Editor’s note: This commentary is by Michael J. Badamo, of Montpelier, who was editor and publisher of The Watchman. He has been in and out of Vermont politics since 1976; in 2002 ran for governor as a Progressive.
[W]e should be getting used to the idea that the United States is no longer the global big dog with his paws planted on the four corners of the earth, powerful jaws ready to snap just about anywhere. Unfortunately the “make America great again” crew seems to want to make the naturally evolving decline of empire much more painful than necessary.
Perhaps the most immediate political-economic-military theater where Trump will come to grief is in the South China Sea. Without going into great detail, Trump has annoyed the Chinese to the point of saber rattling due to Trump’s provocative saber rattling on financial issues, Taiwan, and, at the saber’s tip, the South China Sea. His prospective secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, most recently CEO of Exxon, added fuel with incendiary threats of military force at his confirmation hearing.
Good luck with that. China is big dog in that neighborhood not us.
It doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, moral or immoral. The international poker game is only about who has the cards. China has the cards, we don’t. They have claimed nearly all of the South China Sea as their own exclusive territorial zone, a claim disputed by several adjoining nations and ruled unjustified by an international tribunal. So the Chinese are overreaching but the United States really has no more standing in this dispute than any other nation with no territorial claims to one of the world’s major trade routes.
China is no longer a weak player internationally. They soon will become the world’s most powerful economy, the next superpower. We can’t stop it.
As a practical matter, the Chinese have backed their claim with permanent island building and military presence. Will Trump force a military confrontation as Tillerson seemed to advocate? Such a move would surely fail and serve only to further erode the American empire.
Just who wins a shootout in the South China Sea hardly matters. We have yet to learn the limits of firepower. China’s bases are there to stay and we had better get used to it. If the U.S. actually tried to use force, the surrounding nations that are actually party to the dispute would suffer and their efforts to get a better resource cut would become much more difficult. A U.S. blockade or attacks on Chinese-claimed territory would not change the reality on the ground but would seriously damage the $5 trillion worth of oil tankers and cargo ships that pass through the sea every year.
An actual land war with China is out of the question. We have known that for generations. We couldn’t even come close with Vietnam and Korea. Since that time the U.S. has become dependent on Chinese goods and services. We can only hurt ourselves by picking a fight with China.
China is no longer a weak player internationally. They soon will become the world’s most powerful economy, the next superpower. We can’t stop it. The Chinese are smart, educated, industrious and unified. Sure, we buy a lot of their stuff and will continue to do so. Shooting at them or trying to bully them economically will only make their stuff more expensive and harder to get while the rest of the world will benefit.
Tillerson thinks he can push China around because as Exxon CEO he made a deal with the Vietnamese to drill for oil not far off the coast of Vietnam which overlaps the unjustifiable Chinese territorial claim. Odds are the Chinese will negotiate a pull-back from those extreme claims and allow their smaller neighbors a piece of the action while hanging onto their core areas already under development. They want the oil and gas and also the fish.
U.S. interference, other than as an interested negotiator, will only make that process more difficult and painful. It would also slice more gashes in the former American empire.
