New Cold War

We closed down US military bases here following the EDSA People Power Revolution after the Senate voted against the proposal of then president Corazon Aquino to renew the bases agreement. The Americans probably didn’t mind our decision that much because the Cold War with Russia and world communism was winding down.

Fast forward 35 years later and the Americans are back, not at Clark and Subic but in nine other areas in response to the growing hegemonic behavior of China flexing its muscles as a rising superpower in the region.

China unilaterally imposed their imaginary nine-dash line around the South China Sea, converting it into a Chinese lake. They claimed portions of the sea that international law designates as the exclusive economic zones of countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.

China’s threat to take over Taiwan by force has also raised political instability in the region.

China is acting like the regional bully because it can. The Economist observed that “in recent years, China has improved the effectiveness of its arms to such an extent that, in some areas, it has already matched or surpassed America.” China invested heavily in its military while the US was distracted by conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last month, the Pentagon released its 24th China Military Power Report  that reveals new details of the most dramatic military buildup since World War II. Chinese missile attacks could close the runways and taxiways at US forward air bases in Japan, Guam and other Pacific locations. China’s intercontinental ballistic missiles can reach the continental United States.

China has been courting many Pacific Island nations like the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Kiribati to spread its control in the area. The US belatedly started to rebuild alliances with Australia, Japan and the Philippines to catch up.

Last week, National Security Adviser Eduardo Año announced that the US military’s Typhon launchers will stay in the Philippines for now. The Typhon launchers can fire multi-purpose missiles up to thousands of kilometers, capable of hitting targets in both China and Russia from the Philippines. The SM-6 missiles it carries can strike air or sea targets more than 200 km (165 miles) away.

The first Multi-Domain Task Force successfully deployed the Mid-Range Capability missile system to Northern Luzon on April 11, 2024, as part of Exercise Salaknib 24. China expectedly protested.

More than three out of every four Filipinos, or 76 percent, consider China to be the biggest threat to the country, which explains why the US weapons deployment seems to have general acceptance. The same survey also found that 91 percent of respondents said they “distrust” China, up from 58 percent at the start of the Marcos administration.

Public attitudes toward China in the Philippines have dipped considerably as monster Chinese Coast Guard vessels continue to harass Filipino fishermen just 100 kilometers off the Zambales coast. The nonstop Chinese bullying forced the Philippines to strengthen its military alliance with the US and Japan. That seems to mark the start of a second Cold War.

But China will be more formidable than Russia was during the first Cold War. First of all, China is an economic powerhouse that has poured resources on making a world class military with a blue water navy able to go anywhere in the world. Indeed, China now possesses the biggest navy in the world by number of hulls, the US Defense Department confirmed in its recent report on Beijing’s armed forces.

In recent months, China was also flexing its muscles as it undertook the largest military exercises in the waters around Taiwan in almost three decades. Additionally, Americans learned that China was behind some  major recent hacks of the Treasury Department and several of the country’s largest telecommunications companies.

Chinese owned TikTok has an algorithm that is being used to directly feed disinformation and propaganda to the minds of 170 million Americans. This month in Foreign Affairs, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson suggested America’s second Cold War was already at least five years old.

Even Hollywood has long been kowtowing to China, avoiding producing anything that will displease the Chinese leadership and be banned in the lucrative Chinese entertainment market.

An opinion piece at the New York Times last week observed that “part of how Americans made sense of their rivalry with the Soviet Union was through popular culture –  movies and television and novels that dramatized and personalized the conflict…This time, there has been essentially none of that – no real effort in Hollywood to make use of high-stakes global conflict…

“Not only is there no “Hunt for Red October”; there is also no “Dr. Strangelove” or real heir to John le Carré…if there is a Cold War on, you wouldn’t know it from simply streaming movies or television… Simply put, the stuff we watch these days is overwhelmingly produced by large corporations far too dependent on China, in one form or another, to risk offending its audiences or its leaders…

“Some of the most conspicuous instances of capitulation have become, if often small-stakes: a Taiwanese flag on Tom Cruise’s jacket was removed from a trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick”; the Chinese villains in the 2012 remake of “Red Dawn” became North Korean instead. Even the NBA has been forced to bend the knee to the Chinese government, and conflict over China coverage reportedly helped end Jon Stewart’s show on Apple TV+.”

Interesting to see how Trump will carry out his threat to impose debilitating tariffs on China. Indeed, will Trump be able to deal with China to make America great or will Xi Jinping be able to tickle Trump’s huge but delicate ego with enough platitudes and a royal red-carpet welcome to Beijing to make him love China all over again? In 2020, Trump said in Davos that he and Xi love each other.

Trump’s America First meets China’s Everything Under the Heavens. These are interesting times.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him X @boochanco.