Yuriko Koike: Cold War With China Is Not Inevitable
[Yuriko Koike, Japan's former minister of defence and national security adviser, is chairwoman of the executive council of the Liberal Democratic Party.]
Mesmerised by China's vast military build-up, a new constellation of strategic partnerships among its neighbours, and America's revitalised commitment to Asian security, many shrewd observers suggest last year saw the first sparks of a new cold war in Asia.
But is Cold War II really inevitable?
Although appeasing China's drive for hegemony in Asia is unthinkable, every realistic effort must be made to avoid militarisation of the region's diplomacy. After all, there was nothing cold about the Cold War in Asia. First in the Chinese civil war and then in Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Indochina -- particularly Vietnam -- the Cold War raged not as an ideological-propaganda battle between rival superpowers, but in dogged, often fratricidal combat that cost millions of lives and retarded economic development as well as political democratisation.
It is this grim history that makes China's present disregard for Deng Xiaoping's maxim that China "disguise its ambition and hide its claws" so worrying for Asian leaders from New Delhi to Seoul and from Tokyo to Jakarta. From its refusal to condemn North Korea's unprovoked sinking of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, and shelling of South Korean islands, to its claims of sovereignty over various Japanese, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine archipelagos and newly conjured claims on India's province of Arunachal Pradesh, China has revealed a neo-imperial swagger.
So it should surprise no one that the concept of containment is coming to dominate Asian diplomatic discourse.
But it is wrong -- at least for now -- to think that a formal structure of alliances to contain China is needed in the way that one was required to contain the Soviet Union...
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Mesmerised by China's vast military build-up, a new constellation of strategic partnerships among its neighbours, and America's revitalised commitment to Asian security, many shrewd observers suggest last year saw the first sparks of a new cold war in Asia.
But is Cold War II really inevitable?
Although appeasing China's drive for hegemony in Asia is unthinkable, every realistic effort must be made to avoid militarisation of the region's diplomacy. After all, there was nothing cold about the Cold War in Asia. First in the Chinese civil war and then in Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Indochina -- particularly Vietnam -- the Cold War raged not as an ideological-propaganda battle between rival superpowers, but in dogged, often fratricidal combat that cost millions of lives and retarded economic development as well as political democratisation.
It is this grim history that makes China's present disregard for Deng Xiaoping's maxim that China "disguise its ambition and hide its claws" so worrying for Asian leaders from New Delhi to Seoul and from Tokyo to Jakarta. From its refusal to condemn North Korea's unprovoked sinking of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, and shelling of South Korean islands, to its claims of sovereignty over various Japanese, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine archipelagos and newly conjured claims on India's province of Arunachal Pradesh, China has revealed a neo-imperial swagger.
So it should surprise no one that the concept of containment is coming to dominate Asian diplomatic discourse.
But it is wrong -- at least for now -- to think that a formal structure of alliances to contain China is needed in the way that one was required to contain the Soviet Union...