07/31/14 – Conn Hallinan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
Next up is Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy in Focus.
The Institute for Policy Studies there.
Foreignpolicyinfocusfpif.org.
And boy, it sure seems from this article, like while everybody's distracted with the major crises going on in the country formerly known as Iraq, in Gaza, in Eastern Ukraine, there is a major crisis or perhaps a giant pile of crises arranging themselves to explode in East Asia.
Parsing the East Asian powdered keg is Con's latest article here at Foreign Policy in Focus.
How much worse can it get, Con?
Welcome back to the show.
Tom Lehrer had that old line that you begin to feel like a Christian scientist with an appendicitis.
It's sort of the way we're feeling right now.
I mean, I think you ran through it.
It was the Middle East, the Ukraine, East Asia, this stuff going on in Latin America.
Well, I think that's the most frustrating about it to me is it doesn't have to be this way at all.
Almost all of this stuff is the American empire's fault, poking around in hornet's nests where it doesn't belong, etc.
It's not just we live in a dangerous world and isn't that frustrating.
It's a bunch of no-goodniks making it this way for stupid reasons.
I agree.
I agree.
And, you know, take a look at the Middle East.
There's a really interesting book I think that people should take the time to pick up and read.
And it's Scott Anderson's new book called Lawrence in Arabia.
And basically what it's about, it's less of a biography of T.E. Lawrence than it is a discussion of how the outcome of the First World War and basically the imperial agreements between the British and the French and then the Balfour Declaration basically set what the Middle East is today.
And that if you look at the current upheaval, it's certainly the United States played a major role in this.
But it goes back basically to the imperial division, what they called the Great Loot of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of colonies and spheres of influence by the British, the French, and the Americans.
And, you know, that's what's playing out at this point.
Ukraine, you know, what's playing out is the residue of the Cold War and the march of NATO to the East.
And that's also true in East Asia, which I think most people are sort of unaware of.
I mean, they see this tension between Japan and China and they say, well, it certainly has something to do with World War II because both sides are sort of talking about World War II.
The Chinese are very upset that the Japanese are not very apologetic for what they did in World War II.
And the Japanese claim that the Chinese have become more aggressive.
Again, I think what most people don't realize is that a lot of that tension was built in very deliberately by the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, which essentially ended or resolved the situation in Asia and dismantled the Japanese Empire.
And what happened during those treaty discussions was that the United States very deliberately built in sort of two things it calls a strategic ambiguity and manageable instability.
And what they did was they deliberately didn't resolve certain questions so that there would be this constant state of tension.
And that would allow the United States to keep its military forces there and to inject itself in between these areas of tension.
Now, wait a minute.
Let me interrupt just to ask you to reemphasize that a little bit because you didn't say it in a way where it sounds as huge as it really is.
What you just said that they're not over there making sure to guarantee stability.
This is what prevents conflict.
They're making sure that there's instability in order that they may have an excuse to be there.
Right.
This is a very interesting study by a researcher, Kimi Hara, who's the director of East Asian Studies at Renison University College, which is part of the University of Waterloo near Toronto.
And what she found was that the areas of tension, like for instance, in who owns these islands, the Diaoyu or the Senkaku Islands in the East China Seas or the Doko or the Takashima Islands off of Korea, and a lot of various disputes in the South China Sea.
And what she found was that she found a lot of communications and part of the negotiations where the United States very deliberately built these kind of strategic ambiguity and so that there was no decisions made and the tensions would increase.
And more than that, that the United States actively sabotaged efforts to create a peaceful circumstances.
For instance, in 1954, Japan and the Soviet Union restored diplomatic relations and they were sort of on the verge of cutting a deal over the Curleys, what the Japanese called the Curley Islands, the two islands north of Hokkaido and what the Russians called the Northern Territories.
So there are four major islands involved, and not a lot of little islands, but there are four major islands involved in this chain.
So the Russians and the Soviets and the Japanese were on the verge of cutting a deal and they were going to basically split the difference.
The Soviets said, okay, you take the two southern islands, we'll keep the two northern islands.
The U.S. stepped into that and torpedoed those negotiations and they did so by telling the Japanese that if they cut a deal with the Soviets to split the difference on the islands, that the United States would make certain that it would not return Okinawa to Japan.
Okinawa is an extremely important island for Japan.
And the Americans made quite clear that if you cut this deal with the Soviets, we're not going to return Okinawa to you.
And further, they knew that if the Japanese demanded all four islands back, that that would torpedo the negotiations, and it successfully did so.
So in 1971, the U.S. returned Okinawa to the Japanese.
Now, as a result, there's still not a peace treaty between – well, of course, the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, but there's not a peace treaty between Russia and Japan.
It's an unresolved situation.
And it was deliberately over this effort by the United States to prevent a peaceful resolution of this dispute.
And the same goes for these islands that the Chinese and the Japanese are fighting about.
Originally, what happened is that in 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, the Allies said that they were going to not only dismantle the Japanese Empire, but they were going to return – they were going to remove from Japan everything that it had gained as a result of imperial adventure, which would have included the 1898 Sino-Chinese War in which the Japanese seized these islands, even though the Chinese always claimed that they were theirs, and they have a much better case than the Japanese for.
The United States deliberately did not settle that question in 1951, even though that was clearly part of the Japanese Empire.
They deliberately didn't settle it.
They left the sovereignty unsettled, so that it would be the source of tension eventually.
Would you say the same about just reunification on the Korean Peninsula, too?
Sure, absolutely.
And reunification on the Korean Peninsula, and for that matter, Vietnam as well.
You had a situation where division is what they wanted, and as long as there was division, then there was a place for the United States to meet its own strategic interests.
Now, this is something, of course, that we didn't invent.
I mean, when you think about it, you take a look at what the British and the French did in the Middle East, I mean, they did the same kind of thing.
Yeah, but now we're talking about it's been a generation since the end of the Cold War, and we don't have that excuse anymore.
There's no excuse at all.
Hold it right there.
I'm sorry we've got to take this break, but when we get back, we'll talk more with Con Hallinan about the East Asian Powder Keg, the incredible system of alliances and threats and disputes that threatens to blow up at any moment here.fpif.org for Con Hallinan.
We'll be right back in just a sec.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest, at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Coming up, Marcy Wheeler on NSA stuff and CIA stuff and stuff.
Jason Ditz on Germany's proposal for peace in Ukraine in just a little while.
Bill Clinton now.
There's audio of Bill Clinton from September 10, 2001 talking about woulda, coulda, shoulda got Bin Laden.
Yeah, you think so?
What?
That's coming up in the next segment, but right now we're talking with Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy in Focus, America's East Asia Policy, and all the different disputes.
Whenever you hear islands, think minerals and natural gas and things like this, under the sea, of course, and all these ancient disputes, Con's been describing America's policy of keeping all these disputes going so that, you know, remember why they need us and all that kind of stuff.
But now, when I said Korea, you said Vietnam, which I think maybe people might dismiss because, hey, that was back in the 60s and 70s, but I was thinking more recently when Bush and you can tell I don't know that much about the Korean issue, I gotta go back this far, I'm sure there are better examples, Con, but I remember Bush giving a joint press conference with President Roh of South Korea and he said, well, first we gotta resolve the nuclear issue and then we can resolve, you know, a permanent peace between North and South Korea and President Roh heard him wrong through the translator and said, wow, did you just say that we could work on reunification and peace?
At the same time as we're working on the nuclear issue, Mr. Bush, that's great.
And Bush said, no, I did not say that, what I said was we'll never work on peace and reunification and right now we're using the nuclear issue that, of course, Bush himself created the crisis and forced North Korea out of the treaty and all that anyway, but anyway, we're using this as the excuse to make sure that, no, you can never reunify, he said.
And the danger here is, you know, one thing to formally build in this ambiguity, strategic ambiguity, although really my favorite term is manageable instability, which is an oxymoron if I've ever heard of it, but it is also associated with something which most Americans are completely unaware of because it's never been part of any policy debate and that is that we have a military posture in Asia which is called air-sea battle, ASB.
And it's been the official policy of US military doctrine in Asia since 2010.
And I think most Americans would be quite surprised because it calls for a military, calls for a war with China in the advent of any kind of tension that explodes.
Not just simply war, it calls for military defeat and the term actually used in the document is World War II variety, you know, which is like...
Unconditional surrender.
Unconditional surrender.
Yeah.
And it calls for deep strikes into China aimed at command and control and satellite things and all that kind of thing.
And remember now, China's a nuclear power and it doesn't have a large number of nuclear weapons.
It's not clear how many.
Some people say a little over 100.
Some people say as many as 200, probably on the higher figure.
But it's not a large number of nuclear weapons.
And there's a kind of an old rule in nuclear warfare which is that if you have nukes and you don't use them, you lose them.
That one of the first things an attack is going to do is to strike at your nuclear weapons to behead them and then make it a conventional war.
And of course, the United States is a lot more powerful militarily.
The fact that they're even contemplating defeating China in a war which would actually include a land invasion is completely nuts.
A land invasion of China.
China.
A land invasion of China.
I mean, it is...
It's absolute madness.
What it is in reference to is that in the 1990s the Chinese decided that their traditional way of thinking about the military which is large land armies and large numbers of tanks and artillery and all this kind of stuff was really being...was rapidly being outdated.
And instead, what they wanted to do was they wanted to ensure the fact that the United States or any other group of people allies, etc.could not invade China.
And so they started this policy which is called access denial.
And what it is is it's a mix of ballistic missiles, stealth submarines, surveillance, radar, satellite stuff, etc.that would prevent any potential antagonist from essentially controlling the waters that surround China.
And since 80% of China's energy supplies moves through the South China Sea and the East China Sea, this is kind of a life and death issue for them.
And then in 1996 there was a growing tension between mainland China and Taiwan.
And the Clinton administration put two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait which, by the way, is disputed land.
Okay, that's another area of tension that was not resolved.
There are little islands, there are Kimoy and Matsu, or those Chinese or those Taiwanese and, you know, they're closer to China and whatever.
The Chinese couldn't do anything about it.
So these two big American battle groups showed up and the Chinese were humiliated.
They couldn't do anything about it.
They decided at that point that's not going to happen again.
And they really put the pedal to the metal to develop this area access denial strategy.
The air-sea battle is aimed at decapitating that access denial.
And the thing that's important here is that access denial doesn't call for an aggressive attack at Japan or the Philippines or any other U.S. allies in the region.
What it's saying is that the Chinese intend to control their home waters.
And this is this formal military posture now There's tension growing which just creates the possibility of a military clash.
And the thing that's so crazy about it is there's never been any discussion.
You know, Carl von Clausewitz the great theoretician of modern war said that war is politics by other means.
The problem with air-sea battle is there's no politics involved in it at all.
It's just a military posture.
I mean, it sounds like this is the Schieffen plan or some kind of thing where Plan A is not if it ever really comes to blows with China here's how to try to resolve it as peacefully and as quickly as possible as Plan A.
It's full-scale, full-spectrum dominance hydrogen bomb exchange warfare as Plan A is what you're telling me.
Yeah, I mean the U.S.
Because of course the U.S. cannot destroy all their H-bombs on a first strike.
They can't.
Right, and the idea that a nuclear country that is facing the possibility of military defeat particularly China, you know, because they're a little sensitive about what's happened over the past 150 years that is that is insane.
I mean, there's a level when I was reading this air-sea battle, I just said what are these people smoking?
You know, what are you talking about?
It's completely crazy.
So you couple this quote, managed instability with air-sea battle and, you know, right now as bad as the situation is in Ukraine and how terrible the situation is in the Middle East the thing that keeps me up at night is the East China Sea and I think what it's done is it's also stimulated I would have to say the kind of wrong instincts on the part of the Chinese military because one of the things the Chinese have done now is push into the South China Sea and made a series of very unreasonable demands for control of the Paracels which they have a dispute with Vietnam over disputes with the Philippines over the control of reefs and shoals that the 1968 Law of the Sea really would give to the Philippines and would give to the Vietnamese but the Chinese are using an old imperial map well, you can't use imperial maps, you know, under that circumstance is the British still own India, right?
It's America that's created the atmosphere here Absolutely, there's no question and it's not only creating the atmosphere, it's deliberately encouraging the atmosphere and it's worked because the tension, for instance, between Vietnam and China over the Paracels has reached a point where there are a number of Vietnamese that are talking about bringing the Americans in to military alliance with the Americans because of the tensions between China and the Philippines over the shoals and reefs in the South China Sea, the Philippines has reopened a major military port and series of airfields for the United States It has allowed the United States as part of the Asia pivot by the Obama administration in which eventually 60% of America's military forces will be located in Asia.
There are Marines in Australia, there haven't been Marines in Australia since World War II.
In other words, you're saying there's 20 tripwires for war all over the place, entangling alliances in knots over there And you also have a very aggressive, very right-wing, very conservative government in Japan the Abe government who really kind of thinks that World War II wasn't something they should feel bad about.
In fact, they gave a recent statement about an awful lot like the Greater Co-East Asia Prosperity Sphere that the Japanese pushed forward before World War II and so you put all these things together and I guess powder keg is anything downplaying it.
We're not talking about gunpowder here.
We're talking about nuclear weapons and I think it also creates the tensions that eventually Japan would decide that it's going to build nuclear weapons on its own.
And there are Americans who are pushing the Japanese in that direction.
So the stakes here in Asia are enormous.
It's extremely dangerous and we're talking about it at a time when the United States is economically still on the ropes from the 2007-2008 meltdown.
We're talking about a significant increase in military expenditures in Asia all of which will move that hair trigger a lot closer to someone pulling it.
It's a really dangerous situation.
As I say, it's got me up at night.
My eyeballs glued to foreign policy and focus, that's for sure.
Thanks very much for your time, Con.
I sure appreciate it.
Anytime, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's Con Hallinan at scotthorton.org.
The article is, again, parsing the East Asian powder keg and parse it.
He does very well for you there at fpif.org.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
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