New Cold War

US launches ‘all-front’ offensive against China

In the course of 2018 the US launched an offensive against China on multiple fronts. After Trump had spent much of 2017 flattering Xi Jinping and ‘thanking’ China for its help on North Korea, in 2018 the tone coming from the US abruptly harshened, and increasingly hostile acts – on both the trade and military fronts – have been taken or threatened.

Vice President Mike Pence spelt out the rationale for this sharp turn in a seminal speech at the Hudson Institute on 4^th October setting out the administration’s policy towards China. The speech brought together every preceding critique of China whether for its alleged damage to US national interests or its failure to meet Western norms on ‘democracy’ and human rights. Pence spun through China’s alleged crimes on trade, intellectual property, security, cyber attacks, the South China Sea, military spending, ‘debt diplomacy’, support for the ‘wrong’ regimes (e.g. Venezuela) and so on. And he threw in some new ones, particularly the claim that: ‘China has initiated an unprecedented effort to influence American public opinion, the 2018 elections, and the environment leading into the 2020 presidential elections…’[1]

The speech was a major statement of current US policy towards China, and signalled that the aggressive steps towards China that have characterised US actions this year are not a temporary blip to apply pressure on this or that issue, but that competition not cooperation is the strategic direction of US thinking on China for the long term.

‘America had hoped that economic liberalization would bring China into greater partnership with us and with the world. Instead, China has chosen economic aggression, which has in turn emboldened its growing military’, he argued, and that while ‘…previous administrations all but ignored China’s actions – and in many cases… abetted them…those days are over.’ Spelling out that the aim is ‘to reset America’s economic and strategic relationship with China…to finally put America first’.

Many commentators pointed to parallels between Pence’s speech and Winston Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain speech in 1946, which announced the Cold War. In China there was especial concern with Pence’s suggestion that there is a growing consensus in both the Republican and Democratic parties on adopting a more confrontational approach to China. Certainly Nancy Pelosi, likely to continue to serve as leader of the House Democrats after the midterms, is a noted hard-line China hawk, who has supported Trump’s tariff war for example. This implies that this new aggressive stance could outlast a Trump presidency, and what is opening is a new era of Cold (and even possibly hot) War between the West led by the US and China.

National Defence Strategy – China not ‘terrorism’ now US primary concern

Pence centrally referred to the major reformulation of the priorities in US foreign policy that was set out in the US Defence Department’s new National Defence Strategy published in January. Titled ‘Sharpening the American military’s competitive edge’ it bluntly placed ‘strategic competition’ with key rivals, i.e. China, ahead of the previous priority to the so-called ‘war on terror’. ‘Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security’, it says. [2]

The Defence Strategy document clarifies precisely what this means: ‘The central challenge to US prosperity and security is the re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers’. And in case the message has not fully got through: ‘Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities for the Department, and require both increased and sustained investment, because of the magnitude of the threats they pose to US security and prosperity today, and the potential for those threats to increase in the future.’

It concludes that the US has to ‘build a more lethal force’, with the capacity to fight and win a war with any enemy. The detailed defence procurement proposals to achieve this are set out in the full strategy document, which is classified. But apparently these precise proposals were developed through giving detailed consideration to which military programmes would be essential, and which would not, if the US were to be able to win in an all-out war with China and/or Russia.

In line with this, in the summer the new defence budget was finally agreed on the basis of a bipartisan vote in Congress that increased US defence spending to $718bn in the coming year, an increase of 13% in one year. This compares to China’s defence budget in 2017 of $228bn.[3]

Nuclear weapons and withdrawal from the INF

Part of this budget is allocated to updating and improving the US nuclear arsenal. In October Trump announced that he intended to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). This treaty was signed between Gorbachev and Reagan and resulted in the removal of Cruise missiles and Soviet SS-20 missiles from sites in Europe and Western Russia, and a commitment by both sides not to develop or deploy land-based intermediate and short-range missiles.

Trump’s withdrawal from the INF is widely seen as mainly targeted at China, which was exempt from the Treaty and so has been able to develop short and intermediate range missiles as the heart of its Eastern and Southern defences. While the US does have sea and air based intermediate range missiles in the region, as these are not permanently stationed they do not present a real capability to defeat China, and would rely on US allies allowing ‘transit rights’ to get missile laden aircraft into combat position.

Commentators consider that the US would like to develop new intermediate range missiles and permanently base these in Guam, Japan or even South Korea. This would strengthen the US’s military position to attack China and potentially force China into an economically damaging arms race. However it would also dramatically increase the military tensions in the region and create major political divisions in Japan and/or South Korea if they were asked to host such US missiles.

Nonetheless, creating the military capacity to ‘win’ a war against China on its home territory is clearly the goal of the Defence Department, one aim of the hike in US defence spending and a strong motivator for the decision to leave the INF.

Militarisation of China’s seas

In advance of any substantive steps to change the military relationship of forces with China in the region, the US has been behaving more aggressively in the South China Sea and the Straits of Taiwan. Using the feeble excuse of defending ‘freedom of navigation’ – which has never been threatened by China which urgently needs free navigation through international waters to conduct its vast international trade – flotillas of US warships have sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinese islands in the South China Sea.

In 2017 Trump suspended these so-called Freedom of Navigation operations when he was pursuing a softer policy towards China, but since late last year they were reinstated and on a more frequent basis than under Obama. In mid-2018 France and the UK announced that they intended to join the US FONOP operations. Australia is already a participant in this US-instigated militarisation of the South China Sea.

In July this year the US stepped up its aggressive military stance by sending US warships through the Straits of Taiwan, again on the trumped up grounds of defending free navigation. China has never objected to the passage of any commercial shipping through the Straits, but it does object to hostile navies sending warships so close to Chinese home shores. The only ‘freedom of navigation’ this defends is the right of the US to send its Navy right up to China’s coasts; a freedom that the US would hardly accept around its shores.

All these military steps are directed to two goals. Firstly to change the military balance in the region to make it possible for the US to wage an offensive war against China, which the present state of China’s defences compared to the US presence in the region makes very difficult if not impossible with any hope of success. And secondly to force the Chinese to divert economic resources into a damaging arms race that would reduce its competitivity internationally, and with the US in particular. The US hopes this would eventually create a domestic economic squeeze that would undermine support for the regime and provoke popular feeling in favour of caving in to the US based on the illusion that the US would then ‘allow’ China to develop again. Not only is this an illusion, as the US’s chief aim is that China’s growth should be slowed or halted so that it can present no challenge to the US, but, fortunately, China is showing no sign of falling into an ‘arms race’ trap.

Trade wars

However the US’s offensive against China this year has been most concentrated on seeking to apply pressure on its trade. This has correctly commanded most international attention. This has involved Trump’s escalating imposition of up to 25% tariffs on over $250bn worth of Chinese imports into the US. At present there is no sign of the US backing off on this tariff war, despite its negative effect on world trade and boomerang impact on the US economy in pushing up prices and pushing down stocks and shares. Nor has China shown any signs of giving in – although it has offered reasonable concessions and compromises which have been turned down.

So far Trump’s rhetoric has remained bullish; with exaggerated claims that the tariff war is already damaging China and the US is ‘winning’. But this does not hold up against the pressure on the US itself, which is set to worsen. So far the impact on the US economy has been muted by the fact the imposition of tariffs has coincided with the upswing of the business cycle, a happy circumstance that is unlikely to last long into next year. Moreover, Trump was always unlikely to change course before the midterms for political reasons.

Thus it remains is possible that Trump will retreat from the tariff war at some point if the problems it creates domestically begin to outweigh its value in putting pressure on China. But the US economic offensive does not just take the form of a tariff war.

ZTE and attacks on Chinese companies

The imposition of the first tranche of tariffs in April was preceded by an unprecedented US attack on ZTE, one of the top Chinese telecoms’ companies. The company was found to have broken a previous agreement with the US on trade with Iran, a stupid step that was bound to provoke a response from the US. But the level of sanction that the US imposed in punishment – prohibiting ZTE from using US parts or technology for seven years – threatened to completely destroy the company.

After intense negotiations and the departure of the entire management team at ZTE, China managed to get the sanction lifted in July. But not only had the company itself been seriously damaged, possibly fatally, but the confrontation had been an object lesson in how the US’s lead in major technologies gives it huge international leverage, even as its growth rates falter and it runs major trade deficits with key competitors.

US vs China: a new Cold War?

If this shift to all-front aggressive campaign against China is carried through by the Trump administration it will mark a fundamental change in the US’s China policy towards China for the last 20 years or more.

After the tensions of the late 80s and the US sanctions on China following the events of 1989, from Bill Clinton’s administration in the mid-90s onwards, the various incumbents of the White House sought to maintain relatively neutral relations with China. Trade ties were increased, China was brought into the World Trade Organisation, US investment contributed to China’s economic modernisation, and many major US companies shifted their production to China. At the same time the US used its influence to urge China to keep out of the disputes that increasingly wracked the UN Security Council and NATO as the US launched its ‘war on terror’. To maintain this position the US was prepared to meet China halfway on issues of most strategic concern to it – the status of Taiwan in particular.

Already under Obama there was strong pressure from within the US foreign policy and security establishment to toughen up the US’s stance as China grew in economic strength and it began to pose a perceived threat to the US’s pre-eminent position in East and Southeast Asia – hence Obama and Hillary Clinton’s launch of the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2010. But with the US still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, the challenges and opportunities for US interests presented by the ‘Arab spring’ and the civil war in Ukraine, Obama was never really able to fully follow through on the realignment of priorities that the ‘pivot’ envisaged.

There are still many similar issues confronting Trump before an all-front anti-China policy can be implemented. The US is far from out of the Middle East and Trump has stepped up US involvement in Yemen. The US is also extensively engaged in many unstable African states. Despite Trump’s own preference for a détente with Putin’s Russia, this has not been delivered against opposition within his administration and the Pentagon. Army chief-of-staffs warn that the US military remains over-extended globally and even the large budget hike cannot allow it to upscale sufficiently to believably challenge China and force it to respond without full-blown retreats elsewhere.

But, even if obstacles remain to the launch of a full-blooded Cold War with China, there is now no equivocation that this is the intent of major sections of the current administration and is at the heart of Pentagon strategising. The recently retired Commander of US forces in Europe, Lt Gen Ben Hodges, told the Warsaw Security Forum in October, that he thought ‘it is a very strong likelihood that we will be at war with China’ within 15 years. This is not just dangerous thinking for China, but  for the whole world. No one should be in any doubt that if the US launched a war or generalised aggression towards China that this could be confined to a ‘Pacific theatre’; it would present a threat to the whole world.

This proposed ‘all-front’ offensive against China should be unequivocally opposed in all its aspects: it is unjustified; it is deeply dangerous; its only goal is maintaining US preeminence globally. The Chinese people have the right to live in peace and develop their economy without the malign interference of the US.

 

[1] Vice President Pence’s remarks on the administration’s policy towards China, Hudson Institute, Washington DC, 4^th October, 2018. https://www.hudson.org/events/1610-vice-president-mike-pence-s-remarks-on-the-administration-s-policy-towards-china102018

[2] Summary of the 2018 National Defence Strategy of the USA, ‘Sharpening the American military’s competitive edge’, January 2018. https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf

[3] Figures from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, constant 2016 dollars. China’s defence spending has been rising by about 10% a year, meaning its likely spending in 2019, when the US will spend $718bn, will be around $275bn

Japan: Abe's landslide in seats based on no increase in votes

Shinzo Abe and his right wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) swept to an outright victory in Japan’s snap General Election at the weekend.

His LDP/Komeito Party ruling coalition won over two-thirds – 313 – of the seats in the lower house of the Japanese Parliament. Taken together with the coalition’s existing two-thirds majority in the upper house, the election delivered a ‘super-majority’ for Abe which potentially allows him to take such steps as changing the Japanese constitution without consulting the opposition parties.

Abe’s election platform included a pledge to amend the ‘pacifist’ Article 9 in the Japanese constitution, which currently means it can only wage defensive war.

However although Abe won a stunning majority in seats this was not the result of a similar landslide in votes.  

Firstly the turn out in the election was very low at 53.9 per cent, only about 1 per cent up from 2014 which registered the lowest ever turnout in a Japanese General Election.

Secondly the LDP itself only saw a tiny increase in its share of the vote – from 33.1 per cent in 2014 to 33.3 per cent this time, an increase of only 0.2 per cent – while its coalition partner Komeito saw its vote fall by 1.2 per cent from 13.7 per cent to 12.5 per cent. This meant support for the coalition overall declined from 46.8 per cent in 2014 to 45.8 per cent this year.

In other words the electorate was distinctly lukewarm towards Abe. The fact that – despite crowing in the Western press about the success of ‘Abenomics’ –Japanese economic growth for the last three years has averaged less than 1 per cent has not made Abe or the LDP particularly popular.[i] His personal approval ratings have been increasingly negative in 2017, primarily due to economic issues, but also amplified by a series of corruption scandals,[ii] and concern about the impact of the proposed change to the constitution

The reason why this nonetheless translated into a landslide in seats for the LDP was primarily due to the divisions that have beset the opposition in a system where 60 per cent of the seats are elected by a first past the post system. On the eve of the election the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) dissolved, eventually producing two new rival parties, the right-wing Party of Hope and the more liberal Constitutional Democratic Party(CDP).

The Party of Hope was launched by Tokyo Mayor, Koike provoking the dissolution of the DP.  Abe announced the election later the same day! The new party aped the policies of the LDP, supporting it on changing Article 9, and only opposing it on nuclear power and a previously agreed 2 per cent hike in sales tax – from 8 per cent to 10 per cent – which is due to come in shortly. During the election Koike suggested that her party would be willing to form a ‘grand coalition’ with the LDP, although since the election result she has denied this.

Despite the fanfare on its launch – when the DP effectively dissolved itself to allow its sitting MPs to run for the new party – Koike’s junior version of the LDP eventually came third to the other party formed out of the ruins of the DP, the CDP. Before the rapid founding of the CDP, after the election had been called, it appeared that the Communist Party of Japan would effectively become the main alternative to the LDP’s policies. In the event, the CDP won 55 seats to Hope’s 50, and 19.9 per cent of the popular vote compared to 17.4 per cent, while the Communist vote was squeezed back from 11.4 per cent in 2014 to only 7.9 per cent in 2017. Although the Communists still did considerably better than the Japanese Social Democrats, whose vote fell from a disastrous 2.5 per cent to an annihilating 1.7 per cent.

Neither Hope nor the CDP put forward a clear alternative to Abe’s policy of strengthening Japan militarily against China (with North Korea as the fig leaf for this) nor to his economic policy. The CDP opposed Abe’s proposed constitutional change, but offered no fundamentally different course for Japan domestically or internationally.

The LDP has been in government continuously in Japan since the end of the US occupation in the 1950s, on a platform of subordination of foreign, trade and domestic policy to the demands and interests of the United States. Despite Abe’s nationalistic spin on Japanese politics, he has at all points stressed that maintaining and strengthening Japan’s relationship with the US is fundamental and non-negotiable, a position reinforced by hostility to China in particular.

There have only been two moments where an alternative to the LDP was able to win elections and form a government.

The first was in the mid-1990s when, in the context of a crisis in the LDP, a series of very short-lived coalitions eventually led to a Socialist Party-led government that lasted two years, on a policy of reorienting Japan towards Asia in the context of the end of the Cold War, the end of any threat from Russia, and the growing economic weight of South Korea, the island of Taiwan and increasingly China. The US’s total hostility to this orientation forced it to abandon this course and hastened its fall leading to a return of the LDP in 1996.

The second was when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) under Hatoyama won the election in 2009 on a pledge to close the US base in Okinawa and also to reorient Japan to Asia, now China in particular, floating the idea of some community of northeast Asian states on the model of the EU. Again total hostility from the US forced Hatoyama to change course on Okinawa, and within a year he was ousted as PM and replaced by DPJ right-winger Naoto Kan, who reoriented policy back in line with the US. The LDP, under Abe, easily won the next election in 2012.

The lesson is clear. Barring a crisis in the LDP where a political current of essentially the same character replaces it under a different name, the only opposition that can hope to replace the LDP as Japan’s main party of government is one that proposes to reorient the country from the US to Asia, especially China.

Abe’s policy is to strengthen Japan’s orientation to the US, chiefly by expanding Japan’s military forces. This was begun in response to Obama’s 2010 ‘pivot to Asia’, shifting US naval and military resources to the Pacific to counter China and encouraging US regional allies to rearm. It has stepped up in response to Trump’s threats that allies cannot rely on the US military umbrella unless they ‘pay their way’.

But this is not entirely popular in Japan itself. Although the recent crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes has led to some hardening of positions in the Japanese population in favour of militarily strengthening Japan, opposition to the US base in Okinawa remains strong and support for changing Article 9 of the constitution remains questionable. Not only is such a step highly controversial in Japan, but it is fiercely opposed by Japan’s neighbours, not just China and Russia but also South Korea. Japanese voters are concerned about provoking a deteriorating security situation in the region.

A number of opinion polls taken in April and May this year confirmed this.[iii] A poll by Asahi reported 63 per cent opposed to revision, with 29 per cent in favour; NHK – Japan’s public broadcaster - found 57 per cent and just 25 per cent for (down from 30 per cent in its previous 2002 poll); Kyodo’s ‘mail-in’ poll was the only one to show a majority in favour, with 47 per cent against and 49 per cent for. NHK’s poll also showed that 82 per cent thought Article 9 either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ useful for peace and security, despite also finding that 87 per cent thought Japan was currently threatened, especially by North Korea and China.

Certainly Abe is not going to back off on his support for Japanese rearmament and support for the US’s policies towards China. He has promised a ‘hard line’ on North Korea, but as for Trump himself, short of risking an all-out war that might wreak significant damage on South Korea and Japan itself, Abe does not have many options. Whether he pushes through a change to Article 9 – which looks more likely now he has a ‘super-majority’ and de facto support from the Party of Hope – is nonetheless still an open question, given the level of popular opposition.

Whatever else happens, this election result is no cause for celebration by the peace movement internationally and will deliver no economic respite to the Japanese working class.

 

[i] World Bank data. Available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2016&locations=JP&start=2009&view=chart

[ii] Browne, R. ‘As Shinzo Abe’s approval rating declines, markets could question sustainability of “Abenomics”: Analyst’, CNBC, 14 July 2017

[iii] Mark, C. ‘Japan debates changing its pacifist constitution’, The Diplomat, 18 May 2017

The US is to blame for the crisis with North Korea, and the US could solve it

 

Once again tensions between the US and North Korea over the latter’s nuclear programme have reached a dangerous boiling point, as North Korea carried out its largest-ever nuclear test in early September.

As with previous missile and nuclear tests by the DPRK, this test was accompanied by provocative rhetoric, threats and counter-threats from both sides. But evidently this is of most concern coming from the US, as the US actually has the capacity to carry out its threats, whereas despite the blood-curdling warnings in the Western media, Kim Jong-un does not.

North Korea’s claims have included that US cities are now within the reach of its missiles, that it plans to ‘contain’ the US base in Guam and it would respond to US attack by putting ‘an end to the US’. However these threats are in reality preposterous; North Korea does not have the arsenal to inflict any damage whatsoever to the US mainland or Guam. Such threats are however very dangerous as they are used in the West to whip up public opinion against North Korea, and in support of any response made by the US.

The US, on the other hand, definitely does have the capacity to obliterate the DPRK many times over. It is therefore of great concern that, in response to the latest test, US defence secretary Mattis threatened North Korea with a ‘massive military’ reaction; and that hardline Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, told the BBC that the US should be willing to contemplate 100,000s of civilian deaths to bring North Korea to heel.

Regarding the fundamental background to these events it is US foreign policy, particularly since the 2002 launch of the so-called ‘war on terror’, that has led to this crisis. In 2003 Bush, backed by Tony Blair, faked evidence of a continuing Iraqi nuclear programme to justify by-passing the UN to pursue illegal ‘regime change’ in that country. After defeating the regime through its military policy of ‘shock and awe’, Saddam Hussein and his family were hunted down and he hanged by a kangaroo court.

In Libya, Gaddafi drew the lesson from this that he must make a deal with the US and actually close down the Libyan nuclear programme; but this did not protect Libya from NATO bombing, nor Gaddafi also being hunted down like an animal and murdered with the tacit backing of the West.

The same was intended for Assad; but with Russia backing the regime, and the populations of the US and Europe growing wary of both the costs and domestic blowback from such wars, the US was unable to simply bomb its way to overthrowing Assad.

Putin analysed the situation rather accurately, identifying the US’s repeated violations of the UN Security Council as the prime cause of the uncomfortable bed in which the US and the rest of the world is now lying: 'Foreign [US] interventions in Iraq and Libya had convinced the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that he needed nuclear weapons to survive, Putin said. “We all remember what happened with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. His children were killed, I think his grandson was shot, the whole country was destroyed and Saddam Hussein was hanged ... We all know how this happened and people in North Korea remember well what happened in Iraq.”'

In other words, the main threat to world peace comes from the US’s record of unilateral military actions – exactly as those who opposed them warned at the time.

For small states that are in the crosshairs of the US the lessons are crystal clear. There is no persuasion, no talking, no UN that will protect you if the US decides to come for you. The only solution is to do what is possible to deter the US by building up a sufficient arsenal, including nuclear weapons, so that the threatened collateral damage acts as a brake.

And North Korea has plenty of reasons to feel threatened. Obama’s 2010 ‘pivot to Asia’ – which is one Obama policy that Trump is not reversing – was universally understood to be aimed at containing China, but within this North Korea was set up as a convenient scapegoat and cover for the US’s real intentions. For example, the stationing of the THAAD missile defence system in South Korea was proposed in response to North Korea, although its main target is really China and Russia – THAAD is a far too powerful system, with radar ranges of thousands of kilometres, to be aimed purely at North Korea.

From 2010, US bases in South Korea were expanded, with a new base, Fort Humphreys, slated to become the largest US base in Asia. Meanwhile North Korea’s other unfriendly neighbour, Japan, embarked on a sharp increase in its military spending and deepened its military collaboration with the US.

The DPRK’s August firing of an unarmed missile over Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island took place the day after the conclusion of US-Japan Northern-Viper-II wargames on the island that simulated invasion of North Korea and a ‘decapitation’ operation to remove the regime.

The US has also stepped up the scale of its annual Key Resolve/Foal Eagle land and sea based training exercises held jointly with South Korea, which the North Korean government had regularly objected to. The annual training exercise was already the largest held globally by the US, and from 2010 it was upgraded continuously. In 2013 B-2 and B-52 bombers were included; the exercise in 2016 was the largest to date.

The sea-borne element of these exercises often close in on the North Korean Yellow Sea coast, where the offshore border between North and South Korea is disputed. While the land border at the 38 parallel was de facto agreed by both sides in 1953, the western sea border was not. Despite North Korea’s reasonable objections, the UN, at the behest of the US, which entirely dominated it at the time, unilaterally imposed a sea border curving up the western coast of North Korea, rather than extending the line of the land border out to sea. (see link for map)

The threatening mien of this escalating US military presence, plus the evidence of the US’s practical implementation of ‘regime change’ since 2003, is the reality that has driven the North Korean nuclear programme, which was restarted in 2003 after being suspended under the ‘Agreed Framework’ with the US in the late 1990s. The DPRK knows its nuclear weapons cannot defeat the US, but they can offer sufficient threat to South Korea and Japan that they will act to stay the US’s hand on military action. And threaten some damage to US assets as well.

However, the real defence of the DPRK is that offered by China and Russia. Quite apart from the fact that China has no more intention today that it showed in 1950 of allowing the US to be able station its troops on the Yalu river that runs along its border with the DPRK, both China and Russia are determined that the US will not spread its policies of devastation and instability (as seen in the Middle East) to their backyard.

And it is in this regard that the behaviour of North Korea becomes rather less reasonable or defensible, and more straightforwardly provocative, as despite China’s role as its chief international defender – alongside Russia – and key economic and trading partner, North Korea refuses point blank to listen to its advice or take account of its concerns.

China does not make a big campaign against the DPRK’s nuclear programme, but does suggest that the DPRK should proceed quietly and calmly, refrain from provocative rhetoric and unrealistic threats, and present itself as reasonable, balanced and prepared to talk. China would have liked to see more positive signs in response to openings like the election of a South Korean president committed to easing tensions with the North, which might have positively impacted on Moon’s own wavering.

China’s – and Russia’s – proposal in relation to the current crisis has been dubbed ‘freeze-freeze’: that the US agrees to refrain from holding military exercises off the North Korean coast and that North Korea suspends its nuclear programme to allow talks to take place.

China has stood up to the West’s demands that it impose comprehensive sanctions on North Korea, which would wreck the DPRK’s economy. But China is also concerned to avoid a complete breakdown with the West, so earlier in 2017 it agreed to a figleaf of some limited sanctions on North Korea.

Rather than showing understanding of the corner that China had been placed in, North Korea’s state media denounced China for crossing a ‘red line’ and for ‘dancing to the tune of the US’.

North Korea followed this up by scheduling missile and nuclear test at times chosen to most embarrass and create difficulties for China.

Thus, in May, a missile test was launched hours before president Xi was due to open China’s key 2017 international event, the ‘Belt and Road Forum’ in Beijing, convened to take forward proposals for improved overland and sea communication links across Asia to the West. Similarly, early September’s nuclear test was timed for the eve of the 2017 BRICS summit that was convening in Beijing.

There is no doubt that these tests were deliberately timed as a snub to China.

This is completely unreasonable behaviour by North Korea and makes its defence against the US harder.

Rather than berating China, Kim Jong-un should learn from how it handles its international relations, and listen rather more to its well-judged advice on how North Korea should conduct itself internationally.

However, in the final analysis, it is the US that holds the key to the situation on the Korean peninsula. The speeded up development of North Korea’s, still very primitive, nuclear arsenal and its missile tests are not the real threat to peace in the region. Rather its is the US’s evident capacity to inflict nuclear annihilation, and a White House that is making escalating threats to actually use it, that creates fear in every thinking person’s breast.

Overall, the US will probably not make such a reckless step, primarily because China and Russia stand behind North Korea – which together could inflict great damage on the US, even if the DPRK cannot – and Trump cannot be sure what they would do in response.

But that just means ongoing crisis and tension in the region. If the US really wanted peace and to persuade North Korea to mothball its nuclear programme it would not only have to eschew ‘regime change’, but offer clear security guarantees on the ground, including ending its provocative war games off its coasts.

The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War by Jude Woodward, Manchester University Press., 2017. Available to order in the UK and USA through bookshops and online

Is Trump losing South Korea?

A significant initial impact of the crisis that Trump has whipped up over North Korea was to push security issues up the agenda in South Korean politics, aiding the US in speeding up the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) and boosting the poll ratings of the more pro-US candidate in the Presidential elections due on 9 May. But Trump’s more recent statements about this key US Northeast Asian ally have been so casually insulting that they have led to an upsurge in anti-US sentiment as the elections draw closer.

An exclusive Oval Office interview with Reuters on Thursday 27^th April, was widely flagged under headlines referring to Trump’s portentous warnings that ‘There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea’.

What was less widely reported in the West – but hit the headlines in South Korea – was the fact that he went on to suggest that he may ‘terminate’ the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (known at KORUS), which he described as a ‘horrible deal’ and as ‘a Hillary Clinton disaster… that should’ve never been made’.

So far so not new; Trump has repeatedly put a question mark over all existing US trade deals, especially those with countries with which it runs a trade deficit. But when the interviewer asked when he would decide to renegotiate the agreement, he declared: ‘I am announcing it now’, threatening to unilaterally cancel it if the US could not get a ‘fair deal’. Announcing the renegotiation of a trade deal with a critical ally, and major trading partner, via an interview with Reuters may be par for the course for a US president that announces bombings on his personal twitter account; but this did not go down well in South Korea where the issues of the US military presence and its influence over South Korea’s security policy are already not universally popular to say the least.

But this was not the end of the blunders in Trump’s interview. He went on to say that he wanted South Korea to pay $1bn for the THAAD anti-missile system. This caused outrage, particularly as South Korea only agreed to host the system at all because of unrelenting US pressure, riding out both domestic opposition and strong objections from neighbouring China to meet this US demand; and that the agreement was explicitly on the basis that the South Koreans provided the locations, while the system itself remained both the property and the economic responsibility of the US.

Both the presidential front-runner, Moon Jae-in – who opposes THAAD – and the second place candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo – who supports it – responded angrily, renewing calls that the stationing of THAAD should be slowed until after the elections to allow the new government to reconsider the matter. This undoubtedly boosted the numbers already participating in major protests and sit-downs attempting to block the US convoys installing the THAAD system.

By Saturday 29^th April, Trump’s security advisor McMaster, was on the phone to the acting president of South Korea to reassure him that the US expected no payment for THAAD, and that Trump’s comments had been made in the ‘general context’ of expectations of ‘defence cost burden-sharing with allies’.

This Trump blunder however had already compounded the fury in South Korea at the insulting level of ignorance he had shown when, in a 12 April interview with the Wall Street Journal, he claimed that ‘Korea actually used to be a part of China’!

Nor had South Korea been consulted prior to Trump’s mid-April Twitter announcement that he was sending an ‘armada’ to the Korean peninsula. In the light of this blatant disrespect, not surprisingly the South Korean media were especially excoriating when it emerged that this alleged armada – the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group – was in fact heading for the Indian Ocean at the time.

The upshot is that while Trump has continued to apply stepped up pressure to China and sent envoys on a charm offensive to win Asian allies support for a tougher line on North Korea – senior White House officials visited Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines over the last few days – in reality it is key ally, South Korea, that this policy chiefly impacts upon and whose support is decisive. But the effect is that South Korea is becoming progressively more alienated from the US.

Both front-running presidential candidates in South Korea have strengthened their calls for the resumption of talks with, rather than threats against North Korea. A Moon presidency in particular spells a potential problem for Trump’s ‘get tough’ policy on the North. Not only is Moon committed to trying to restart the six-party talks, but he has promised a new version of the 1998-2008 ‘sunshine policy’ towards the DPRK that successfully bought stability on the peninsula in return for talks, international advocacy for the North, aid, trade and other openings.

Moon currently looks unbeatable given that the climb in the polls of the more pro-US Ahn stalled in the face of the erosion of popular support for Trump’s interventions.

Trump’s military threats are genuinely dangerous in the context of North Korea’s isolation and understandable paranoia, with an unintended conflict not impossible. But his bluster, bombast and incivility is not winning friends in South Korea and therefore are not bringing together a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Northeast Asia that includes the US ally most central to the issues.

China is the real target for Trump’s menaces on North Korea

Trump’s dramatic escalation of sabre-rattling over North Korea from mid-April was not triggered by any new provocative action by North Korea nor any notable advance in its nuclear or missile programme, although in the din of overwrought rhetoric emanating from Mar-a-lago it appeared that the US and North Korea's neighbours faced an imminent threat. But this crisis was conveniently timed to influence the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections due on 9^th May.

The sudden heightening of US rhetoric on North Korea, with unnerving suggestions that the US might imminently launch a pre-emptive strike, did not relate to any specific actions by the North. The DPRK had indeed run several missile tests on 6^th March, which led to protests, especially by Japan, but there were no threats of imminent action by the US. It was not until five weeks later, on 12^th April – shortly after Xi’s visit to the US – that the crisis was kicked off by Trump's boastful claim that he had despatched a US ‘armada’ to the peninsula. The following day the tensions escalated when a White House representative was quoted as saying the US was considering retaliatory action against the North, which was given additional weight when set against the dropping of the so-called 'Mother of all bombs' in Afghanistan on the same day. It is true that two days after this, on 16^th April, the North did make a further missile test – which ignominiously failed. But this was after the crisis had broken out and anyway showed the opposite to the White House contention that the North Korean programme was now dangerously advanced.

However, what this furore did create were great fears in the region that war might be on the horizon, pushing national security issues right up the agenda in South Korea. Until this crisis began to unfold, the clear front-runner in the presidential race, was Moon Jai-in, the left-leaning Democratic Party candidate. Moon was opposed to the US stationing of the THAAD missile defence system, and is strongly oriented to China and seen as more distant from the US.[i] The sudden increase in tension with the North allowed the US to insist upon the speeding up the deployment of THAAD, so that it will be sufficiently advanced by the elections that it is hard to roll it back. Moon himself also backed off from outright opposition to THAAD as the sabre-rattling and fears of war boosted the poll ratings of the more centrist and pro-American candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo, who is now running neck-and-neck with Moon. Both of these outcomes clearly suit the US.

Not only this crisis, but the whole ongoing crisis in relations with North Korea and the very existence of its nuclear weapons programme, are problems entirely of the US’s own making. For 67 years, since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the US has refused to enter into diplomatic relations with the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), while maintaining a continuous sanctions regime against it – the longest by any state against another. It has repeatedly sabotaged attempts by China and South Korea to facilitate international talks that could bring the North in from the cold and persuade it to close down its nuclear weapons programme in return for security guarantees, trade and normalisation of relations. Instead the US has demonised the North as an irrational rogue state, which it refuses to deal with, accompanied by frequent direct threats of military action.

This US inflexibility on the DPRK and its constant sabotage of talks for nearly 70 years have not been driven by the actions of Pyongyang, but by US concerns to maintain local support for it military presence in South Korea – which has never been universally popular – and latterly to provide an internationally acceptable cover for the extensive and growing US military deployments in North-east Asia. The original Cold War case for its huge presence in the region had ceased looking so reasonable after the fall of the USSR, especially with China increasingly on very good terms with its neighbours and beyond. Thus caricaturing North Korea as a dangerous, unpredictable, failed state, and exaggerating the threat from its still rather primitive nuclear arms programme have served to justify an on-going US presence in South Korea and Japan, the real target of which is to ensure ongoing US military dominance in the region, particularly in the context of the rise of China.

It is true that some of the actions of Kim Jong-un, who came to power in North Korea in 2011 following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, have indeed played into this US agenda, such as the provocative timing of missile launches, the use of belligerent and threatening language and overblown claims for its nuclear weapons capacity.

But this is a recent development. Although North Korea has always had a bad press in the West, in reality under its two previous leaders, Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, its actions could be well understood by anyone who bothered to give it sufficient attention to get beyond the media caricatures. But this requires understanding Korea’s unresolved post-1945 history.

In 1945, with Germany defeated in the west, the USSR joined the Allied effort against the Japanese. To the enthusiastic welcome of the local population, it subsequently swept through the Korean peninsula liberating it from Japanese colonial occupation. However the USSR halted its advance at the 38^th parallel, as it had previously agreed with the Allies, and allowed the US time to move its own army into the remainder of the country. This temporarily divided Korea between the areas under USSR and US administration, north and south of the 38^th parallel.

In the northern part of partitioned Korea the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) then led a thoroughgoing revolution to overturn the old elites. With backing from the USSR, first the lands of Japanese collaborators were seized, then of all large landlords; their lands were redistributed to the peasants. This was immensely popular and made Kim Il-sung, already well known for his role in the resistance to Japan, into a national hero. The land reform was followed by nationalisations, the introduction of extensive social, welfare and workers’ rights and, on the model of the USSR, the attempt to embark upon building ‘socialism in one country’.

In the South, by contrast, the US occupying force was forced to rely on the landlords and ruling elites – many of whom were hated collaborators with the Japanese – in order to prevent the widespread mobilisation of the southern population linking up with developments in the North and extending the revolution to the whole peninsula. Amid riots and rising popular opposition to the US occupation force, which was widely viewed as just another colonial army replacing the Japanese, the US staged rigged elections which installed pro-US strongman Syngman Rhee at the head of a de facto military government of the ‘Republic of Korea’ (ROK) in the South. The US then withdrew from Korea (as did the USSR), having ensured it had left a puppet government in the South that would resist the extension of the revolution in the North to the rest of the country.

The North’s 1950 attempt to overcome the division of the peninsula arose directly from these developments in the South. Repression of popular movements, failure to address the post-war devastation of the economy, and the continuing role of known collaborators in his government soon made Syngman Rhee even more unpopular in the South than he had been to start with. With Rhee’s regime looking extremely shaky Kim Il-sung, almost certainly with the backing of the USSR, invaded the South, meeting little resistance and much support from the local population. But as Rhee’s army disintegrated the US gained approval from the newly established UN for an intervention (the USSR was boycotting the Security Council at the time) and soon drove Kim’s army back. Only China’s intervention in support of the North prevented the ‘reunification’ of the peninsula by the US army. Instead the status quo ante was re-established when war ended in 1953, with a demilitarised border between pro-communist North and effectively US-occupied South along the 38^th parallel.

For the next three decades the DPRK openly nursed the aim of at some point driving into the South, to reunify the country and expel the US from the peninsula. But it never again had Soviet (or Chinese) backing for such an attempt, and at the same time the relationship of forces with the South progressively deteriorated. First, the US army established permanent bases in the ROK, backed by the US Navy Seventh Fleet. Second, the North progressively fell behind South Korea economically, as the South became the premier post-colonial economic success story.

However, the South’s economic success took time to appear, and initially it was not at all clear that it wasn’t the North that would be the economic success story. When Korea was partitioned, the North was home to most of Korea’s pre-war heavy industry and mineral resources, and had been spared the Japanese sabotage that had reduced 1948 production in the South to 20% of 1940 levels. Using centralised control and Soviet aid to get the economy going again, for the two decades after the war it grew somewhat faster than the South overall. From 1950-70 the DPRK’s economy grew from $7bn to $27bn, while with slightly more than double the population South Korea grew from $16bn to $63bn.[ii] GDP per head was roughly similar, but social provision and workers’ conditions in the North were generally much better.

However from the mid-1970s the DPRK’s growth slowed sharply, reflecting underlying problems in its ultra-centralised, self-enclosed economic model. This coincided with South Korea’s take-off, with its high investment and export led growth making it the quintessential Asian ‘tiger’. By 1990 the DPRK’s GDP was only $57bn compared to the ROK’s stunning $373bn.

Thus from the mid-1970s the North understood it was neither militarily nor economically in a position to lead a reunification of the peninsula and its attempts to recruit China or the Soviet Union to that cause also ended. But Kim Il-sung did not abandon the hope of turning this relationship of forces around again. However with few resources to achieve this, the DPRK began to sponsor sabotage aimed at undermining stability in the South. This DPRK ‘terrorism’ of the 1980s included hijackings of civilian aircraft, the attempted assassination of ROK president Chun Doo-hwan in 1983 and the downing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987. This strategy did not work, made relations with the South exceedingly tense and handed the US a perfect excuse for its continuing campaign of isolation.

Additionally, as the North fell behind economically, becoming more internationally isolated and with Soviet support declining as a result of its own 1980s reforms, an increasingly vulnerable DPRK decided to shore up its position by speeding up its nuclear programme through investing in uranium enrichment technologies.

After 1989-91 with the end of the Cold War and fall of the USSR, the US turned its attention to the surviving ‘communist’ countries, applying carrot and stick pressure to ‘aid’ their progress towards 'reform'. But North Korea was only offered the stick. The US stepped up the campaign against its nuclear programme, particularly through deeper sanctions, and jacked up the direct military threat to the North, increasing the US forces stationed in the South and holding more aggressively framed joint military exercises on land and sea.

The impact of this international pressure combined with the end of economic support from the USSR and a series of natural disasters resulted in a devastating economic crash in the DPRK. Annual GDP growth between 1990-97 averaged -4.6%, and GDP fell by more than half to $25bn leading to widespread famine.

The US believed that North Korea was on the point of collapse and only needed a final push. In June 1994, Clinton despatched former president Carter on a ‘private’ visit to the North to try to negotiate a face-saving climb down for the DPRK. However the agreement Carter negotiated with the aging Kim Il-sung, although perfectly reasonable, was not the complete capitulation that Clinton had been looking for; in return for the DPRK’s nuclear disarmament the US would lift some sanctions, help the North build light water reactors and supply it with domestic fuel oil. Clinton’s administration had little choice but to sign up to this ‘Agreed Framework’ in December of that year. But it was never implemented: Congress openly opposed it; and the Clinton administration did not take it seriously still believing the famine-struck state would collapse before the US had to implement it. The North however did suspend its nuclear weapons programme and sign up to the NPT.

The DPRK only returned to developing a nuclear weapons programme in 2003. This was provoked first by Bush’s post 9/11 State of the Union address, which labelled the DPRK part of an ‘axis of evil’ and a legitimate target of his war on terror; and secondly by the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom which overthrew Saddam Hussein in a display of military and technological might. The next targets of the US war machine appeared to be Iran and the DPRK.

Pyongyang withdrew from the NPT and relaunched its nuclear weapons programme. Which, of course, in turn became the basis on which the US launched a new round of threats against the DPRK and persuaded South Korea to agree to an expanded US presence on the peninsula.

However, while relations between the US and the North deteriorated, the end of the Cold War had had the opposite impact on South Korea itself, which, following the end of military rule in 1988, adopted a new spirit of engagement with the DPRK. This trend dominated the politics of South Korea’s first democratically elected governments from the elections in 1988 right through until 2008, during which period – despite the DPRK’s resumption of its nuclear programme in 2003 and first nuclear test in 2006 – relations on the peninsula remained calm and the US found little leverage to whip up an international campaign against the North. In 2003 South Korea and China worked together to launch the Six-Party talks, which forced the US to grudgingly come to a multilateral table with the DPRK.[iii]

This policy changed with the election of the right-wing Grand National Party’s presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak in 2008 on a pledge to take a hard line on the North against its nuclear programme and reprioritise relations with the US. The Six Party talks were de facto suspended. As relations deteriorated under Lee the North began to more seriously step up its nuclear arms programme with missile and nuclear tests in 2009 and 2013. Other signs of rising tension included the 2010 incident when the DPRK shelled a South Korean held island during US-South Korea naval exercises in disputed waters. Also in 2010 the South Korean ship Cheonan sank during exercises, allegedly due to a North Korean torpedo – a story that is strongly disputed.[iv]

Lee’s successor in 2012, Park Geun-hye, came from the same right wing political tradition and quickly pledged to pursue reunification of the peninsula on a ‘democratic’ i.e. capitalist, basis, but her actual course was more conciliatory than Lee as she particularly sought good relations with China, which demanded stability with the North. However, Park’s generally weak presidency achieved little; she took no substantive initiatives to alleviate international pressure on the North. The Six Party talks were flagged to restart in 2012 and in 2014 but did not actually happen.

Park’s election had also coincided with a change of leadership in the North. Since Kim Jong-un’s accession to the leadership of the DPRK above all its rhetoric, but also its tactics, have become less reasonable – although still far from providing justification for the US campaign of threats and intimidation.

Despite being highly dependent upon China economically – 76% of all North Korea’s trade is with China – which has also extended substantial direct aid and investment and has defended it internationally, Kim Jong-un has tested relations with his country’s only real international friend to breaking point. The arrest and execution of his uncle, Jang Song-thaek in 2013 may have been triggered by more personal power struggles, but Jang was also particularly well connected in Beijing. He was a key advocate of the line that the DPRK should prioritise economic development, using China’s support to pursue a Chinese style development model, while playing down its ambitions in missile and nuclear weapons technology. Instead a hardline political faction that is anti-reform, pro-nuclear and somewhat antagonistic to China seems to have taken control.

Many of the actions Kim Jong-un has pursued, particularly regarding nuclear and missile tests, have been directly in the face of counter-advice from China. Kim has clearly bargained on the fact that China has little choice but to defend North Korea, whatever his provocative actions, as it is only the DPRK that stands between China and the US bases in South Korea, which could be moved to the border of China if the DPRK fell.

Kim is also directly calling the US’s bluff – a particularly dangerous course when facing an unknown quantity like Donald Trump. Kim’s hubris could run into the braggadocio of Trump to unleash a disastrous confrontation. But outside that, Kim is reckoning that the risk of nuclear war with China is enough to mean that threats from the US will remain angry words rather than missile strikes. Moreover he understands that the US’s chief target is not really the DPRK but an excuse to accelerate its regional military build-up for which the real target is China. Some of China’s anger with North Korea is precisely that Kim’s tactics aid this US agenda against China.

Nonetheless, for the moment, however ill advised, Kim’s wager appears to be correct, particularly as it has emerged that the ‘armada’ that Trump claimed was on its way to Korea was in fact heading in the opposite direction to exercises in the Indian Ocean!

But what Kim’s brinkmanship has actually achieved is to aid the US in gaining the agreement of South Korea to speed up the stationing of the THAAD missile defence system. The Pentagon has been warning for nearly a decade that China’s land to sea missile systems are now sufficiently comprehensive that China is close to being capable of repelling a putative US invasion force. Although the US claims that the THAAD system is necessary to repel the threat from the North, it is widely acknowledged that it is in fact primarily aimed at restoring the US capacity to knock out China defences. Hence why China’s objections to the stationing of THAAD are so strong, and why it is particularly furious with North Korea for having de facto facilitated the US in winning agreement to this in South Korea.

The US’s key lever in seeing off opposition within South Korea to the US’s extensive military presence has always been to play up the alleged threat emanating from the DPRK. The old film is just being rerun by Trump, this time de facto aided by belligerent language from North Korea.

Despite Kim Jong-un’s confrontational tactics, the situation could still be settled if it was clear that the US was willing to offer a reasonable peace deal with security guarantees, underwritten by China and South Korea, in return for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons programme. This is exactly what North Korea agreed to in 1994 when former US president Carter negotiated precisely such a deal, and which foundered on US bad faith not the DPRK’s. As Carter himself has continued to argue, an agreement with North Korea to end its nuclear weapons programme ‘could be worked out… in half a day’, if the US was prepared to lift its state of siege on this small and relatively weak country.[v]

[i] Terminal High Altitude Area Defence

[ii] A. Maddison, The world economy: a millennial perspective, Vol. 2: Historical statistics, OECD, Paris, 2006. Figures expressed in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars.

[iii] The six parties are US, China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan and Russia

[iv] See Beal, T. 2014, Crisis in Korea: America, China and the risk of war, Pluto Press, London

[v] Beal, T. 2014, Crisis in Korea. p.71

The US, UNCLOS and the militarisation of the South China Sea

On 12 July, the Arbitration Court at The Hague handed down judgment on the case brought under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) by the Philippines against China. In a pre-arranged declaration, the Court ruled comprehensively against China’s claims in the South China Sea.

From the outset, China rejected the authority of the Court. When China signed up to UNCLOS in 1996, it also exercised its right under article 298 of the Convention to opt out of the arbitration process. China’s legal right to do this is unchallenged, meaning that at the very least, China is correct to say that the judgment is not binding. But there is also a strong case that the court went beyond its competence in de facto ruling on issues of disputed sovereignty.

As a result, the judgment will do nothing to resolve the disputes in the South China Sea. But that was never the intention. The real aim of going to the Arbitration Court was to internationalise the dispute, justifying the involvement of the U.S. and, in particular, providing a rationale for an exponential increase in the presence of the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea.

From around 2009, with the aftermath of the world financial crisis accelerating the rate at which China was catching up to the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, the U.S. administration took a decision to ‘pivot’ U.S. foreign policy to Asia, with the aim of ‘preserving U.S. primacy in the global system… in the face of rising Chinese power’.

In embarking on this, U.S. strategists urged: ‘Nothing would better promote the United States’ strategic future and grand strategy toward China than robust economic growth’. But this is not happening. While the U.S. has given a central role to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a proposed free trade agreement between the U.S. and some Pacific Rim countries that excludes China – the reality is that China’s economy is much more dynamic and more attractive than that of the U.S. A purely economic competition with China is one that the U.S. will lose.

Therefore, in its ‘grand strategy’ against China, the U.S. has been forced to rely more and more on the military front, where it still has a huge strategic advantage over China and will have for decades to come.

The two key arenas for increased U.S. military pressure on China are the South China Sea and northeast Asia. A few days before The Hague ruling, South Korea agreed to the installation of the U.S. THAAD missile defence system, allegedly to counter North Korea, but with a range of 2000 km, it is clearly aimed at China.

In 2010, the U.S. declared that the South China Sea was within its sphere of  ‘national interest’ as a prelude to stepping up its military presence. U.S. navy surveillance intensified; U.S. air sorties for close reconnaissance increased from about 260 in 2009 to over 1,200 in 2014; more than 100 U.S. planes have been stopping over each month at Clark, the former U.S. airbase in the Philippines.

In 2003 there were six visits by U.S. warships to Malaysian ports; in 2012 there were over 50. More recently, U.S. navy ships have sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinese installations. U.S. warships and planes have also made frequent so-called ‘innocent passage’ transits through China’s territorial waters and airspace. Japan has threatened it will also send warships to ‘defend freedom of navigation’ in the Sea.

In 2012, Manila agreed the U.S. could return to its old Subic Bay naval base from which it had been kicked out in 1992. Australia agreed to a new U.S. Marine base in Darwin, within striking distance of the South China Sea.

Taking the issue of China’s claims to the Arbitration Court was a further step in militarising the disputes in the South China Sea. China described it as ‘a political provocation under the cloak of law’, inspired by the U.S. with the Philippines a willing puppet.

It blew up the bilateral and ASEAN-led negotiating regime that had ensured stability in the Sea for the previous 20 years which allowed a ‘golden era’ in China-ASEAN relations‘from 1991 to the end of 2010, during which bilateral cooperation flourished and trade ballooned nearly 37 times, from no more than $8bn to $300bn’. China’s GDP rose rapidly and most Southeast Asian economies expanded more than five-fold.

China’s approach to the disputes in the South China Sea was set out by Deng Xiaoping. When China eventually signed a peace treaty with Japan in 1978, Deng had said the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands could be left for the ‘wisdom of future generations’ to find solutions which they could not. He took the same approach to the South China Sea, saying to president Aquino of the Philippines in 1988: ‘We can set aside this issue for the time being and take the approach of pursuing joint development’ and not let ‘this issue stand in the way of China’s friendship with the Philippines and with other countries’.

Led by China, this approach was largely followed by the other main parties – the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam. On this basis in 2002, China and ASEAN agreed to a Code of Conduct for Parties in the South China Sea, which shelved the question of sovereignty and set in place non-binding protocols for joint seabed exploration and other activities in contested areas. This had meant the disputes over islands and reefs were in the background but ‘without spinning out of control’.

This framework of bilateral agreements and ASEAN-led protocols did not altogether prevent issues arising. There were numerous breaches of the ASEAN Code of Conduct – mainly not by China – but these were kept within bounds.

But once the U.S. entered the fray arguing this historic dispute could no longer be left to those directly involved and insisting on the involvement of the big international guns – not just the U.S. itself but Japan and Europe ­– this framework began to crumble. Particularly when anyone that stood up to China’s claims was backed up by with a visible show of U.S. naval power.

The use of UNCLOS to try to delegitimise China’s claims in the South China Sea is ironic, as the main role of the 1982 Convention had been to allow the atrophied old colonial empires to use their island remnants to define vast tracts of the world’s oceans as their ‘exclusive economic zones’. The 1982 Convention had introduced a ‘revolutionary change in the law of the sea’ by adding to the previously defined 12 nautical miles (22 kilometres) of territorial waters, a new designation of much more extensive ‘exclusive economic zones’ (EEZ) giving rights to explore and exploit waters and seabed 200 nautical miles out from anything defined as ‘land’.

It was this new designation of EEZs that added urgency and fervour to the clash between the UK and Argentina over the Falklands/Malvinas in 1982. The combined EEZ of the Falklands, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands delivers the UK rights over two million square kilometers of the South Atlantic, almost three times the EEZ of the UK itself (774,000 km2). In the Pacific, excluding the U.S. west coast, Alaska and the Aleutian Island chain, the U.S. EEZ around its other island territories amounts to 5.8m km2. Compared to these, China’s claim in the South China Sea is tiny, moreover it is not a far-flung outpost of former empire, but its own backyard.[1]

What is even more ironic is that while the U.S. has happily used the UNCLOS definitions to claim exclusive rights over vast areas of the Pacific Ocean and now demands China abides by the outcome in The Hague, the U.S. itself is one of a tiny handful of countries that has never ratified UNCLOS, unlike China.

However, while the ruling may have gone against China, in some respects the response has simply underlined the continuing relative weakening of the U.S. position in the region. The international enthusiasm for The Hague ruling has been muted to say the least. ASEAN failed even to agree that the ruling ‘could be useful’ and decided not to say anything; Singapore simply ‘noted’ it, as did South Korea; Vietnam did not mention the ruling but called for acceptance of international law. The EU could only agree to note that the ruling had gone against China, while the statement from the July Asia-Europe summit in Mongolia didn’t mention it at all. Taiwan rejected it in terms as strong as Mainland China.

So the ruling may have been a blow against the perceived status of China’s claims in the Sea, it is by no means left isolated.

So what will happen next? The U.S. and the Philippines will brand China an international outlaw; the U.S. will continue to ratchet up its military presence while blaming China for the militarisation of the South China Sea; and as long as China grows at 6.5 per cent annually, just by existing it will continue to undermine the U.S.’s attempts to assert its ‘leadership’ in Asia-Pacific.

Notes:
[1] Peter Nolan, Imperial Archipelagos, New Left Review, No 80, March-April 2013.

 

This article was written for The New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond, and the original publication can be found at https://newcoldwar.org/u-s-unclos-militarisation-south-china-sea/