Eagle has landed: China better hunker down for next decade

Presidential politics, the interests of the dominant US military security sector, and the search for a useful geopolitical narrative to sustain the American exceptionalist role as world leader are converging in a hostile focus on the People’s Republic of China.

Hillary Clinton’s primary claim to executive-branch mastery is her tenure as secretary of state. By my lights, it was a disaster of hubris, opportunism, and strategic failure, particularly in the Middle East. The Trump campaign, if it is able to gather its feet underneath itself, will probably attempt to make an issue of the serial disasters of Iraq, Syria, and Libya, the floundering regime-change effort in Ukraine and, if time and interest permit, the dismal situation in Haiti and the coup in Honduras.

On the other hand, Clinton’s pivot to Asia has, by its own standards, succeeded: the US has spun local anxieties about the PRC’s strength and aggressiveness into geopolitical gold, strengthening and expanding a security regime to include enhanced participation by Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. A sign of success is the fact that the French are unnecessarily sticking their oar in the South China Sea with the proposal that European warships conduct freedom of navigation (FON) patrols in the South China Sea.

Politically and strategically, therefore, the PRC menace is low-hanging fruit: low risk, high reward, and generating a bandwagon effect. And that means the PRC menace is going to be kept front and center, both to enhance Hillary Clinton’s political stature in the presidential election, and to make sure that over the long term, in the unlikely event that the Middle East is stabilized, another global challenge is at hand to avert the threat of a budget-sapping “peace dividend.”

http://atimes.com/2016/06/eagle-has-landed-china-better-hunker-down-for-next-decade/