{"id":9292,"date":"2025-06-03T23:53:54","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T23:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/?p=9292"},"modified":"2025-06-03T23:53:56","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T23:53:56","slug":"powder-keg-in-the-pacific-how-chinas-challenge-revived-americas-position-in-asia-and-the-pacific","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/?p=9292","title":{"rendered":"Powder Keg in the Pacific, How China’s Challenge Revived America’s Position in Asia and the Pacific"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Yves here. This is the sort of largely orthodox post that readers hopefully will enjoy picking apart. I am not as far down the curve with respect to the current state of the US-China threat display as I am with events in Ukraine and the Middle East, so I will benefit from the input of the commentariat and hope all of you enjoy debating these issues.<\/p>\n

But even on a first pass, this article flogs the long-standing US position that regional powers protecting and advancing their security interests are threat that must be contested aggressively, without admitting the blatant hypocrisy give our Monroe Doctrine. The post flogs the lame justification that the US needs to preserve its discredited rules based order. And China is no mere regional power but a superpower.<\/p>\n

That is not to say that great powers are nice. But China is currently dependent on ocean routes for its economic prosperity. The US is more than enough of a sea power to harass sea transport. And the example of the Houthis shows it does not take all that much to make commercial carriers shun risky destinations.<\/p>\n

The article (following the headline) makes the questionable claim that the US position in the region has strengthened. Open and increased Russian cooperation with North Korea, Mongolia defying the US (and UN) by not arresting Putin pursuant to an ICC warrant during a recent visit, and Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar applying to join BRICS all counter this US-biased account.<\/p>\n

By Alfred McCoy. Originally published at TomDispatch<\/p>\n

While the world looks on with trepidation at regional wars in Israel and Ukraine, a far more dangerous global crisis is quietly building at the other end of Eurasia, along an island chain that has served as the front line for America\u2019s national defense for endless decades. Just as Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine has revitalized the NATO alliance, so China\u2019s increasingly aggressive behavior and a sustained U.S. military build-up in the region have strengthened Washington\u2019s position on the Pacific littoral, bringing several wavering allies back into the Western fold. Yet such seeming strength contains both a heightened risk of great power conflict and possible political pressures that could fracture America\u2019s Asia-Pacific alliance relatively soon.<\/p>\n

Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, for instance, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even penetrating American airspace in Alaska. To respond to what Moscow called \u201crising geopolitical tension around the world,\u201d such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese-Russian \u201cOcean-24\u201d exercise that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft, and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of \u201ctrying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost\u201d by \u201cincreasing [its] military presence\u2026 in the Asia-Pacific region.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cChina is not a future threat,\u201d the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall responded in September. \u201cChina is a threat today.\u201d Over the past 15 years, Beijing\u2019s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels, with the likelihood of war \u201cincreasing\u201d and, he predicted, it will only \u201ccontinue to do so.\u201d An anonymous senior Pentagon official added that China \u201ccontinues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and\u2026 the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for American global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its \u201cdefense\u201d on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo-Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the United States and among its allies.<\/p>\n

Building a Pacific Bastion<\/p>\n

For well over a century, the U.S. has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region, producing geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo\u2019s attack on the American naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the U.S. defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense remarkably irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American \u201cdefenses\u201d deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the U.S. built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the U.S. extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia-Pacific allies \u2014 Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia.<\/p>\n

For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of American global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) and dominate another (Eurasia). In many ways, in fact, the U.S. geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.<\/p>\n

After the Cold War<\/p>\n

Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, Washington cashed in its peace dividend, weakening that once-strong island chain. Between 1998 and 2014, the U.S. Navy declined from 333 ships to 271. That 20% reduction, combined with a shift to long-term deployments in the Middle East, degraded the Navy\u2019s position in the Pacific. Even so, for the 20 years following the Cold War, the U.S. would enjoy what the Pentagon called \u201cuncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the September 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S., Washington turned from heavy-metal strategic forces to mobile infantry readily deployed for counterterror operations against lightly armed guerrillas. After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power. As its opening gambit, Beijing started building bases in the South China Sea, where oil and natural gas deposits are rife, and expanding its navy, an unexpected challenge that the once-all-powerful American Pacific command was remarkably ill-prepared to meet.<\/p>\n

In response, in 2011, President Barack Obama proclaimed a strategic \u201cpivot to Asia\u201d before the Australian parliament and began rebuilding the American military position on the Pacific littoral. After withdrawing some U.S. forces from Iraq in 2012 and refusing to commit significant numbers of troops for regime change in Syria, the Obama White House deployed a battalion of Marines to Darwin in northern Australia in 2014. In quick succession, Washington gained access to five Philippine bases near the South China Sea and a new South Korean naval base at Jeju Island on the Yellow Sea. According to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to operate those installations, the Pentagon planned to \u201cforward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020.\u201d Nonetheless, the unending insurgency in Iraq continued to slow the pace of that strategic pivot to the Pacific.<\/p>\n

Despite such setbacks, senior diplomatic and military officials, working under three different administrations, launched a long-term effort to slowly rebuild the U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific region. After proclaiming \u201ca return to great power competition\u201d in 2016, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China\u2019s \u201cgrowing and modernized fleet\u201d was \u201cshrinking\u201d the traditional American advantage in the region. \u201cThe competition is on,\u201d the admiral warned, adding, \u201cWe must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.\u201d<\/p>\n

Responding to such pressure, the Trump administration added the construction of 46 new ships to the Pentagon budget, which was to raise the total fleet to 326 vessels by 2023. Still, setting aside support ships, when it came to an actual \u201cfighting force,\u201d by 2024 China had the world\u2019s largest navy with 234 \u201cwarships,\u201d while the U.S. deployed 219 \u2014 with Chinese combat capacity, according to American Naval Intelligence, \u201cincreasingly of comparable quality to U.S. ships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paralleling the military build-up, the State Department reinforced the U.S. position on the Pacific littoral by negotiating three relatively new diplomatic agreements with Asia-Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India, and the Philippines. Though those ententes added some depth and resilience to the US posture, the truth is that this Pacific network may ultimately prove more susceptible to political rupture than a formal multilateral alliance like NATO.<\/p>\n

Military Cooperation with the Philippines<\/p>\n

After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars, and the Cold War, American relations with the Philippines suffered a severe setback in 1991 when that country\u2019s senate refused to renew a long-term military bases agreement, forcing the U.S. 7th Fleet out of its massive naval base at Subic Bay.<\/p>\n

After just three years, however, China occupied some shoals also claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea during a raging typhoon. Within a decade, the Chinese had started transforming them into a network of military bases, while pressing their claims to most of the rest of the South China Sea. Manila\u2019s only response was to ground a rusting World War II naval vessel on Ayungin shoal in the Spratly Islands, where Filipino soldiers had to fish for their supper. With its external defense in tatters, in April 2014 the Philippines signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington, allowing the U.S. military quasi-permanent facilities at five Filipino bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.<\/p>\n

Although Manila won a unanimous ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague that Beijing\u2019s claims to the South China Sea were \u201cwithout lawful effect,\u201d China dismissed that decision and continued to build its bases there. And when Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016, he revealed a new policy that included a \u201cseparation\u201d from America and a strategic tilt toward China, which that country rewarded with promises of massive developmental aid. By 2018, however, China\u2019s army was operating anti-aircraft missiles, mobile missile launchers, and military radar on five artificial \u201cislands\u201d in the Spratly archipelago that it had built from sand its dredgers sucked from the seabed.<\/p>\n

Once Duterte left office, as China\u2019s Coast Guard harassed Filipino fishermen and blasted Philippine naval vessels with water cannons in their own territory, Manila once again started calling on Washington for help. Soon, U.S. Navy vessels were conducting \u201cfreedom of navigation\u201d patrols in Philippine waters and the two nations had staged their biggest military maneuvers ever. In the April 2024 edition of that exercise, the U.S. deployed its mobile Typhon Mid-Range Missile Launcher capable of hitting China\u2019s coast, sparking a bitter complaint from Beijing that such weaponry \u201cintensifies geopolitical confrontation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manila has matched its new commitment to the U.S. alliance with an unprecedented rearmament program of its own. Just last spring, it signed a $400 million deal with Tokyo to purchase five new Coast Guard cutters, started receiving Brahmos cruise missiles from India under a $375 million contract, and continued a billion-dollar deal with South Korea\u2019s Hyundai Heavy Industries that will result in 10 new naval vessels. After the government announced a $35 billion military modernization plan, Manila has been negotiating with Korean suppliers to procure 40 modern jet fighters \u2014 a far cry from a decade earlier when it had no operational jets.<\/p>\n

Showing the scope of the country\u2019s reintegration into the Western alliance, just last month Manila hosted joint freedom of navigation maneuvers in the South China Sea with ships from five allied nations \u2014 Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States.<\/p>\n

Quadrilateral Security Dialogue<\/p>\n

While the Philippine Defense Agreement renewed U.S. relations with an old Pacific ally, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., first launched in 2007, has now extended American military power into the waters of the Indian Ocean. At the 2017 ASEAN summit in Manila, four conservative national leaders led by Japan\u2019s Shinzo Abe, India\u2019s Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump decided to revive the \u201cQuad\u201d entente (after a decade-long hiatus while Australia\u2019s Labour governments cozied up to China).<\/p>\n

Just last month, President Biden hosted a \u201cQuad Summit\u201d where the four leaders agreed to expand joint air operations. In a hot-mike moment, Biden bluntly said: \u201cChina continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.\u201d China\u2019s Foreign Ministry replied: \u201cThe U.S. is lying through its teeth\u201d and needs to \u201cget rid of its obsession with perpetuating its supremacy and containing China.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 2020, however, the Quad has made the annual Malabar (India) naval exercise into an elaborate four-power drill in which aircraft carrier battle groups maneuver in waters ranging from the Arabian Sea to the East China Sea. To contest \u201cChina\u2019s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region,\u201d India announced that the latest exercise\u00a0this October\u00a0would feature live-fire\u00a0maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, led by its flagship aircraft carrier and a complement of MiG-29K all-weather jet fighters. Clearly, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi put it, the Quad is \u201chere to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

AUKUS Alliance<\/p>\n

While the Trump administration revived the Quad, the Biden White House has promoted a complementary and controversial AUKUS defense compact between Australia, Great Britain, and the U.S. (part of what Michael Klare has called the \u201cAnglo-Saxonization\u201d of American foreign and military policy). After months of secret negotiations, their leaders announced that agreement in September 2021 as a way to fulfill \u201ca shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a goal sparked howls of diplomatic protests. Angry over the sudden loss of a $90 billion contract to supply 12 French submarines to Australia, France called the decision \u201ca stab in the back\u201d and immediately recalled its ambassadors from both Canberra and Washington. With equal speed, China\u2019s Foreign Ministry condemned the new alliance for \u201cseverely damaging regional peace\u2026 and intensifying the arms race.\u201d In a pointed remark, Beijing\u2019s official Global Times newspaper said Australia had now \u201cturned itself into an adversary of China.\u201d<\/p>\n

To achieve extraordinary prosperity, thanks in significant part to its iron ore and other exports to China, Australia had exited the Quad entente for nearly a decade. Now, through this single defense decision, Australia has allied itself firmly with the United States and will gain access to British submarine designs and top-secret U.S. nuclear propulsion, joining the elite ranks of just six powers with such complex technology.<\/p>\n

Not only will Australia spend a monumental $360 billion to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade, but it will also host four American Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the U.S. in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the U.S. and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles, and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has, it seems, won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.<\/p>\n

Stand-Off Along the Pacific Littoral<\/p>\n

Just as Russia\u2019s aggression in Ukraine strengthened the NATO alliance, so China\u2019s challenge in the fossil-fuel-rich South China Sea and elsewhere has helped the U.S. rebuild its island bastions along the Pacific littoral. Through a sedulous courtship under three successive administrations, Washington has won back two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines, making them once again anchors for an island chain that remains the geopolitical fulcrum for American global power in the Pacific.<\/p>\n

Still, with more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the United States, China\u2019s advantage in warships will almost certainly continue to grow. In compensating for such a future deficit, America\u2019s four active allies along the Pacific littoral will likely play a critical role. (Japan\u2019s navy has more than 50 warships and South Korea\u2019s 30 more.)<\/p>\n

Despite such renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, America\u2019s Asia-Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future. Beijing is already putting relentless pressure on Taiwan\u2019s sovereignty, breaching that island\u2019s airspace and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Straits hundreds of times monthly. If Beijing turns those breaches into a crippling embargo of Taiwan, the U.S. Navy will face a hard choice between losing a carrier or two in a confrontation with China or backing off. Either way, the loss of Taiwan would sever America\u2019s island chain in the Pacific littoral, pushing it back to a \u201csecond island chain\u201d in the mid-Pacific.<\/p>\n

As for that fraught future, the maintenance of such alliances requires a kind of national political will that is by no means assured in an age of populist nationalism. In the Philippines, the anti-American nationalism that Duterte personified retains its appeal and may well be adopted by some future leader. More immediately in Australia, the current Labour Party government has already faced strong dissent from members blasting the AUKUS entente as a dangerous transgression of their country\u2019s sovereignty. And in the United States, Republican populism, whether Donald Trump\u2019s or that of a future leader like J.D. Vance could curtail cooperation with such Asia-Pacific allies, simply walk away from a costly conflict over Taiwan, or deal directly with China in a way that would undercut that web of hard-won alliances.<\/p>\n

And that, of course, might be the good news (so to speak), given the possibility that a growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and an American urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter, transforming the Pacific into a genuine powder keg and leading to the possibility of a war that would, in our present world, be almost unimaginably dangerous and destructive.<\/p>\n

\"Print<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yves here. This is the sort of largely orthodox post that readers hopefully will enjoy picking apart. I am not as far down the curve with respect to the current state of the US-China threat display as I am with events in Ukraine and the Middle East, so I will benefit from the input of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-berita-internasional"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10332,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9292\/revisions\/10332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}