The Morning Rant: Worrisome News In The South Pacific, Where China Is Building An Airstrip Close To Hawaii

Did you hear the news about Kiribati, the sparsely populated country of only 120,000 people that recently severed ties with Taiwan and aligned itself with Communist China?

Most Americans have never even heard of Kiribati. For those of us who have, it may be because of our historical interest in the WWII battle at Tarawa, or evidence that Amelia Earhart may have been a castaway on the Kiribati island of Nikumaroro.

Well not only has Kiribati aligned with China. China is upgrading an airstrip and infrastructure on the Kiribati island of Kanton, which sits closer to Hawaii than the US mainland is to Hawaii.

Monica Showalter of The American Thinker noticed this under-covered story, and wrote about it a few days ago. Buried News: China setting up an airstrip close to Hawaii. It's worth reading. Here are some important points she made:

China is building an airstrip about as close to Hawaii as it's possible to get, well closer than Hawaii is to the mainland…

…does anyone not think that China's sudden interest in constructing things in that middle-of-nowhere part of the Pacific is about anything else but menacing Hawaii? The strip is roughly 2,000 miles from Honolulu, while San Diego is 2,600 miles from Honolulu and 3,300 miles from Kiribati. Based on advanced fighter jet technology, 2,000-mile distances are doable, and the shorter distance provides some useful possibilities for China — not just in launching an attack, but in constructing more lily-pad atolls.

Kiribati may not amount to much total land, but its territorial waters encompass 1.4 million square miles of the South Pacific. In the map below, the Hawaiian archipelago is the island group to the north of Kiribati.

Quite simply, China will be in position to exert naval control over the South Pacific in a few short years if it so chooses. We should fear that it will make that choice.

Meanwhile, we have a barely functioning President focused on Ukraine, where his family has - ahem - had financial success, and we have a woke military leadership that is apparently more focused on green energy and transsexuality than it is on preparing for threats from an expansion-minded China.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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