BY BRIAN WILLIAMS. The Militant
In a one-week visit to Southeast Asia in early June, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta played up U.S. military shifts toward the Asia-Pacific region aimed at countering the growing influence and military power of China.
The U.S. Navy plans to place 60
percent of its battleships in the Pacific over the next eight years, up from 50
percent now, Panetta said at the Shangri-La Dialogue annual meeting of Asian
defense ministers in Singapore.
“That will include six aircraft carriers in this region, a majority of our
cruisers, destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, and submarines.”
In addition, the number and size
of U.S.
military exercises and other naval activity in the region will increase,
Panetta said. Last year U.S.
forces participated in 172 military exercises in the area.
Recent advances in Chinese
military technology, as well as rapid acquisition and production of modern
weaponry, poses an emerging challenge to U.S. imperialism’s dominance of the
Pacific. Major Chinese military innovations include the development of a new
generation of stealth jet fighters and the world’s first land-based anti-ship
ballistic missile designed to take out aircraft carriers.
Last year the Pentagon announced
its “AirSea Battle” war strategy, a plan that entails coordinated U.S. Air
Force and Navy offensive operations in the Western Pacific tacitly directed at China.
These battle guidelines are
raising concerns “even among military circles,” noted the Financial Times,
with some warning “that the new doctrine will aggravate relations with China
unnecessarily.”
Panetta’s seven-day trip was
aimed at bolstering military ties with governments throughout the region. In
his visit to India, Panetta
described the country as a “linchpin” in Washington’s
regional military strategy. “We will expand our military partnerships and our
presence in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East
Asia into the Indian Ocean Region,” he stated, according to the Times
of India.
A month and a half earlier New Delhi test-fired a long-range ballistic missile
capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as Shanghai. Washington,
which since 2008 has been providing India
access to civil nuclear technology, responded favorably to this development, in
contrast to its campaign to terminate the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.
“India’s
build-up is being watched with a benign eye by those who see it as a useful
counterweight to China’s
rising military power in south Asia,” said an
April 20 editorial in the Financial Times.
Washington
is also exploiting disputes between Beijing and
several Southeast Asian governments—Brunei,
Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore,
Taiwan and Vietnam—over territorial waters and islands in
the South China Sea. More than half of the
world’s supertanker commerce travels through the South
China Sea and it is believed to hold vast reserves of oil and gas.
Along these lines, the U.S. government is stepping up its military
presence in the Philippines,
which has been involved in a two-month standoff with China over control of the
Scarborough Shoals. Military exercises and the number of U.S. troops and
ships being rotated through the country are “ramping up,” said the New York
Times. At the same time, relations between Manila
and Beijing
have been deteriorating in recent years.
In April Washington and Manila conducted joint military exercises near disputed
territory in the South China Sea. That same
month some 200 U.S. Marines arrived in Darwin, Australia, where Washington
is expanding its military presence as part of its growing strategic ring around
China.
Manila
is also asking Washington
for more military hardware, including patrol vessels and aircraft, radar
systems and coast watch stations, reported the Army Times.
During Panetta’s visit to Singapore, the government backed Washington’s request to deploy four U.S. warships there, double the
amount previously agreed upon.
Relations between Vietnam and Washington were normalized in 1995. In recent
years U.S imperialism has sought to exploit rifts between Hanoi
and Beijing to
strengthen ties with the Vietnamese government. Twenty U.S. vessels have docked in Vietnam since 2003, military
officials told the Wall Street Journal.
On June 3, Panetta “became the
first Pentagon chief to set foot in Cam Ranh Bay,” a major port and airfield
for U.S.
forces during the Vietnam War, reported Agence France-Presse. He “described the
deep-water harbour as a strategically valuable port that could support the U.S. military’s
focus on the Pacific,” according to the news agency.
Courtesy:
The Militant
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