Foreign Digest: Syria and China

Syria The United States and Israel have struck pro-Iranian militants and Iranian rockets that threaten Israel, respectively, in Syria. The pro-Iranian militants fired rockets two American bases. The U.S. leads an international coalition in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State, the offshoot of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization responsible for the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks. Islamist Iran uses its ally Syria as a conduit for funds and arms for militants and terrorists. It also supports Syria’s Bashar Assad, whose regime sponsors terrorism through its cooperation with Iran and by giving safe harbor to terrorists, in the Syrian Civil War. The war began in 2011 as an uprising against tyranny and has killed over half a million people and displaced millions. Russia also supports Assad. The U.S. and its allies have backed Syrian democratic forces among the many sides in the war, while Turkey has supported its own faction, but the Americans have avoided confronting Syria directly, except as punishment for using chemical weapons, focusing primarily instead on the Islamist terrorists. Syria is sanctioned by the U.S. for state sponsorship of terrorism. China The United States recently conducted its routine maneuvers in the South China Sea in support of the principle of freedom of the seas. Every American Administration since President George W. Bush has sent warships periodically through the Taiwan Strait, which Communist China claims. The mission comes at a time when the Chinese Communists have been threatening more vociferously to use force to reunite Taiwan with mainland China. The island province and some islands off the shores of China are the remnants of the Republic of China, which had been the Chinese government before the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In the South China Sea, Communist China had seized the Paracel Islands, which were claimed by Vietnam, and some of the Spratly Islands, which are disputed among several Asian States. Freedom of the seas has been an American principle since the U.S. defeated the Barbary Pirates in the early Eighteenth Century.