“What Japan was in the 20th century, though brought to its knees after the Pacific War, China is now – a threat upon America, with two China Sea flashpoints”
“SI VIS pacem, para bellum,” the Roman general Vegetius was supposed to have originally said, quoting from his book Epitoma Rei Militaris.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
Thus, from the Roman emperors to the Ottoman Empire, from the Anglo-Saxons to the Iberian kings, the Prussians, the Austro-Hungarian empire, to Napoleon, to Hitler and now, the US of A, China and Russia, and even North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, leaders have always beefed up their military and their navies, their air force and their arsenals with the most deadly weapons, be it for lebensraum and outright invasion, or preparing for war, ostensibly to achieve “peace in their time.”
Poorer nations, however, cannot always afford the high cost of military preparations, and thus they have to rely on “alliances” with the richer nations whose military-industrial complexes profit richly from the sale of weapons of war, often backed-up by long-term loans from their governments.
Hand-me downs or weapons made obsolescent by ever-evolving technologies of the military-industrial complex for use of their rich client governments are often sold to the poorer nations who cannot afford the ever-increasing costs of “para bellum.”
And these weapons are sold through loans, sometimes grants-in-aid with strings attached by the developed to the under-developed nations, often to those who are considered “allies,” whether through bilateral or multilateral treaties.
But preparing for war can be quite tricky, especially after the Second World War where millions perished, and in the Pacific theater, where atomic bombs were dropped by the Americans to force the Japanese to surrender quickly and surely.
And in the complex world of geopolitics, today’s enemies can be tomorrow’s allies, as in a defeated Japan becoming America’s staunch friend in East Asia, or an isolated Korea north of Seoul has become a client-state of a wealthy China after the Soviet Union disintegrated.
Here in our region, several countries are in dispute with a hugely enriched and amply militarized China over small islands, mostly islets which bob up and down with the tides, in what is largely known as the South China Sea.
These are Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
And Taiwan, too, which China considers an integral part of its territory, but which seeks to have its own national identity under a different form of government, and which has control of Itu Aba which it calls Taiping, the largest island in the Spratly group, but is likewise claimed by China, Vietnam and the Philippines as part of its territory.
Vietnam and China fought a short war over the Paracels in 1974, but after the Chinese won, the Vietnamese have had an uneasy “peace,” preferring to shore up an economy destroyed by civil war and American intervention, with amazing results.
The Philippines under the present dispensation invokes a Mutual Defense Treaty forged in 1951, six years after the end of the Pacific War, where both nations agreed to support each other in case of an attack by another.
For 40 years thereafter, we hosted American military bases in our territory, the largest of which were the deep-sea harbor in Subic and the massive airfield in Clark.
But in 1991, the Philippine Senate decided to retrieve those bases and converted them to industrial zones.
For a long time, China was yet a “sleeping giant,” and Napoleon warned the abusive British and other world powers of the time that when it wakes up, the “world will be shaken.”
By 1991, the giant had awakened, as its leaders focused the energies of its people on becoming “rich,” which its paramount leader after Mao, the widely admired Deng Xiaoping described as a “glorious” endeavor.
China’s ascent over the last 50 years can only be described as “glorious,” and is now the world’s second largest economy, threatening the US of A which for almost the entire 20th century had no parallel on the world stage, its wealth used to become the strongest military force, often described as the “constable of the world.”
That China achieved such economic progress, its technology astoundingly innovative and it becoming the world’s factory of value-for-money goods in so short a period is truly phenomenal.
Together with new wealth, China also developed its own military and naval forces to the point where they now threaten America’s hegemony in the Pacific.
What Japan was in the 20th century, though brought to its knees after the Pacific War, China is now – a threat upon America, with two China Sea flashpoints: Taiwan and what we call our West Philippine Sea. (To be continued)