Asia: The Next War?

From: Real Clear World

Don't look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific. Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy.

In Washington, it is widely assumed that a showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions will be the first major crisis to engulf the next secretary of defense -- whether it be former Senator Chuck Hagel, as President Obama desires, or someone else if he fails to win Senate confirmation. With few signs of an imminent breakthrough in talks aimed at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, many analysts believe that military action -- if not by/around_the_world/united_states/United States -- could be on this year's agenda.

Lurking just behind the Iranian imbroglio, however, is a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us imagine. >China's determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from>Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally.

Islands, Islands, Everywhere

The possibility of an Iranian crisis remains in the spotlight because of the obvious risk of disorder in the Greater Middle East and its threat to global oil production and shipping. A crisis in the East or South China Seas (essentially, western extensions of the Pacific Ocean) would, however, pose a greater peril because of the possibility of a U.S.-China military confrontation and the threat to Asian economic stability.

The United States is bound by treaty to come to the assistance of Japan or the Philippines if either country is attacked by a third party, so any armed clash between Chinese and Japanese or Filipino forces could trigger American military intervention. With so much of the world's trade focused on Asia, and the American, Chinese, and Japanese economies tied so closely together in ways too essential to ignore, a clash of almost any sort in these vital waterways might paralyze international commerce and trigger a global recession (or worse).

All of this should be painfully obvious and so rule out such a possibility -- and yet the likelihood of such a clash occurring has been on the rise in recent months, as China and its neighbors continue to ratchet up the bellicosity of their statements and bolster their military forces in the contested areas.

Beijing belligerence

From: NYPOST.com

Thirty-six years after chasing the United States out of Vietnam, the com munist rulers in Hanoi now want us back. The ironies of this bizarre turn of events are many, but the reason is simple: China.

Beijing has been flexing its newfound military muscle and geopolitical ambitions in the face of its neighbors.

Together with its global cyberhacking offenses, China is looking less like an emerging superpower and more like an out-of-control bully.

The latest run-in with Vietnam -- once China's ally, now its steadfast foe -- is over oil exploration in the South China Sea, where China claims sole sovereignty and where Vietnam has staged live fire naval exercises to protect its rights. China has responded with three days and nights of its own exercises, although it says it won't "resort to force" to resolve the dispute. Still, Vietnam has issued a strong statement welcoming foreign help -- a veiled but unmistakable invitation to the US and its Navy.

There's an opportunity here for US policy, not just to close the circle on our most divisive war but to find a new, more realistic approach in dealing with the rulers in Beijing. Because there's trouble brewing for the Middle Kingdom -- and not just in its dealings with its neighbors.

Over the last several weeks, a serious wave of unrest has roiled China's cities with outbreaks of violence -- even bomb blasts -- against the Beijing regime.

There's no sign of an organized uprising a la the Arab Spring. But the number of what the authorities call "mass incidents" has risen steadily. As many as 127,000 occurred in 2008. They are going to get worse before they get better -- and not just because Beijing authorities still can't get a handle on suppressing dissent on the Internet.

China's phenomenal economic growth is sputtering. Rising oil prices and growing inflation are erasing many economic gains. If the US economy, a major source for exports, doesn't recover soon, it could threaten China's long, unbroken record of growth -- setting the stage for more trouble there.

India inches toward Shanghai

From: Asia Times Online

Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna declared his country's desire for "a larger and deeper role" in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That pronouncement at the forum's recently concluded tenth summit makes supreme sense for India, since as a geopolitical and geo-economic reality that bridges the former Soviet space, East Asia and South Asia, the SCO is hastening the global shift towards multipolarity.

India shares with the SCO the limited goal of a more "democratic international system", wherein power is widely diffused among multiple centers even as many of the organization's member states - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - and applicants have undemocratic regimes.

Yet, as the summit in the Kazakhstan capital of Astana finalized

negotiations for India (and Pakistan) to join the SCO, New Delhi will be aware that its eventual promotion from "observer" status to full membership of the group will necessitate subtle policy shifts that would require moving away from its close embrace with the United States on certain issues.

If the historic purpose of NATO was to "keep the Germans down, the Americans in and the Russians out", then SCO is at least minimally united around the motto of "keeping the Americans out". India's strategic establishment is contradictorily keen on keeping the Americans in Afghanistan for as long as possible, believing that a US withdrawal would throw open the doors to renewed Pakistani (and indirectly Chinese) hegemony in a geostrategic lynchpin.

However much the SCO's leading lights - China and Russia - verbally deny that the SCO is a countervailing military alliance against the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it has undeniable value in the "new Cold War" that Moscow has broached on and off.

The latest iteration of an impending escalation was uttered by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last month in the context of the United States pressing ahead to build a recalibrated missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. Russia used the summit in Astana to reinforce this warning to the West via a denunciation of "unilateral and unlimited build-up of missile defense" in the joint declaration from all member states.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that this veiled attack on the US was a "consolidated position" of all six members of SCO and that Moscow did not have to push to get this critique included in the final summit communique. Most interestingly, he added that the US's missile shields "also covers the Southeast Asian region" - an allusion to China's fears that Washington is encircling it with a chain of anti-missile systems operable from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

As has been the practice since the SCO was created a decade ago, China lets Russia do the hard talking and snorting against the US, but agrees behind the scenes that it too would like to whittle down American power and military encroachments in the territories and waters that it prefers to dominate in Asia.

Characterizations of the SCO as a "NATO of the East", or as a present-day Warsaw Pact, may therefore be inept insofar as there is no single principle setting its agenda, but the comparison is not preposterous as the SCO does act as a counterbalancing power center against the US. The more SCO matures in joint military exercises and its use of diplomatic pressure against American expansion, the less becoming the fiction that it is a purely regional entity for fighting terrorism and sharing intelligence.

India must be conscious that its impending full membership of SCO would entail being called on to make statements similar combative to the one just out of Astana. The SCO has suffered from absence of unanimity on key global questions in the past, and it would be an exaggeration to expect that its two major patrons will impose conformity on all other members.