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Yes, it's hard even to remember (if you aren't of a certain advanced age), but I grew up in a world where the two superpowers, the United States and Russia, both increasingly armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and so unable to fight each other directly without the possibility of the planet going up in flames, engaged in what came to be known as a Cold War. Meanwhile, we kids found ourselves in our own school-time version of the possibility that the Cold War might turn all too hot -- with regular "duck and cover" drills (while sirens wailed outside) and, not having shells like Bert the Turtle, we had to dive under our desks to protect ourselves from the Russian nukes theoretically heading our way.
But that was then" this is" hmmm" Could it be possible that, as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy suggests today, without a duck-and-cover drill in sight, we're nonetheless in a new Cold War with a rising power (all too well-armed with nukes), this time in Asia, a "war" that the island of Taiwan threatens to turn hot any day now? And yet, isn't it strange -- among all the horrors on this planet from Ukraine to Gaza and (endlessly) beyond -- that this new Cold War gets remarkably little attention, even as both sides in it grow ever more edgy and even aggressive?
So let McCoy, author of a classic book on the rise and potential fall of the first of those powers, the United States, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, lay out for us how the two great powers on this planet at present (Russia now being a great warring mess) are facing off ever more dangerously. Just what we need now, right? Tom
Powder Keg in the Pacific
How China's Challenge Revived America's Position in Asia and the Pacific
By Alfred McCoy
While the world looks on with trepidation at regional wars in Israel and Ukraine, a far more dangerous global crisis is quietly building at the other end of Eurasia, along an island chain that has served as the front line for America's national defense for endless decades. Just as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has revitalized the NATO alliance, so China's increasingly aggressive behavior and a sustained U.S. military build-up in the region have strengthened Washington's position on the Pacific littoral, bringing several wavering allies back into the Western fold. Yet such seeming strength contains both a heightened risk of great power conflict and possible political pressures that could fracture America's Asia-Pacific alliance relatively soon.
Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, for instance, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even penetrating American airspace in Alaska. To respond to what Moscow called "rising geopolitical tension around the world," such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese-Russian "Ocean-24" exercise that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft, and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of "trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost" by "increasing [its] military presence" in the Asia-Pacific region."
"China is not a future threat," the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall responded in September. "China is a threat today." Over the past 15 years, Beijing's ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels, with the likelihood of war "increasing" and, he predicted, it will only "continue to do so." An anonymous senior Pentagon official added that China "continues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and" the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War."
Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for American global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its "defense" on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo-Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the United States and among its allies.
Building a Pacific Bastion
For well over a century, the U.S. has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region, producing geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo's attack on the American naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the U.S. defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.
Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense remarkably irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American "defenses" deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the U.S. built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the U.S. extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia-Pacific allies -- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia.
For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of American global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) and dominate another (Eurasia). In many ways, in fact, the U.S. geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.
After the Cold War
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