As the Cold War taught us, fear and the inability to fully predict the opponent’s true intentions can lead to acts that, in the worst of times, have taken humanity to the brink of catastrophe. The Berlin Blockade, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuclear arms race between East and West are but three examples of misinterpreted signals or flawed communication that could have ended in disaster. What these three and other instances of brinkmanship have in common is that fear — fear of the unknown — guided policymakers and made them adopt strategies that, with hindsight, look like sheer folly.
Similar fears appear to be animating two countries today: China and Russia. No historical friends (despite a fleetingly shared ideology) and long haunted by border disputes, Moscow and Beijing are being pushed into the same corner by policies of the US and its regional allies. Whether their reading of Washington’s true intentions is accurate or not remains to be seen, but one thing is sure — the two are weary and they are acting on it, epitomized in no uncertain terms by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Beijing over the weekend.
Two main items have appeared on radar screens in Moscow and Beijing that have made them consider an alliance of convenience.
The first is the US-led expansion of NATO — launched soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall — that has crept ever closer to Russia’s strategic border and effectively encircled it, which, in Moscow’s view, threatens not only its sovereignty, but also its access to natural resources and political influence in Central Asia.
The second item, raised in two different theaters — Europe and Asia — is the US ballistic missile defense system, which in both instances threatens to obviate Moscow and Beijing’s nuclear deterrent. Both have long been opposed to the deployment of such systems, with Beijing seeing it as an attempt to permanently make Taiwan out of its reach.
While it will be years, if not decades, before an effective US defense system can be deployed, China and Russia have already begun to adjust their policies and respective militaries to counter what they perceive as an attempt by the US to buttress its hegemonic power and thus allow it to dictate its policies in a part of the world that, in their eyes, is more theirs than Washington’s.
Rather than sit down with its counterparts in Beijing and Moscow and find common ground on missile defense, Washington has acted in a manner that has alienated its counterparts and managed to make two unlikely allies shed their differences and join forces to counterbalance the US. Furthermore, the failure to engage in dialogue and the apprehensions that this gives rise to also threatens to compel Beijing and Moscow to expand their newfound friendship to include other countries — Iran comes to mind — that, for one reason or another, are inimical to the US and the alliances it leads.
There are, at present, no signs that dialogue between the two blocs will improve anytime soon. Secrecy, as the Cold War made crystal clear, begets secrecy. Beijing’s lack of transparency on military matters — which has earned it no small amount of criticism by Washington — has contributed to the very mistrust in Japan, Taiwan and the US, among others, that makes the deployment of a missile defense shield desirable. But this plan also gives rise to a vicious circle in Russia and China, where the unclear intentions of the US have prompted them to bolster their defenses in a bid to countervail what they perceive as a threat to their sovereignties.
Unless the principal parties sit down and talk soon, a new Cold War could soon begin in the east, with implications for all, not least Taiwan.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?” It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.” In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP)
The scuffle between Chinese embassy staffers in Fiji and a Taiwanese diplomat at a Republic of China (ROC) Double Ten National Day celebration has turned into a public relations opportunity for the government, Beijing and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Although the incident occurred on Oct. 8, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) downplayed it, only for the story to be picked up by the foreign media, forcing the ministry to respond. The public and opposition parties asked why the government had failed to remonstrate more strongly in the first instance. It is still unclear whether the ministry missed a trick
US President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, former US vice president Joe Biden, are holding their final debate tonight. In their foreign policy debate, China is sure to be a major issue of contention for the two candidates. Here are several questions the moderator should pose to the candidates: For both: In the first televised US presidential debates in 1960, then-Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy and his Republican counterpart, Richard Nixon, were asked whether the US should intervene if communist China attacked Taiwan’s outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu. Kennedy said no, unless the main island of Taiwan was also attacked.
For most of us, the colorful, otherworldly marinescapes of coral reefs are as remote as the alien landscapes of the moon. We rarely, if ever, experience these underwater wonderlands for ourselves — we are, after all, air-breathing, terrestrial creatures mostly cocooned in cities. It is easy not to notice the perilous state they are in: We have lost 50 percent of coral reefs in the past 20 years and more than 90 percent are expected to die by 2050, a presentation at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego, California, earlier this year showed. As the oceans heat further and
RSS