|
SABER RATTLING IN ASIA
Facing down China and North Korea
by John-David Morgan
March 31, 2005
There is little comfort to be found from a Chinese perspective in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the Project for a New American Century report that laid the “road map” for the Bush foreign policy in 2000.
The U.S. presence in Southeast Asia has been “sparse” since pulling out of the Philippines in 1992 and China “clearly seeks to regain influence in the region,” the report rationalizes. As such, PNAC recommends a build-up of air and ground forces in Southeast Asia that could “constrain a Chinese challenge to American regional leadership.”
The key to “coping with the rise of China to great-power status” is “raising U.S. military strength in East Asia,” the PNAC authors argue. This would “reassure” regional allies such as Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia of U.S. commitment. “By guaranteeing the security of our current allies and newly democratic nations in East Asia, the United States can help ensure that the rise of China is a peaceful one. Indeed, in time, American and allied power in the region may provide a spur to the process of democratization inside China itself.”
The bottom line, according to PNAC: “It is time to increase the presence of American forces in Southeast Asia.” Stationing permanent, “rapidly mobile U.S. ground and air forces in the region will be required.”
“Control of key sea lines of communication, ensuring access to rapidly growing economies, maintaining regional stability while fostering closer ties to fledgling democracies and, perhaps most important, supporting the nascent trends toward political liberty are all enduring security interests for America,” the report states.
NORTH KOREA
North Korea is never far off the Bush Administration foreign policy “road map,” and the country has retained its “Axis of Evil” status into Bush’s second term.
“North Korea, is on the verge of deploying missiles that can hit the American homeland,” the PNAC authors note in 2000. That remains the situation, and the conflict with North Korea has made diplomatic demands that the Bush Administration has been loath to consider.
The troops in South Korea are the only permanent U.S. force on the Asian Continent, and PNAC calls for a build-up at the South Korean garrison. However, the Iraq War has limited the build-up of Army forces. Should they no longer be needed to defend South Korea, the PNAC authors conclude that the force would still have other uses in Asia.
The PNAC authors assume a unification effort between North Korea and South Korea. Instead, U.S. and North Korea appear to have reached a stalemate. PNAC reasons that U.S. forces would remain in Korea after unification to ensure “stability” in the North, which assumes a stand-down from the stalemate and unification desirable to the interests of the U.S. and South Korea. But all roads lead to China: The troops “will still have a vital role to play in U.S. security strategy … with the rise of Chinese military power.”
For China, none of this can be settling, particularly when one of the “main military missions” that PNAC prescribes for the 21st Century is to “deter rise of new great-power competitor.”
|
March,
2004
The
March for Peace in Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI -- As Peace Action Wisconsin Organizer Julie Enslow read through the tale of devastation in Iraq last Saturday, she paused to consider whether it was possible for optimism to exist on the second anniversary of the war. Over 100,000 perished, 1,521 of them U.S. soldiers as of March 18. 108 Iraqi prisoners dead in US custody -- only one at the now-infamous Abu Gharab prison and none investigated by the US Military, according to Human Rights Watch. 11,344 wounded soldiers. 5,500 American troops AWOL. |
|
March
31, 2004
Saber
Rattling in Asia
There is little comfort to be found from a Chinese perspective in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the Project for
the New American Century report that laid the “road map” for the Bush foreign policy in 2000.
|
|
March
31, 2004
Hospitals
in Iran? Tommy's Farewell to Bush
Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson will leave his post as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services this week, bidding farewell to Washington and the Bush Administration cabinet. On the way out, Thompson dished up some of his views on the state of American diplomacy, calling for a policy of "medical diplomacy." Thompson told Journal Sentinel Washington, D.C. Bureau scribe Craig Gilbert that this involves the U.S. "using our tremendous medical expertise to give our medical assistance to all the places where we're fighting the wars, areas that are tinderboxes." |
|
|
|
|
Perhaps you've felt a burning need or an uncomfortable itch
that one of our stories has inspired in you and you feel a need to
respond. No problem. Log in to our blog section and we'll publish most
non-fictional, well written responses.
|
|
|
| BUSTED!
Who's behind CRG? Click
here to see a
captured image from the web page of Milwaukee's self proclaimed
"citizen watchdog". |
|
