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Lời giới thiệu:
Hôm Thứ Tư mùng 16, tháng 11, năm 2011, Tổng thống Hoa Kỳ Obama đã
tuyên bố Hoa Kỳ sẽ dự định đổ bộ hai ngàn năm trăm (2,500) quân nhân
thuộc Binh chủng Thủy Quân Lục Chiến (TQLC) Hoa Kỳ (HK) lên lãnh thổ Úc
Đại Lợi với mục đích là để thiết lập một lực lượng Đồng minh quân sự tại
Á châu Thái Bình Dương. Sự kiện này đã khiến cho chính quyền Cộng
sản Bắc Kinh, Tàu cộng phản đối dữ dội và tố cáo Tổng thống Obama của
Hoa Kỳ có hành động leo thang quân sự gây căng thẳng trong vùng.
Ngay ngày hôm sau, TT Obama đã bay đến Darwin, một thành phố hẻo lánh
nằm về phía bắc của Úc Đại Lợi, và chủ tọa buổi nói chuyện trước một cử
tọa gồm hơn 2,000 quân nhân Úc trong quân phục màu xanh rằn-ri cùng với
55 quân nhân TQLC/HK. Ông nói: "Darwin, một nơi tuyệt diệu để củng
cố lực lượng Đồng minh của chúng ta." Buổi thuyết trình đã được tổ
chức trong một nhà chứa máy bay (hangar) nóng bức. Trong bài nói
chuyện, TT Obama cũng đã nhắc: "Vùng này là vùng có rất nhiều đường thủy
đi đi về về trên thế giới!". Dĩ nhiên sự việc này đã làm cho nhà
cầm quyền Trung cộng "nổi điên".
Xin mời quí độc giả theo rõi tiếp phần Anh ngữ sau đây:
Asia Pacific
Obama Addresses Troops at Final Stop in Australia
By JACKIE CALMES
Published: November 17, 2011
DARWIN, Australia — Fresh from announcing an expanded American
military presence in Australia, a plan that has angered China,
President Obama came to this remote northern town that will be
the base of operations and told American and Australian troops
it is “the perfect place.”
“We are deepening our alliance and this is the perfect place to
do it,” said Mr. Obama, speaking in a steamy air force hangar to
about 2,000 people, mostly Australian troops in green camouflage
uniforms but with 55 American Marines salted among them. “This
region has some of the busiest sea lanes in the world.”
Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Wednesday, Mr. Obama announced that the United States planned
to deploy 2,500 Marines in Australia to shore up alliances in
Asia, but the move prompted a sharp response from Beijing, which
accused Mr. Obama of escalating military tensions in the region.
The agreement with Australia amounts to the first long-term
expansion of the American military’s presence in the Pacific
since the end of the Vietnam War. It comes despite budget cuts
facing the Pentagon and an increasingly worried reaction from
Chinese leaders, who have argued that the United States is
seeking to encircle China militarily and economically.
“It may not be quite appropriate to intensify and expand
military alliances and may not be in the interest of countries
within this region,” Liu Weimin, a Foreign Ministry spokesman,
said in response to the announcement by Mr. Obama and Prime
Minister Julia Gillard of Australia.
In an address to the Australian Parliament on Thursday morning,
Mr. Obama said he had “made a deliberate and strategic decision
— as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and
long-term role in shaping this region and its future.”
The president said the moves were not intended to isolate China,
but they were an unmistakable sign that the United States had
grown warier of its intentions.
China has invested heavily in military modernization and has
begun to deploy long-range aircraft and a more able deep-sea
naval force, and it has asserted territorial claims to disputed
islands that would give it broad sway over oil and gas rights in
the East and South China Seas.
While the new military commitment is relatively modest, Mr.
Obama has promoted it as the cornerstone of a strategy to
confront more directly the challenge posed by China’s rapid
advance as an economic and military power. He has also made some
progress in creating a new Pacific free-trade zone that would
give America’s free-market allies in the region some trading
privileges that do not immediately extend to China.
Mr. Obama described the deployment as responding to the wishes
of democratic allies in the region, from Japan to India. Some
allies have expressed concerns that the United States, facing
war fatigue and a slackened economy, will cede its leadership
role to China. The president said budget-cutting in Washington —
and the inevitable squeeze on military spending — would not
inhibit his ability to follow through. Defense cuts “will not —
I repeat, will not — come at the expense of the Asia-Pacific,”
he said.
Some analysts in China and elsewhere say they fear that the
moves could backfire, risking a cold war-style standoff with
China.
“I don’t think they’re going to be very happy,” said Mark
Valencia, a Hawaii-based senior researcher at the National
Bureau of Asian Research, who said the new policy was months in
the making. “I’m not optimistic in the long run as to how this
is going to wind up.”
The United States will not build new bases on the continent, but
will use Australian facilities instead. Mr. Obama said that
Marines would rotate through for joint training and exercises
with Australians, and the American Air Force would have
increased access to airfields in the nation’s Northern
Territory. “We’re going to be in a position to more effectively
strengthen the security of both of our nations and this region,”
he said.
The United States has had military bases and large forces in
Japan and South Korea, in the north Pacific, since the end of
World War II, but its presence in Southeast Asia was greatly
diminished in the early 1990s with the closing of major bases in
the Philippines, at Clark Field and Subic Bay. The new
arrangement with Australia will restore a substantial American
footprint near the South China Sea, a major commercial route —
including for American exports — that has been roiled by China’s
disputed claims of control.
The United States and other Pacific Rim nations are also
negotiating to create a free-trade bloc, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, that would not initially include China, the world’s
largest exporter and producer of manufactured goods. The
tentative trade agreement was a topic over the weekend in
Honolulu, where Mr. Obama hosted the annual Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation forum, and it will be discussed again in
Bali, Indonesia, when he becomes the first American president to
participate in the East Asia Summit meeting.
For China, the week’s developments could suggest an economic and
a military encirclement. Top leaders did not immediately comment
on Mr. Obama’s speech, but Mr. Liu, the Foreign Ministry
spokesman, emphasized that it was the United States, not China,
seeking to use military power to influence events in Asia.
The Global Times, a state-run news organization known for its
nationalist and bellicose commentaries, issued a stronger
reaction in an editorial, saying that Australia should be
cautious about allowing the United States to use bases there to
“harm China” and that it risked getting “caught in the
cross-fire.”
Analysts say that Chinese leaders have been caught off guard by
what they view as an American campaign to stir up discontent in
the region. China may have miscalculated in recent years by
restating longstanding territorial claims that would give it
broad sway over development rights in the South China Sea, they
say. But they argue that Beijing has not sought to project
military power far beyond its shores, and has repeatedly
proposed to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations.
The United States portrays itself as responding to a new Chinese
assertiveness in the region that has alarmed core American
allies. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote a recent
article in Foreign Policy laying out an expansive case for
American involvement in Asia, and Defense Secretary Leon E.
Panetta characterized China’s military development as lacking
transparency and criticized its assertiveness in the regional
waters.
Mr. Obama reached out to China even as he announced the new
troop deployment. “The notion that we fear China is mistaken;
the notion that we are looking to exclude China is
mistaken,” he said.
 The president said that China would be welcomed into the new
trade pact if Beijing was willing to meet the free-trade
standards for membership. But such standards would require China
to let its currency rise in value, to better protect foreign
producers’ intellectual property rights and to limit or end
subsidies to state-owned companies, all of which would require a
major overhaul of China’s economic development strategy.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama praised the long chain of alliance
between Australia and the United States. Indeed, the mix of
Australian troops and American Marines represented the latest in
a line of comrades-in-arms from the two countries dating back
nearly a century, from World War I through Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It was here in Darwin where our alliance was born,” Mr. Obama
said, at “Australia’s Pearl Harbor” — a nickname derived from
the town’s having been devastated in bombing attacks by the
Japanese in 1942, just months after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Ms. Gillard also joined Mr. Obama here to commemorate the 60th
anniversary of their nations’ official alliance. Before
appearing at the base, he and Ms. Gillard laid wreaths at the
memorial to the U.S.S. Peary, which was sunk with 80 of its crew
when Darwin was bombed in 1942. After speaking at the Australian
military base, Mr. Obama arrived in Bali on Thursday evening for
the East Asia Summit on regional security and economic issues.
Nguồn:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/world/asia/obama-addresses-troops-at-final-stop-in-australia.html?_r=1&ref=asia
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