Free Republic

China responded on Thursday to growing international defiance of its new air-defense zone in the East China Sea both by sending advanced fighter jets to the area and trying to play down any threat of military retaliation—underlining the confusion and escalated tension over the territorial dispute. The announcement by China's air force that it had sent fighters and an early-warning aircraft to patrol the zone came just a few hours after Japan and South Korea, following the U.S.'s lead, said their military aircraft had flown into the zone without notifying Beijing over the past few days, and would continue to...

In 1823, U.S. President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams used the president’s annual message to Congress to codify a new foreign policy doctrine. The United States, they announced, was entitled to “indisputable sovereignty” over the islands and waters within a line on the map that enclosed the vast majority of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Monroe and Adams proclaimed that these claims constituted a “core interest” of the United States – an interest for which the republic was prepared to fight. It went without saying that they would brook no opposition from weak...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China is building two aircraft carriers as part of a military modernization program that is causing concern among other Asian countries, sources said on Wednesday. President Hu Jintao has made the navy a keystone of China's defense upgrade, and the carriers will be among the most visible signs of its rising military prowess. ... "Two aircraft carriers are being built at the Jiangnan shipyard in Shanghai," a source with ties to China's Communist Party leadership told Reuters, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the program. China's Defense Ministry has confirmed the existence of...

Military Advantage: Our defense secretary proposes doing what no other foreign adversary has done: sink the U.S. Navy. We don't need those billion-dollar destroyers, he says. Meanwhile, the Chinese navy rushes to fill the vacuum. Once Britannia ruled the waves, later to be replaced by America and its Navy. From the Battle of Midway to President Reagan's 600-ship fleet that helped win the Cold War, naval supremacy has been critical to the protection and survival of our nation. Which is why we find the recent remarks of Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the Navy League at the Sea-Air-Space expo so...

THE seizure of the Maersk Alabama and her American crew of 21 by pirates on Tuesday may finally be the wake-up call we need to deal with the ongoing piracy threat in the waters off Somalia. To their everlasting credit, the Americans on board saved the Obama administration from its version of Jimmy Carter's Iran hostage crisis by turning the tables on their captors and taking back their ship. Can we hope that the US government will finally be as decisive -- and truly act against this growing threat to world trade? The pirates prey at the Horn of Africa,...