The China Syndrome

Interestingly, the US is now beefing up its military presence in the northwest Pacific as part of a broader strategy to increase American capability and flexibility in the Asia Pacific. Upgrading of the Andersen Air Force Base and naval facilities in Guam suggests a busy future for the island as a vital strategic hub. Combined with a string of smaller bases, supply depots and “lily pads” - from Korea and Japan to Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and Singapore - the United States will be able to project smaller and nimbler forces more rapidly to counter terrorism and deal with regional crises. There can no doubt that this is also a soft containment strategy aimed at China.

The relative importance of the southwest Pacific should not be exaggerated, but nor should it be dismissed out of hand - particularly since the Australian Government now insists the region is its special “patch”. Given the possibility that internal weakness and tension could encourage and facilitate external intervention and manipulation, it seems prudent rather than paranoid to relate short-term issues and developments to underlying long-term trends and to make a comprehensive strategic assessment in regional terms.

The expansion of Chinese influence reflects more than a benign attempt to gain access to the region’s abundant minerals, timber and fisheries. Strategic issues often have economic faces. Rising Chinese activity in the region has a broader twofold purpose: to sideline Taiwan and to undermine ties between Pacific island nations and regional powers such as the United States, Australia and Japan. It should be seen as part of a longer-term political and strategic investment aimed at challenging the leadership of the US in the greater Asia Pacific region.

What this underscores is that the strategic significance of a region depends ultimately on the extent to which it gets caught up in the interactions of great powers. This explains why the southwest Pacific was catapulted from geopolitical obscurity in the 1930s into the strategic limelight between 1941 and 1945 - and why it lapsed back into relative obscurity afterwards. While the region may seem unimportant now, we cannot be sure it will always remain so.