can also dominate and even restrict access to them if it so chooses.

So, as the U.S.-China relationship has become more contentious, China has become less willing to accept that its economic prosperity requires the forbearance of the U.S. Navy. Chinese strategists have become acutely aware of the “Malacca Dilemma” -- the prospect that the U.S. could severely constrain China’s imports of oil and other critical commodities by interdicting shipping at a few crucial maritime chokepoints.

U.S. strategists are also fully aware of this possibility, as proposals for a far-seas blockade meant to starve Beijing of vital resources have figured prominently in the debate on how to defeat China in a possible war. Any great power would chafe at a situation in which its foremost rival has such enormous power over its own economic well-being, and China is no exception.

At the same time, the growth of Chinese military strength is giving Beijing greater ability to start redressing this vulnerability. In the mid-1990s, the People’s Liberation Army was still an antiquated force that would have faced enormous difficulty projecting power anywhere beyond China’s borders. Chinese defense spending amounted to only around 2 percent of the global total.

Now, after decades of rapid economic growth and steadily rising defense spending, China has the second-largest defense budget in the world, and the PLA is a more sophisticated, modern force capable of taking on ever-more ambitious missions.

As a result, Chinese military officials are looking beyond the Western Pacific and considering how to project power ever farther abroad.

Naval strategists are thinking about how to exert Chinese military influence in the Indian Ocean, the Horn of Africa and other critical waterways that represent China’s maritime lifelines to key regions such as Persian Gulf. The Belt and Road Initiative, a vast trade and infrastructure project meant to link China with countries throughout Asia and Europe, serves a similar purpose.

And even though China’s force posture is still focused on the country’s maritime and territorial peripheries (as well as on internal security), Beijing is gradually building a more global military footprint. Chinese forces have carried out counter-piracy missions, crisis evacuations and naval exercises thousands of miles from China’s coast. They have ventured into the Arctic Ocean, Baltic Sea and other faraway waterways. The PLA Navy is developing capabilities, such as aircraft carriers, that may eventually provide some type of global power-projection capability.

China is also working to secure the logistical facilities necessary to sustain such operations. Beijing has opened its first overseas military base in strategically located Djibouti, among other developments elsewhere along the Indian Ocean littoral, and it is reportedly using economic leverage and coercive diplomacy to seek access to ports and other facilities in countries from Vanuatu to Sri Lanka and beyond.

Additionally, Chinese forces have engaged in exercises in Africa, as part of an effort to protect China’s growing overseas presence in that continent. This more global outlook is even evident in pop culture. A blockbuster movie recently depicted a Chinese battleship rescuing overseas Chinese from the chaos of a civil war in a fictional African country.

It will be decades, at earliest, before China can even come close to equaling the global military reach of the U.S. But Beijing is moving, clearly and deliberately, in that direction.

From an American perspective, this trend is troubling for what it says about China’s long-range ambitions. It shows that, at a time when U.S.-China relations are becoming increasingly antagonistic, Beijing is already looking ahead to a period when it will compete with America not just regionally but globally as well.

And if China is aspiring to a more global presence now, at a time when the areas just off its coast are still heavily contested, how ambitious might it become if and when it succeeds in establishing itself as the dominant power in the Western Pacific?

This is just one of several ways in which Beijing is steadily taking on more of the trappings of an aspiring global power, one whose objectives and interests expand with its capabilities.

The silver lining is that China may be getting ahead of itself. Its efforts to develop a larger overseas footprint -- particularly to secure access to ports and other facilities -- have created greater international suspicion of its motives and designs. That, in turn, will probably lead to more international resistance to China’s strategic rise.

Moreover, if one assumes that Chinese military spending is not infinitely expandable, then there is a tradeoff between developing power-projection capabilities that may be useful in a global context -- a carrier strike group, for instance -- and those that would provide the greatest bang for the buck in a war against the U.S. over Taiwan, such as anti-ship missiles.

Global powers are continually confronted with hard decisions about resources and priorities. China will become more familiar with such predicaments as its ambitions grow.

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A Q&A on the Trump-Kim summit with Victor Cha, who was nearly U.S. ambassador to South Korea. The Best – and Worst – That Can Happen in Singapore
By: Tobin Harshaw - Bloomberg 6-8-18
RE: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...worst-outcomes

When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Moscow in 1988 to discuss nuclear reductions, Reagan compared it to appearing in an epic cinematic production by Cecil B. DeMille. By this he meant more than, as he put it, "being dropped into a great historical moment." He was also noting that much, if not most, of the interaction between the two leaders had been pre-scripted as tightly as a Hollywood blockbuster.

This included months of direct meetings between the leaders' top aides; negotiations over a list of 20 proposed prospective events prepared by Nancy Reagan's staff; even the creation a "focus group" of voters in Philadelphia on which to test Reagan's lines. The only surprise was when Gorbachev quoted a Russian proverb that was supposed to be part of Reagan's welcoming speech. Reagan improvised by repeating the line, but crediting Gorbachev on his "wonderful phrase": "It is better to see once than hear a hundred times."

In contrast, next week's Singapore summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un has been preceded by a paucity of seeing, hearing or communication of any kind. Singapore was chosen less than a month ago. The venue, an island resort, was announced only days ago. And, with less than five days to go as of this writing, there is no word on when Trump will even arrive.

And, if the logistics remain a question mark, the substance of the meeting is a complete mystery. Will they discuss little more than agreeing to more discussions? Will Kim make a dramatic concession on his nuclear arsenal? Will Trump respond with a drawdown of U.S. troops on the peninsula? Will they finally end the Korean War?

To answer some of these questions, I talked to someone who has dealt with the North Koreans before: Victor Cha. Now a professor at Georgetown and chair of the Korea program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Cha was from 2004 to 2007 director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council.

But perhaps what he is best known for is a job he doesn't have: U.S. ambassador to South Korea. After being all but named to the position by the Trump administration, he created a minor firestorm by publicly criticizing the White House for considering a limited military strike to give North Korea a "bloody nose." The more hawkish element of Republican foreign-policy circles drew out the long knives and, well, Cha is enjoying the academic/think tank life.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion:


Tobin Harshaw: So, although there's never been a U.S.-North Korea summit at this level, Washington has made several deals with the North Koreans in the past, and they have always flouted them. What would you need to see from this Kim, beyond a declaration, to show he is more serious than his father?

Victor Cha: First, it would take a clear statement of intent to adhere to the process. Then it would mean committing to allowing the IAEA to seal the buildings involved in the nuclear program and then to take everything out of them. This would be a real sign that things are different.

TH: We know the U.S. is not going to get everything it wants. So what is the very minimum it should accept in any deal?

VC: I think the bare minimum would be statements by the North Korean leader committing to denuclearization and negotiating a process, conducted at a high level such as Secretary of State Pompeo and his equivalent, to negotiate terms of full denuclearization. That is the bare minimum of what could be called success.

If there are just a bunch of words, we know it's just made for TV and not a real process. That wouldn't make us more secure -- if anything it would make us less secure.

TH: Kim's not going to give up his arsenal overnight. If there is a deal, it will be over a timeline. What needs to come first, and how would you structure the other elements over time?

VC: Kim would have to give a full accounting of their sites, and the IAEA would have to go in and confirm and seal them. You cannot stop fissile material, you have to seal it up. Next would come the disabling of the operating systems, so that if the North broke the seals they could not easily restore the program. Eventually would come preparations for dismantling and removal.

Equally important would be creating a dispute-resolution mechanism. There needs to be a process of adjudication between the two sides, probably involving third parties. It becomes very complex very quickly.

TH: I had a conversation some months ago with former National Security Council staffer Philip Bobbitt, who had a somewhat radical plan: the U.S. should negotiate not with the North but with China. China would agree to protect North Korea under its nuclear umbrella, thus giving Kim no need for a bomb. Does that strike you as realistic?

VC: I would say that China wouldn't do that. It presumes that China is like us and willing to give security guarantees to other countries. China doesn't do that. They did during Cold War with North Korea but that was over concerns about the Soviets, not the U.S.

China would be happy to help provide capital for infrastructure, to take out minerals from North Korea, etc. But when you give security guarantees you can get trapped. And the last country you want to be trapped with is North Korea.

TH: In any case, China has a large stake in this summit working out. How will any deal help them? What can the U.S. do to minimize the benefits to a rival?

VC: That's very hard to do. Because if this goes well, it will open opportunities for China, things like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank becoming more involved in North Korea, and this means China exercises more influence over the peninsula.

And if Singapore goes badly, the U.S. will need China even more because you cannot do maximum pressure sanctions without them. They win either way.

The only worry for Beijing is if Trump went very far and asked for a peace treaty ending the Korean War. China would not be happy -- it's too far for them to go. But it's also too far for us to go. After a treaty, our Congress and South Korea would ask if we still needed troops in Korea. Every U.S. ally would start looking over their shoulder. Of course, Trump doesn't really care about that.

TH: We agree that's a farfetched scenario. But what if the U.S. pulled out its troops: how would South Korea and Japan react?


VC: Japan would be the most concerned. Because its forward line of defense is the Korean Peninsula, and the U.S. has always looked at the defense of the two nations as an integrated whole. We could say we would double down on the troop presence in Japan, but there would still be a great deal of concern.

It would have an effect on markets, at least initially, because they respond not to what North Korea does but to what the U.S. does in response.

As for the south, it has a government that wants to do more of its own defense, but it does not want that to be part of the bargaining process. They would see that as a degrading of alliance.

TH: Would they build their own nuclear weapons?

VC: I believe that the norm against nuclear weapons in Japan is quite strong. But if you ask people there what scenario would make them consider it, 99 percent would say it is if the U.S. substantially downgraded its troop commitment in the region.

TH: Many people thought the Iran nuclear deal was flawed because it dealt only with the nuclear issue. Do you think any North Korea deal should go beyond the nuclear and missile program -- to deal with things like human rights abuses, weapons shipments, chemical weapons stocks and the like?

VC: I think it has to. The last two deals we did were just about nukes, and they didn't succeed. I worked on one of them.

Trump says he wants a more normal relationship with the North Koreans, and Kim says the same. This means necessarily that chemical and biological weapons need to be part of the solution.

Human rights is also integral. It is very hard to normalize relations with a country that treats its own people the way the north does. If the regime wants an assurance of security, the primary threat is not from external powers like Japan or the U.S. or Russia, but from its own people. And the U.S. cannot guarantee a government against the will of its own people.

TH: Finally, most people know you were the leading candidate to become ambassador to South Korea until you raised concerns over a potential limited military strike. What's it like now for you to watch things from the outside, and what might you have handled differently if you were on the scene?

VC: First, let me say that all presidents have the right to choose their own people, and the right to change their minds. In my case, the president changed his mind.

I'm very happy to see the administration giving diplomacy a try, and taking us away from where we were in 2017, when there was no talk of diplomacy. Conflict on the peninsula would not solve the nuclear problem and would result in the vast loss of Korean and American lives.

I'm trying to be as supportive as I can as an American as we think about this problem. I'm willing to give advice if they ask for it. But I am very content to be back in my position as a professor at Georgetown and adviser at CSIS.

What would I do differently? The main thing is to stop the loud tweets. A long time ago I would have recommended going into a quiet phase, to focus on allowing the professionals to get some deliverables for the president when he shows up in Singapore.

I also would have advised not impulsively agreeing to this summit back in March, as I am sure many people around the president did. But I seriously doubt Trump would have listened to me or anyone else.

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