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29 August 2010 By Rick Rozoff
The first decade of what more than a
generation ago was predicted to be the Asian Century
is drawing to a close, marking ten years since the end
of the American Century. China overtook Japan as the world’s
second-largest economy during the second financial
quarter of this year and three-quarters of the BRIC
(Brazil, Russia, India, China) nations, the world’s
largest emerging economies, are entirely or primarily
in Asia. During its first heads of state summit in
Russia last year, BRIC “urged the creation of a new
global financial security system.” [1] At the time its
members accounted for 15 percent of the global economy
and 42 percent of international currency reserves [2]
even after the advent of the U.S.-triggered world
financial crisis in 2008. 60 percent of humanity lives in
Asia and the continent is home to several of the
fastest growing economies in the world. Demographics and economics alike
assure a preeminent role for Asia in any natural –
which is to say peaceful – course of development. Asia is in fact part of a broader
land mass, Eurasia, which in turn is inextricably
connected to the rest of what over a century ago
British geographer Halford Mackinder called the World
Island: Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The
last has recently recorded a population exceeding a
billion, making it the second most populous continent.
The Asia-Europe-Africa grouping
contains the overwhelming majority of the human race,
perhaps as many as 5.6 billion of the world’s 6.8
billion inhabitants. The entire Western Hemisphere, by
contrast, has a population under one billion and
Oceania’s numbers are negligible. But for 500 years a small number of
nations in the global West and North, a limited
contingent of countries that collectively calls itself
the North Atlantic community, has dominated most of
the world. With the demise in 1991 of an
eastern power that for decades had presented them with
the greatest challenge in their history, the Soviet
Union, the major Western states, a coalition of all
the main past colonial empires and the new American
global superpower united in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization military alliance, viewed the entire
world as being ripe for penetration and dominance,
starting with the former Eastern European socialist
bloc and the territories of the former Soviet Union. Military formations were used to
spread American and Western European influence
throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East – NATO
and its numerous partnership programs, U.S. Africa
Command, ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” – and into
the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea basin, Central Asia and
South Asia, in which last location the Pentagon and
NATO are waging a nine-year-old war with 150,000
troops. In the past eleven years the U.S.
has obtained military, including missile shield, bases
and facilities in parts of the world where the
Pentagon had never ensconced itself before: Kosovo,
Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Israel, Iraq,
Kuwait, Jordan, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali,
Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Colombia.
Just since last year the Pentagon
has conducted bilateral and multinational military
exercises in and off the coasts of nations like India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Mongolia,
Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, East Timor, Finland,
Sweden, the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria,
Romania, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan,
Angola, Burkino Faso, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique,
Senegal and Uganda in addition to traditional Cold War
allies and partners, including holding the first
large-scale joint war games in Israel. This month troops from the U.S. and
other NATO nations have participated in military
exercises in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, which both
border Russia and China. If Asia is superior with regard to
economic growth and potential, resources natural and
human, and other factors, the U.S. supersedes it in
one key category: An overwhelming advantage in
military firepower. The world’s largest expeditionary
warfighting machine, U.S. Pacific Command, and its
biggest naval “permanent forward projection force,”
the U.S. Seventh Fleet, both are concentrated on East
Asia. The Pentagon withdrew troops and
even closed bases in Asia after the end of the Cold
War, but now it is returning. In addition to three joint naval
exercises in as many months – in the Sea of Japan in
late July, the South China Sea this month and the
Yellow Sea in September – the U.S. is massively
expanding military facilities in Guam, has deployed 60
percent of its nuclear submarine fleet to the Pacific
region and is considering increasing its naval fleet
from 282 to 346 ships to “beef up U.S. maritime power
in Asia.” [3] In recent days Robert Scher, U.S.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and
Southeast Asia, was in the capital of Vietnam to meet
with Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh, Deputy
Minister of Defense, for the two countries’ “first
high-level defense dialogue.” On August 17, a week after a U.S.
warship docked in Vietnam for the two nations’ first
joint military exercise, the Pentagon official stated
the event was “the next significant historic step in
our increasingly robust defense relationship,” and
confirmed that the discussions included sharing
“impressions of Chinese military modernization.” [4]
The next day the chief of U.S.
Pacific Command, Admiral Robert Willard, was in the
Philippines to meet with defense officials from the
host nation including the head of the military,
Lieutenant-General Ricardo David, and insisted that
“the United States will maintain a presence in the
South China Sea for many years,” with what he
identified as increasingly “assertive” Chinese actions
as the rationale for doing so. [5] In respect to conflicting
Philippine and Chinese claims on the Spratly islands,
Willard said that the Pentagon “very much looks
forward to working continually” with Manila’s military
to ensure it is “shaped just right to meet the needs
of this very complex archipelago that’s located in a
very strategic area of the world.” [6] This week the Japanese press
announced that the nation’s military will conduct war
games in December “simulating the recapture of an
isolated island from enemy forces,” the first such
exercises by the Self-Defense Forces which are “seen
as a response to China’s recent naval expansion.” The Yomiuri Shimbun revealed that
“The island-reclaiming drills will be part of joint
exercises with the U.S. military and the U.S. Navy’s
7th Fleet will provide support.” [7] The drills will be held under a
recently elaborated defense program for the Nansei
Islands near territory southwest of Okinawa. On August 19 the Japanese Foreign
Ministry said that the Senkaku Islands, contested by
Japan and China, are “subject to the Japan-US security
treaty” and that Washington and Tokyo would “respond
together” to any attack there. The ministry’s press
secretary said, “It is natural that Japan and the
United States respond together.” [8] A senior Japanese Defense Ministry
official stated “We’ll show China that Japan has the
will and the capability to defend the Nansei Islands.”
The war games will include “Air Self-Defense Force F-2
fighters, which have advanced air-to-ground and
antiship attack capabilities, and Maritime “The planned exercises are a
groundbreaking move….It will also be a good
opportunity to reinforce cooperation between U.S.
forces and the SDF.” An article in the August 20 edition
of a major Japanese daily stated: “It must be
demonstrated to China, which has been strengthening
its military capability and plans to expand its sphere
of influence, that the SDF and the U.S. military form
a watertight defense array.” [9] This week Japan’s Defense Ministry
said it would “keep paying attention to China’s
military trend” and “Taiwan renewed its call…on the
U.S. to sell it advanced weaponry as it joined Japan
in vowing to keep a close eye on China’s rising
military power.” “Taipei and Tokyo were reacting to
the release of a U.S. Defense Department report which
warned that China’s expanding capabilities are
changing the strategic balance in East Asia.” [10] On the same day that the preceding
account appeared, the Indian press disclosed that New
Delhi will order a “large” amount of U.S. Javelin
third generation anti-tank guided missiles used in
last year’s Yudh Abhyas 2009 bilateral combat
exercises with 1,000 U.S. and Indian troops, which
featured “17 Stryker vehicles – the largest deployment
of the vehicles outside of Iraq and Afghanistan,” and
which showcased “the Javelin Anti-Tank Missile system,
employed to defeat current and future threat armored
combat vehicles.” [11] Regarding the proposed Javelin
acquisition, one of India’s main newspapers wrote:
“Much to the dismay of Russians and Europeans, India
is increasingly taking the FMS [foreign military
sales] route to ink big arms deals with the US. The
biggest on the verge of finalisation…is for 10 C-17
Globemaster-III giant strategic airlift for upwards of
$3 billion.” [12] President Barack Obama is scheduled
to visit India in November to secure further arms
deals which by some reports will establish the U.S. as
the nation’s main weapons supplier, replacing Russia
in that role. On August 19 one of Australia’s
main newspapers carried an opinion piece by Greg
Sheridan, recently appointed by the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
its Australian Scholar, in which he wrote: “The US has five full military
treaty allies in Asia: Japan, South Korea, Thailand,
The Philippines and Australia, and one de facto ally,
Singapore, and an increasingly critical strategic
relationship with India. “It is also developing a strong
strategic relationship with Vietnam….It is also
working hard on Indonesia and Malaysia….” He quoted U.S. Defense Secretary
Robert Gates at June’s Shangri-La Dialogue in
Singapore affirming that “My government’s overriding
obligation to allies, partners and the region is to
reaffirm America’s security commitments in the
region….The strength of US commitment and deterrent
power will be expressed through the continued forward
presence of substantial US forces in the region.”
Sheridan added, “You can’t get much more explicit than
that” concerning the “complex security equation in the
Asia-Pacific.” The Australian analyst summed up
his argument by calling for “a greater US naval and
air force presence” in Darwin on the Timor Sea. [13]
The rise of a dynamic, integrated
and dominant Asia in this century is inevitable and
inexorable. Any attempt to retard or thwart it by
military force from outside the continent will produce
catastrophic consequences. 1) Voice of Russia, June 17,
2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/../u-s-expands-asian-nato-to-contain-and-confront-china 4) Agence France-Presse, August
17, 2010 |
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