Water Becomes Political: Nobody Need Thirst

Water is the world’s most abundant resource. Lakes, rivers, streams, and ponds - not to mention rain - water crops around the world. Fresh drinking water is more available than ever before. Even oceanic saltwater - once thought irredeemably unpotable - is now subject to desalinization at ever shrinking prices.

Why, then, would any human being not have enough water to drink?

Yet it is the case that water is in some places scarce - even to the point at which lives are lost.

The problem is not the amount of water on the planet - there’s more than enough of that. The problem is politics.

While most of the human race has plenty of fresh clean water, people are thirsting and even dying in specific places: (1) nations with socialist or communist governments, (2) Islamic republics, and (3) nations with notoriously corrupt governments.

It’s worth noting that there’s a difference between “Islamic republics” on the one hand, and “Muslim majority” or “majority Muslim” nations on the other.

In any case, water shortages are unnecessary, as author David Wallace-Wells writes:

Today, the crisis is political — which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix — and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development. There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it. Some cities lose more water to leaks than they deliver to homes: even in the United States, leaks and theft account for an estimated loss of 16 percent of freshwater; in Brazil, the estimate is 40 percent.

A political problem demands a political solution - not an engineering or climatological one.

An infinite amount of pipelines and wells will not solve the world’s water problem; neither will gerrymandering human behavior to impact the climate.

Only when a nation has a government which has at least a modicum of respect for human life - only then will the water problem be solved.

China’s Two-Pronged Strategy: Cyber Warfare and Military Buildup

In the early twenty-first century, foreign policy analysts have paid a great deal of attention to China, even if the news media and public at large failed to do so. On those rare occasions when China was the focus of news coverage, the topic was often trade agreements.

The analysts, however, are more concerned about China’s teams of hackers, and about China’s military buildup.

China’s cyberwar teams have gone beyond mere theft of intellectual property. They now focus on disruptive techniques to take American systems offline entirely.

China’s physical military has constructed islands out of concrete and cement in the South China Sea. These islands are home to sophisticated weapons and radar systems, as well as bases for soldiers, as Jim Sciutto writes:

By the mid-2000s, China’s national effort to steal US technology and state secrets was already in high gear and logging up enormous successes in both the public and private sectors. In 2014 China defied both international law and the laws of physics to manufacture entirely new sovereign territory in the middle of the South China Sea, beginning construction of a string of man-made islands in waters claimed by several of its Southeast Asian neighbors. China was also expanding its military capabilities and military footprint from under the waves all the way into space, with the express intention of surpassing the United States and — if necessary — defeating the United States in war.

What’s at stake? Here’s one of many possible scenarios: China could activate its killer satellites to destroy several American satellites. This would cause disruptions in all manner of telecommunication, paralyzing the military, the government, and the businesses of the private-sector economy. Next, China’s hackers overwhelm or otherwise crash major computer systems, further paralyzing the nation and potentially causing permanent loss of data.

Finally, with the U.S. paralyzed, the Chinese military would be positioned in the South China Sea to carry out a sort of piracy or extortion. Passing freighters would be made pay cash or a fraction of their cargo to pass through was are supposed to be free international waters.

Estimates state that perhaps between 30% and 40% of the world’s cargo shipping passes through the South China Sea. Any nation which could control that region would have a stranglehold on the global economy.

Not only have the media failed to inform the public about Chinese threats, but even officials inside the U.S. government often fail to assess or respond to China’s slow-motion aggression, as Jim Sciutto reports:

Inside the US government and the intelligence community, these aggressive steps were first missed and then downplayed. US officials, led by President Barack Obama, accepted China’s assurances it would not militarize its man-made islands in the South China Sea — assurances Beijing reneged on almost immediately. Obama would later accept Chinese assurances that Beijing would dial back its cyber theft of US corporate secrets, malicious activity that remains rampant and aggressive today. Even after finally acknowledging these acts of aggression, many US officials and policy experts continued to portray them as short-term or easily reversible.

As serious as other situations may be — Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Afghanistan, etc. — China has the potential to easily become a much graver danger than any of the others.

Yet media reporting and government diplomats fail to emphasize the seriousness of China’s long-range plans to dominate not only the South China Sea, but larger segments of the global economy. Smaller ‘developing’ nations in Africa and Asia have already fallen victim to China’s program to reduce them to vassal states.

China offers to help these nations with large infrastructure projects (roads, dams, etc.). When these ‘third-world’ countries are unable to pay the ensuing debts, China offers to ‘forgive’ the debt in return for the rights to permanently station Chinese military units in those nations, and in return for rights to in, around, and through those countries.

Under this pattern, called the “Belt and Road” initiative, China would dominate both world trade and transportation. This goal has been deliberately articulated among the highest levels of Chinese leadership.

One possible response to China would be for American leaders to publicly explain China’s tactics and goals, to create a global awareness. The leaders of many nations could be expected to unite on this matter, even if they disagree about many other topics.