Optical Store in India

I was looking for Citi Field in New York, where the Mets play, on Google Streetview. Instead, I landed on Citi Park Road, Greater Khanda, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. More particularly, I found myself inside an optical store decked out for Christmas...or at least, for the secular side of Christmas. Except for the scooters visible through the store windows, the place could be in a strip mall in Fort Wayne.



[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Just My Opinion: Watch Out for the Beijing Regime

Charles Krauthammer is no fan of President Obama, but he had no use for the silly (and largely misinformed) carping over the cost of the president's recent trip to Asia. I agree with Krauthammer. It's important for Presidents of the United States to go abroad for these diplomatic missions. The president is America's diplomat-in-chief. When presidents take such trips, it is in everybody's interest that he be kept safe and protected.

More substantively, I emphatically agree with Krauthammer on the wisdom of Obama's special overtures to India. The US and India, along with the rest of the world really, has an abiding interest in these two countries having strong relations. That abiding interest is the Chinese government, an enemy to its own people's freedom and an enemy to the peace and stability of the world. A partnership between India and the US is essential for strengthening democracy, for checking China's growing military power, and for preventing the world from being sucked into China's economic vortex, with permanent trade imbalances and endemic loss of employment opportunities. (That's why the President was right to say that the greatest object of his diplomatic mission was "jobs." That's really at stake right now in this era of unscrupulous business, environmental, economic, and human rights practices on the part of the Chinese government, practices that, along with the West's undisciplined spending and use of credit, is slowly turning the world into a playground for the Butchers of Beijing.)

President Obama's endorsement of India's desire to become a member of the Security Council of the United Nations is sensible for both the US and India. The council is reserved for those nations that are deemed major powers. As Obama pointed out in India that with major power status comes major power responsibilities. (And I would say, major power expectations.) India was not a major power after World War II when the UN was established. But it is now. That needs to be acknowledged.

Krauthammer explains very well why Presdent Obama's trip to India was so important for the US and the world:

[China's] hegemony is the growing source of tension in Asia today. Modern China is the Germany of a century ago - a rising, expanding, have-not power seeking its place in the sun. The story of the first half of the 20th century was Europe's attempt to manage Germany's rise. We know how that turned out. The story of the next half-century will be how Asia accommodates and/or contains China's expansion.

Nor is this some far-off concern. China's aggressive territorial claims on resource-rich waters claimed by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan are already roiling the neighborhood. Traditionally, Japan has been the major regional counterbalance. But an aging, shrinking Japan can no longer sustain that role. Symbolic of the dramatic shift in power balance between once-poor China and once-dominant Japan was the resolution of their recent maritime crisis. Japan had detained a Chinese captain in a territorial-waters dispute. China imposed a rare-earth mineral embargo. Japan capitulated.

That makes the traditional U.S. role as offshore balancer all the more important. China's neighbors from South Korea all the way around to India are in need of U.S. support of their own efforts at resisting Chinese dominion.

And of all these countries, India, which has fought a border war with China, is the most natural anchor for such a U.S. partnership. It's not just our inherent affinities - democratic, English-speaking, free-market, dedicated to the rule of law. It is also the coincidence of our strategic imperatives: We both face the common threat of radical Islam and the more long-term challenge of a rising China. 

Mind you, all of this is just my opinion (and Krauthammer's). I'm still just a preacher and I'm not foisting a social statement on anybody. These views haven't been brought from Mount Sinai. But I nonetheless think the world would do well to watch out for the regime in Beijing.

Mr. Obama Goes to Moscow, Where the Real Story is Beijing and Tehran

While the Vice President put his foot in his mouth (twice) and his seasoned political pro, Rahm Emanuel, did the same, President Obama was acomplishing quite a lot during his trip to Russia. The BBC reports:

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have reached an outline agreement to cut back their nations' stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

The "joint understanding" signed in Moscow would see reductions of deployed nuclear warheads to below 1,700 each within seven years of a new treaty.

The accord would replace the 1991 Start I treaty, which expires in December.

Mr Obama said the two countries were both "committed to leaving behind the suspicion and the rivalry of the past".

Separately, Russia also agreed to allow the US military to fly troops and weapons across its territory to Afghanistan, allowing it to avoid using supply routes through Pakistan that are attacked by militants.

These are huge agreements, which also bring huge benefits to US interests.

More broadly speaking, they also may help to lay a foundation for Russia, the US, and India in forming an informal hedge against the Chinese regime in Beijing and Islamic Republic's government in Tehran, each of which appears intent not only on oppressing their own peoples, but also on extending their powers regionally and globally.

One lesson of history is that oppressive regimes with designs on regional or global hegemony need to be checked by other nations cooperatively. In recent weeks, both Tehran and Beijing governments have provided more evidence of their malevolent intentions and of their need to be checke. Better to thwart them now peacefully through temporary, realist alliances, than to face major conflicts with them later.

One might also hope that Russian accords signal an intention on the Obama Administration's part to curb Chinese investment in US bonds, already at an alarming level.

The trip to Russia, I believe, was less about Russia, than it was about China, and certainly about nailing al Qaeda in the mountainous areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's interesting that the Russians are cooperating and hard not to speculate on what sorts of concessions were exacted from the US side,

Obama appears intent to follow a foreign policy realist's approach, a departure both from recent Democratic orthodoxy and from the Wilsonian adventurism of his immediate predecessor, Republican President, George W. Bush.

Please Pray

For the victims of flooding in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

In India alone the number of dead has crossed the 1,000 mark, with new victims reported from northern Uttar Pradesh state...

Further east in Bangladesh, authorities have reported another 11 deaths taking the annual monsoon toll to 191.

Disaster management minister Tapan Chowdhury says thousands of army and civilian personnel have been mobilised.

Around 6.9 million Bangladeshis are either displaced or marooned in villages, he said...

Nepal has also been badly hit and its home ministry says the death toll has risen to 87.

About 32 of the Himalayan nation's 75 districts have been affected. Biratnagar, a border town close to India, reported 223 millimetres of rain in the last 24 hours.

I'm praying that God will bring the millions affected by this year's monsoons relief, safety, and comfort.