AN IMPORTANT ARTICLE ABOUT FUTURE US-CHINA RIVALRY

Some two hundred + years ago the biggest economies in the world were China and India. That was before the discovery of coal, and mechanized weapons and navies gave the US and the UK and some other European nations the power to colonize or otherwise dominate the Asian giants of the time, as well as the reclusive Japan.

Japan was given the choice of 'trade' or war by the US (in short, let us into your markets and resources, or we will kill you..).

And the UK terrorized a China bleeding from internal chaos, famine and rebellions into consuming opium it produced in India. When the Chinese threw a shipment of British opium into the sea, 'Great Britain' extorted massive 'reparations' including territories such as Hong Kong...and turned millions of Chinese citizens into opium addicts while fattening British coffers.

Most people are now aware that economic power is returning to Asia, with China expected to equal the US in GNP by 2050 (Wall Street estimates) and India sometime thereafter.

This article propounds that China will also flex military muscle in the Pacific and areas of the world where the US is less present. The so-called 'unipolar' world after the collapse of the Soviet Union will remain so only for a short time......and America's current 'hyper-power' status will soon be challenged. If the US attacks Iran, its inevitable decline will accelerate.

China Rising
Kevin Libin, National Post
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

China Daily, Reuters
The Teatro Speakers Series is a modern-day salon: an informal gathering where Calgary business leaders and scholars gather to discuss the pressing issues of our time with renowned thinkers. The 2007-08 Teatro Speakers Series, for which the National Post acts as official media sponsor, focuses on the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its implications for both the U.S. presidential race and the future of the Middle East. Last week author Robert D. Kaplan spoke on shifting world power in the wake of the Iraq invasion and sat down for an interview with National Post writer Kevin Libin.

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CALGARY -It goes without saying that 2001 signalled a dramatic realignment in the global military landscape, but perhaps not entirely for reasons that come naturally to mind. Events in autumn of that year -- the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, then the first of this century's Arab wars -- made a convincing case that the future of combat would be on the sands of the Middle East. And yet, what happened in April that year may have been just as, maybe more, portentous. That was when Chinese jet fighters intercepted, collided with and forced the landing on Hainan Island of a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane. For 11 days, the Beijing government held the 24 American crew-members as virtual captives. Chinese intelligence officers inspected the plane rivet by rivet, then cut it into pieces before it was sent back to the U.S., two months later.

The incident was an embarrassing one for the normally unflappable U.S. military --almost surely the effect the Chinese had planned, suggests Robert D. Kaplan, who was in Calgary last week for the National Post-sponsored Teatro Speakers Series. Mr. Kaplan is a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly magazine and an author of several books on the military and geopolitics, including his latest two: Imperial Grunts and Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts (his 1993 Balkan Ghosts heavily influenced the Clinton administration's policies in Bosnia). But such a description falls miles short of explaining what Mr. Kaplan is, and does, which is traveling the world, from the Horn of Africa to El Salvador to the Arctic, to live amongst American troops for months at a time, in their barracks, their Blackhawks, their Humvees, their destroyers and their submarines. That, and his immersion in military history -- he easily drops references to Thucydides and Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in our conversation -- has given Mr. Kaplan such instinctive understanding of the way militaries think and work that he would surely be as comfortable working at the Pentagon as he is at a monthly mainstream magazine (as a matter of fact, he has been made National Security Chair of the U.S. Naval Academy's political science department). And what top militaries around the world are thinking most deeply about right now, he says, is not Afghanistan or Iraq. Not even Iran. But the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and what he predicts will be a new Cold War between Beijing and Washington, part of the imminent and vast reorganization of world power.

"While we're all focused on the Middle East, in a dirty counter-insurgency war, the world is changing," Mr. Kaplan says. "Military power as well as economic power is moving from Europe to Asia. You're seeing the Indian navy go from the fifth-to third-largest navy in the world. You're seeing an expansion in Russia's Far Eastern fleet. You're seeing the Japanese navy that is soon going to be four times as large as the British Royal Navy."

All of it preparation for the transformation of the post-Soviet unipolar world to a multipolarity, dominated by a remarkably muscular China, one that will increasingly demand more control over the ocean routes of cargo ships and oil tankers to secure supply for the appetites of its burgeoning middle class. It's happened before:

"When did the United States become a great world power?" Mr. Kaplan asks. It was between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War that "the U.S. economy was growing at about 10% a year for several decades straight ... And as we grew economically in a very dynamic way, we developed interests around the world that we never had before, because we were trading in those areas." Washington began adventures to secure influence and real estate in South America, Alaska, Hawaii and a network of Pacific Islands -- Guam, the Marianas, the colonized Philippines -- which opportunely, more than a century later, will count as the U.S. Pacific Command's most strategic lines.

"For half a century after the Second World War, the U.S. owned the Pacific Ocean," Mr. Kaplan says. "It was our own private lake. The U.S. Navy could go anywhere it wanted, anytime it wanted." That is about to change. Spending by some estimates 4.5% of its GDP on defence (Washington spends 3.9%, though America's GDP is six times larger than the People's Republic of China's) "the Chinese will field more warships around the world than the U.S. in a few years," he says. China covets, and will likely eventually attain, either direct or indirect control of areas outside the U.S. sphere of influence, places like Pyonyang, Moscow and Tehran. Wherever America's influence is weak or absent, Beijing will seek to assert its own. And in some areas where Washington's hand is now strong, the long-term may favour the Middle Kingdom:Mr. Kaplan fully expects the PRC to eventually absorb Taiwan -- which the politburo desires less for ethnic affinities than as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier," key to projecting power into the Pacific -- despite America's determination to prevent exactly that.

Beijing may not truly challenge the overwhelming power and strength of America's total military force anytime soon. But it doesn't have to. The Communist government will focus on three key strategic strengths, Mr. Kaplan predicts: submarine power, to secure coastal shelves and infest blue waters, ballistic missiles and weapons in space. When China surprised the world last year, shooting down one of its own satellites, it "ended the debate about the militarization of space," Mr. Kaplan says. "Of course space is going to be militarized -- just like the oceans were militarized by the Portuguese in the 16th century. It's a new sphere of human activity, so it's going to be militarized."

That shot-down satellite -- a first for any country -- was yet another move to humble Washington, and the sort of stunt we can anticipate plenty more of, he expects. Unable to compete with the U.S. across the board, the PRC is "looking for a very subtle asymmetrical capability, not to beat us in battle, but to embarrass us in incidents in confrontations," he says. "The Chinese are going to show Americans the high-tech, subtle end of asymmetry the same way that insurgents in Iraq have shown the Americans the low-tech, brutal end of asymmetry." Think: mischievous demonstrations of cyberattacks, or the sudden surfacing of a Chinese submarine adjacent a U.S. Navy destroyer, merely to show it can be done.

Of course, changes in where we fight will necessarily change how we fight. "While we're all focused on land wars ... the future may be a lot more friendly to air forces and navies, so we don't get bogged down as much," Mr. Kaplan says. And a rearrangement of alliances will naturally follow. NATO, as borne out in the alliance's unevenness in Afghanistan, is effectively "obsolete," Mr. Kaplan argues, and the U.S. is now "looking beyond NATO" to more effective alliances, with willing partners -- certain to include the British, the Australians, the Dutch and potentially Canada, if its recently renewed military vigour in Afghanistan proves sustainable. After its unpleasant experience with fair-weather allies unwilling to bear risk in Afghanistan-- such as Germany and Italy -- Washington, however, is bound to utilize a basic calculus to determine its partnerships, Mr. Kaplan believes: "The more you deploy, the more influence you have." And as navies and marine forces again become the spear-tip of the world's dominant militaries, Ottawa's ability and its willingness, in the years and decades to come, to add strength to the Western side of this growing pan-Pacific rivalry, will ultimately determine Canada's place in the new global arrangement.

klibin@nationalpost.com

Bush Jr. on steroids - the new threat from McCain

One shameful, despicable war-criminal responsible for some three-quarters of a million civilian deaths in Iraq - George Bush Jr., current occupant of the White House - could be replaced with a bigger, badder, more dangerous version - John McCain.

It is shocking that the vast majority of American voters are somnolescent and oblivious to this danger. That leading Republican figures like California governor Schwarzenegger and former NYC mayor Giuliani have thrown their weight behind this unabashed war-mongerer, who openly declares that he will stay the course in Iraq, keep American troops there for a "hundred years", and attack Iran....

This man has no shame either for the massive American crimes against Vietnam (some 3 million casualties), openly declaring during a recent debate that it was the American people that prevented victory....apparently he does not believe that it is civilians who are the ultimate boss...will such an odious figure become the next American president?
Under Bush the US has openly practised torture......under McCain, a torture victim, may we expect torture to become official policy?

As Kubrick put it in Full Metal Jacket, 'we live in a world of shit'....