Source: Asia Times.
This new Asian security regime is due to be celebrated as the successful implementation of the “pivot to Asia” during President Barack Obama’s visit to the region. (Obama leaves the US on Tuesday for a week-long tour, taking in Malaysia the Philippines, Japan and South Korea.)
The question that should be asked is whether the PRC leadership has looked at events in Asia and developments worldwide and decided to do something other than fight on the West’s preferred ground of “soft power”.
It should be pointed out that whenever the PRC wants to get serious about its Japan-related gripes, it does not engage in what I would characterize as Senkaku kabuki, the ritualized display of sovereignty-asserting chicken-of-the-sea encounters between PRC and Japanese maritime patrol vessels and aircraft.
Instead, it kicks off hostilities on its home ground, where the PRC holds the legal and diplomatic advantage and can draw on the assiduously cultivated anti-Japan hostility of a significant swath of its citizenry.
Therefore, the fact that the PRC has chosen to flex its anti-Japanese muscles in Qingdao and Shanghai, pivot be damned, should be a matter of interest to the US and the Asian democracies.
Categories: Americas