China reveals plans to ship cargo across Canada’s Northwest Passage

Also from the Guardian.

China sets its sights on the Northwest Passage as a potential trade boon

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/a ... ping-guide

Hopefully I won't live long enough to watch China take the NWP away from us, but it will happen.

And we won't do anything to stop it.

As long as we charge less to traverse it than what it would cost to take, hold, and maintain it...we will always 'have it'.

Everybody forgets that little tidbit when talking about nations appropriating things from one another.

One enemy at a time please. I'm starting to come around, after watching too much of Islam in Europe and the dindu-fication of the United States, to believing that China (and Japan) might someday be the last hope for the human race. Every other place is rapidly going into the crapper, and willingly too, so I'm not going to get to torqued up over China flexing it's muscles every once in a while. If the West tossed away the mantle of world leadership, and gave up on the containment of barbarism, in order to be politically correct nice guys then maybe the ones like the Chinese who have no shame in being hard men when they have to be are the ones that have to take up the torch so the savages won't extinguish the light once and for all.

If I understand correctly, China is basically making the same case the US (and others) are making--that the Northwest Passage is international waters, not Canadian waters. I suppose that there will be some kind of international tribunal on the issue eventually, but the reality is that both China and the US will end up whatever China and the US feel like doing.

Like I said before just farm out national defense to the United States and become a part of the continental defense grid that the Americans already have in place anyway. That way no one will go ripping through the NWP without American consent or, at a minimum, will be closely and uncomfortably shadowed by a USN hunter-killer submarine for every mile of the voyage. We're incapable, both financially and in terms of basic willpower, of defending every square inch of this country. In reality we're not capable of defending even a single square inch of this country. It's too huge, we don't have the money or the amount of willing volunteers to even come close to doing it. Time to quit pretending that we have any intention of doing anything to patrol or defend our territorial integrity.

Farm out defense to THE #1 COUNTRY insisting the NWP is international waters? Yeah that makes a lot of sense.

China feels that they should get 20% of any Arctic mineral reserves, not because they have any right to it they just have a lot of brass, so why not passage through the NWP.

China can feel whatever they want. Same for any nation.

Doesn't change the fact that every nation will do the same thing...cost analysis.

Cheapest option wins.

Nobody is going to dump a couple hundred billion into a war for the NWP, just to dump another couple hundred billion into monitoring, defense, and maintenance, if they can pay way less for access rights under the status quo.

The Northwest Passage is Canadian territory - period. If China wants to try to run ships through there, let them explain all their B.S. to a couple of our frigates. A Bofors cannon doesn't discriminate

-J.

I'm not sure the government would have the balls to do that, even if they did have the capability.

But that also means they don't have the capability to prevent attacks on foreign cargo ships from occurring in our waters... I don't think it would take too many attacks or acts or piracy to force the government to do something.

Not advocating terrorism or vigilante policing of our northern waters by any means, of course.

So we want to deny nations the right to ship thru our waters? We may not like it when it happens to us. I mean there is even an international law about it - innocent passage. But sure, let's whip our our Bofors and see how well that goes. Idiotic.

We have neither the capability or intent of policing the NWP and that's equally true no matter what political party is in control of the federal government. Here's hoping that all the pathetic chest-thumping and flag-waving actually meets reality someday.

It's funny that you whine and bitch so much about oil going through BC,
yet seem completely happy about doing nothing up North.