Three fronts for Russia: How Washington will fan the flames of chaos in Central Asia

by Ivan Lizan for Odnako

Source: http://www.odnako.org/blogs/tri-fronta-dlya-rossii-kak-vashington-razduet-plamya-haosa-v-sredney-azii/

Translated by Robin

U.S. Gen. “Ben” Hodges’ statement that within four or five years Russia could develop the capability to wage war simultaneously on three fronts is not only an acknowledgment of the Russian Federation’s growing military potential but also a promise that Washington will obligingly ensure that all three fronts are right on the borders of the Russian Federation.

In the context of China’s inevitable rise and the soon-to-worsen financial crisis, with the concomitant bursting of asset bubbles, the only way for the United States to maintain its global hegemony is to weaken its opponents. And the only way to achieve that goal is to trigger chaos in the republics bordering Russia.

That is why Russia will inevitably enter a period of conflicts and crises on its borders.

And so the first front in fact already exists in the Ukraine, the second will most likely be between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and the third, of course, will be opened in Central Asia.

If the war in Ukraine leads to millions of refugees, tens of thousands of deaths, and the destruction of cities, defrosting the Karabakh conflict will completely undermine Russia’s entire foreign policy in the Caucasus.

Every city in Central Asia is under threat of explosions and attacks. So far this “up-and-coming front” has attracted the least media coverage – Novorossiya dominates on national television channels, in newspapers, and on websites –, but this theater of war could become one of the most complex after the conflict in the Ukraine.

A subsidiary of the Caliphate under Russia’s belly

The indisputable trend in Afghanistan – and the key source of instability in the region – is to an alliance between the Taliban and the Islamic State. Even so, the formation of their union is in its early days, references to it are scarce and fragmentary, and the true scale of the activities of the IS emissaries is unclear, like an iceberg whose tip barely shows above the surface of the water.

But it has been established that IS agitators are active in Pakistan and in Afghanistan’s southern provinces, which are controlled by the Taliban. But, in this case, the first victim of chaos in Afghanistan is Pakistan, which at the insistence of, and with help from, the United States nurtured the Taliban in the 1980s. That project has taken on a life of its own and is a recurring nightmare for Islamabad, which has decided to establish a friendlier relationship China and Russia. This trend can be seen in the Taliban’s attacks on Pakistani schools, whose teachers now have the right to carry guns, regular arrests of terrorists in the major cities, and the start of activities in support of tribes hostile to the Taliban in the north.

The latest legislative development in Pakistan is a constitutional amendment to expand military court jurisdiction [over civilians]. Throughout the country, terrorists, Islamists and their sympathizers are being detained. In the northwest alone, more than 8,000 arrests have been made, including members of the clergy. Religious organizations have been banned and IS emissaries are being caught.

Since the Americans do not like putting all their eggs in one basket, they will provide support to the government in Kabul, which will allow them to remain in the country legitimately, and at the same time to the Taliban, which is transforming itself into IS. The outcome will be a state of chaos in which the Americans will not formally take part; instead, they will sit back on their military bases, waiting to see who wins. And then Washington will provide assistance to the victor. Note that its security services have been supporting the Taliban for a long time and quite effectively: some of the official security forces and police in Afghanistan are former Taliban and Mujahideen.

Method of destruction

The first way to destabilize Central Asia is to create problems on the borders, along with the threat that Mujahideen will penetrate the region. The testing of the neighbours has already started; problems have arisen in Turkmenistan, which has even had to ask Kabul to hold large-scale military operations in the border provinces. Tajikistan has forced the Taliban to negotiate the release of the border guards it abducted, and the Tajik border service reports that there is a large group of Mujahideen on its borders.

In general, all the countries bordering Afghanistan have stepped up their border security.

The second way is to send Islamists behind the lines. The process has already begun: the number of extremists in Tajikistan alone grew three-fold last year; however, even though they are being caught, it obviously will not be feasible to catch all of them. Furthermore, the situation is aggravated by the return of migrant workers from Russia, which will expand the recruiting base. If the stream of remittances from Russia dries up, the outcome may be popular discontent and managed riots.

Kyrgyz expert Kadir Malikov reports that $70 million has been allocated to the IS military group Maverenahr, which includes representatives of all the Central Asian republics, to carry out acts of terrorism in the region. Special emphasis is placed on the Fergana Valley as the heart of Central Asia.

Another point of vulnerability is Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for this fall. The initiation of a new set of color revolutions will lead to chaos and the disintegration of countries.

Self-supporting wars

Waging war is expensive, so the destabilization of the region must be self-supporting or at least profitable for the U.S. military-industrial complex. And in this area Washington has had some success: it has given Uzbekistan 328 armored vehicles that Kiev had requested for its war with Novorossiya. At first glance, the deal isn’t profitable because the machines were a gift, but in reality Uzbekistan will be tied to U.S. spare parts and ammunition. Washington made a similar decision on the transfer of equipment and weapons to Islamabad.

But the United States has not been successful in its attempts to impose its weapons systems on India: the Indians have not signed any contracts, and Obama was shown Russian military hardware when he attended a military parade.

Thus the United States is drawing the countries in the region into war with its own protégés – the Taliban and Islamic State – and at the same time is supplying its enemies with weapons.

***

So 2015 will be marked by preparations for widespread destabilization in Central Asia and the transformation of AfPak into an Islamic State subsidiary on the borders of Russia, India, China, and Iran. The start of full-scale war, which will inevitably follow once chaos engulfs the region, will lead to a bloodbath in the “Eurasian Balkans,” automatically involving more than a third of the world’s population and almost all the United States’ geopolitical rivals. It’s an opportunity Washington will find too good to miss.

Russia’s response to this challenge has to be multifaceted: involving the region in the process of Eurasian integration, providing military, economic, and political assistance, working closely with its allies in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS, strengthening the Pakistani army, and of course assisting with the capture of the bearded servants of the Caliphate.

But the most important response should be the accelerated modernization of its armed forces as well as those of its allies and efforts to strengthen the Collective Security Treaty Organization and give it the right to circumvent the highly inefficient United Nations.

The region is extremely important: if Ukraine is a fuse of war, then Central Asia is a munitions depot. If it blows up, half the continent will be hit.

Putting US war spending in perspective

First, check out this: http://www.ibtimes.com/14-million-hour-war-costs-top-16-trillion-911-say-congressional-researchers-1764816

Then watch this:

Saker interview with Nebojsa Malic aka "Grey Falcon"

Today I want to do something which I have not done in a long while: interview somebody by email and give that person the space to fully answer.  For those interested, in the past I did that with Mizgin (Kurdistan), Roger Tucker (One Democratic State), Taimur (Indian Kashmir), Gilad Atzmon (Palestine), Joel Bainerman (Israel), Uri Avnery (Israel), Jonathan Cook (Palestine), Joel S. Hirschhorn (USA), Anticapitalista (Greece) and Scott Horton (USA).  I think that I like this format and I will come back to it again.

[BTW - my dream would be to make such an "email interview" with a Hezbollah official or party member but, alas, all my attempts to obtain such an interview have, so far, failed.  If anybody could help me get such an interview I would be eternally thankful to him/her!!]

Just a few days after seeing him interviewed by Peter Lavelle on RT about Crimea, I got an  email from Nebojsa Malic who blogs at Gray Falcon and who is currently President of the R. Archibald Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies in Washington, DC.  I immediately seized the opportunity to ask him a question which had been nagging at me for many years already.

I understand that the topic of war in Bosnia might reopen old wounds for some readers and I also understand that some might categorically disagree with Nebojsa Malic's point of view.  To those readers I would say two things: the war in Bosnia left everybody wounded, not just one group.  As for what lessons can be learned from this war, they might be painful, but they are also important because of the undeniable fact that what happened in Bosnia was the blueprint which was subsequently applied to Kosovo, Chechnia, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine.

I would very much welcome another point of view on this topic, especially one from a supporter of Alija Izetbegovic.  If somebody is willing to share such a point of view here, I would be delighted to publish it.

Finally, and especially because this is a painful topic, I will be far stricter than usual in my comments moderation policy.  While everybody will be free to express disagreements or criticisms, any comment which will be rude or include any ad hominems will be deleted.  Likewise, I will tolerate no insults towards any of the Bosnian ethnic and religious groups involved in this war.  We all probably think that this or that party was in the right, and that's fine, but at the end all parties are first and foremost victims of this war.  Thus they ideally all deserve respect and, if that is impossible, then at least basic courtesy.  This restriction does not apply to any of the external parties to this conflict whom you may insult to your heart's content (if you feel that this adds something useful to the conversation).

A big "thank you!" to Nebojsa Malic for his time and very interesting answer.

The Saker

-------

Question from The Saker:

Ever since the war in Bosnia began, I have been convinced that the Bosnian-Muslims have been conned by the USA into the wrong alliance and that they would have been infinitely better off if they had sided with the Serbs against the Croats. Do you agree with that? If not - why not? As far as I know, Radovan Karadzic made several offers to make a deal, but they were all rejected. Is that true? Can you be specific and outline what the Bosnian-Serbs offered as a basis for negotiations? I also know that some Bosnian-Muslims were favorable to a dialog with the Bosnian-Serbs - why did that never happen? There is the mostly overlooked example of Fikret Abdic in Bihac. Why was his "model" not emulated by other Bosnian-Muslim leaders? Why has a "Bosnian Akhmad Kadyrov" not appeared during this war? Lastly, what are your hopes for a future national reconciliation between all Bosnians?

Answer from Nebojsa Malic:

My experience in Bosnia is enough to sell me on the idea of powerful personalities as forces of history. Because a lot of what happened in Bosnia cannot be explained other than through the man who emerged as the leader of the Bosnian Muslims, Alija Izetbegovic.

The rift between Bosnia’s communities is religious, but also historical. The Serbs are natives who remained loyal to the Orthodox Church. Bosnia’s Muslims are mainly local converts to Islam over the four centuries of Ottoman rule (1461-1878). And then you have the locals who converted to Catholicism, as well as settlers who arrived from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the 1878-1918 occupation; these two groups were later shoehorned into the catch-all category of “Croats.”

A century ago, there were both Serb, Croat and Muslim members of “Young Bosnia,” the organization behind the 1914 assassination of the Hapsburg heir in Sarajevo that was later used as a pretext for WW1. When Austria-Hungary fell apart at the end of the war, the unified state of South Slavs (in 1929 renamed “Yugoslavia”) got mired in a bitter conflict between the Orthodox Serb majority and the Catholic Croats. When Hitler invaded in 1941, Croats sided with the Axis and established their own state, which immediately began the mass murder of Serbs. Many Muslims, sadly, joined the Croats in this endeavor, perhaps seeing the German Reich as the return of Austria-Hungary (within which most of their Ottoman privileges were preserved). Others backed the Germans directly, unhappy that the Ustasha regime saw them as nothing more than “Islamic Croats.”

One of those people was the young Alija Izetbegovic – too young to join the two Muslim Waffen-SS divisions, but old enough to be an activist. Briefly imprisoned by the Communist regime after the war, he was released and later went to law school.

Originally intent on dismembering Yugoslavia, Tito’s Communists rethought the idea when they came into power in 1945. So they partitioned the country into “socialist republics.” One of these republics reunited the two Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina into a single polity, which was supposed to hold Yugoslavia together as a place belonging to Serbs, Muslims and Croats alike. A system of ethnic quotas was put into place to encourage parity, and in the 1960s the Muslims were recognized not just as a religious group, but as a proper nation (narod, as opposed to narodnost).

In 1971, young Izetbegovic wrote a treatise called “The Islamic Declaration,” calling for a return of secularized Muslim societies to political Islam – eight years before the revolution in Iran did precisely that. But his samizdat wasn’t noticed until the early 1980s, when Albanian separatism began manifesting as terrorist attacks, and the Communists jailed Izetbegovic – with a dozen associates – on charges of “inciting ethnic hatred”. Agitating the loudest for his release was a group of Serbian writers and political activists.

The Yugoslav Communist Party started to come apart in 1989, and by 1990, individual republics were holding their own elections. Izetbegovic met with a prominent Muslim who had been living in exile in Switzerland – Adil Zulfikarpasic – and together with him and historian Muhamed Filipovic established the “Party of Democratic Action” (SDA). This was prior to the abolition of a law banning ethnic political parties, hence the neutral name. Zulfikarpasic invested his money, Filipovic his idea of a Muslim-dominated “Bosniak” nation, and Izetbegovic his zeal. They scored another success by talking Fikret Abdic into headlining the SDA’s election ticket. Abdic was a successful Muslim businessman from western Bosnia, who late in the 1980s crossed a powerful political clan and was railroaded on charges of embezzlement; this garnered him much sympathy among all Bosnians, in addition to his regional popularity.

Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serbs split their support between the “nationalist” Serb Democratic Party (SDS) and the more “Yugoslav”-oriented Social-Democrats and the Reformist Alliance. SDS leader Radovan Karadzic, a poet and psychiatrist, kept trying to negotiate a “historic agreement” with the Muslims. But a deal he made with Zulfikarpasic and Filipovic was rejected by Izetbegovic, and the two were driven out of the SDA. After Abdic had won most of the votes in the presidential poll, he was pressured to cede the chair of the seven-member body to Izetbegovic, who thus became “President of Bosnia”.

Meanwhile, at Izetbegovic’s instructions, the SDA made a pact with the Croats (the local branch of the ruling Croatian party, HDZ, aiming to resurrect the 1940s independent Croatia). Even then, the Serbs offered Izetbegovic a deal: he could be the president of Yugoslavia, composed of Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and possibly Macedonia. He said no. In February 1991 he famously declared: “I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina… but for that peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina I would not sacrifice sovereignty.” In October 1991, SDA and HDZ legislators illegally called an independence referendum.

The last-ditch effort by the Europeans to salvage peace in Bosnia resulted in the “Cutilheiro plan” proposed by the top Portuguese diplomat. Under it, Bosnia would be partitioned into three ethnic provinces, but in return the Serbs and Croats would recognize its independence and integrity. Izetbegovic signed it at first – then, in mid-March 1992, following the visit by U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, reneged on the deal. The Croats were already raiding the border areas, seeking to continue Croatia’s war (officially ended by the January 1992 armistice) by proxy in Bosnia. Faced with the complete collapse of political dialogue, the Serbs took to arms as well.

Izetbegovic’s entire strategy was to get the U.S. military involved on his behalf. Meanwhile, he entrusted the head of the ulema, Mustafa Ceric, to “Islamize” the Muslims in line with Izetbegovic’s 1971 declaration, even to the point of importing Wahhabis and “Afghans” to serve as missionaries.

Fikret Abdic tried to make peace even then. He had left Sarajevo in March 1992, going back to western Bosnia. In 1993, he proclaimed the “Autonomous Region of Western Bosnia” (Autonomna Oblast Zapadna Bosna). At the time, Izetbegovic’s alliance with the Croats had fallen apart, and Muslims and Croats were fighting viciously in central Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both the Serbs and the Croats had made separate peace with Abdic.

While Izetbegovic thought he was using the Americans, they were using him. Washington continued to sink several European peace initiatives in 1992 and 1993, while gradually dragging NATO into the Bosnian War at the expense of the UN. In 1994, Washington arranged a truce between Izetbegovic’s Muslims and the Croats and forced them into a military alliance, as well as the political one (“Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina”). The Croatian Army was armed and trained by American “contractors” and in August 1995 – backed by NATO - launched an all-out assault on the Serb-inhabited territories claimed by Croatia. This was the cue for Izetbegovic’s Fifth Corps to attack Abdic. Outnumbered, outgunned and unable to get support from the hard-pressed Serbs, Abdic’s followers surrendered. They have been persecuted ever since.

But Washington had its own agenda: by ending the war in Bosnia, America could posture as a white knight coming to the aid of oppressed Muslims (thus scoring propaganda points in the Muslim world) while reasserting dominance over Europe. In the minds of American leaders, by the time the Dayton peace talks began, Izetbegovic and the Bosnian War had served their purpose.

According to Richard Holbrooke, chief US negotiator at the Dayton talks in November 1995, Izetbegovic tried to sabotage the talks several times. Holbrooke’s memoirs relate the Americans’ frustration with Izetbegovic at that point, describing how he drove even the normally sanguine Warren Christopher into a paroxysm of rage. In the end, Izetbegovic gave in – the Americans had secured the backing of the Serbs, the Croats, and the rest of his delegation, and he could not refuse the peace plan without being obviously responsible. The Bosnian War ended with a partition. It was essentially the same plan the Americans urged Izetbegovic to reject in 1992, only now a 100,000 people were dead and the country destroyed by war.

Izetbegovic claimed, echoed by his hagiographers, that he “saved” the Bosnian Muslims from “Serb aggression and genocide.” In reality, he almost destroyed them – by pushing them into a suicidal war against their friends, neighbors and relatives, by letting the West use them as propaganda pawns, and in the end by stealing from the billions of dollars in foreign aid that came to Bosnia after the war. Bosnia’s economy never recovered, but the bank accounts of SDA officials benefited handsomely.

With his wartime propaganda poisoning the well of Muslim relations with Serbs and Croats, it has been impossible to glue Bosnia together even 18 years after Dayton. Not only did he destroy the inter-ethnic trust by reneging on agreements with Serbs and Croats, Izetbegovic also deceived and discarded every Muslim associate of his. He double-crossed Zulfikarpasic, Filipovic before the war, Abdic during, and his wartime lieutenants Ganic and Silajdzic afterwards. The warlords he personally commanded during the war (such as Jusuf “Juka” Prazina or Musan “Caco” Topalovic) ended up dead on Belgian roads, or “shot while attempting to escape” police custody, or victims of mysterious suicides and “car accidents.”

None of this absolves the West from responsibility for the Bosnian tragedy, by the way. Their attempts to use Izetbegovic may have been the deciding factor in plunging Bosnia into war. And their behavior after Dayton – making Bosnia into a de facto protectorate and trying to impose their vision of what the country should be (which was often conflicted, and always confused) – created a powerful disincentive for any sort of internal dialogue. This is why the legacy of hatred and distrust has persisted to the present day, even though Izetbegovic himself died in 2003.

What motivated his hatred of the Serbs is difficult to divine – some say it was his family history, as they left Serbia in 1867 and settled in Bosnia, ever resentful of the Serb “infidels” – but ultimately doesn’t matter. The damage has been done. A generation of Muslims has grown up learning to hate the Serbs and Croats, and believe themselves the victims to whom the West owes a living. The real question is who among the Bosnian Muslims will have the courage to challenge Izetbegovic’s political dogma, and the vision to transcend it. Right now, there is no one that comes to mind.

Though Sulejman Tihic, who succeeded Izetbegovic as the head of the SDA in 2001, has made many attempts to mend fences with the Serbs over the years, the “old guard” within the party – led by Izetbegovic’s son Bakir – successfully undermined all his efforts. To make matters worse, Tihic has cancer, and his prognosis is terminal.

I hope the same is not true of the future of Bosnia. But nothing gives me reason to be optimistic.

Nebojsa Malic was born in Sarajevo (today the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina) and lived through the Bosnian War. He was a translator for the Sarajevo City Hall in 1995, as well as a freelance interpreter to the Anglosphere media. After leaving Bosnia in 1996, he got a BA in History and International Studies from Graceland University in Iowa. He started writing on Balkans issues in 1999, blogs at Gray Falcon since 2004, and is currently President of the R. Archibald Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies in Washington, DC.

The tip of the immense iceberg of US diplomatic stupidity now spotted off the Chinese Pacific coast

written specially for the Asia Times

Do you remember President Clinton ordered two US aircraft carrier battle groups into the Strait of Taiwan in 1996 to "send a message" to China?  Well, it appears that Barak Obama, the lame duck spineless multi-humiliated and multi-defeated President of the US of A just had a surge of testosterone and decided to provoke China yet again by mocking its decision to extend its air defense zone over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.  The way Uncle Sam sent his usual message of imperial contempt was to send two B-52 bombers to flout the Chinese air defense zone.  Not content to do something so mind-bogglingly stupid and irresponsible, the Americans also decided to make sure to add an inflammatory statement.  According to the BBC, (emphasis added)

US Colonel Steve Warren at the Pentagon said Washington had "conducted operations in the area of the Senkakus". "We have continued to follow our normal procedures, which include not filing flight plans, not radioing ahead and not registering our frequencies," he said. There had been no response from China, he added.

Brilliant, no?

The geniuses at the Pentagon sent two strategic bombers (capable of nuclear strikes) directly into an airspace which the Chinese have just declared "air defence identification zone" in which non-compliance with Chinese rules would trigger "emergency defensive measures" and to make sure to inflict the maximal amount of loss of face on China they have essentially mocked the Chinese for not taking any measure.

I would qualify all these actions as criminally reckless and phenomenally stupid.

First, imagine just for a second that the Chinese had shot down the two US bombers.  Then what?  Would the US which did not even have the balls to strike Iran or Syria attack China?  The US sure could not go to  the UNSC for support where they would be laughed out from the Council chambers by both Russia and China and, probably most other UNSC members too.  So did the Americans count on the Chinese doing the right thing?  If that is the case, then the only message sent to Beijing is "look, we are irresponsible and reckless, and we count on your sanity".  This is most unlikely to impress anybody in China.

Second, now that the Chinese did the smart thing and ignored the US stupidity, what has this move achieved beyond alienating China even further?  One really ought to know absolutely nothing about Asia to believe that you can impose a major loss of face on a superpower like China and not have to pay dearly for it.  The big difference between the US and China is that the former acts like a spoiled teenager brat with an attention and memory span in the 5-10 minutes range:  "The Chinese did not attack our bombers - that must mean that we taught them a good lesson!".  Wrong.  The Chinese will make you pay - dearly - for each such humiliation (and God knows there have been many such humiliations the past couple of decades -  remember the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?), but they will make you pay on their own time, when they decide, and that could take literally centuries.  Chinese diplomats and politicians have 4000 years of experience dealing with uneducated and uncivilized barbarians and they know how important it is not to act in haste but with slow focused determination.  And they will remember that humiliation for as long as it takes to avenge it.

Third, does anybody in the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom or the White House really think that US colonies allies in the region will be positively impressed?  Of course not!  Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese diplomats will be horrified to be associated to a such a sorry bunch of nuke-wielding cowboys, but they will keep their mouths shut because they all know that their countries are simply vassal states of the USPACOM province of the US Empire.

Lastly, what has the US proven to the rest of the world.  That is is powerful?  Hardly.  Having lost the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, having lost control of Libya, and having been defeated by Russia and Iranian diplomats over Syria and Iran, the US is an obese and obnoxious giant, but hardly a powerful one.  Yes, it is reckless to send bombers literally into China's backyard (or doorstep - pick you metaphor), but recklessness is not a quality which impresses anybody in Asia and the Americans are deeply deluded if they think that they "scared" the Chinese.  Truly, the one thing that this latest US provocation has achieved is to prove to the world and, especially, Asia, the US simply does not understand the nature and purpose of diplomacy.

I am personally take no position whatsoever on the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute itself.  What I am saying is that type of dispute can only be resolved with careful and time consuming diplomatic negotiations and measures and that if Japan truly wanted to get China to give up its claim on these islands the best way to do that would be to make sure that this does not involve any loss of face.  But for a country which has not had Administration capable of diplomacy since the years of George Bush (senior) the kind of provocation we have just witnessed is par for the course.

In conclusion, I would like to say here that US politicians are wrong to be ignorant of Hegel's dialectics and its rules.  Gradual quantitative changes (over time) do eventually result in qualitative changes and this very much applies to the Chinese military which is currently embarked on a huge program of deep modernization and reform which, when completed, will result in a profound strategic shift in the Asian-Pacific Ocean region.  In contrast to the aging and completely overstreched US armed forces, the Chinese armed forces are catching up and catching up really fast.  Yes, in the 1980s the Chinese military did look at lot like the Soviet military of the late 1950s, but the economic boom of China has deeply changed this and today the Chinese armed forces are gradually acquiring more and more 21 century characteristics and soon they will easily surpass the capabilities of the ROK and Japan.  Next,  and before the folks in the White House fully understand it, the US will be facing a large and technologically equal or even superior Chinese military.  China is also being very smart in forging and informal but truly strategic alliance with Russia which, unlike the USA, does every effort possible to show respect and support for its large neighbor.  Should it ever come to a shooting match between the US and China there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Russia will offer its fullest support for China short of actually attacking US targets.
 
In the meantime, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel that China's extension of its air defense zone was  "destabilising attempt to alter the status quo in the region" while the White House said it was "unnecessarily inflammatory".

Yeah, right.

Have these cowboys ever looked into a mirror?

The Saker

The picture which says it all

Photo from the streets of Cairo: