Tin Tình báo- Tin về tình hình quân sự ASEAN (P1)

Sau Hồng Kông và Macau, Đài Loan là cửa ngõ cuối cùng để Hoa Lục tự hào là Hoa Lục. Thế nhưng niềm tự hào ấy đã được họ theo đuổi nửa thế kỷ qua vẫn chưa thành quả, mặc dầu những nhà lãnh đạo Trung Quốc đã hao tốn rất nhiều công-của. Trong đó kể cả biện pháp quân sự cũng đã được đề cập đến nhiều lần trong ba thời kỳ Mao Trạch Đông, Hoa Quốc Phong đến Đặng Tiểu Bình và hiện nay. Điều hiển nhiên hơn nữa, nếu thập niên 1949 Mao Trạch Đông không chiếm được cửa ngõ cuối cùng Đài Loan thì sau nầy thế hệ đàn em của Tưởng Giới Thạch và Lý Đằng Huy sẽ khó có thể để Đài Loan vụt mất về tay Trung Quốc bằng biện pháp quân sự hay chính trị giống như trường hợp Hồng Kông của Anh Quốc và Macau của Bồ Đồ Nha đã trở về cùng Hoa Lục dưới một dạng chế độc lập và tự trị, nhưng nằm trong quỷ đạo Bắc Kinh. Điều hiển nhiên hơn nữa Đài Loan không nằm trong mô thức tự trị thuộc địa như trường hợp của Hồng Kông và Macau, bởi vì định chế chính trị của họ tự trị độc lập, được gầy dựng bởi quan niệm và ý thức chính trị riêng biệt, cho nên bởi chính nó (Đài Loan) có được chính quyền, lãnh thổ và nhân dân nên Đài Loan mặc nhiên có được lá quốc kỳ hợp lệ, hợp hiến và hợp pháp (đối với Đài Loan). Mặc dầu trên căn bản và thực tế họ không có được yếu tố de-facto kể từ 1971. Đây là một ?oniềm đau chính trị? đối với Đài Loan, bởi vì chính họ là một trong những sáng lập viên và thành viên của Liên Hiệp Quốc khi được thành lập vào năm 1945 dựa theo điều khoản 23/110 Liên Hiệp Quốc. Nhưng sau vì sự vận động của khối cộng sản và yếu tố lãnh thổ cũng như dân số tu chính 2758 LHQ được ra đời và đã không cho phép mọi hoạt động của Đài Loan tại LHQ nữa, thay vào đó chính quyền Trung Quốc điền chân vào sự khiếm khuyết trên.
Sự loại khỏi Liên Hiệp Quốc của Đài Loan không có nghĩa là Đài Loan bị cô lập trên thị trường kinh tế hay không còn sự hỗ trợ của các quốc gia khác trên thế giới. Ngược lại Đài Loan được sự ủng hộ của Hoa Kỳ, Nhật Bản và các quốc gia trong Cộng Đồng Đồng Tiến (Common Wealth) Âu Châu, đồng thời liên hệ ngoại giao chính thức của họ hiện nay ràng buộc đến 30 quốc gia khác. Riêng về phương diện trao đổi kinh tế, văn hóa, kỷ thuật, giáo dục, Đài Loan đã trao đổi trên 140 quốc gia trên thế giới. Trên phương diện thị trường chứng khoán Đài Loan đã đóng vai trò quan trọng hàng thứ 6. Tổng sản lượng quốc gia (GNP) hằng năm thâu hoạch đứng hàng thứ 11 cộng với tiền dự trữ trong ngân hàng 100 tỷ Mỹ kim. Hiện nay cả PRC (People Republic of China ) và ROC (Republic of China) đều là hội viên chính thức của Ngân Hàng Asian Development Bank (ADP) và Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Cả hai đều có đại diện ở cấp bậc ngang nhau trong khối WTO (World Trade Organization). Một điểm khác đáng được ghi nhận hơn nữa Đài Loan là một ?oquốc gia? duy nhất đầu tư vào Hoa Lục 20 tỷ dollars năm 1998, với số tiền khổng lồ trên nền kinh tế Hoa Lục đã lệ thuộc vào Đài Loan một phần lớn và ngược lại. Song song với kế hoạch đầu tư Hoa Lục, Đài Loan còn viện trợ qua hình thức cho vay không tính tiền lời cho 15 quốc gia với số tiền lên đến 331.1 triệu Mỹ kim qua tổ chức mang tên là IECDF (International Economic Cooperation Development Fund). Đồng thời Đài Loan còn huấn luyện cho 7500 học viên từ 80 quốc gia trên các lãnh vực khoa học và bảo trợ 40 nước khác, cũng như tình nguyện cung cấp các vật dụng về y khoa, canh nông, ngư nghiệp cho 30 quốc gia trên thế giới.
Trên khía cạnh chính trị, kể từ ngày ?olập quốc? đến nay, Đài Loan là một ?oquốc gia? có một định chế chính quyền dân chủ, phân lập, đầy đủ và rõ ràng. Tất cả các chức vụ hành chánh từ hạ tầng đến thượng tầng và Hội Đồng hàng tỉnh trở lên đều do dân bầu lên. Nhờ thế Đài Loan đã có một tiếng nói vững chắc trên các diễn đàn chính trị thế giới. Từ những ưu điểm trên trong những năm gần đây có nhiều quốc gia đã đưa ra đề nghị tái cứu xét để Đài Loan trở thành thành viên Liên Hiệp Quốc dựa theo những lý do sau đây:
- Bắc Hàn và Nam Hàn trước đây chỉ là những quan sát viên (observers) nay đã trở thành thành viên chính thức.
- Trước đây Đông Đức và Tây Đức đã là thành viên LHQ.
- Đài Loan (ROC) đã tự trị độc lập nửa thế kỷ qua và có một định chế chính trị dân chủ, tôn trọng nhân quyền và nền kinh tế thịnh vượng trên thế giới.
- Ngược lại Trung Quốc (PRC) không có tự do và tôn trọng nhân quyền, cũng như PRC chưa được liệt kê vào những quốc gia văn minh trên thế giới (Third world).
Nhìn về lãnh vực quân sự, Đài Loan có một lực lượng quân sự hùng mạnh và các loại vũ khí hiện đại sẵn sàng đương đầu với bất cứ cuộc tấn công nào của Hoa Lục. Ngoại trừ những vũ khí do chính Đài Loan chế tạo họ còn được trang bị thêm các loại vũ khí tối tân của Hoa Kỳ, Anh và Pháp bán lại. Đặc biệt Lực Lượng Hải và Không Quân của ROC được liệt kê vào hàng thứ 4 trên thế giới. Với những ưu điểm và thuận tiện trên, ROC còn ký thêm một hiệp ước Liên Minh phòng thủ chung với Hoa Kỳ, điển hình như trường hợp khi Trung Quốc thực tập đã bắn một số hỏa tiển gần hải phận Đài Loan, Tổng Thống Clinton đã lập tức ra lịnh cho hai chiến hạm USS Independence và USS Nimitz tiến gần vào hải phận Đài Loan để ?ogiám định? (monitor) tình tình.
Ngoại trừ những tác động hiệu quả của Hải và Không Quân, Đài Loan còn khó khả năng nguyên tử bắn vào các thành phố chính của Hoa Lục, cọng thêm các dàn hỏa tiển hiện đại có thể tiêu diệt hầu hết tất cả các kỹ nghệ của Trung Quốc đã tốn công gầy dựng từ 25 năm trở lại.
Từ những áp lực quân sự, cô lập kinh tế và bủa vây trên phương diện ngoại giao của Trung Quốc, trong quá khứ và hiện tại Đài Loan gặp niều trở ngại ở thương trường chính trị toàn cầu. Tuy nhiên, nhờ sự cố gắng phát triển và tinh thần đoàn kết của 21 triệu người, Đài Loan ngày nay không còn bị hạn chế trên chính trường thế giới nữa. Ngược lại tiếng nói của Đài Loan đã được nhiều quốc gia trên thế giới lắng nghe và hổ trợ một cách tích cực. Điển hình nhất là gần đây ngoại trưởng Jason Hu đã viếng thăm Hung Gia Lợi cùng các quốc gia Âu Châu và đã được tiếp đón một cách trang trọng và chính thức của một vị ngoại trưởng đại diện cho một quốc gia.
Thống nhất toàn cõi Hoa Lục không những chỉ là hoài bảo riêng rẽ của những nhà lãnh đạo Trung Quốc hay Đài Loan. Ngược lại hoài bảo trên còn là ý nguyện chung của mọi người dân Trung Quốc. Thế nhưng thống nhất đất nước dưới dạng thể nào là một vấn đề mà cả hai bên (ROC và PRC) cùng nhau tìm kiếm mẫu số. Trong đó yếu tố quốc tế còn đóng vai trò quyết định quan trọng hơn cả Bắc Kinh lẫn Đài Loan. Hơn nữa, trên phương diện chiến lược một Đài Loan sát nhập cùng với Bắc Kinh có phải là hiện tượng khôn ngoan để duy trì nền hòa bình và an ninh cũng như trật tự trên thế giới hay không? Ngược lại, tình trạng Đài Loan tự trị và tách rời còn là tiền đồn chống lại và ngăn chận sức mạnh bành trướng của Trung Quốc sau nầy. Do đó, Hiệp Ước Liên Minh phòng phủ chung của Hoa Kỳ và Đài Loan vẫn còn là một ?oHiệp Ước? hiệu quả và được sự hỗ trợ hơn 2/3 của Quốc Hội Hoa Kỳ cũng như các quốc gia Âu Châu và Nhật Bản. Chính vì thế nếu cuộc tấn công của Trung Quốc có xảy ra trong tương lai, chúng ta tin chắc rằng Hoa Kỳ và khối đồng minh của họ sẽ không cho phép Trung Quốc có cơ hội thực hiệm tham vọng cưỡng chiếm Đài Loan một cách dễ dàng được.

Lo ngài khà? nfng Bf́c Hà?n thư? tĂn lư?a


ViẶc thư? nghiẶm mẶt tĂn lư?a nhò? cùfng sèf gĂy ra lo ngài
Hoa Kỳ? và? NhẶt Bà?n nòi hò 'ang xem xèt càc bào cào vĂ? viẶc Bf́c Hà?n 'àf thư? nghiẶm mẶt tĂn lư?a tĂ?m ngf́n bf́n và?o biĂ?n NhẶt Bà?n.
Hàfng truyĂ?n hì?nh nhà? nước NhẶt, NHK, nòi tĂn lư?a 'àf bay khoà?ng 100 cĂy sẮ trước khi rơi xuẮng biĂ?n.
Tokyo 'àf theo dòfi tì?nh hì?nh sau càc cà?nh bào trước 'ò rf?ng Bì?nh Nhươfng sf́p thư? mẶt 'Ă?u 'àn hàt nhĂn.
Chành vfn phò?ng Nhà? Trf́ng, Andrew Card, nòi với bào chì Mỳf rf?ng cò vè? 'àf cò mẶt thư? nghiẶm tĂn lư?a tĂ?m ngf́n bơ?i Bf́c Hà?n.
Ă"ng nà?y nòi Ăng khĂng ngàc nhiĂn nẮu quà? thẶt viẶc nà?y xà?y ra.
Già? thiẮt phòng tĂn lư?a xà?y ra mẶt ngà?y trước lùc 187 quẮc gia 'àf kỳ và?o hiẶp ước khĂng phĂ? biẮn vùf khì hàt nhĂn gf̣p nhau tài New York 'Ă? xem xèt tiẮn trì?nh.
HĂ?i thàng Ba, chình phù? Bf́c Hà?n nòi hò khĂng cò?n thực hiẶn viẶc tàm hoàfn thư? tĂn lư?a tĂ?m xa vẮn cò hiẶu lực tư? nfm 1999.
Hàfng tin NhẶt Kyodo nòi NhẶt Bà?n 'àf 'ược quĂn 'Ặi Mỳf thĂng bào vĂ? vù thư? cù?a Bf́c Hà?n 'ược nòi là? thực hiẶn và?o sàng thứ Bà?y vư?a qua.
Và?o thơ?i 'iĂ?m khi mòi 'Ặng tìfnh tài Bì?nh Nhươfng 'Ă?u 'ược xem xèt kỳf lươfng, viẶc thư? nghiẶm mẶt tĂn lư?a nhò? cùfng sèf gĂy ra lo ngài.
Mòi ngươ?i ơ? ngoà?i Bf́c Hà?n khĂng ai ròf ỳ 'ình cù?a Bì?nh Nhươfng, nhưng Hoa Kỳ? lo ngài Bf́c Hà?n 'ang chuĂ?n bì thư? thiẮt bì hàt nhĂn 'Ă?u tiĂn sau khi và?o thàng Hai, hò loan bào 'àf sơ? hưfu vùf khì hàt nhĂn và? sèf khĂng quay lài 'à?m phàn sàu bĂn.
HĂm thứ Nfm tuĂ?n trước, mẶt viĂn chức tì?nh bào Hoa Kỳ? nòi với càc thượng nghì sìf ơ? Washington là? Bf́c Hà?n cò khà? nfng vòf trang tĂn lư?a bf?ng 'Ă?u 'àn hàt nhĂn, mf̣c dù? Ăng khĂng dàm chf́c trong bao lĂu hò sèf là?m 'ược.
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Mấy tuần nay nghe nĂi bắc hĂn từ ch'i 'Ăm phĂn, khĂng lẽ nĂ mu'n gĂy hấn sao.CĂ ai bĂnh luận gĂ khĂng
www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/regionalnews/story/2005/05/050501_northkoreatest.shtml

Được kenjijing sửa chữa / chuyển vào 10:09 ngày 02/05/2005

Lo ngài khà? nfng Bf́c Hà?n thư? tĂn lư?a


ViẶc thư? nghiẶm mẶt tĂn lư?a nhò? cùfng sèf gĂy ra lo ngài
Hoa Kỳ? và? NhẶt Bà?n nòi hò 'ang xem xèt càc bào cào vĂ? viẶc Bf́c Hà?n 'àf thư? nghiẶm mẶt tĂn lư?a tĂ?m ngf́n bf́n và?o biĂ?n NhẶt Bà?n.
Hàfng truyĂ?n hì?nh nhà? nước NhẶt, NHK, nòi tĂn lư?a 'àf bay khoà?ng 100 cĂy sẮ trước khi rơi xuẮng biĂ?n.
Tokyo 'àf theo dòfi tì?nh hì?nh sau càc cà?nh bào trước 'ò rf?ng Bì?nh Nhươfng sf́p thư? mẶt 'Ă?u 'àn hàt nhĂn.
Chành vfn phò?ng Nhà? Trf́ng, Andrew Card, nòi với bào chì Mỳf rf?ng cò vè? 'àf cò mẶt thư? nghiẶm tĂn lư?a tĂ?m ngf́n bơ?i Bf́c Hà?n.
Ă"ng nà?y nòi Ăng khĂng ngàc nhiĂn nẮu quà? thẶt viẶc nà?y xà?y ra.
Già? thiẮt phòng tĂn lư?a xà?y ra mẶt ngà?y trước lùc 187 quẮc gia 'àf kỳ và?o hiẶp ước khĂng phĂ? biẮn vùf khì hàt nhĂn gf̣p nhau tài New York 'Ă? xem xèt tiẮn trì?nh.
HĂ?i thàng Ba, chình phù? Bf́c Hà?n nòi hò khĂng cò?n thực hiẶn viẶc tàm hoàfn thư? tĂn lư?a tĂ?m xa vẮn cò hiẶu lực tư? nfm 1999.
Hàfng tin NhẶt Kyodo nòi NhẶt Bà?n 'àf 'ược quĂn 'Ặi Mỳf thĂng bào vĂ? vù thư? cù?a Bf́c Hà?n 'ược nòi là? thực hiẶn và?o sàng thứ Bà?y vư?a qua.
Và?o thơ?i 'iĂ?m khi mòi 'Ặng tìfnh tài Bì?nh Nhươfng 'Ă?u 'ược xem xèt kỳf lươfng, viẶc thư? nghiẶm mẶt tĂn lư?a nhò? cùfng sèf gĂy ra lo ngài.
Mòi ngươ?i ơ? ngoà?i Bf́c Hà?n khĂng ai ròf ỳ 'ình cù?a Bì?nh Nhươfng, nhưng Hoa Kỳ? lo ngài Bf́c Hà?n 'ang chuĂ?n bì thư? thiẮt bì hàt nhĂn 'Ă?u tiĂn sau khi và?o thàng Hai, hò loan bào 'àf sơ? hưfu vùf khì hàt nhĂn và? sèf khĂng quay lài 'à?m phàn sàu bĂn.
HĂm thứ Nfm tuĂ?n trước, mẶt viĂn chức tì?nh bào Hoa Kỳ? nòi với càc thượng nghì sìf ơ? Washington là? Bf́c Hà?n cò khà? nfng vòf trang tĂn lư?a bf?ng 'Ă?u 'àn hàt nhĂn, mf̣c dù? Ăng khĂng dàm chf́c trong bao lĂu hò sèf là?m 'ược.
..................................................................................................................

Mấy tuần nay nghe nĂi bắc hĂn từ ch'i 'Ăm phĂn, khĂng lẽ nĂ mu'n gĂy hấn sao.CĂ ai bĂnh luận gĂ khĂng
www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/regionalnews/story/2005/05/050501_northkoreatest.shtml

Được kenjijing sửa chữa / chuyển vào 10:09 ngày 02/05/2005

Chẳng có tin gì mới, nhưng thằng cu sỹ phú nhờ tìm lại nên tớ lôi cổ nó lên

Chẳng có tin gì mới, nhưng thằng cu sỹ phú nhờ tìm lại nên tớ lôi cổ nó lên

Tàu nói Nhật phải đối mặt với lịch sử, nhưng lịch sử Tàu giúp Khơ Me Đỏ diệt chủng dân Khơ Me thì đang bị chôn vùi.
lời tựa:
Only weeks ago, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao uttered the now famous words, "Japan needs to face up to history squarely." China has adamantly demanded that Japan come clean about its past war indiscretions, an issue that has provoked lively public debate. At the same time, Beijing has remained mum regarding its support for Cambodia''''s Khmer Rouge in the mid- to late-1970s. Today, the two countries are financially intertwined; China is Cambodia''''s largest source of foreign investment. According to the International Herald Tribune, these circumstances have kept many from discussing China''''s role in supporting one of the world''''s most violent regimes: Many Cambodians do not want to bite the hand that feeds them. Meanwhile, Beijing remains quiet ?" despite claiming that any nation with global aspirations must acknowledge its history. ?" YaleGlobal
Burying China''''s Complicity in the Killing Fields
Jehangir S. Pocha
The International Herald Tribune, 5 May 2005
CHEUNG EK, Cambodia Outside this stark, but pastoral monument to the victims of Cambodia''''s gory Khmer Rouge years southwest of Phnom Penh, a group of young men played cards recently and listened to Chinese pop music.
Music from China seemed a bit incongruous, given that China, along with the United States and the Soviet Union, helped create Pol Pot''''s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Beijing, indeed, was the group''''s chief patron when it held power from 1975 through 1978 and killed more than 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia''''s population, in its quest to create an agrarian Maoist utopia.
But China''''s role in this nation''''s grim experience now lies in the past - deep and more or less undisturbed, which is how both Beijing and many Cambodians prefer it.
"The Chinese are O.K.; they are our friends now," said Var Sareth, 21. "We can learn from them; we can work with them."
Var Sareth and his companions work as guides at the Cheung Ek monument, which is on the site of a Khmer Rouge labor camp 15 kilometers, or 9 miles from the capital, and is filled with the skulls of 8,000 people who perished there.
Though they diligently tell tourists about the shrine and how tall its dome is, they refrain, even when pressed, from talking about China''''s role in the events that led to Cambodia''''s killing fields.
Pan Samnang, 24, who sells postcards and other memorabilia to tourists, said that he could not dislike China because "all the businesses started by people in my family" recently have been bankrolled by Chinese money.
Indeed, China has emerged as a major supporter of Cambodia, after an ambitious $2.8 billion UN peacekeeping operation meant to help Cambodia get back on its feet ended in November 1993. Beijing has pumped nearly $300 million in aid into Cambodia since then, and last year, Chinese businesses invested $217 million in Cambodian industries like timber, textiles, and food processing, making China the largest foreign investor in Cambodia, according to the Center for the Development of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh.
That would have been "unbelievable" a decade ago, said Var Sareth. Back then, emotions over China''''s support of the Khmer Rouge were still raw.
China saw the Khmer Rouge "as a zealous national movement toppling a regime propped up by the US and gave it very close support," said Sophie Richardson, who recently completed a dissertation at the University of Virginia, on Chinese-Cambodian relations.
Beijing, which did not want the Soviet Union expanding into its backyard, supplied the Khmer Rouge with arms, food, material, training, technicians and, most important, international political support.
"Without China, the Khmer Rouge might never have become what it did," Richardson said.
When Pol Pot seized Phnom Penh in 1975, the city was emptied of people. They were sent to work in what became Cambodia''''s killing fields.
"My husband died in fields, and my two boys were poisoned while working in a children''''s work team," said Mam Sophon, 58, a midwife at Angkor Chey Referral Hospital in Kampot province, about 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, southwest of Phnom Penh.
"My daughter was forced to carry rice all day and finally collapsed. They said blood came out from her mouth, and buttocks from overwork."
Richardson said, "The Chinese knew a lot, if not all, of what was going on, but they were not joking when they said ''''domestic affairs are domestic affairs.'''' No matter how awful the Khmer Rouge regime got, the Chinese said they did not think it was their place to intervene."
China''''s non-interference policy largely continues to this day. China opposed UN economic sanctions against Sudan, where it has oil interests.
"Business is business," Zhou Wenzhong said last year when he was China''''s deputy foreign minister. "The situation in the Sudan is an internal affair."
The implications of China''''s position on the Khmer Rouge are set aside by many young Cambodians born after the Khmer Rouge years, who compose about half the country''''s population.
"To repair my life I need this," said Var Sareth, holding up the two crumpled US dollar bills his previous client had handed him after a 30-minute tour. "China is China. We are small. To go forward we must look forward, not keep looking back."
Yet in families scarred by Cambodia''''s brutal civil war, which intensified when the United States began covertly bombing the country as part of its Vietnam campaign, the promise of money can be an inadequate balm.
"No one has paid for my loss," said Mam Sophon, as tears welled at the memory. "We will remember these bad things forever" if there is no public explanation of how and why all this happened.
Like many people in Cambodia, Mam Sophon is careful to clarify that her Buddhist beliefs direct her to seek only truth, not vengeance, from those who directly and indirectly tormented her life and nation. While this exchange of absolution for honesty has been partly satisfied by disclosures about Washington''''s role in supporting the Khmer Rouge, and Cambodia''''s own impending trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders before a tribunal backed by the United Nations, China has remained mostly silent about its role in the violence that ravaged this idyllic country.
"China does not have to take responsibility for the Khmer Rouge''''s domestic policy and has no responsibility to explain what China did at that time," said Professor Zhang Xi Zhen of the Asian Studies Department at Peking University, in Beijing. "Our leaders, from Zhou Enlai to advisers in Phnom Penh, tried to persuade them to change these kind of policies. They just didn''''t listen."
China, as well as the United States, Britain, Singapore,and Thailand, continued supporting the Khmer Rouge even after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and put an end to the devastation Pol Pot''''s regime had unleashed.
"To help the Khmer Rouge, China even launched the border war against Vietnam" in 1979, Zhang said. "It might seem hard to understand today, but don''''t forget that at that time Vietnam was very close to the Soviet Union and together they wanted to control South-East Asia. That would have been a grave threat to China."
Zhang said the combination of China''''s own revolutionary zeal and its ambitions to become a great power might have blinded it in Cambodia.
While China did not commit the Khmer Rouge crimes, its reluctance to discuss its support may seem to run counter to the recent admonishing of Japan by Premier Wen Jiabao of China, who said nations must "face up to history" if they want to be full and normal members of the global community. But despite the inconsistency, Beijing is not likely to budge, said Jin Linbo, director of Asia Pacific Studies at the China Institute of Foreign Studies in Beijing.
"I don''''t think Chinese leaders are ready to reflect fully on China''''s actions and history," Jin said.
Source:
The International Herald Tribune

Tàu nói Nhật phải đối mặt với lịch sử, nhưng lịch sử Tàu giúp Khơ Me Đỏ diệt chủng dân Khơ Me thì đang bị chôn vùi.
lời tựa:
Only weeks ago, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao uttered the now famous words, "Japan needs to face up to history squarely." China has adamantly demanded that Japan come clean about its past war indiscretions, an issue that has provoked lively public debate. At the same time, Beijing has remained mum regarding its support for Cambodia''''s Khmer Rouge in the mid- to late-1970s. Today, the two countries are financially intertwined; China is Cambodia''''s largest source of foreign investment. According to the International Herald Tribune, these circumstances have kept many from discussing China''''s role in supporting one of the world''''s most violent regimes: Many Cambodians do not want to bite the hand that feeds them. Meanwhile, Beijing remains quiet ?" despite claiming that any nation with global aspirations must acknowledge its history. ?" YaleGlobal
Burying China''''s Complicity in the Killing Fields
Jehangir S. Pocha
The International Herald Tribune, 5 May 2005
CHEUNG EK, Cambodia Outside this stark, but pastoral monument to the victims of Cambodia''''s gory Khmer Rouge years southwest of Phnom Penh, a group of young men played cards recently and listened to Chinese pop music.
Music from China seemed a bit incongruous, given that China, along with the United States and the Soviet Union, helped create Pol Pot''''s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Beijing, indeed, was the group''''s chief patron when it held power from 1975 through 1978 and killed more than 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia''''s population, in its quest to create an agrarian Maoist utopia.
But China''''s role in this nation''''s grim experience now lies in the past - deep and more or less undisturbed, which is how both Beijing and many Cambodians prefer it.
"The Chinese are O.K.; they are our friends now," said Var Sareth, 21. "We can learn from them; we can work with them."
Var Sareth and his companions work as guides at the Cheung Ek monument, which is on the site of a Khmer Rouge labor camp 15 kilometers, or 9 miles from the capital, and is filled with the skulls of 8,000 people who perished there.
Though they diligently tell tourists about the shrine and how tall its dome is, they refrain, even when pressed, from talking about China''''s role in the events that led to Cambodia''''s killing fields.
Pan Samnang, 24, who sells postcards and other memorabilia to tourists, said that he could not dislike China because "all the businesses started by people in my family" recently have been bankrolled by Chinese money.
Indeed, China has emerged as a major supporter of Cambodia, after an ambitious $2.8 billion UN peacekeeping operation meant to help Cambodia get back on its feet ended in November 1993. Beijing has pumped nearly $300 million in aid into Cambodia since then, and last year, Chinese businesses invested $217 million in Cambodian industries like timber, textiles, and food processing, making China the largest foreign investor in Cambodia, according to the Center for the Development of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh.
That would have been "unbelievable" a decade ago, said Var Sareth. Back then, emotions over China''''s support of the Khmer Rouge were still raw.
China saw the Khmer Rouge "as a zealous national movement toppling a regime propped up by the US and gave it very close support," said Sophie Richardson, who recently completed a dissertation at the University of Virginia, on Chinese-Cambodian relations.
Beijing, which did not want the Soviet Union expanding into its backyard, supplied the Khmer Rouge with arms, food, material, training, technicians and, most important, international political support.
"Without China, the Khmer Rouge might never have become what it did," Richardson said.
When Pol Pot seized Phnom Penh in 1975, the city was emptied of people. They were sent to work in what became Cambodia''''s killing fields.
"My husband died in fields, and my two boys were poisoned while working in a children''''s work team," said Mam Sophon, 58, a midwife at Angkor Chey Referral Hospital in Kampot province, about 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, southwest of Phnom Penh.
"My daughter was forced to carry rice all day and finally collapsed. They said blood came out from her mouth, and buttocks from overwork."
Richardson said, "The Chinese knew a lot, if not all, of what was going on, but they were not joking when they said ''''domestic affairs are domestic affairs.'''' No matter how awful the Khmer Rouge regime got, the Chinese said they did not think it was their place to intervene."
China''''s non-interference policy largely continues to this day. China opposed UN economic sanctions against Sudan, where it has oil interests.
"Business is business," Zhou Wenzhong said last year when he was China''''s deputy foreign minister. "The situation in the Sudan is an internal affair."
The implications of China''''s position on the Khmer Rouge are set aside by many young Cambodians born after the Khmer Rouge years, who compose about half the country''''s population.
"To repair my life I need this," said Var Sareth, holding up the two crumpled US dollar bills his previous client had handed him after a 30-minute tour. "China is China. We are small. To go forward we must look forward, not keep looking back."
Yet in families scarred by Cambodia''''s brutal civil war, which intensified when the United States began covertly bombing the country as part of its Vietnam campaign, the promise of money can be an inadequate balm.
"No one has paid for my loss," said Mam Sophon, as tears welled at the memory. "We will remember these bad things forever" if there is no public explanation of how and why all this happened.
Like many people in Cambodia, Mam Sophon is careful to clarify that her Buddhist beliefs direct her to seek only truth, not vengeance, from those who directly and indirectly tormented her life and nation. While this exchange of absolution for honesty has been partly satisfied by disclosures about Washington''''s role in supporting the Khmer Rouge, and Cambodia''''s own impending trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders before a tribunal backed by the United Nations, China has remained mostly silent about its role in the violence that ravaged this idyllic country.
"China does not have to take responsibility for the Khmer Rouge''''s domestic policy and has no responsibility to explain what China did at that time," said Professor Zhang Xi Zhen of the Asian Studies Department at Peking University, in Beijing. "Our leaders, from Zhou Enlai to advisers in Phnom Penh, tried to persuade them to change these kind of policies. They just didn''''t listen."
China, as well as the United States, Britain, Singapore,and Thailand, continued supporting the Khmer Rouge even after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and put an end to the devastation Pol Pot''''s regime had unleashed.
"To help the Khmer Rouge, China even launched the border war against Vietnam" in 1979, Zhang said. "It might seem hard to understand today, but don''''t forget that at that time Vietnam was very close to the Soviet Union and together they wanted to control South-East Asia. That would have been a grave threat to China."
Zhang said the combination of China''''s own revolutionary zeal and its ambitions to become a great power might have blinded it in Cambodia.
While China did not commit the Khmer Rouge crimes, its reluctance to discuss its support may seem to run counter to the recent admonishing of Japan by Premier Wen Jiabao of China, who said nations must "face up to history" if they want to be full and normal members of the global community. But despite the inconsistency, Beijing is not likely to budge, said Jin Linbo, director of Asia Pacific Studies at the China Institute of Foreign Studies in Beijing.
"I don''''t think Chinese leaders are ready to reflect fully on China''''s actions and history," Jin said.
Source:
The International Herald Tribune

Bài này nói về việc Mỹ nên đánh Tàu như thế nào nếu Tàu trở mặt gây chiến tranh.
The Atlantic Monthly | June 2005
How We Would Fight China
The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was
by Robert D. Kaplan
For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific-and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It''s not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but also of its rear base-stretching far back into Central Asia-from which it may eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific.
In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of "soft" power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence-by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America''s liberal imperium.
How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War-which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations-it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns.
The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome in an age that requires light and lethal strikes. During the fighting in Kosovo in 1999 (a limited air campaign against a toothless enemy during a time of Euro-American harmony; a campaign, in other words, that should have been easy to prosecute) dramatic fissures appeared in the then-nineteen-member NATO alliance. The organization''s end effectively came with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the aftermath of which, despite talk of a broad-based coalition, European militaries have usually done little more than patrol and move into areas already pacified by U.S. soldiers and Marines-a job more suggestive of the United Nations. NATO today is a medium for the expansion of bilateral training missions between the United States and formerly communist countries and republics: the Marines in Bulgaria and Romania, the Navy in Albania, the Army in Poland and the Czech Republic, Special Operations Forces in Georgia-the list goes on and on. Much of NATO has become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military.
The second thing to understand is that the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is indeed up and running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM. Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy, PACOM is a large but nimble construct, and its leaders understand what many in the media and the policy community do not: that the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East. PACOM will soon be a household name, as CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) has been in the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict-an epoch that will start to wind down, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, during the second Bush administration.
The third thing to understand is that, ironically, the vitality of NATO itself, the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold War in the Pacific -and indeed the re-emergence of NATO as an indispensable war-fighting instrument should be America''s unswerving aim. In its posture toward China the United States will look to Europe and NATO, whose help it will need as a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a force to patrol seas more distant than the Me***erranean and the North Atlantic. That is why NATO''s current commander, Marine General James L. Jones, emphasizes that NATO''s future lies in amphibious, expe***ionary warfare.
Let me describe our military organization in the Pacific-an area through which I have traveled extensively during the past three years. PACOM has always been the largest, most venerable, and most interesting of the U.S. military''s area commands. (Its roots go back to the U.S. Pacific Army of the Philippines War, 1899-1902.) Its domain stretches from East Africa to beyond the International Date Line and includes the entire Pacific Rim, encompassing half the world''s surface and more than half of its economy. The world''s six largest militaries, two of which (America''s and China''s) are the most rapidly modernizing, all operate within PACOM''s sphere of control. PACOM has-in ad***ion to its many warships and submarines-far more dedicated troops than CENTCOM. Even though the military''s area commands do not own troops today in the way they used to, these statistics matter, because they demonstrate that the United States has chosen to locate the bulk of its forces in the Pacific, not in the Middle East. CENTCOM fights wars with troops essentially borrowed from PACOM.
Quietly in recent years, by negotiating bilateral security agreements with countries that have few such arrangements with one another, the U.S. military has formed a Pacific military alliance of sorts at PACOM headquarters, in Honolulu. This is where the truly interesting meetings are being held today, rather than in ***chley or Davos. The attendees at those meetings, who often travel on PACOM''s dime, are military officers from such places as Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines.
Otto von Bismarck, the father of the Second Reich in continental Europe, would recognize the emerging Pacific system. In 2002 the German commentator Josef Joffe appreciated this in a remarkably perceptive article in The National Interest, in which he argued that in terms of political alliances, the United States has come to resemble Bismarck''s Prussia. Britain, Russia, and Austria needed Prussia more than they needed one another, Joffe wrote, thus making them "spokes" to Berlin''s "hub"; the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan exposed a world in which America can forge different coalitions for different crises. The world''s other powers, he said, now need the United States more than they need one another.
Unfortunately, the United States did not immediately capitalize on this new power arrangement, because President George W. Bush lacked the nuance and attendant self-restraint of Bismarck, who understood that such a system could endure only so long as one didn''t overwhelm it. The Bush administration did just that, of course, in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which led France, Germany, Russia, and China, along with a host of lesser powers such as Turkey, Mexico, and Chile, to unite against us.
In the Pacific, however, a Bismarckian arrangement still prospers, helped along by the pragmatism of our Hawaii-based military officers, five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of Washington, D.C. In fact, PACOM represents a much purer version of Bismarck''s imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy (1994), Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology. He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by recognizing that when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.
Only a similarly pragmatic approach will allow us to accommodate China''s inevitable re-emergence as a great power. The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first century into a battlefield. Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on the scene (Germany and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century, to cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive-and therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil. China will be no exception. Today the Chinese are investing in both diesel-powered and nuclear-powered submarines-a clear signal that they intend not only to protect their coastal shelves but also to expand their sphere of influence far out into the Pacific and beyond.
This is wholly legitimate. China''s rulers may not be democrats in the literal sense, but they are seeking a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people-and doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy resources from the Middle East and elsewhere. Naturally, they do not trust the United States and India to do this for them. Given the stakes, and given what history teaches us about the conflicts that emerge when great powers all pursue legitimate interests, the result is likely to be the defining military conflict of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold War-style standoffs that stretch out over years and decades. And this will occur mostly within PACOM''s area of responsibility.
To do their job well, military officers must approach power in the most cautious, mechanical, and utilitarian way possible, assessing and reassessing regional balances of power while leaving the values side of the political equation to the civilian leadership. This makes military officers, of all government professionals, the least prone to be led astray by the raptures of liberal internationalism and neo-conservative interventionism.
The history of World War II shows the importance of this approach. In the 1930s the U.S. military, nervous about the growing strength of Germany and Japan, rightly lobbied for building up our forces. But by 1940 and 1941 the military (not unlike the German general staff a few years earlier) was presciently warning of the dangers of a two-front war; and by late summer of 1944 it should have been thinking less about defeating Germany and more about containing the Soviet Union. Today Air Force and Navy officers worry about a Taiwanese declaration of independence, because such a move would lead the United States into fighting a war with China that might not be in our national interest. Indonesia is another example: whatever the human-rights failures of the Indonesian military, PACOM assumes, correctly, that a policy of non-engagement would only open the door to Chinese-Indonesian military cooperation in a region that represents the future of world terrorism. (The U.S. military''s response to the Asian tsunami was, of course, a humanitarian effort; but PACOM strategists had to have recognized that a vigorous response would gain political support for the military-basing rights that will form part of our deterrence strategy against China.) Or consider Korea: some Pacific-based officers take a reunified Korean peninsula for granted, and their main concern is whether the country will be "Finlandized" by China or will be secure within an American-Japanese sphere of influence.
PACOM''s immersion in Asian power dynamics gives it unusual diplomatic weight, and consequently more leverage in Washington. And PACOM will not be nearly as constrained as CENTCOM by Washington-based domestic politics. Our actions in the Pacific will not be swayed by the equivalent of the Israel lobby; Protestant evangelicals will care less about the Pacific Rim than about the fate of the Holy Land. And because of the vast economic consequences of misjudging the power balance in East Asia, American business and military interests are likely to run in tandem toward a classically conservative policy of deterring China without needlessly provoking it, thereby amplifying PACOM''s authority. Our stance toward China and the Pacific, in other words, comes with a built-in stability-and this, in turn, underscores the notion of a new Cold War that is sustainable over the very long haul. Moreover, the complexity of the many political and military relationships managed by PACOM will give the command considerably greater influence than that currently exercised by CENTCOM-which, as a few military experts have disparagingly put it to me, deals only with a bunch of "third-rate Middle Eastern armies."
The relative shift in focus from the Middle East to the Pacific in coming years-idealistic rhetoric notwithstanding-will force the next American president, no matter what his or her party, to adopt a foreign policy similar to those of moderate Republican presidents such as George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. The management of risk will become a governing ideology. Even if Iraq turns out to be a democratic success story, it will surely be a from-the-jaws-of-failure success that no one in the military or the diplomatic establishment will ever want to repeat-especially in Asia, where the economic repercussions of a messy military adventure would be enormous. "Getting into a war with China is easy," says Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret who developed the weapons strategy for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s as a CIA officer and is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington. "You can see many scenarios, not just Taiwan-especially as the Chinese develop a submarine and missile capability throughout the Pacific. But the dilemma is, How do you end a war with China?"
Like the nations involved in World War I, and unlike the rogue states everyone has been concentrating on, the United States and China in the twenty-first century would have the capacity to keep fighting even if one or the other lost a big battle or a missile exchange. This has far-reaching implications. "Ending a war with China," Vickers says, "may mean effecting some form of regime change, because we don''t want to leave some wounded, angry regime in place." Another analyst, this one inside the Pentagon, told me, "Ending a war with China will force us *****bstantially reduce their military capacity, thus threatening their energy sources and the Communist Party''s grip on power. The world will not be the same afterward. It''s a very dangerous road to travel on."
The better road is for PACOM to deter China in Bismarckian fashion, from a geographic hub of comparative isolation-the Hawaiian Islands-with spokes reaching out to major allies such as Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and India. These countries, in turn, would form secondary hubs to help us manage the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian archipelagoes, among other places, and also the Indian Ocean. The point of this arrangement would be to dissuade China so subtly that over time the rising behemoth would be drawn into the PACOM alliance system without any large-scale conflagration-the way NATO was ultimately able to neutralize the Soviet Union.
Whatever we say or do, China will spend more and more money on its military in the coming decades. Our only realistic goal may be to encourage it to make investments that are defensive, not offensive, in nature. Our efforts will require particular care, because China, unlike the Soviet Union of old (or Russia today, for that matter), boasts soft as well as hard power. Businesspeople love the idea of China; you don''t have to beg them to invest there, as you do in Africa and so many other places. China''s mixture of tra***ional authoritarianism and market economics has broad cultural appeal throughout Asia and other parts of the world. And because China is improving the material well-being of hundreds of millions of its citizens, the plight of its dissidents does not have quite the same market allure as did the plight of the Soviet Union''s Sakharovs and Sharanskys. Democracy is attractive in places where tyranny has been obvious, odious, and unsuccessful, of course, as in Ukraine and Zimbabwe. But the world is full of gray areas-Jordan and Malaysia, for example-where elements of tyranny have ensured stability and growth.
Consider Singapore. Its mixture of democracy and authoritarianism has made it unpopular with idealists in Washington, but as far as PACOM is concerned, the country is, despite its small size, one of the most popular and helpful in the Pacific. Its ethnically blind military meritocracy, its nurturing concern for the welfare of officers and enlisted men alike, and its jungle-warfare school in Brunei are second to none. With the exception of Japan, far to the north, Singapore offers the only non-American base in the Pacific where our nuclear carriers can be serviced. Its help in hunting down Islamic terrorists in the Indonesian archipelago has been equal or superior to the help offered elsewhere by our most dependable Western allies. One Washington-based military futurist told me, "The Sings, well-they''re just awesome in every way."
PACOM''s objective, in the words of a Pacific-based Marine general, must be "military multilateralism on steroids." This is not just a question of our future training with the "Sings" in Brunei, of flying test sorties with the Indian air force, of conducting major annual exercises in Thailand, or of utilizing a soon-to-open training facility in northern Australia with the approval of our alliance partners. It''s also a matter of forging interoperability with friendly Asian militaries at the platoon level, by constantly moving U.S. troops from one training deployment to another.
This would be an improvement over NATO, whose fighting fitness has been hampered by the ad***ion of substandard former-Eastern-bloc militaries. Politics, too, favors a tilt toward the Pacific: tensions between the United States and Europe currently impede military integration, whereas our Pacific allies, notably Japan and Australia, want more military engagement with the United States, to counter the rise of the Chinese navy. This would work to our benefit. The Japanese military, although small, possesses elite niche capabilities, in special-forces and diesel-submarine warfare. And the aggressive frontier style of the Australians makes them cognitively closer to Americans than even the British.

Bài này nói về việc Mỹ nên đánh Tàu như thế nào nếu Tàu trở mặt gây chiến tranh.
The Atlantic Monthly | June 2005
How We Would Fight China
The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was
by Robert D. Kaplan
For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific-and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It''s not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but also of its rear base-stretching far back into Central Asia-from which it may eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific.
In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of "soft" power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence-by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America''s liberal imperium.
How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War-which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations-it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns.
The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome in an age that requires light and lethal strikes. During the fighting in Kosovo in 1999 (a limited air campaign against a toothless enemy during a time of Euro-American harmony; a campaign, in other words, that should have been easy to prosecute) dramatic fissures appeared in the then-nineteen-member NATO alliance. The organization''s end effectively came with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the aftermath of which, despite talk of a broad-based coalition, European militaries have usually done little more than patrol and move into areas already pacified by U.S. soldiers and Marines-a job more suggestive of the United Nations. NATO today is a medium for the expansion of bilateral training missions between the United States and formerly communist countries and republics: the Marines in Bulgaria and Romania, the Navy in Albania, the Army in Poland and the Czech Republic, Special Operations Forces in Georgia-the list goes on and on. Much of NATO has become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military.
The second thing to understand is that the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is indeed up and running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM. Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy, PACOM is a large but nimble construct, and its leaders understand what many in the media and the policy community do not: that the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East. PACOM will soon be a household name, as CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) has been in the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict-an epoch that will start to wind down, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, during the second Bush administration.
The third thing to understand is that, ironically, the vitality of NATO itself, the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold War in the Pacific -and indeed the re-emergence of NATO as an indispensable war-fighting instrument should be America''s unswerving aim. In its posture toward China the United States will look to Europe and NATO, whose help it will need as a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a force to patrol seas more distant than the Me***erranean and the North Atlantic. That is why NATO''s current commander, Marine General James L. Jones, emphasizes that NATO''s future lies in amphibious, expe***ionary warfare.
Let me describe our military organization in the Pacific-an area through which I have traveled extensively during the past three years. PACOM has always been the largest, most venerable, and most interesting of the U.S. military''s area commands. (Its roots go back to the U.S. Pacific Army of the Philippines War, 1899-1902.) Its domain stretches from East Africa to beyond the International Date Line and includes the entire Pacific Rim, encompassing half the world''s surface and more than half of its economy. The world''s six largest militaries, two of which (America''s and China''s) are the most rapidly modernizing, all operate within PACOM''s sphere of control. PACOM has-in ad***ion to its many warships and submarines-far more dedicated troops than CENTCOM. Even though the military''s area commands do not own troops today in the way they used to, these statistics matter, because they demonstrate that the United States has chosen to locate the bulk of its forces in the Pacific, not in the Middle East. CENTCOM fights wars with troops essentially borrowed from PACOM.
Quietly in recent years, by negotiating bilateral security agreements with countries that have few such arrangements with one another, the U.S. military has formed a Pacific military alliance of sorts at PACOM headquarters, in Honolulu. This is where the truly interesting meetings are being held today, rather than in ***chley or Davos. The attendees at those meetings, who often travel on PACOM''s dime, are military officers from such places as Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines.
Otto von Bismarck, the father of the Second Reich in continental Europe, would recognize the emerging Pacific system. In 2002 the German commentator Josef Joffe appreciated this in a remarkably perceptive article in The National Interest, in which he argued that in terms of political alliances, the United States has come to resemble Bismarck''s Prussia. Britain, Russia, and Austria needed Prussia more than they needed one another, Joffe wrote, thus making them "spokes" to Berlin''s "hub"; the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan exposed a world in which America can forge different coalitions for different crises. The world''s other powers, he said, now need the United States more than they need one another.
Unfortunately, the United States did not immediately capitalize on this new power arrangement, because President George W. Bush lacked the nuance and attendant self-restraint of Bismarck, who understood that such a system could endure only so long as one didn''t overwhelm it. The Bush administration did just that, of course, in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which led France, Germany, Russia, and China, along with a host of lesser powers such as Turkey, Mexico, and Chile, to unite against us.
In the Pacific, however, a Bismarckian arrangement still prospers, helped along by the pragmatism of our Hawaii-based military officers, five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of Washington, D.C. In fact, PACOM represents a much purer version of Bismarck''s imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy (1994), Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology. He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by recognizing that when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.
Only a similarly pragmatic approach will allow us to accommodate China''s inevitable re-emergence as a great power. The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first century into a battlefield. Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on the scene (Germany and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century, to cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive-and therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil. China will be no exception. Today the Chinese are investing in both diesel-powered and nuclear-powered submarines-a clear signal that they intend not only to protect their coastal shelves but also to expand their sphere of influence far out into the Pacific and beyond.
This is wholly legitimate. China''s rulers may not be democrats in the literal sense, but they are seeking a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people-and doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy resources from the Middle East and elsewhere. Naturally, they do not trust the United States and India to do this for them. Given the stakes, and given what history teaches us about the conflicts that emerge when great powers all pursue legitimate interests, the result is likely to be the defining military conflict of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold War-style standoffs that stretch out over years and decades. And this will occur mostly within PACOM''s area of responsibility.
To do their job well, military officers must approach power in the most cautious, mechanical, and utilitarian way possible, assessing and reassessing regional balances of power while leaving the values side of the political equation to the civilian leadership. This makes military officers, of all government professionals, the least prone to be led astray by the raptures of liberal internationalism and neo-conservative interventionism.
The history of World War II shows the importance of this approach. In the 1930s the U.S. military, nervous about the growing strength of Germany and Japan, rightly lobbied for building up our forces. But by 1940 and 1941 the military (not unlike the German general staff a few years earlier) was presciently warning of the dangers of a two-front war; and by late summer of 1944 it should have been thinking less about defeating Germany and more about containing the Soviet Union. Today Air Force and Navy officers worry about a Taiwanese declaration of independence, because such a move would lead the United States into fighting a war with China that might not be in our national interest. Indonesia is another example: whatever the human-rights failures of the Indonesian military, PACOM assumes, correctly, that a policy of non-engagement would only open the door to Chinese-Indonesian military cooperation in a region that represents the future of world terrorism. (The U.S. military''s response to the Asian tsunami was, of course, a humanitarian effort; but PACOM strategists had to have recognized that a vigorous response would gain political support for the military-basing rights that will form part of our deterrence strategy against China.) Or consider Korea: some Pacific-based officers take a reunified Korean peninsula for granted, and their main concern is whether the country will be "Finlandized" by China or will be secure within an American-Japanese sphere of influence.
PACOM''s immersion in Asian power dynamics gives it unusual diplomatic weight, and consequently more leverage in Washington. And PACOM will not be nearly as constrained as CENTCOM by Washington-based domestic politics. Our actions in the Pacific will not be swayed by the equivalent of the Israel lobby; Protestant evangelicals will care less about the Pacific Rim than about the fate of the Holy Land. And because of the vast economic consequences of misjudging the power balance in East Asia, American business and military interests are likely to run in tandem toward a classically conservative policy of deterring China without needlessly provoking it, thereby amplifying PACOM''s authority. Our stance toward China and the Pacific, in other words, comes with a built-in stability-and this, in turn, underscores the notion of a new Cold War that is sustainable over the very long haul. Moreover, the complexity of the many political and military relationships managed by PACOM will give the command considerably greater influence than that currently exercised by CENTCOM-which, as a few military experts have disparagingly put it to me, deals only with a bunch of "third-rate Middle Eastern armies."
The relative shift in focus from the Middle East to the Pacific in coming years-idealistic rhetoric notwithstanding-will force the next American president, no matter what his or her party, to adopt a foreign policy similar to those of moderate Republican presidents such as George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. The management of risk will become a governing ideology. Even if Iraq turns out to be a democratic success story, it will surely be a from-the-jaws-of-failure success that no one in the military or the diplomatic establishment will ever want to repeat-especially in Asia, where the economic repercussions of a messy military adventure would be enormous. "Getting into a war with China is easy," says Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret who developed the weapons strategy for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s as a CIA officer and is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington. "You can see many scenarios, not just Taiwan-especially as the Chinese develop a submarine and missile capability throughout the Pacific. But the dilemma is, How do you end a war with China?"
Like the nations involved in World War I, and unlike the rogue states everyone has been concentrating on, the United States and China in the twenty-first century would have the capacity to keep fighting even if one or the other lost a big battle or a missile exchange. This has far-reaching implications. "Ending a war with China," Vickers says, "may mean effecting some form of regime change, because we don''t want to leave some wounded, angry regime in place." Another analyst, this one inside the Pentagon, told me, "Ending a war with China will force us *****bstantially reduce their military capacity, thus threatening their energy sources and the Communist Party''s grip on power. The world will not be the same afterward. It''s a very dangerous road to travel on."
The better road is for PACOM to deter China in Bismarckian fashion, from a geographic hub of comparative isolation-the Hawaiian Islands-with spokes reaching out to major allies such as Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and India. These countries, in turn, would form secondary hubs to help us manage the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian archipelagoes, among other places, and also the Indian Ocean. The point of this arrangement would be to dissuade China so subtly that over time the rising behemoth would be drawn into the PACOM alliance system without any large-scale conflagration-the way NATO was ultimately able to neutralize the Soviet Union.
Whatever we say or do, China will spend more and more money on its military in the coming decades. Our only realistic goal may be to encourage it to make investments that are defensive, not offensive, in nature. Our efforts will require particular care, because China, unlike the Soviet Union of old (or Russia today, for that matter), boasts soft as well as hard power. Businesspeople love the idea of China; you don''t have to beg them to invest there, as you do in Africa and so many other places. China''s mixture of tra***ional authoritarianism and market economics has broad cultural appeal throughout Asia and other parts of the world. And because China is improving the material well-being of hundreds of millions of its citizens, the plight of its dissidents does not have quite the same market allure as did the plight of the Soviet Union''s Sakharovs and Sharanskys. Democracy is attractive in places where tyranny has been obvious, odious, and unsuccessful, of course, as in Ukraine and Zimbabwe. But the world is full of gray areas-Jordan and Malaysia, for example-where elements of tyranny have ensured stability and growth.
Consider Singapore. Its mixture of democracy and authoritarianism has made it unpopular with idealists in Washington, but as far as PACOM is concerned, the country is, despite its small size, one of the most popular and helpful in the Pacific. Its ethnically blind military meritocracy, its nurturing concern for the welfare of officers and enlisted men alike, and its jungle-warfare school in Brunei are second to none. With the exception of Japan, far to the north, Singapore offers the only non-American base in the Pacific where our nuclear carriers can be serviced. Its help in hunting down Islamic terrorists in the Indonesian archipelago has been equal or superior to the help offered elsewhere by our most dependable Western allies. One Washington-based military futurist told me, "The Sings, well-they''re just awesome in every way."
PACOM''s objective, in the words of a Pacific-based Marine general, must be "military multilateralism on steroids." This is not just a question of our future training with the "Sings" in Brunei, of flying test sorties with the Indian air force, of conducting major annual exercises in Thailand, or of utilizing a soon-to-open training facility in northern Australia with the approval of our alliance partners. It''s also a matter of forging interoperability with friendly Asian militaries at the platoon level, by constantly moving U.S. troops from one training deployment to another.
This would be an improvement over NATO, whose fighting fitness has been hampered by the ad***ion of substandard former-Eastern-bloc militaries. Politics, too, favors a tilt toward the Pacific: tensions between the United States and Europe currently impede military integration, whereas our Pacific allies, notably Japan and Australia, want more military engagement with the United States, to counter the rise of the Chinese navy. This would work to our benefit. The Japanese military, although small, possesses elite niche capabilities, in special-forces and diesel-submarine warfare. And the aggressive frontier style of the Australians makes them cognitively closer to Americans than even the British.

Military multilateralism in the Pacific will nevertheless be constrained by the technical superiority of U.S. forces; it will be difficult to develop bilateral training missions with Asian militaries that are not making the same investments in high-tech equipment that we are. A classic military lesson is that technological superiority does not always confer the advantages one expects. Getting militarily so far ahead of everyone else in the world creates a particular kind of loneliness that not even the best diplomats can always alleviate, because diplomacy itself is worthless if it''s not rooted in realistic assessments of comparative power.
At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy''s warships have a collective "full-load displacement" of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world''s warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy''s warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world''s thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn''t mount a rescue effort after the tsunami). The statistics go on. But as Robert Work, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, points out, at the start of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War, Athens had a great advantage over Sparta, which had no navy-but Sparta eventually emerged the victor.
China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, in late June of 1944, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Surigao Strait, in October of 1944, were the last great sea battles in American history, and are very likely to remain so. Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically, as terrorists do. In Iraq the insurgents have shown us the low end of asymmetry, with car bombs. But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art. That is the threat.
There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection-that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range-all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile''s hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda''s attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers.
With an advanced missile program the Chinese could fire hundreds of missiles at Taiwan before we could get to the island to defend it. Such a capability, combined with a new fleet of submarines (soon to be a greater undersea force than ours, in size if not in quality), might well be enough for the Chinese to coerce other countries into denying port access to U.S. ships. Most of China''s seventy current submarines are past-their-prime diesels of Russian design; but these vessels could be used to create mobile minefields in the South China, East China, and Yellow Seas, where, as the Wall Street Journal reporter David Lague has written, "uneven depths, high levels of background noise, strong currents and shifting thermal layers" would make detecting the submarines very difficult. Add to this the seventeen new stealthy diesel submarines and three nuclear ones that the Chinese navy will deploy by the end of the decade, and one can imagine that China could launch an embarrassing strike against us, or against one of our Asian allies. Then there is the whole field of ambiguous coercion-for example, a series of non-attributable cyberattacks on Taiwan''s electrical-power grids, designed to gradually demoralize the population. This isn''t science fiction; the Chinese have invested significantly in cyberwarfare training and technology. Just because the Chinese are not themselves democratic doesn''t mean they are not expert in manipulating the psychology of a democratic electorate.
What we can probably expect from China in the near future is specific demonstrations of strength-like its successful forcing down of a U.S. Navy EP-3E surveillance plane in the spring of 2001. Such tactics may represent the trend of twenty-first-century warfare better than anything now happening in Iraq -and China will have no shortage of opportunities in this arena. During one of our biennial Rim of the Pacific naval exercises the Chinese could sneak a sub under a carrier battle group and then surface it. They could deploy a moving target at sea and then hit it with a submarine- or land-based missile, demonstrating their ability to threaten not only carriers but also destroyers, frigates, and cruisers. (Think about the political effects of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, off the coast of Yemen in 2000-and then think about a future in which hitting such ships will be easier.) They could also bump up against one of our ships during one of our ongoing Freedom of Navigation exercises off the Asian coast. The bumping of a ship may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind that in a global media age such an act can have important strategic consequences. Because the world media tend to side with a spoiler rather than with a reigning superpower, the Chinese would have a built-in political advantage.
What should be our military response *****ch developments? We need to go more unconventional. Our present Navy is mainly a "blue-water" force, responsible for the peacetime management of vast oceanic spaces-no small feat, and one that enables much of the world''s free trade. The phenomenon of globalization could not occur without American ships and sailors. But increasingly what we will need is, in essence, three separate navies: one designed to maintain our ability to use the sea as a platform for offshore bombing (*****pport operations like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan); one designed for littoral Special Operations combat (against terrorist groups based in and around Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines, for example); and one designed to enhance our stealth capabilities (for patrolling the Chinese mainland and the Taiwan Strait, among other regions). All three of these navies will have a role in deflecting China, directly and indirectly, given the variety of dysfunctional Pacific Island republics that are strengthening their ties with Beijing.
Our aircraft carriers already provide what we need for that first navy; we must further develop the other two. The Special Operations navy will require lots of small vessels, among them the littoral-combat ship being developed by General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin. Approximately 400 feet long, the LCS requires only a small crew, can operate in very shallow water, can travel very fast (up to forty knots), and will deploy Special Operations Forces (namely, Navy SEALs). Another critical part of the littoral navy will be the Mark V special-operations craft. Only eighty feet long, the Mark V can travel at up to fifty knots and has a range of 600 nautical miles. With a draft of only five feet, it can deliver a SEAL platoon directly onto a beach-and at some $5 million apiece, the Pentagon can buy dozens for the price of just one F/A-22 fighter jet.
Developing the third type of navy will require real changes. Particularly as the media become more intrusive, we must acquire more stealth, so that, for example, we can send commandos ashore from a submarine to snatch or kill terrorists, or leave special operators behind to carry out missions in an area over which no government has control. Submarines have disadvantages, of course: they offer less of a bombing platform than aircraft carriers, and pound for pound are more costly. Nevertheless, they are the wave of the future, in no small measure because protecting aircraft carriers from missile attack may slowly become a pursuit of diminishing returns for us.
Our stealth navy would be best served by the ad***ion of new diesel submarines of the sort that Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Sweden already have in the water or under development-and which China will soon have too. But because of our global policing responsibilities, which will necessarily keep us in the nuclear-sub business, we''re unlikely to switch to diesel submarines. Instead we will adapt what we''ve got. Already we are refitting four Trident subs with conventional weapons, and making them able *****pport the deployment of SEAL teams and eventually, perhaps, long-range unmanned spy aircraft. The refitted Tridents can act as big mother ships for smaller assets deployed closer to the littorals.
None of this will change our need for basing rights in the Pacific, of course. The more access to bases we have, the more flexibility we''ll have-*****pport unmanned flights, to allow aerial refueling, and perhaps most important, to force the Chinese military to concentrate on a host of problems rather than just a few. Never provide your adversary with only a few problems to solve (finding and hitting a carrier, for example), because if you do, he''ll solve them.
Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam''s northern tip, rep- resents the future of U.S. strategy in the Pacific. It is the most potent platform anywhere in the world for the projection of American military power. Landing there recently in a military aircraft, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among others. Andersen''s 10,000-foot runways can handle any plane in the Air Force''s arsenal, and could accommodate the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing. The sprawl of runways and taxiways is so vast that when I arrived, I barely noticed a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make from its home port in Japan. I saw a truck filled with cruise missiles on one of the runways. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Andersen also stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force''s biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world.
Guam, which is also home to a submarine squadron and an expanding naval base, is significant because of its location. From the island an Air Force equivalent of a Marine or Army division can cover almost all of PACOM''s area of responsibility. Flying to North Korea from the West Coast of the United States takes thirteen hours; from Guam it takes four.
"This is not like Okinawa," Major General Dennis Larsen, the Air Force commander there at the time of my visit, told me. "This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory." The United States can do anything it wants here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out. Indeed, what struck me about Andersen was how great the space was for expansion to the south and west of the current perimeters. Hundreds of millions of dollars of construction funds were being allocated. This little island, close to China, has the potential to become the hub in the wheel of a new, worldwide constellation of bases that will move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia. In the event of a conflict with Taiwan, if we had a carrier battle group at Guam we would force the Chinese either to attack it in port-thereby launching an assault on sovereign U.S. territory, and instantly becoming the aggressor in the eyes of the world-or to let it sail, in which case the carrier group could arrive off the coast of Taiwan only two days later.