Don't Be Surprised If
There's A War Between Japan And China In The Next Year
Chinese planes flew near Japanese airspace Monday to assert its
claims to Japan's Senkaku islands (China calls them the Diaoyu
islands).
The move came just as Japan announced its new prime minister.
Hugh White, a professor at Australian National University and a
former Australian defense official, believes this is the latest
sign the two countries are heading to war.
And the U.S. will be dragged in.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, White says we are now
witnessing the types of conditions that have historically led to
war — despite conflict being in no one's interest.
THIS is how wars usually start: with a steadily escalating
stand-off over something intrinsically worthless. So don't be too
surprised if the US and Japan go to war with China next year over
the uninhabited rocks that Japan calls the Senkakus and China
calls the Diaoyu islands. And don't assume the war would be
contained and short.
...
It seems almost laughably unthinkable that the world's three
richest countries - two of them nuclear-armed - would go to war
over something so trivial. But that is to confuse what starts a
war with what causes it.
The conflict is really about China challenging the U.S. in the
Pacific, White says. President Obama has vowed a Pentagon "pivot
to Asia," itself a response to China's growing strength.
Claiming the Senkaku islands, a series of small outcroppings in
the East China Sea, is China's way of testing America's new
posture, White says.
And it's this kind of tit-for-tat that inevitably causes someone
to open fire.
The risk is that, without a clear circuit-breaker, the escalation
will continue until at some point shots are exchanged, and a
spiral to war begins that no one can stop. Neither side could win
such a war, and it would be devastating not just for them but for
the rest of us.
No one wants this, but the crisis will not stop by itself.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.