US interventions in South China Sea provoke war: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Mike Billington, a member of the Executive Intelligence Review in Leesburg, to discuss maritime disputes in the South China Sea.

A rough transcription of the interview appears below.

Press TV: How do you feel about this? Is this an escalation, provocation, how would you term this?

Billington:

Well, I would not agree with your characterization of this as a conflict between nations over control over trade routes. There has never been any complaint from any commercial ship of any sort over freedom of navigation in South China Sea. Obviously, China is the most concerned with freedom of navigation since they are very, very dependent on trade through that region of which the US has very little concern. But the danger here is that so-called freedom of navigation is being used as an excuse by the war party in Washington under Obama and especially his literally insane Defense Secretary Ashton Carter who has spent the last several weeks speaking to Annapolis, the Naval Academy, other naval institutions, the Air Force Academy and then in Shangri-La at the Singapore security meeting, ranting about China being the greatest danger. Almost his entire speech was spent talking about the extreme danger of Chinese aggression and the necessity for a military to prepare for war.

And the reality here as Lyndon LaRouche has pointed out is that the Asian nations have pulled together around China’s initiative for development. This includes Japan which has taken a quite dramatic turn apparently towards working with Russia and with China on development issues and even the Philippines whose new government has immediately indicated that they, as soon as inaugurated at the end of this month, will open negotiation with China.

So in that context, these repeated interventions by US military, I mean spy planes as you call them, and their interventions into the islands around the South China Sea have to be seen as a provocation which even though the US is at this point failing to consolidate a kind of NATO in Asia as Ash Carter called for but nonetheless are in a very dangerous position where they could in fact provoke something that would turn into a war virtually overnight in the situation there and that constitutes the gravest danger not only to Asia but the mankind.

The brink of thermonuclear conflict that we now face in Europe where the NATO forces are deploying 40 or 50 thousand troops up to the Russian border for these crazy exercises and in Asia where they are attempting still despite resistance from virtually all of the Asian countries to provoke a NATO type opposition to China and to China’s development not its rise, not its rise to power, not taking control of trade routes as your opening statement said but rather China’s rise through development offering to repeat the tremendous development process that they have implemented internally in China to the rest of the developing sector and offering the same to the US and Europe who desperately need help if they would stop this geopolitical confrontation policy and join in a win-win policy of the common interest of mankind as Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche have focused their efforts for these last 40 years.

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