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 Barack
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 Israel,
then by the 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 Japan and the
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 US-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.
Washington's continuing statements
about its ongoing plans for a "pivot" to, or
"rebalancing" of, its forces in the Pacific have
only fueled Chinese intransigence and intensified
a rising sense of crisis in the region. Leaders on
all sides continue to affirm their country's
inviolable rights to the contested islands and vow
to use any means necessary to resist encroachment
by rival claimants.
In the meantime, China
has increased the frequency and scale of its naval
maneuvers in waters claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and
the Philippines, further enflaming tensions in the
region.
Ostensibly, these disputes revolve
around the question of who owns a constellation of
largely uninhabited atolls and islets claimed by a
variety of nations. In the East China Sea, the
islands in contention are called the Diaoyu by
China and the Senkakus by Japan. At present, they
are administered by Japan, but both countries
claim sovereignty over them.
In the South
China Sea, several island groups are in
contention, including the Spratly chain and the
Paracel Islands (known in China as the Nansha and
Xisha Islands, respectively). China claims all of
these islets, while Vietnam claims some of the
Spratlys and Paracels. Brunei, Malaysia, and the
Philippines also claim some of the Spratlys.
Far more is, of course, at stake than just
the ownership of a few uninhabited islets. The
seabeds surrounding them are believed to sit atop
vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Ownership of
the islands would naturally confer ownership of
the reserves - something all of these countries
desperately desire. Powerful forces of nationalism
are also at work: with rising popular fervor, the
Chinese believe that the islands are part of their
national territory and any other claims represent
a direct assault on China's sovereign rights; the
fact that Japan - China's brutal invader and
occupier during World War II - is a rival claimant
to some of them only adds a powerful tinge of
victimhood to Chinese nationalism and
intransigence on the issue.
By the same
token, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos,
already feeling threatened by China's growing
wealth and power, believe no less firmly that not
bending on the island disputes is an essential
expression of their nationhood.
Long
ongoing, these disputes have escalated recently.
In May 2011, for instance, the Vietnamese reported
that Chinese warships were harassing
oil-exploration vessels operated by the
state-owned energy company PetroVietnam in the
South China Sea. In two instances, Vietnamese
authorities claimed, cables attached to underwater
survey equipment were purposely slashed. In April
2012, armed Chinese marine surveillance ships
blocked efforts by Filipino vessels to inspect
Chinese boats suspected of illegally fishing off
Scarborough Shoal, an islet in the South China Sea
claimed by both countries.
The East China
Sea has similarly witnessed tense encounters of
late. Last September, for example, Japanese
authorities arrested 14 Chinese citizens who had
attempted to land on one of the Diaoyu/Senkaku
Islands to press their country's claims, provoking
widespread anti-Japanese protests across China and
a series of naval show-of-force operations by both
sides in the disputed waters.
Regional
diplomacy, that classic way of settling disputes
in a peaceful manner, has been under growing
strain recently thanks to these maritime disputes
and the accompanying military encounters.
In July 2012, at the annual meeting of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),
Asian leaders were unable to agree on a final
communique, no matter how anodyne - the first time
that had happened in the organization's 46-year
history. Reportedly, consensus on a final document
was thwarted when Cambodia, a close ally of
China's, refused to endorse compromise language on
a proposed "code of conduct" for resolving
disputes in the South China Sea.
Two
months later, when Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton visited Beijing in an attempt to
promote negotiations on the disputes, she was
reviled in the Chinese press, while officials
there refused to cede any ground at all.
As 2012 ended and the New Year began, the
situation only deteriorated. On December 1,
officials in Hainan province, which administers
the Chinese-claimed islands in the South China
Sea, announced a new policy for 2013: Chinese
warships would now be empowered to stop, search,
or simply repel foreign ships that entered the
claimed waters and were suspected of conducting
illegal activities ranging, assumedly, from
fishing to oil drilling. This move coincided with
an increase in the size and frequency of Chinese
naval deployments in the disputed areas.
On December 13, the Japanese military
scrambled F-15 fighter jets when a Chinese marine
surveillance plane flew into airspace near the
Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Another worrisome incident
occurred on January 8, when four Chinese
surveillance ships entered Japanese-controlled
waters around those islands for 13 hours.
Two days later, Japanese fighter jets were
again scrambled when a Chinese surveillance plane
returned to the islands. Chinese fighters then
came in pursuit, the first time supersonic jets
from both sides flew over the disputed area. The
Chinese clearly have little intention of backing
down, having indicated that they will increase
their air and naval deployments in the area, just
as the Japanese are doing.
Powder keg
in the Pacific While war clouds gather in
the Pacific sky, the question remains: why, pray
tell, is this happening now?
Several
factors seem to be conspiring to heighten the risk
of confrontation, including leadership changes in
China and Japan, and a geopolitical reassessment
by the United States.
In China, a new
leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on
military strength and on what might be called
national assertiveness. At the 18th Congress of
the Chinese Communist Party, held last November in
Beijing, Xi Jinping was named both party head and
chairman of the Central Military Commission,
making him, in effect, the nation's foremost
civilian and military official.
Since
then, Xi has made several heavily publicized
visits to assorted Chinese military units, all
clearly intended to demonstrate the Communist
Party's determination, under his leadership, to
boost the capabilities and prestige of the
country's army, navy, and air force. He has
already linked this drive to his belief that his
country should play a more vigorous and assertive
role in the region and the world.
In a
speech to soldiers in the city of Huizhou, for
example, Xi spoke of his "dream" of national
rejuvenation: "This dream can be said to be a
dream of a strong nation; and for the military, it
is the dream of a strong military."
Significantly, he used the trip to visit
the Haikou, a destroyer assigned to the fleet
responsible for patrolling the disputed waters of
the South China Sea. As he spoke, a Chinese
surveillance plane entered disputed air space over
the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea,
prompting Japan to scramble those F-15 fighter
jets.
In Japan, too, a new leadership team
is placing renewed emphasis on military strength
and national assertiveness. On December 16,
arch-nationalist Shinzo Abe returned to power as
the nation's prime minister. Although he
campaigned largely on economic issues, promising
to revive the country's lagging economy, Abe has
made no secret of his intent to bolster the
Japanese military and assume a tougher stance on
the East China Sea dispute.
In his first
few weeks in office, Abe has already announced
plans to increase military spending and review an
official apology made by a former government
official to women forced into sexual slavery by
the Japanese military during World War II. These
steps are sure to please Japan's rightists, but
certain to inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in
China, Korea, and other countries it once
occupied.
Equally worrisome, Abe promptly
negotiated an agreement with the Philippines for
greater cooperation on enhanced "maritime
security" in the western Pacific, a move intended
to counter growing Chinese assertiveness in the
region. Inevitably, this will spark a harsh
Chinese response - and because the United States
has mutual defense treaties with both countries,
it will also increase the risk of US involvement
in future engagements at sea.
In the
United States, senior officials are debating
implementation of the "Pacific pivot" announced by
President Obama in a speech before the Australian
parliament a little over a year ago. In it, he
promised that additional US forces would be
deployed in the region, even if that meant
cutbacks elsewhere. "My guidance is clear," he
declared. "As we plan and budget for the future,
we will allocate the resources necessary to
maintain our strong military presence in this
region."
While Obama never quite said that
his approach was intended to constrain the rise of
China, few observers doubt that a policy of
"containment" has returned to the Pacific.
Indeed, the US military has taken the
first steps in this direction, announcing, for
example, that by 2017 all three US stealth planes,
the F-22, F-35, and B-2, would be deployed to
bases relatively near China and that by 2020 60%
of US naval forces will be stationed in the
Pacific (compared with 50% today).
However, the nation's budget woes have led
many analysts to question whether the Pentagon is
actually capable of fully implementing the
military part of any Asian pivot strategy in a
meaningful way. A study conducted by the Center
for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at
the behest of congress, released last summer,
concluded that the Department of Defense "has not
adequately articulated the strategy behind its
force posture planning [in the Asia-Pacific] nor
aligned the strategy with resources in a way that
reflects current budget realities".
This,
in turn, has fueled a drive by military hawks to
press the administration to spend more on
Pacific-oriented forces and to play a more
vigorous role in countering China's "bullying"
behavior in the East and South China Seas.
America's Asian allies "are waiting to see whether
America will live up to its uncomfortable but
necessary role as the true guarantor of stability
in East Asia, or whether the region will again be
dominated by belligerence and intimidation,"
former secretary of the navy and former senator
James Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
Although the administration has responded
to such taunts by reaffirming its pledge to
bolster its forces in the Pacific, this has failed
to halt the calls for an even tougher posture by
Washington. Obama has already been chided for
failing to provide sufficient backing to Israel in
its struggle with Iran over nuclear weapons, and
it is safe to assume that he will face even
greater pressure to assist America's allies in
Asia were they to be threatened by Chinese forces.
Add these three developments together and
you have the makings of a powder keg - potentially
at least as explosive and dangerous to the global
economy as any confrontation with Iran. Right now,
given the rising tensions, the first close
encounter of the worst kind, in which, say, shots
were unexpectedly fired and lives lost, or a ship
or plane went down, might be the equivalent of
lighting a fuse in a crowded, over-armed room.
Such an incident could occur almost any
time. The Japanese press has reported that
government officials there are ready to authorize
fighter pilots to fire warning shots if Chinese
aircraft penetrate the airspace over the
Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. A Chinese general has said
that such an act would count as the start of
"actual combat". That the irrationality of such an
event will be apparent to anyone who considers the
deeply tangled economic relations among all these
powers may prove no impediment to the situation -
as at the beginning of World War I - simply
spinning out of everyone's control.
Can
such a crisis be averted? Yes, if the leaders of
China, Japan, and the United States, the key
countries involved, take steps to defuse the
belligerent and ultra-nationalistic pronouncements
now holding sway and begin talking with one
another about practical steps to resolve the
disputes.
Similarly, an emotional and
unexpected gesture - Prime Minister Abe, for
instance, pulling a Nixon and paying a surprise
goodwill visit to China - might carry the day and
change the atmosphere. Should these minor disputes
in the Pacific get out of hand, however, not just
those directly involved but the whole planet will
look with sadness and horror on the failure of
everyone involved.
Michael Klare
is a professor of peace and world security studies
at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch
regular, and the author, most recently, of
The
Race for What's Left, just published in
paperback. A documentary movie based on his
book Blood and Oil can be previewed and
ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can
follow Klare on Facebook by clicking here.
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