Print

Obama’s Infamous Pivot to Asia: Countdown to War in the South China Sea?
By Joachim Hagopian
Global Research, July 30, 2016

Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/countdown-to-war-in-the-south-china-sea/5537755

On July 12th, 2016 the UN arbitration decision against China’s claim of territorial islands based on “historical rights” ruled in favor of the Philippines, serving as the latest international war machine’s ratcheting up imminent all-out war. The United Nations as a globalist extension of American Empire’s dominance over the rest of the world is just another engineered US machination designed to instigate further conflict and tension as the latest face of Obama’s announced 2011 Asian pivot, pushing, prodding and provoking a high risk military showdown against re-designated cold war enemy China being potentially pinned in on all sides by US attempted aggression.

A recent example is Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s April trip to secure a military alliance with India, exploiting the strained Beijing-New Delhi relations over their mutual border dispute. Moreover, a visit last month to Washington by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi cemented the US-Indian military alliance in preparation for war against China. But with both the Asian pivot and the TPP stalling during this election year, a number of Asian countries are moving towards increased neutrality rather than buckling under to US Empire’s mounting pressures to align with the United States against China.

Over this weekend the ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met at a conference in the Laos capital to decide how to respond to The Hague slamming China over the South China Sea dispute and, with nearly half the ASEAN members also contesting islands with China, aside from the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam, the meeting ended up deadlocked. It’s being reported that Laos and Cambodia are unwilling to take a stand against China having been given recent Chinese aid and loans. And similar to Carter’s April India visit, John Kerry is opportunistically flying into Vientiane on Monday morning to apply his undue superpower persuasion pressing ASEAN to also formally back the UN’s decision against China.

With the Western elitist influenced UN proclamation rendering illegal China’s reformation claims in the South China Sea, the tribunal’s stiff ruling is being heralded as a much needed victory for the globalists and US Empire. The relentless assault on China in recent years simultaneously combined with the same propaganda war tactics and militarized threat being used against China’s prime allied partner Russia is producing an outcome that recklessly endangers every human life on our planet. The US-NATO-UN’s divisive agenda is a driving force racing us towards World War III against the two Eastern nuclear powers.

After ruling last year that it held jurisdiction despite China’s objections, the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration earlier this month ruled that China does not possess any legitimate claim over dozens of contested islands in the South China Sea and that specifically the islands in the Scarborough Shoal located 140 miles (225km) from the Philippine coastline do not belong to China due to its deemed violation of UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS). UNCLOS stipulates a 22km (near 14 miles) maritime boundary and legal access to economic resource development within 370km (230 miles). The Hague tribunal flatly rejected China’s “nine dash line” map that carves up the vast bulk of the disputed sea waters claimed as China’s historical precedent. The panel’s decision is non-binding and in fact illegal since arbitration requires both conflicting parties to voluntarily seek resolution. China never chose to participate. Thus in response to the ruling, the Chinese ministry claims, “The award is null and void and has no binding force.”

The Hague ruling charges China’s reclamation efforts as “causing severe harm to the coral reef environment,” violating the UN Convention. Funny how the UN never criticizes the US for wreaking total environmental havoc and destruction in the Pacific islands still under colonial rule in Okinawa Japan or the Marianas or Guam where the native populations and ecological habitats are being poisoned and wantonly degraded by Empire’s total disregard for local life and health carrying out its massive military operations. Again, US and UN exceptionalism and double standard hypocrisy rule supreme every time. And true to hypocritical form, while the US is busily admonishing China for its unwillingness to follow the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s finding, the US itself refuses to ratify the Law of the Seas Convention.

Though the legal challenge contesting China’s regional island claims were initiated in 2013 by the Philippines, actually it was the United States throwing its full weight around the globe despite its ocean’s width away. Not one Filipino attorney was a member of the legal team that filed the lawsuit to the arbitrator – all American lawyers from a high rolling Boston legal firm other than a small British contingent. Long before this month’s decision, China asserted that it would not comply with the UN ruling due to never recognizing the UN’s jurisdiction over sovereign maritime matters. China has consistently called for bilateral negotiations between China and Philippines as the only viable sovereign resolution to the territorial dispute. Even the recently elected Philippine presidentconcurred that a bilaterally reached agreement is the most judicious option available to resolving the controversy. Under the previous Aquino administration in 2012, Philippine’s former US naval base at Subic Bay was reoffered the US Empire after the Philippine Senate in 1992 had ordered it off limits to US military due to repeated rape and murder cases of underage Filipina girls.

One of the elitist Boston attorneys handling the recent victorious case against China on behalf of the US, I mean the Philippines, in aWall Street Journal article earlier this year answered the question “what if China simply ignores a judgment that goes against it?” The attorney smugly stated that 95% of the time a losing nation complies with international maritime decisions, citing not wanting to jeopardize its world reputation and influence as factors leading to court ruled submission.

Given that the Hague tribunal is already rigged, over-stacked with representatives from imperialistic Western nations, and the fact that the UN has long played a prejudicial, criminal role actively or passively enabling the US-NATO aggressor to defiantly break every international law invading, occupying and otherwise warring against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria and Yemen just to name its half dozen short list, destroying nation after nation in its wake by willfully turning each into a failed state as the West slaughters four million Muslims.

Meanwhile, the sheer hypocrisy of US Empire’s exceptionalismpermits it to bully and pressure other countries into rigid compliance with international rules and UN mandates that apply to every nation on earth except the US. If America can thumb its nose at international law with complete impunity, in a lesser vein, China is simply exercising its inherent right as a regional power inasmuch as asserting a buffered self-defense against Empire’s continued long arm of targeted aggression directed against Beijing.

The US and its Pacific naval fleet have opportunistically placed itself as the “might makes right” enforcer for all the smaller Asian nations like the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan that also are staking claims to islands that China views as its own territorial possessions in the South and East China Seas. But astute writer-analyst Tony Cartalucci points out the deceptive cover the US is hiding behind:

Part of America’s agenda in the South China Sea is to provoke and then portray tensions in the region as being solely between China and its neighbors, with the United States feigning the role as peacekeeper – thus justifying its continued military, political, and economic “primacy” over Asia.

Just as Putin and Russia have been the brunt of a 24/7 propaganda campaign to demonize as the enemy, so too has China. A recent Council on Foreign Relations white paper titled “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China” further delineates Empire’s arrogant sense of entitlement in the form of its “primacy” and control over the Pacific:

Because the American effort to ‘integrate’ China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to US primacy in Asia – and could result in a consequential challenge to American power globally – Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.

In January another hawkish DC think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) pounded the war drums, strongly recommending the US Empire deploy extra nuclear attack submarines and begin installing advanced long range missiles in the Asian Pacific in order to effectively combat China’s advancing military prowess as a direct hegemonic threat.

The bottom line is the imperialistic, unipolar powered US Empire will not allow China to assert itself even regionally. And because what CFR and its fellow warmongering think tank policymakers want, CFR et al always historically gets from its White House puppets. Beginning last October Obama began sending US Navy destroyers – cruisers three times now – to aggressively patrol and trespass within the 12 nautical mile limit of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea as provocative acts of war directly defying China’s territorial claims. A number of highly visible joint naval exercises between the integrated US 7th and 3rd Fleets and Pacific allies Japan, Australia, Philippines and Vietnam have increasingly challenged China’s military posturing in the tension-filled region. The latest was last month’s with the US, India and Japan. The merging of the two US naval fleets comprise two thirds of all US combat vessels and is yet one more sign that the US Empire is once again heading the world to global war.

As if that’s not enough of an indicator that the world will soon be engulfed in military mayhem, at an annual conference last month held in Singapore labeled the Shangri-La Dialogue, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter threatened China “could end up erecting a Great Wall of self-isolation” should it proceed with its plans claiming the disputed islands.

To further attempt to intimidate China, Carter boasted that it would “take decades for anyone to build the kind of military capability the United States possesses.” Carter then named all the US allies in the Pacific it has in its pocket ready to go to war against China, starting with Japan and Australia, followed by Philippines, India, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Laos. Next the general who is Japan’s defense minister accused China of challenging the US imperialistic “ruled-based global order.” Vietnam’s deputy defense minister sitting right next to the Chinese admiral in attendance bluntly warned China that if it refuses to comply with the UN ruling, it “would lead to military conflict.” The Chinese admiral’s response to the entire group’s overt threats was that his nation has no intention to retreat nor back down, having “no fear of trouble.” This foreboding lead-up to this month’s anti-China decision casts US Empire and its puppet allies inevitably on a perilous military collision course with China.

China’s “self-isolation” that warmongering neocon Carter promised, refers to the US plan to use its full spectrum dominance on the high seas by controlling the crucial narrow maritime passageway linking the Indian Ocean where Middle Eastern oil and near half of the world’s total cargo, two thirds of all natural gas shipments, a third of all oil and 10% of commercial fish catch, worth a total of $5.3 trillion annually flow through the South China Sea into the Asian Pacific. By interdicting and cutting off China’s supplied shipments of vital oil and critical raw materials, thus choking China’s lifeblood to either sustain itself much less win a global war, the US Empire foolishly believes it can deliver its checkmated blow to China. To further compound this increasingly dangerous, deteriorating situation, back in November 2013 in response to encroaching US, Japanese and South Korean warships, spy planes and fighter jets invading what China believes is its legitimate sea and airspace,

China launched an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) policy requiring non-Chinese aircraft intending to fly over the South China Sea to first request entrance into China’s designated airspace. US planes often defy China’s ADIZ. In recent months as tensions in the South China Sea have escalated, a growing number of too close for comfort encounters have ensued. US Empire’s imperialistic provocations are forcing China as the burgeoning regional, if not world power, to react to America’s unilaterally imposed game of chicken now being perilously played at humanity’s expense.

Obama’s infamous Asian pivot has everything to do with maintaining unipolar US global hegemony, going out of its way (across the earth’s biggest ocean) to flex its muscle in order to challenge, thwart and minimize China’s surging regional power at all cost. Washington’s primary agenda in Asia is to militarize, manipulate and coerce Japan along with every other Pacific nation into becoming China’s enemies, risking to war against both China and Russia with potentially disastrous consequences. Western propaganda portrays China as the regional bully, unwilling to submit to international law, while Empire has enjoyed its unchallenged role as the global bully for numerous decades.

An identical pattern has already taken place against Russia as US Empire actively recruited and transformed every former Soviet bloc nation in Eastern Europe into a hostile, anti-Russian Western bloc of NATO puppet allies. War criminal Bush one betrayed Gorbachev in 1991, reneging on his promise not to move NATO “one inch eastward” towards Russia.

This unabated global chessboard cheating to put the big squeeze to isolate and weaken Russia, China and Iran with hostile neighbors at their every doorstep has created an out of control arms race that has the planet dangerously teetering on the edge of worldwide war and total self-annihilation.Just as US foreign policy has ravaged the Middle East with nonstop oil wars for decades and engaged in divide and conquer balkanization of Arab nations designed to keep them weak and fighting amongst themselves per the Greater Israel Project, so too is this same ruthlessly self-serving, Great Game being played out currently in Pacific Asia for its vast, untapped underwater gas and oil reserves buried beneath the coveted South China Sea.

Empire’s naked neocolonial aggression involves exploiting unlimited energy resources anywhere in the world while neutralizing key enemies as America’s predatory, vested self-interest (or more accurately the parasitic ruling elite’s self-interest only, clearly neither America’s nor Americans’ nor any Asian countries’). Because the world’s only superpower has gotten away with raping and pillaging the planet at will for decades, Empire is banking on its retaining its global unipolar dominance for years to come by more of the same tactics.

But Washington’s megalomaniacal neocons’ rush to provoke confrontation and war with the Eastern powers totally fed up with Empire’s lies and insatiable one-sided lust for continued absolute world dominance, control and utter global destruction, carry grave risk of dooming humanity and all life on earth.

Clearly over the last several years the Western ruling elite’s agenda has ultimately been bent on triggering unthinkable levels of violence and earthly destruction between the forces of the West and East fought in every corner of the globe. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Empire a quarter century ago that left the US Empire the last superpower still standing, put simply, sharing global power in a bipolar world with Eastern nations runs counter to New World Order’s one world government tyranny.

Be it the US military, NATO or ISIS, all are simply malevolent tools misused by evil-minded globalists to promote planetary destabilization and destruction in order to usher in their New World Order. Their Great Game must be stopped. before it’s too late.

We citizens of the world must finally rise up and begin holding accountable the controlling psychopaths who’ve hijacked for far too long both humanity and our only planet we call home.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/

 

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article.