People's Democracy

Andrew Murray

ANCIENT Chinese maps invariably placed the celestial kingdom at the centre of the known world. Viewed from Beijing today, the horizons of maps are studded with Stars and Stripes, fluttering over newly acquired US military bases. Every twist in the war on terrorism seems to leave a new Pentagon outpost in the Asia-Pacific region, from the former USSR to the Philippines. One of the lasting consequences of the war could be what amounts to a military encirclement of China.

First there are the new bases being set up in haste by the US military in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzystan and elsewhere in once-Soviet central Asia. It is curious that, while the Bush administration has repeatedly made it clear that it has little interest in establishing an enduring presence in Afghanistan, and derides any notion of investment in nation-building there, it is at the same time talking of these new bases in the central Asian "stans" as being semi-permanent.

The US interest in the oil and gas reserves of that part of the world has been well-canvassed, and let no one for a second accuse this Enron administration in Washington of neglecting the interests of Big Oil. But the significance of the new US presence goes well beyond even the signal importance of Exxon Mobil’s share price.

Who, for example, would have anticipated that the second military front in the war would be opened in the jungles of the Philippines, to which 600 US troops - with promised British support to come - were dispatched recently? The Abu Sayyaf Muslim guerrilla movement there numbers only about 500 fighters. It has no prospect of overthrowing the government of the Philippines, a former US colony, which, since the second world war, has twice required Washington’s arms to defeat radical domestic insurgencies. Nor is there any suggestion that it has the capacity to organise terrorist attacks on the US mainland (or, indeed, the slightest intention of even trying).

What is certain, however, is that the eviction of the US military from the Philippines after the end of the cold war still rankles. A diplomat was quoted in Washington as observing, "the Americans have been desperate to get back into the Philippines since their armed forces were kicked out of the Clark and Subic Bay bases in 1992".

Why, one might ask? It is not as if the Pacific lacks a powerful Pentagon presence. The US already maintains just short of 40,000 troops in South Korea, a similar number in Japan and additional forces in the US’s western outpost in Hawaii - not to mention formidable military guarantees, backed with hardware, for Taiwan, which is regarded by China as a rebel province.

But long before September 11, Asia was already seen as the centre of post-cold-war competition - and China as the main potential rival for commercial and strategic influence over the continent and its emerging markets. Not for nothing has Fortune magazine for the first time published a ranking of China’s 100 biggest corporations - nor presumably that the Pentagon has itself recently highlighted the risks and rewards of Asia as requiring a bigger US military presence.

The Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review attracted little attention when it was published shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Centre. However, this official policy document, the first such of the second Bush presidency, identified north-east Asia, and the East Asian littoral as "critical areas" for US interests which must not be allowed to fall under "hostile domination".

The review characterised Asia as "emerging as a region susceptible to large-scale military competition", with a "volatile mix of rising and declining regional powers". China is clearly one of the former. Coyly avoiding naming the obvious challenger, the Pentagon warned of the possibility that "a military competitor with a formidable resource base will emerge in the region", adding that the lower "density of US basing" in this "critical region … places a premium on securing additional access and infrastructure agreements."

There is a growing vacuum for the US to fill - the Russians have just agreed to vacate their naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. More importantly, there is a real clash of interests developing. Most of the biggest Chinese companies on the Fortune list are in the same energy and petrochemical sectors that appear to drive the Bush administration’s international agenda, from Kyoto to Kazakhstan. Money and power are at stake.

It would be absurd to suggest that the main purpose of the rolling, open-ended Bush-Blair "war on terrorism" is to box in China, the one country in the world with the most demonstrable capacity to act independently of the US. But there is little doubt that the fog of war is being used as cover to give the balance of power in Asia a hefty shove towards Washington - and little doubt either that in our new world order, each conflict simply prepares the ground for the next.

Andrew Murray is author of Flashpoint: World War III (Pluto), a study of post-cold war international conflict.

Courtesy, The Guardian, Wednesday January 30, 2002)