From: sanjeev nayyar
CHELLANEY: China's game of chicken 8/12/13
Beijing's creeping aggression signals a challenge to U.S. presence in the Asian Pacific
China's recent declaration of an air-defense identification zone extending to territories it does not control is just the latest example of its jurisdictional creep that reflects a larger strategy to supplant the United States as the pre-eminent power in Asia. Yet President Obama's administration has responded to China's aggression with words of cautious criticism, but no castigatory step, not even delaying Vice President Joe Biden's Beijing visit. China gave no ground to Mr. Biden during his Dec. 4-5 trip.
Worse still, with its advisory to U.S. airlines to respect China's new air-defense identification zone, Washington has opened a rift with ally Japan at a time when the imperative is for presenting a united front against an escalatory act that even Mr. Biden admits is "a unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea," causing "significant apprehension in the region."
Japan has asked its carriers to ignore China's demand for advance notification of flights even if they are merely transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese airspace. Washington is signaling that if Beijing backed away from this unusual demand, it may be willing to live with the Chinese air-defense identification zone.
Let's be clear: At stake in the East China Sea are not just some flyspeck islands, but regional power balance, a rules-based order, freedom of navigation of the skies and seas, and access to maritime resources, including seabed minerals. If China gets its way, the path to a Sino-centric Asia would open.
As China accumulates economic and military power, it has increasingly taken to flexing its muscles, ratcheting up territorial disputes with multiple neighbors and seeking to alter the status quo in Asia through surprise actions.
Irredentist China's incremental encroachments into neighbors' borderlands can be described as a "salami-slice" strategy — or what Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong of China's People's Liberation Army last May called a "cabbage" strategy. This involves asserting a claim, launching furtive incursions into the coveted territory, and erecting — one at a time — cabbage-style multiple layers of security around a contested area so as deny access to an opponent.
The air-defense identification zone establishment — China's latest cabbage-style security-layer move — was cleverly timed to coincide with the unveiling of the interim Iran nuclear deal in Geneva so as to take advantage of the U.S. and international distraction. Shrewdly timing an action and achieving a major tactical surprise against an adversary are key elements in Beijing's strategic doctrine.
China's action is a reminder that Mr. Obama must turn his attention from the preoccupations of the Middle East to the potentially combustible situation in East Asia. To make the promise of his Asian "pivot" real, he must be willing to assert U.S. leadership in order to help tame China's belligerence and reassure allies.
Sending two unarmed B-52 bombers on "routine" runs through the Chinese air-defense identification zone was tokenism that cannot obscure the need for crafting a credible response. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems more interested in balancing America's relationships in Asia than in checkmating an aggressive China.
The president's Asia policy seeks to reap the benefits of building closer engagement with Asian states — including China, now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests — while charting a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes. This delicate balancing act, however, implies strategic and moral equivalence, even though the coercion and aggression is largely by China against states that are America's allies or strategic partners.
For example, in the current geopolitical crisis, Washington is urging restraint also on Japan's part, lest any escalation force the United States to take sides, undermining its policy to manage China's rise without trying to contain it. Washington is seeking to manage Sino-Japanese tensions, too, by urging both sides to reduce the risk of escalation or miscalculation through crisis-management and confidence-building measures. This is the message Mr. Biden took to Tokyo and Beijing.
Yet the focus on the dual management of China's rise and Sino-Japanese tensions obfuscates the broader test of power in the Asian Pacific that Chinese actions represent. It also obscures the warning from then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January 2011 that China's long-term goal is to push the United States and its military assets farther out in the Pacific.
In this light, the Obama administration's stance not to challenge China directly only aids its creeping aggression in Asia.
China is nibbling at territories held by several neighbors, as highlighted by growing People's Liberation Army incursions across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India, its success in outwitting the Philippines to gain effective control of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal, and its aggressive moves against Vietnam over their unsettled maritime boundary. Its self-declared zone in the East China Sea even covers the sky over the South Korean-held Leodo Isle, which Beijing calls the Suyan Rock.
As part of its step-by-step strategy, Beijing has no intention of enforcing its air-defense identification zone immediately. Efforts at enforcement will come later when circumstances are more favorable. Right now, the priority of China's leaders is to prevail in the game of chicken that they have started.
If China is able to ride out international criticism while holding its ground, it will be emboldened to set up a similarly expansive air-defense zone in the South China Sea, more than 80 percent of which it now formally claims.
That is why it is important for the United States to draw the line now over China's territorial creep. Otherwise, China will continue to subvert the status quo in the East and South China Seas, along its border with India, and even on the cross-border flows of Asia's major rivers, which originate in the Chinese-annexed Tibetan plateau.
Without a concerted U.S.-led effort to push back against China's aggression in the East China Sea, it won't be long before another Chinese encroachment occurs.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/8/chellaney-chinas-game-of-chicken/?page=2#ixzz2mxaOBws6
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1 comment:
Bottom line - there are no White People's lands at risk here. If China's aggressive expansionism was directly threatening Australia, then perhaps the USA might do something. But if they're only bothering fellow Asiatics, then it's nothing the US would concern itself about.
I'm wondering why Japanese strategic thinkers never saw that reality looming on the horizon? I guess the country seems to suffer from myopia and complacency on geo-strategic matters.
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