Nuclear explosion
Nuclear weapons do not make war between states impossible. They only make wars between Great Powers ‘cold’ rather than ‘hot’ shooting wars. Even if ‘cold’, a cold war is a war just the same. The Cold War of the 20th century between the USA and the USSR was fought through an extremely expensive and dangerous strategic arms race and conventional proxy wars. The Soviet Union could not match the US move to deploy strategic weapons in outer space. It lost the Cold War and had to disappear into the pages of history in the 1990s. The Soviet bloc also collapsed and a few of former Soviet allies are now members of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev returns to Moscow after a coup against him fizzles out a few months before the Soviet Union gets dissolved as an independent state
Vestiges of the 20th century Cold War remain in the region and the focal point is the Korean peninsula. The situation in Korea and the broader Northeast Asian strategic environment can change if the current US-North Korean rapprochment will eventually lead to a peace treaty between the two states and denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
North Korean leader Kim Jung Un meets US President Donald Trump in Singapore
Northeast Asia
South Asia is also a potential trouble spot as nuclear weapons states India and Pakistan continue to face each other in hostile emnity.
South Asia
Since three-four years ago, two new Cold Wars commenced.
The first is between frenemies US and China in the Indo Asia-Pacific theater.
The second is between the US and Russia (both are clearly enemies to each other notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s cozying up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin) in the European and Middle East- North Africa (MENA) theaters.
Eurasia and the Middle East
This means that the US is waging a two-front ‘cold’ war.
In the Indo Asia-Pacific theater, the US superiority in strategic and conventional weaponry does not guarantee regional hegemony. For one, it does not have enough carrots to win and consolidate friendships and alliances.
In contrast, China has a lot of carrots (including the various connectivity schemes like the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank, and the readiness to bribe state leaders in exchange for contracts and friendly relations).
Through a classic carrots-and-sticks strategy, China has been balkanizing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with some degree of success. The soft targets of China’s carrots are the poorer members of ASEAN like Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar as well as the next member of ASEAN–Timor Leste.
Southeast Asia
China is also actively pushing its lines of defense outward away from its coastlines through aggressive force projection platform building in the South China Sea/West Philippines and territorial claims in both Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. In response to Chinese activism ang aggressiveness, a broad anti-China alliance has formed in the region. The US move to rename its former Asia Pacific (military) theater to the Indo Asia-Pacific theater is a recognition of the importance of the Indian Ocean and India in its bid to contain and engage China. The US effort to get India in its anti-China effort is stifled by US support for India’s enemy, Pakistan.
The US cannot successfully complete its rebalancing to Asia (clearly an anti-China strategy) as it is still embroiled in serious disputes in too many other places (Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, etc) in the rest of the world.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and US President Donald Trump
For this reason, its Asian allies are rethinking their relations with the US and adopting independent strategies. Of course, the US had been exhorting its allies to spend more for their own defense, a call reiterated in so many ways by incumbent US President Donald Trump. The new South Korean leader is now keen to normalize relations with North Korea. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had been tyrying to change Japanese strategic doctrine so it becomes a normal power and its military forces shed its limited ‘self-defense’ role and assume full military capabilities and responsibilities. I believe that if the US under President Trump shirks on its responsibility to its Northeast Asian allies, given the rapproachment with North Korea, Japan will develop its own nuclear weaponry ala Charles de Gaulle’s force de frappe.
French nuclear submarine aptly named Le Terrible
We do indeed live in very interesting times specially since eccentric leaders like Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un can really change the game!
bong mendoza's blog 