Call it the Gulf of Baja if you like.
Or the Sea of Cortez as per John Steinbeck’s book
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China claim that it was there in order to spy on their submarines. That’s at least vaguely plausible. It’s a microaggression in response to Trump’s provocation on Twitter. Expect more.
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How do you say “finder’s keepers, looser’s weepers” in mandarin?
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It is ours, and it is clearly marked as ours and we would like it back. And we would like this not to happen again,
Queen Liliuokalani
If Trump is five orders of magnitude tougher on China than Obama has been, or five orders less, I doubt the difference will be distinguishable without an electron microscope.
Trump literally has been the toughest on China since the 70s and maybe ever before taking office by questioning One China; I’m not sure how you could think his policy would be indistinguishable from Obama not rocking the boat at all. This is one of those cases of an extremely wide glow-in-the-dark line that has been crossed. Without Trump flipping entirely on the issue (and possibly being even softer than Clinton) the damage is done. You don’t unring two very public questions of a decades old diplomatic stance.
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That’s… more factually accurate than I expected Trump’s take on it to be.
(Damning with faint praise though that might be)
That’s the corrected edit after everyone mocked him for spelling it “unpresidented”
I wish I were kidding.
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I saw the original tweet he did…guess I better start learning Chinese.
You know, that would be a great name for a documentary on Trump’s presidency after he’s impeached.
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I think #unpresidented will describe the next 4 years pretty well.
Might be a good hashtag for his impeachment, too.
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Mexico calls the states of the peninsula Baja California and Baja California Sur. Alta California, of course, was taken from Mexico in the Mexican-American war, and the Alta part was ditched. So, Gulf of California may sound like a US construction or claim, but it’s not. I’ve mostly only heard it called Golfo de California when in the area, sometimes Mar de Cortés, but mostly for tourist type stuff.
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There are twenty ships in the picture-- (some of them are probably Japanese), about the size of a carrier strike group. The 7th fleet consists of several groups/task forces/sqaudrons-- 60 or 70 ships according to wikipedia
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USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) is currently the Navy’s forward deployed aircraft carrier in Seventh
Fleet. Whereas other carriers are homeported in the U.S. and deploy periodically, USS Ronald Reagan is
permanently forwarddeployed to Yokosuka, Japan and spends about half of each year at sea.
USS Ronald Reagan, when combined with guided missile destroyers and cruisers, creates a carrier
strike group of up to 12 ships and 75 aircraft. These forces have a higher operational tempo than other
Navy vessels, and being forward deployed cuts an average of 17 days transit time to the region compared
to forces based in the continental U.S. The Navy may assign another aircraft carrier to Seventh Fleet for
temporary operations, adding 70 more aircraft and numerous ships to our long range strike capability.
http://www.c7f.navy.mil/Portals/8/documents/7thFleetTwoPagerFactsheet.pdf?ver=2016-01-27-061248-087
Things like temperature and salinity measurements are totally standard oceanography/climatology/general civilian science of various degrees of applied-ness; and the equipment to make those measurements(not necessarily the top shelf stuff, which might be exclusive to those with bigger budgets) is fairly prosaic. Any university or research institution with a decent oceonography program should be able to hook you up; and scientific publications aren’t considered all hush-hush.
However, salinity and temperature(along with seabed geometry and assorted other variables, apparently including the swim bladders of local fish, if they are present in sufficient numbers, which I find inordinately amusing) affect the acoustic properties of seawater, which means that anyone operating sonar(active or passive) will have a better time making sense of the data if they also have accurate and current information on the acoustic properties of the water they are working in.
I have no special knowledge of what this UUV is capable of, or what it was doing; but it wouldn’t be technologically infeasible for it to be a more or less off-the-shelf, unremarkable, research grade device; but gathering data as part of a navy effort to ensure optimal day-ruining for Chinese naval assets in the area.
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Though, you only get to be both ‘inward focused’ and ‘empire’ by doing some good, old fashioned, expanding at some point; then (whether by some accident of history, because you’ve run out of soft targets, or something else) switching tactics.
We think of the Brits as aggressively expansionistic because their expansionary period was relatively recent history; and because they (mostly) couldn’t make the territorial gains stick post WWII.
In the world wars period, when the European powers sat down to hammer out who got what colonial spoils; and ensure that they could get on with squeezing the natives without the distraction of border wars between themselves; we could have seen the beginning of a British move toward focusing on the empire they had; had the European custom of fighting a horrifyingly brutal and somewhat incomprehensible meatgrinder war every generation or two not gotten in the way.
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Just about time for the EU to collapse so they can have another one.
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I hope not: the EU may be terribly flawed, but it does bring stability to europe and surrounding regions.
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