The Asian countries have more than enough on their plates without their former overlords from the north joining the Americans in throwing their weight about.
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No sooner had this esteemed outlet published my piece on NATO convoying ships through the Red Sea but the French Navy scuttled that plan. As France has begun convoying her own ships and those of allied nations past the Houthi, the question now arises as to what the Yanks, who have a staggering 15% of their entire navy off the Yemeni coast, can do next.
At the moment, they are doing little or nothing. American-flagged cargo ships are sitting at either end of the Red Sea and are unsure whether to run the Houthi gauntlet, or to turn tail and run. As Russian ships sail blithely by, the Chinese 45th Escort Force sit in their base in Djibouti and radio their observations back to Beijing, which factors all of this into their coming conflagration in the South China Sea.
If the Americans cannot control the Houthi and if their stationary ships are at increased risk of piracy, what chance do they have against China, a peer enemy, in the South China Sea, which carries 25% of the world’s maritime shipping?
Although answers vary to that question, it is one Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, as well as Vietnam and the Philippines must give serious consideration to. Just as the French are tiptoeing away from America’s 5th Fleet, so also must those East and South East Asian powers distance themselves from Uncle Sam, whose Asian race is well and truly run. Whatever chance the Yanks have of blasting Yemen into silence, there is absolutely no chance of doing that with China, which has been building up its naval resources for decades now.
China is currently responsible for over 50% of all new ships built which, when augmented by its Fishing Militia, makes it a particularly fearsome foe, at least on paper.
Should America’s plans come to fruition, I have no doubt that South Korea and Japan, which has a track record of meticulous planning from the First Russo-Japanese War and the Pearl Harbor attack, will inflict considerable damage on Chinese ports, air strips and critical infrastructure but, conversely, that China will exact a terrible price in retribution. The smart move for those countries is to follow France’s example and to gingerly tiptoe away from Uncle Sam’s poisoned chalice.
South Korea and Japan have to grow up and not be forever a knock-off Asian version of Germany, living in an American-inspired Peter Pan world, destroying themselves for the sake of America. Although Germany is only mentioned here in passing as it is beyond saving, for Asia, we must live in hope.
The Philippines, with its ramshackle armed forces and American-inspired ISIS attacks in its south, is a different matter. It is beyond criminal that America is pushing that ravaged country into conflict with China.
But then the Seychelles Coast Guard is an integral part of the Yanks’ Red Sea Armada. And though the Seychelles, on account of its scratch navy donated to it from such nations as Sri Lanka, China, India and Portugal is easily mocked, it has played a crucial role in combatting Somali piracy. That said, there is something particularly cynically American in pushing Africa’s smallest country into the frontline against formidable Arab adversaries. Having fought Russia to the last Ukrainian, the Yanks are now ready to fight the Houthi to the last Seychellois and the Chinese to the last Filipino. The Americans, at least, are consistent.
Vietnam is a different case as it shows the blinkered arrogance of the Chinese, who are forcing the Vietnamese to align with the Americans, who have no business whatsoever in Asia.
But it is precisely that rank Chinese arrogance that makes the American 7th fleet essential to guaranteeing whatever independence the Philippines and other ASEAN countries enjoy. Those countries currently have no hope of withstanding Chinese encroachment, let alone reaching their own full potential, without American help.
One need only stand in Manila’s garishly opulent Chinese cemetery for a few minutes to appreciate why there is such antipathy to the Chinese in South East Asia and why pogroms against them are such a regular feature of South East Asian, Vietnamese and Korean life and why their so-called Belt and Road Initiative, which largely bypasses the area, is distrusted.
China, together with its American rival, should learn to practice an economy of enemies and to treat the national interests of sovereign countries it currently bullies with respect. As things currently stand, China is practising both mercantilism and neo-mercantilism in the seas it contests with Japan and the ASEAN countries. China actually has military bases within sight of the main islands of the Philippines and, somewhat like the predatory Israelis, it claims dubious maps allegedly charted by Chinese sycophantic imperialist cartographers millennia ago, give it the right to claim whatever it is it wants. Because China has no such right, it should sail its navy back to Yulin.
As regards China’s predatory trading, America is busy linking the Netherlands up with Korea and Taiwan to freeze China out of the semiconductor industry and much the same is happening in other industries and with other countries such as India as well. Although that might be a futile exercise in trying to hold back the economic tides, the collateral damage these titans sparring with each other in the South China Sea concerns me much more.
That said, peer powers cannot allow China to be the new Rule Britannia, being both the workshop of the world and the guardian and owner of the High Seas. The United States certainly cannot and that is why Indian warships are docking in Manila, Vietnam is back in play, the Philippines is being recolonised, rabid Australia is tooling up with nuclear attack subs and the Chinese minority are again on the back foot in pogrom prone Indonesia.
At the heart of all this lies China’s colonisation of the bountiful South China Sea, which can be looked at in the following links from the points of view of the Brookings Institute, the Carnegie Endowment, the Wilson Center, China, the Philippines, the CIA’s Constitutional Rights Foundation, the CIA’s Council on Foreign Relations, the CIA’s Institute for China America Relations, the United States, the Czech Republic, the European Union, Singapore, the New Atlas, Myanmar and the American Naval War College.
For those of you needing a shortcut through all that, here is the excellent Defense Politics Asia explaining the issues from the point of view of, firstly. the Philippines and, secondly, China which should immediately cease and desist from its totally unacceptable attacks like this one on the navy of the Philippines.
China must accept that the South China Sea and waters contiguous to it are not Chinese lakes and that the countries of East Asia and South East Asia can never and must never bow down before it like the ancients of Korea and Vietnam were forced to do. China should either live in the modern world or sail in the puddles of its muddied imperialist past, which was not all porcelain, pottery and happy, clappy Vietnamese serfs.
The Asian countries have more than enough on their plates without their former overlords from the north joining the Americans in throwing their weight about. If the Chinese want to be the new America, fine, let their navies duke it out. If they want to join the modern, civilised world, then they should impress on Russia, which will chair the BRICS formation in 2024, the need to initiate dialogue with all the countries of East and South East Asia on the premise, unfashionable though it might be in the United States and its clones, that jaw-jaw with realists like the late Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew is better than war-war with all comers. If China cannot partake in such a process without its hallmark abrasiveness and if it cannot do better than bully the Philippines, then it deserves everything the United States, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, France and the Seychelles throw at it.
