Could China Arm Hawaiian Nationalists?

Michael Pillsbury, author of ‘The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy To Replace America As The Global Superpower’ PHOTO COURTESY MICHAEL PILLSBURY

Should we laugh at this? Some Chinese generals asked a U.S. Defense Department consultant, “How would the Pentagon like it if we provide arms to our friends in the Hawaiian independence movement?”

That’s from Michael Pillsbury, author of the book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy To Replace America As The Global Superpower.

(Pillsbury, by the way, is the husband of the former Susan Tompkins, the Hawaii resident who owned the old Kaiser estate at Portlock.)

He says: “Beijing’s extraordinary sensitivity to American arms sales to Taiwan — even one bullet or a spare tire for a jeep — often provokes angry words.”

Here’s what journalist Bill Gertz writes about that in the online Free Beacon:

“Chinese threats to back several groups of Hawaiian independence activists who want to restore the islands’ constitutional monarchy, ousted in a U.S.-backed coup over a century ago, has raised concerns that military facilities on the strategic central Pacific archipelago are threatened at a time when the Obama administration is engaged in a major shift toward Asia as part of its military and diplomatic rebalance.”

Beijing’s extraordinary sensitivity to American arms sales to Taiwan — even one bullet or a spare tire for a jeep — often provokes angry words.

I don’t believe anybody at any command takes this Chinese lip-flapping as a threat to military facilities here.

But the arm-the-Hawaiians remark is worth tossing out there mainly because of something then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2002 after talks with the Chinese about their claims to islands in the South China Sea that also are claimed by Japan, the Philippines or Indonesia:

“At one point in one of my long discussions about this, one of my Chinese interlocutors said, ‘Well, we could claim Hawaii,'” Clinton said. “I said, ‘Well, go ahead, and we’ll go to arbitration and prove we own it. That’s what we want you to do.'”

Author Pillsbury was a senior national security adviser in the White House of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. His book is based on interviews with 35 Chinese generals, some Chinese defectors and newly declassified national security documents.

I try to answer all emails about my columns.

That is hard when I get 84 of them over a three-hour period.

That avalanche came 23 days after I criticized U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s foray into Middle East foreign policy.

Why the lag in email outrage?

Probably because of a Fox News link to my column.

But so many in a short time period usually means some kind of organization.

Four were against me but thoughtfully so.

The others were “you are a Jack Ass,” “you are a fat, pompous, wannabe journalist,” “you never served your country,” “you’re kissing the ass of your god Obama the Muslim traitor” and “I’d trust my dog’s judgment more than I would that Muslin(cq) racist bastard in the White House.”

I answered some that jackass is one word, being 6 feet and 220 pounds makes me a smallish linebacker, and I’m an Air Force vet.

Those Obama ones went unanswered.

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