NATIONAL SECURITY: With An Eye Toward China, India Inks Intelligence Defence Pact With USA

Trump was roundly mocked for beating that drum in warning about China back in 2016. Attitudes sure have changed in the 4 years that followed. Now there is a new development with India that China won’t like at all.

We were given horror stories about how badly Trump was going to destroy our foreign relations. Fight with our friends. Start wars with our foes — or else the other extreme, that Trump would be licking the boots of whoever was ‘really’ pulling his strings.

(Cue the Russia Russia Russia memes.)

But Trump was right about China… and a lot of other foreign policy too.

We’ve talked about Trump’s Peace-Prize-Nominated deals worked out through the Middle East. Or the troops that are finally coming home from hotspots around the world. Or about crushing ISIS and smoking Soleimani.

But hardly anyone is talking about an intelligence arrangement being set up between USA and one of the few geopolitical threats with the raw manpower to go toe-to-toe with China and make them blink.

India.

With China testing India’s borders lately, and both sides building up the border between the rival nations, an agreement between the most populous Commonwealth country and USA seems a natural and mutually beneficial fit.

India and the United States on Tuesday signed a basic exchange and cooperation agreement for geospatial cooperation, a major defense pact for the exchange of classified geospatial intelligence between their armed forces.

The agreement was signed between the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is part of the Defense Department, and the Indian Ministry of Defence during the third 2+2 dialogue between the defense and foreign ministers of the two counties.

India and the U.S. negotiated the terms of the agreement for more than a decade, according to an MoD official.

“BECA will permit the U.S. armed forces to provide advanced navigational aids and avionics and share geospatial intelligence to India that will help boost the accuracy of the Indian military’s automated hardware systems and weapons such as drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles,” the official explained.

The third round of the bilateral 2+2 meeting was held in India on Oct. 27 against the backdrop of a tense border standoff with China in eastern Ladakh.

In a joint statement the ministers — Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Minister of External Affairs Subramanyam Jaishankar, with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper — described the pact as a significant step in bilateral relations. The Defense Technology and Trade Initiative, meant to bolster the joint production of weapon systems, was also discussed, and a bilateral summit is planned later this year to strengthen defense industrial cooperation, the joint statement noted. —DefenseNews

With Xi squashing the religious rights of Chinese citizens, suppressing journalists, ‘disappearing’ Doctors blowing the whistle on Covid, using in slave labor, filling concentration camps, negating the rights of Hong Kong’s citizens, and threatening neighbors like Taiwan and India, people have come to the realization that maybe Xi really IS a problem.

Unless you work for the NBA, Big Tech, Hollywood or some big media. Then you still prostitute yourselves to whatever whim the Communist Chinese pay you to agree to. (Which is the real reason the Hunter Biden story is such a big deal … a compromised President would potentially have personal interests and national interests running at cross purposes.)

China had been eating our lunch in a lot of different ways.

They were stealing our patents and then selling our own technology back to us at a lower price. They were flooding our markets with CCP-subsidized goods to put our local suppliers out of business.

They were begging, borrowing, or stealing access to dual-use technologies which helped their military skip entire generations of R&D, simply piggybacking on what we had already discovered.

On and on it went, until Trump started getting tough with them.

Biden was supposed to talk the Chinese out of building those artificial islands which they are using to project their military presence into what had been International Waters. Joe’s negotiations weren’t able to make that happen, but Hunter DID come back from China with a kickass business deal.