Nuclear weapons and the strategic environment in the Indo Asia-Pacific super-region

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!

Dealing with ‘fre-enemies’

 

 

 

 

Two great powers with authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political systems should really attend seminars of Dale Carnegie on how to win friends and influence people. Or on how not to help your ‘frenemies’.

I am referring to China and Russia. Due to their heavy-handedness and hard-ball approaches, they manage to augment the ranks of their adversary’s (the US) allies and friends.

China single-handedly pushed the Philippines further into the Americans’ embrace due to its aggressive activism in the South China Sea. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) of 2014 is the latest (most likely not the last) agreement strengthening US-Philippine strategic ties. Furthermore, Chinese territorial aggressiveness in Northeast Asia is further driving South Korea and Japan into the ‘tacit’ US-led anti-Chinese front. Japan in fact offered a strategic alliance with the Philippines (obviously versus China) last year after ‘gifting’ the Philippine navy with some nifty and spankingly-new fast craft (an obvious improvement over the decades-old US hand-me-downs). Vietnam and the Philippines cozied up to each other again due to Chinese heavy-handedness.

 

 

 

Sealing the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA)

 

 

Elsewhere, Ukraine responded to Russia territorial incursions by firmly siding with the West. Admittedly, Russia was simply a reactor to West-sponsored ouster of a pro-Russian government in Kiyev. However, hardball tactics versus a pro-West successor goverment will only alienate the latter. What it feared–an anti-Russia and pro-West Ukraine–actually came to pass.

Should Ukraine aspire for and gain admission into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after clinching EU membership, the Russian nightmare of a hostile ‘near abroad’ will materialize. That Western sanctions over the Ukraine question are helping push the Russian economy to a crisis is ‘salt on an open wound’.

Strategically, China and Russia will most likely get drawn together. Partnerships within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and with the rest of the BRIC (i.e., India and Brazil) and Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments with a left-leaning social policy and an anti-US foreign policy orientation will be strengthened or cultivated. Chinese carrots will continue to be available for pariah African states (over such issues as Darfur).

In Asia, China appears to have finessed with its tack with its billion-dollar funded Asian infrastructure bank and the proposed new Silk Road. However, these new carrots are on offer while consolidation (hardening and construction of new and improved infrastructure) proceeds apace in its newly-‘acquired’ SCS territories.

Meanwhile, the US is smelling like a bed of roses. Notwithstanding the partisan blindness of the Republicans and die-hard Tea Party zealots, the US economy is slowly recovering and all other economic indicators are doing quite well. Of course,the 1%-99% divide remains a serious socio-political thorn.

 

 

(Photo from cyprus-mail.com)

 

 

 

On the global front the US earned a lot of brownie points with the on-going normalization of ties with Cuba. Kudos to Pope Francis for brokering the bilateral preps. On the other hand, the Americans cannot seem to realize their government’s continued support for isolated Israel’s does not help their war effort against international terror.

I will continue to monitor these global developments and post my observations in this page and elsewhere.

No Russia policy

 

Prof. Andrei Tsygankov

 

 

Andrei Tsygankov, a professor of political science and international relations at the San Francisco State University, believes Obama does not have a Russia policy. “That US strategic thinking is impotent;” the world has changed since the end of the Cold War but US thinking has not.

Tsygankov argues that the US cannot return to Cold War strategies of containment and ideological struggle. He believes the proper approach is to help Russia become stronger in a future and a more secure multipolar world. Otherwise, the alternative is a dangerous bipolar world dominated by US and China with Russia firmly on China’s side.

The confluence of events after the end of the Cold War had led to Obama’s current predicament. Russia became so weak and supine the West almost got everything from it thanks to the drunkard Yeltsin.

 

Russian President Boris Yeltsin

 

And yet, the West did not give anything of consequence to Russia. Instead, it brought the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an anti-Soviet military alliance that should have disbanded after the Cold War’s end, right up to Russia’s doorsteps and subverted pro-Moscow regimes through the so-called color revolutions.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin

 

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that post-Yeltsin leaders of a different breed like Putin cannot accept such further diminution of Russian power and the embedding of existential threats at its very borders. Looks like the American have not heard of Napoleon and a guy named Adolf Hitler.

 

China President Xi Ping

 

 

At this point, China found it opportune to repair its relations not only with Russia through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) but also with India. If the US is dreaming of containing China in the East Asian littoral through another containment strategy, the SCO may make it easier said than done. China’s cultivation of Thailand and Myanmar and normalized relations with India can afford it access not only to the Indian Ocean but to new sources of energy.

 

 

Furthermore, the ASEAN connectivity projects specially in mainland Southeast Asia will have positive spillover effects for China’s economy.

 

 

Putin can then decide which state will butter the Russian bread. Or could even have both buttering up to the Russian bear. And supply the bread to boot!

 

 

Of course, in some way, an incoherent power is more harmful than one with a carefully crafted strategy.

Pussy Riot 3: Sentenced to jail for ‘blasphemous hooliganism’

Sir Paul McCartney may have supported them.

Madonna, Franz Ferdinand, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers may have asked that they be set free.

These artists may have just be few among many who either expressed support or asked that they be set free.

The Pussy Riot 3 in a glass cage during court proceedings

However, Moscow Judge Marina Syrova found three members of a punk-rock band, Pussy Riot, guilty for hooliganism–a ‘blasphemy incited by religious hatred’.  The three women were meted a 2-year jail sentence; the prosecutors wanted 3 years; while legally, they could have been jailed for seven years.

Tolokonnikova: A still defiant Pussy Riot-er

Sentenced were Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, a philosophy student described by the prosecution to be ‘evil genius’ behind Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, 24, a student of journalism and creative writing   and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, a computer programmer.  Two of them were young mothers.  They have been in jail since early March this year after they staged an anti-Vladimir Putin prayer at the nave of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow’s most important church.  Putin is the current prime minister of the Russian Federation and the Pussy Riot declared they were opposed to Putin’s policies and the close ties between the Putin government and the Russian Orthodox Church.

A pensive Yekaterina Samutsevich

The Guardian reported that in her opening statement, read by a lawyer, Tolokonnikova apologized for those who were insulted by Pussy Riot’s performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. “We had no intentions to offend anyone,” she said. “We wish that those who cannot understand us can forgive us.”  She spelled out the group’s intent: “The words we spoke and our entire punk performance aimed to express our disapproval of a specific political event: the patriarch’s support of Vladimir Putin, who has taken an authoritarian and anti-feminist course. Our performance contained no aggression towards the audience, but only a desperate desire to change the political situation in Russia for the better.”

For Tolokonnikova’s full profile, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/08/pussy-riot-profile-nadezhda-tolokonnikova).

The political is personal: Maria Alyokhina smiles as she is led by police to a court in Moscow.

Before the sentencing, Moscow was rife with talk that the PS3 will indeed be sent to jail for hooliganism instead of being slapped on the wrist for committing a mere misdemeanor.  There was likewise talk that even if they will be jailed, the sentence will be less than the full seven years.

While Prime Minister Putin asserted that the case was off his hands, many believed that the court hearing the case was not truly independent of the Kremlin.

Across the English Channel and the Atlantic, pundits pontificated that the PS3 decision will be a test of the Russian judicial system and could affect the flow of Western investments into the Federation.

Everybody seems so ‘het up’ save the three.   Look at them.  Nadezhda is defiant.   Maria is smiling.   And Yekaterina is at peace.  I guess the three are satisfied they have made their (strong) point at the Cathedral and in court.  I believe they also knew they could not get away with their punk prayer lightly.

So they’re jail-bound.  I hope they will find more time to rehearse their acts and write new material.

As someone who was also jailed for my beliefs and political activities, I salute Nadya, Katya, and Masha.

Viva Pussy Riot!

 

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Author’s note: See my earlier post on the Pussy Riot (https://bongmendoza.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/self-immolation-and-prosecution-israel-and-russia/).  Thank you.