US-Japan building castles in the air
- By Wang Yusheng
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E-mail China Daily, May 30, 2012
Some media in the United States and Japan have been promoting the view that there is an increasingly heavy smell of gunpowder emanating from China's "rhetoric" in its recent disputes with other regional countries.
They have argued that because of this, the US and Japan should adapt to a changing situation in the Asia-Pacific region and establish a "Washington-Tokyo-plus-one" strategy to weave a "network of containment" against China.
The so-called US-Japan-plus-one strategy refers to the establishment of a kind of alliance or cooperation between Washington and Tokyo with a strategic and military arc of countries, including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and the Republic of Korea, in a bid to build a network that can keep China bottled up in the Asia-Pacific region.
Such a strategy is in essence the latest development of an "Asian version" of NATO, which the US has been trying to establish since the end of the Cold War.
In a recent military and security report, the Pentagon exaggerated the "threat" from China's military modernization. In this context, it is by no means accidental that the leaders of Japan, the ROK, Australia and New Zealand, which are all non-NATO members, were invited to attend the recent NATO summit in Chicago.
In 2011, some media in the US and Japan even proposed an "Asia-minus", China being the minus obviously, but to no avail.
But any hopes of building a Washington-Tokyo-plus-one strategy in the Asia-Pacific region are doomed to failure.
If China perseveres with its peaceful approach to resolving disputes, no country in the region is willing to put themselves at the forefront of any US-rigged confrontation with China.
At last year's summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that no single country is able to manage global affairs, pouring cold water on US President Barack Obama's commitment to maintaining the US' "No 1" status in world affairs.
Likewise, K. Shanmugam, the Singaporean foreign minister, has also explicitly said it is impossible for the US to contain China, as Washington will not acquire support from regional countries. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also said recently that a big country with China's vigor cannot be contained and that New Delhi is committed to developing cooperative relations both with Washington and Beijing.
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