Saturday, February 19, 2005
They're moving in...
After the Hatian crisis last year, China sent peacekeeping forces in its first deployment of troops to the western hemisphere. This is part of a long-term strategy to "supplant U.S. influence in the region." Now it's taking the next step:
China is waging an aggressive campaign of seduction in the Caribbean, wooing countries away from relationships with rival Taiwan, opening markets for its expanding economy, [and] promising to send tourists
Right now it seems that they main goal is to erode Caribbean support for Taiwan. However, from an American standpoint, this could be rather threatening in the long term. However, the administration has no will to respond.
"China's intensified interest in the Western Hemisphere does not imply a lack of focus by the United States," Roger Noriega, the U.S. assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in a recent letter to the editor of New Jersey's Newark Star Ledger.
The United States has long stood for expansion of global trade and consolidating democracy."
But when does this commitment to trade end and when does the Monroe Doctrine kick in? I don't think we've even come close to that point yet, but it is something to consider. Perhaps we're waiting for this economic liberalization to lead to the corresponding political liberalization? In that case, I just hope we don't end up waiting too long.
Or maybe Mearsheimer is getting to me. If he were SecDef, though, I'm pretty sure that he'd be defending U.S. regional hegemony pretty strongly.
China is waging an aggressive campaign of seduction in the Caribbean, wooing countries away from relationships with rival Taiwan, opening markets for its expanding economy, [and] promising to send tourists
Right now it seems that they main goal is to erode Caribbean support for Taiwan. However, from an American standpoint, this could be rather threatening in the long term. However, the administration has no will to respond.
"China's intensified interest in the Western Hemisphere does not imply a lack of focus by the United States," Roger Noriega, the U.S. assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in a recent letter to the editor of New Jersey's Newark Star Ledger.
The United States has long stood for expansion of global trade and consolidating democracy."
But when does this commitment to trade end and when does the Monroe Doctrine kick in? I don't think we've even come close to that point yet, but it is something to consider. Perhaps we're waiting for this economic liberalization to lead to the corresponding political liberalization? In that case, I just hope we don't end up waiting too long.
Or maybe Mearsheimer is getting to me. If he were SecDef, though, I'm pretty sure that he'd be defending U.S. regional hegemony pretty strongly.
Comments:
I've always been a fan of the strategy outlined in _The Tragedy of Great Power Politics_, that the US needs to do all that it can to keep its hegemony by keeping China down. The alternative to that is world war, and in the nuclear age that possibly means world destruction...
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