Containing China – Boundary Training, American Style

China is feeling its oats, sitting on a couple of trillion dollars of U.S. currency reserves, hanging in there with significant growth as the Western World is still stagnating under the press of a very long economic collapse and buying up technologies, international brands, oil futures and agricultural land like it’s going out of style. According to a July 30th LBN-Alert, “China has overtaken Japan to become the world's second-largest economy, the fruit of three decades of rapid growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Depending on how fast its exchange rate rises, China is on course to overtake the United States and vault into the No.1 spot sometime around 2025, according to projections by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and others.” More and more China is calling the shots, and the rest of the world is kow- towing like an ancient Chinese peasant to her master.

But the U.S. isn’t really a paper tiger, with military forces that eclipse perhaps the rest of the earth combined. We have sharp claws that might not work as well against insurgent irregulars, but they have real power against traditional military structures. So when China decided to expand its definition of … well… China, the U.S. put its foot down, encased in a steel-tipped military boot. “Faced with a Chinese government increasingly intent on testing U.S. strength and capabilities, the United States unveiled a new policy that rejected China's claims to sovereignty over the whole South China Sea [also known as the Sea of Japan]. It rebuffed Chinese demands that the U.S. military end its longtime policy of conducting military exercises in the Yellow Sea. And it is putting new pressure on Beijing not to increase its energy investments in Iran as Western firms leave.” Washington Post (July 30^th).

With the North Korean government, hovering under the protection of a Chinese umbrella and the saber-rattling value of its limited nuclear arsenal, threatening all kinds of military action against our maneuvers in the region, we just keep rolling merrily along with some of the biggest naval war games staged in the region, joint efforts with the South Korean Navy, sending a clear signal to the North in response to its recent sinking of a South Korean Naval vessel, resulting in the death of 46 seamen.

China is not taking very well to such a prominent U.S. display of naval prowess in her own backyard (or back “pond”): “The U.S. maneuvers have prompted a backlash among Chinese officialdom and its state-run press, which has accused the United States of trying to contain China. Yang Jiechi, the minister of foreign affairs, issued a highly unusual statement [July 26^th] charging that the United States was ganging up with other countries against China. One prominent academic, Shen Dingli of Fudan University, compared the planned U.S. exercises in international waters of the Yellow Sea to the 1962 Russian deployment of nuclear-ar med missiles in Cuba.” The Post. Tough rhetoric.

And so it goes with Sino-American relations. We have to get along; our economies are profoundly interdependent. We cannot conquer each other without self-destruction. And we have many common challenges that we need to work together to overcome – from climate change to environmental pollution to seeking new sources of energy and new ways to generate and conserve water. But because there is so much at stake, the relations between these superpowers – one on the ascent the other on the decline – will rock back and forth between seeming extremes, each side posturing like a peacock to the other. A push to extremes will almost always be followed fairly quickly by at least détente if not an outright joyful entente rife with joint communiqués and common goals. That too never lasts that long either.

I’m Peter Dekom, calling it as I see it!