All right.
Ciao.
Welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And next up is John Pfeffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
That's fpif.org.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you doing?
Pretty good.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, you're welcome.
Thank you for joining us.
Appreciate it.
Um, listen, so, uh, there are some kind of hubbub going on, uh, fighting over resources under the sea or something like that, uh, border dispute in the ocean between the Philippines government and the Chinese one, and somehow I think the Democrats have made this my business or something.
What's happening?
Well, this is a long standing dispute actually, uh, between a number of governments, uh, over the resources in the South China Sea, South China Sea, as you can guess, is a body of water South of China, but it borders on nine other countries, there been disputes over fishing, uh, because there's lots of good fishing in the area.
But more recently there has been the prospect of considerable oil and natural gas underneath the wave.
And, um, China has basically claimed almost all of this area, almost all of South China Sea and its claims have overlapped with the claims of the other countries, uh, and this has come to a head with the Philippines most recently because the Philippines seized a couple of Chinese fishermen that, Hey, you guys are in our exclusive economic zone and you've kind of taken away some endangered species, uh, you've been fishing here and in retaliation, China said, Hey, you know, uh, that's unacceptable.
Um, we're going to, you know, basically hold on to some bananas that, you know, you guys have been selling to us and the Philippines sells an enormous amount of bananas to China.
Um, and it escalated from there.
Right now, things are a little calmer, um, China and the Philippines are talking with one another, but, uh, but there's still going to be considerable disagreement, particularly around, uh, claims, uh, to oil and natural gas, but that's where we are right now between the two countries.
I understand that.
Um, well, you know, the world is not, you know, made in rectangles and everything.
It's all very, uh, uh, misshapen, especially place like the Philippines.
Right.
And, and all the islands of, uh, you know, uh, Indonesia and everywhere near there, um, Southeast Asia and that part of the Pacific ocean, um, whatever border there is, uh, has to be settled somehow by political agreement.
Nothing is obvious, I guess, is what I'm trying to get at here.
Um, it's not like just central Africa where we're dealing with Belgian drawn borders from 150 years ago or something like that.
This is just naturally an absolute mess.
But so I guess what happened though, is the Americans, uh, Obama and Hillary, and I guess Leon Panetta too, they look at this like, uh, Condoleezza Rice or Rahm Emanuel, and they say a crisis, an opportunity there's some of the Chinese word is the same thing or whatever.
Right.
And so here's their chance to intervene.
Well, before we get to, uh, to, to the Democrats, Democrats and what they've done, um, uh, I just want to pursue your, your point, which is an important one about historical claims because, uh, China rolls out maps and it says, look, you know, we've controlled this area for hundreds of years and they can show it on the map.
Uh, but the key issue here is that China actually signed the UN, um, law of the seas and the law of the seas, uh, trumped historical claims.
If you sign the law of the seas, the United States hasn't done so, but China has done so.
Uh, it basically says that you agree to cede, uh, all historical claims according to a new benchmark.
And that benchmark are these exclusive economic zones, which are measured from your coastline or in some cases from your continental shelf.
And that's the, the sticking point here in South China because, uh, China has advanced claims and the Philippines have, uh, Japan has a number of countries in the region have advanced claims based on continental shelf and they measure it from, in some cases, islands that are uninhabited or islands that practically don't exist as islands, uh, islands.
And in one case, in the Japanese case, an island that they've actually built up from the sea in order to advance certain claims, uh, under the law of the seas.
This is the problem, um, in terms of identifying historical claims, um, in terms of the Democrats, well, basically the United States didn't do anything about this issue other than saying, you know, uh, there should be freedom of navigation in South China Sea.
And, and US is interested in this, not so much because of, uh, the fish or because of the potential oil and natural gas that's there, but rather because of the amount of oil and natural gas or oil in this case, actually, that travels through the South China Sea, uh, and is, you know, very important for the economies of Japan and South Korea.
So that's where the United States previously had, had kind of entered into the fray in 2010 Hillary Clinton at the ASEAN regional forum had said, look, you know, the United States, uh, actually considers this a very important national, uh, priority.
So this was a shift in us thinking on the issue.
And it did.
So basically at the request of Vietnam and the Philippines, because, uh, China has historically said, we want to deal with this issue on a bilateral basis.
We don't want to deal with it multilaterally and China's big country, Vietnam, Philippines, not very big countries.
They felt that they were completely kind of, uh, had their arms twisted by a larger neighbor and they sought help from the United States.
Clinton comes in, makes this statement, essentially, again, on behalf of the Philippines and Vietnam, other small parties to the conflict and China to a certain extent backed off, or at least took the kind of claims of Vietnam and Philippines a little bit more seriously.
Um, so it's, there are additional twists here.
Of course, the United States has military, uh, alliances with the Philippines, a very important one, visiting forces agreement, uh, conducts military exercises with the Philippine and China occasionally views those as, um, uh, problematic, especially one that happened recently, uh, took place immediately after the Philippines seized the Chinese fishermen.
So, uh, the United States is implicated in the region more than just making statements at ASEAN regional forum.
All right now.
Yeah.
I want to talk more about the alliance with the Philippines, uh, on the other side of the break there.
But so I guess what I'm wondering is how dark is the line that Hillary drew in the sand here about this, you know, strategic sea lane and nevermind, I guess the irony that here we're defending the interests of Vietnam from China and any kind of, you know, history that, uh, makes might make one want to look a little cross-eyed at all that.
But, uh, well, I don't think anybody expects that there'll be a military confrontation in South China Sea.
Um, and, uh, China, you know, has much more powerful military than any other country, other countries, but, uh, the potential of the United States stepping in definitely makes it difficult for China to, to advance its claims in a military fashion.
All right.
Well, we'll have to leave it there for a minute.
It's Jon Pfeffer from foreign policy and focus the Institute for policy studies.
And, uh, we'll be back with more about the Pacific pivot after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm on the line with Jon Pfeffer from foreign policy in focus.
And we're talking about, uh, the empire in the seas over there.
And, you know, I'm sorry.
I probably am coming off sounding all alarmist and things like this and that.
And, uh, I realized that, well, I'm not trying to make it sound like, oh, we're out on the brink of war and the, and the seas off the coast of China or anything like that, but it does bring to me, uh, to mind the, uh, the importance of the danger of this entire theory of collective security, that if we just make enough promises to everybody all the time, then no one will even ever try to start anything when really history shows that what's much more likely is somebody is going to start something and then we're going to find ourselves involved in it.
So you could have, I don't know, who knows what somebody does something stupid and China and the Philippines start shooting at each other for a few days.
And now all of a sudden it's the business of all of us who live between Canada and Mexico and our cities are subject to hydrogen bombs.
If our government, you know, escalates and lives up to all their promises to defend everybody else's interest in the world.
Well, you make a strong point.
Um, we definitely have treaty obligations, uh, with the Philippines.
Uh, we have treaty obligations with Japan and South Korea, uh, with Australia.
Um, and as you mentioned before the break, uh, the Obama administration has executed a Pacific pivot, which has meant to a certain extent, greater focus on Asia Pacific, uh, from a security and from an economic point of view.
Um, if you add all of that up, especially with China, you know, spending a lot of money each year, upgrading and modernizing its military, you could see those lines intersecting a very dangerous way in the future.
Um, there's probably somebody in China who thinks like, uh, Madeline Albright thought, you know, kind of back when in the Clinton years, Albright was famous for saying, Hey, we have all of these, these weapons.
Uh, why aren't we using, you know, there's no point having them unless we use them.
Now that's a pretty dangerous sentiment.
And unfortunately the, uh, Clinton administration supply side economics.
If you think about it.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And so it's likely that there's someone in China who has that same perspective and they, they, they're building tremendous amount of weapons each year.
Uh, and then they'd probably figure why aren't we using it?
And if you look at some of the websites around this issue of the China, Philippines conflict, you see a tremendous amount of nationalism and of welling up, uh, people saying, Hey, this is our territory.
We're not going to let the Philippines push us around.
They're just a little small country.
We are China.
We're a great power.
We have to assert our rights.
Um, so all of that is true.
However, uh, we also have to see that so far China actually hasn't done very much.
Um, it has pushed a little bit on, you know, oil rigs, setting up oil rigs in the region.
Um, it has pushed a little bit in terms of advancing its claims.
Um, but it really hasn't done anything from a military point of view that would challenge any of the countries in the region, even though China could easily dispatch them very quickly, much more powerful than any of the countries in the region.
So at the moment, at least I'm not too concerned.
Uh, nevertheless, it can serve as a justification for the United States to invest a great deal more in its military presence in the region.
We're seeing a lot more Marines go to Australia, for instance.
Uh, we're seeing a big kind of expansion of our facility in Guam.
Uh, and part of that is, is kind of re, um, positioning Marines that are currently in Okinawa.
We will see a small shrinking of the footprint there, but still, uh, especially if, if, uh, a candidate wins in October, in, uh, November who says, you know, we have to expand military spending.
We have to expand our presence overseas.
This Pacific pivot could just be the beginning of, of a much bigger kind of, uh, U S military footprint in the Pacific.
And so I wonder how you would rank the interests involved in pushing this policy in terms of like, well, you know, the admirals like metals and higher ranks for themselves and Lockheed and other companies like building Navy ships for them and selling them to the government.
Right.
And then, uh, I don't know, oil interests right in the, uh, trying to suck oil out of the ground from underneath the ocean over there.
Well, there's, I would put economic interest pretty high up, uh, on the scale.
Um, and I do so because, you know, uh, the Pacific region is, you know, rapidly expanding economically.
The United States has tried to kind of hook its wagon on the, uh, East Asian, uh, engine.
Uh, it began to do so in during the Clinton administration with the creation of AIPAC, uh, the Asia Pacific economic community.
Um, it's trying to kind of double down on that with a version of NAFTA for the Pacific called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
All of this is an attempt basically to kind of, uh, revive, uh, US economic participation in, uh, the Pacific on the backs of economic growth in China, uh, in South Korea and so forth.
Um, so I put that kind of way up on the list.
Now, as part of that, of course, is oil, natural gas exploration.
Um, you know, we, uh, we are concerned about where our sources of, of oil and natural gas are going to come from.
Uh, and they're pretty volatile parts of the world, Africa, Middle East, and so forth.
So, you know, if we can get a more stable source of energy, that's what we're going to, going to push for.
So energy interest, definitely up there.
Pentagon?
Well, I mean, we definitely have the Marines, uh, and the Air Force and the Navy digging in their heels at the prospect of cuts in military spending over the next decade.
We're going to see not enormous cuts, uh, Obama administration, somewhere between 500 and $600 billion across 10 years.
Uh, by the end of 10 years, we'll see that translates into only an 8% reduction in Pentagon, uh, spending.
So it's not really a lot of money, but the contractors are worried and they're worried if sequestration goes through, and that's another 500 billion on top of that.
And that, and then we're starting to talk real money in terms of Pentagon cut.
So anything that, uh, that could, you know, forestall, uh, retrenchment on the part of the services, uh, especially the Navy, looking at the Pacific, they're saying, Hey, this is a growth opportunity.
We're going to need ships for all this territory.
Marines are saying, Hey, some new bases.
Uh, the Air Force is saying, Hey, uh, they need this kind of expeditionary force capability, be able to strike a terrorist anywhere in the region.
So all of the services are stepping up to the, to the plate and saying, Hey, we got what it takes, what it takes.
And this Pacific pivot works for us as well.
Right.
Because, you know, for all the expansion of AFRICOM, that's still not really war against any state there.
It's all partnering up with states there to fight against their local people who dare resist their pretended authority.
Right.
So that's the job of special forces types and whatever, but you can't sell that many boats with a policy like that.
You got to have something else going on.
That's right.
I mean, AFRICOM, we're talking, uh, you know, it's, uh, there are expenses associated with it, no question about it.
But if we're talking big ticket items, if we're talking destroyers, aircraft carriers, uh, you know, uh, joint strike fighter, I mean, that's, that's, you know, that requires a significant opponent.
You're not going to use those forces against, you know, some ragtag, uh, militia, for instance, in Central Africa, not going to use that against pirates off the coast of Somalia.
You're going to use that against a significant adversary.
Where is that significant adversary today?
Uh, well, kind of hard to find them, you know, China is basically the only power on the horizon that can challenge the United States at a military level.
And the same way that the Soviet union did before.
Um, so the Pacific is where it's at in terms of finding a significant enough threat to justify really big ticket item for the Pentagon.
Well, yeah.
And again, uh, they got hydrogen bombs just enough really to, you know, hopefully deter us, but also enough to destroy a couple of dozen of our cities if they need to.
They do.
I mean, China's nuclear program pretty small in comparison to certainly what we have with the Soviet staff.
If we're talking, uh, you know, significant reductions in nuclear arsenals, which is not something that's envisioned right now under the new START treaty, but, uh, that the Obama administration has done some exploratory looks into what it might be like, for instance, to reduce, uh, nuclear arsenals, uh, to 30%, for instance, of what, what they are right now.
Uh, China doesn't start to kind of, uh, be part of that discussion, uh, until much, much lower levels of nuclear weapons.
Um, we're going to have to cut a lot before we get down to where China starts to participate in the discussion.
Um, nevertheless, they do have a certain deterrent capability, which they're worried about losing.
If missile defense goes through in the region, that's definitely, uh, that's a major concern for China.
And, you know, it has been a concern for Russia as well.
All right.
We got to leave it there.
Thanks very much for your time, everybody.
That's Jon Pfeffer from foreign policy and focus, fbif.org.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for having me on the show.
