Gives RIMPAC perspective
Tuesday, June 28th, 2022Foreign Policy in Focus
From June 29 to August 4, the United States will lead 26 nations in a massive, coordinated military exercise around Hawai’i and Southern California known as Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC. The world’s largest international maritime exercise, it will involve approximately 25,000 military personnel, 38 warships, four submarines, and over 170 aircraft from countries including Japan, India, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines. This year’s RIMPAC—the largest ever—happens against a backdrop of a ballooning U.S. defense budget and calls for increased U.S. military presence in the “Indo-Pacific”—all for the purpose of containing China.
Yet often overlooked are the very real consequences of increased militarization in the Asia-Pacific, especially for frontline communities and marine ecosystems. During last year’s RIMPAC war games, for example, an Australian destroyer killed a mother fin whale and her calf in San Diego. “These military exercises can wreak havoc on whales, dolphins and other marine mammals through explosions, sonar, and ship strikes,” says Kristen Monsell of the Center Biological Diversity.
Aggressive language around U.S. power has also created a false binary paradigm of democracy versus authoritarianism (nations such as China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran) that increases tensions, militarization, and the possibility of new wars. This limited thinking obscures opportunities for cooperation on key issues that threaten our existence, such as climate change and pandemics, while diminishing the resources available for true measures of security like health, education, and housing.
That is why in the coming weeks the Feminist Peace Initiative—a collaboration between Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, MADRE, and Women Cross DMZ—in partnership with Foreign Policy in Focus will amplify the voices of feminist peacemakers and experts across the Pacific and Asia on the impact of this hyper-militarization on their communities, and to provide alternatives to great power competition between the United States and China.
We’ll hear from activists in Hawaii, where the U.S. Navy’s jet fuel storage has contaminated Oahu’s aquifers, and in Guahan (Guam), where U.S. military exercises have desecrated the ancestral lands of the Chamorro peoples. In Henoko, Okinawa, activists have been fighting the U.S. Marines to preserve coral reef and the endangered dugong, while on Jeju Island, South Korea, villagers have fought to stop the construction of a naval base where U.S. destroyer ships are docked to project power against China.
Collectively, these communities are calling for an alternative future that replaces militarized security with genuine human security.
What’s Driving U.S. Tensions with China
In March, the Biden administration affirmed that China is the nation’s top security challenge, followed by Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
According to Biden’s Asia czar, Kurt Campbell, the U.S. goal for maintaining a presence in Asia has been “selling shirts, saving souls, and spreading liberal ideas.” This has largely been achieved by diplomats, missionaries, and businessmen, but always backed by the threat of military force.
The U.S. and Chinese economies are highly intertwined, which makes a potential war not in either country’s interest. But the threat of China’s rising power is also a boon for the U.S. military industrial complex. Although the pandemic and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after the failed, 20-year “War on Terror” provided a rare opportunity to push for change in U.S. foreign policy—leading to proposed cuts in the Pentagon budget and the repeal of the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has bolstered the view in Washington that unless the United States acts, China will launch a similar invasion of Taiwan.
Across partisan lines, U.S. elite views on China are being shaped by Elbridge A. Colby, a former Trump official in the Defense Department. In his 2021 book, Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, Colby advocates for a “defensive perimeter” from Japan and South Korea through the Taiwan Strait to the Philippines. To Colby, achieving peace with China “requires firm and focused action, and acceptance of the distinct possibility of war with China,” including the possibility of giving nuclear weapons to states in the region. Colby says peace through strength is needed to prevent “reduced access to markets that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living.” To counter China’s dominance over the region and ultimately the world, Colby argues, the United States must massively invest and modernize its already lethal military and strengthen its alliances in the Indo-Pacific.
The real threat China poses is to the bottom line of U.S. multinationals like the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm where Colby’s father, Jonathan Colby, is a senior advisor and managing director. According to historian Laurence Shoup, “Asia represents a very important market for Carlyle,” with $20 billion in assets in the region, many based in Taiwan. A 2016 study in Business History showed that Carlyle faced regulatory hurdles from China during a $440 million deal to acquire Xugong, China’s largest construction equipment manufacturer, while failing as well to acquire Advanced Semiconductor Engineering in Taiwan. As a result, Carlyle concluded that a more favorable national institutional framework was needed for buyouts to succeed. “Financial capitalist corporations like Carlyle want to be able to buy and sell companies without restrictions and do what they want to profit from each company’s resources and workers,” writes Shoup. But “China does not allow such unrestricted access, putting up roadblocks to the unfettered capitalism favored by neoliberal thinkers like Colby family members.”
As a result of the focus on military primacy, the United States is mobilizing NATO and European allies against Russia and China. For the first time in 14 years, the United Kingdom is set to store U.S. nuclear weapons; South Korea, under a newly elected conservative president, is calling for the return of U.S. nuclear assets to the peninsula; and, this spring, Japan’s Parliament finalized a $8.6 billion package to cover the cost of hosting U.S. troops until 2027, reflecting the deepening of a bilateral alliance.
However, this expanding militarization only increases the chances of a dangerous conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific. The 290 U.S. military bases encircling China and provocative U.S. military exercises like RIMPAC “increase threats to Chinese security and encourages the Chinese government to respond by boosting its own military spending and activity,” says anthropologist David Vine of American University.
The Feminist Counter to the Great Power Competition
To prevent more devastating wars, the Feminist Peace Initiative seeks to transform U.S. foreign policy away from a military-first approach towards one that prioritizes genuine human security. This requires democratizing the process of shaping foreign policy by centering the voices of those most impacted by U.S. wars and militarism.
Feminism offers a powerful framework for reimagining U.S foreign policy. Consider the many gendered assumptions in the shaping of our foreign policy—for example, how traditional masculine traits like domination, competition, and aggression so often trump feminine ones like shared prosperity, mutual reliance, and cooperation. Imagine instead if policies based on the collective well-being of all people and the planet took precedence.
Addressing the most urgent threats to our existence—climate change, pandemics, and poverty—requires slashing the Pentagon budget, which currently comprises more than half of all federal discretionary spending each year, which could instead go towards Head Start, Pell grants for low-income college students, food assistance for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), and any number of other programs that advance collective well-being. This is especially urgent as the “US Department of Defense is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of oil—and, as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters,” according to the Cost of War Project.
Black, brown, and Indigenous communities in the United States and abroad most often face the brunt of violence of US militarism. The U.S. military heavily recruits in poor communities of color with the promise of signing bonuses, educational opportunities, and world travel, while making invisible the collateral damage on veterans’ lives, such as mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness, PTSD, and high rates of suicide, not to mention the trauma families endure when soldiers return home from war. These communities witness firsthand how U.S. military bases are sites where the violence of U.S. militarism manifests before a war, whether through the destruction of coral reefs, forests, farmland, and sacred sites or through sexual exploitation and violence around U.S. military bases.
We are all casualties and accessories of empire, which is why we must link across oceans and national boundaries to end this rampant militarization. As the Biden administration pursues aggressive policies to confront China’s rise, it is ever more urgent to challenge outdated definitions of security that imperil our collective futures.
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Also interesting—
Star Advertiser-Hypersonic missile test fails off Hawaii
By Jon Herskovitz and Tony Capaccio
Bloomberg News
June 30, 2022
A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii ended in failure due to a problem that took place after ignition, the Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has suffered stumbles.
It didn’t provide further details of what took place in the Wednesday test but said in a statement sent by email “the Department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.”
“An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesperson Navy Lt. Cmdr. Tim Gorman said in the statement.
“Program officials have initiated a review to determine the cause to inform future tests,” he said. “While the Department was unable to collect data on the entirety of the planned flight profile, the information gathered from this event will provide vital insights.”
The trial marked the second unsuccessful test flight of the prototype weapon known as Conventional Prompt Strike. There was a booster failure in its first flight test in October, which prevented the missile from leaving the launch pad. The Conventional Prompt Strike weapon is envisioned to be installed on Zumwalt destroyers and Virginia- class submarines.
The Army is developing a land-based version. Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. are the top contractors.
The Pentagon is feeling pressure to deploy hypersonic systems as rivals including Russia, China and North Korea are pressing ahead with the systems designed to evade interception by flying at more than five times the speed of sound and gliding on a maneuverable path to deliver nuclear warheads.
China is investing heavily in hypersonic weapons, putting one in orbit in July of last year that flew 25,000 miles in more than 100 minutes of flight, according to the top U.S. nuclear commander. In January, North Korea conducted two separate launches of hypersonic missile systems that traveled several hundred kilometers.
Russia debuted a hypersonic air-to-ground missile in its attack on Ukraine. Adversaries don’t have to meet the rigorous standards set under the U.S. defense acquisition system or face public scrutiny over delays and failure.
The slower pace of U.S. hypersonic programs prompted a number of heated exchanges when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified in April before the House Armed Services Committee.
“You recently called in the defense industrial community that were involved in the hypersonics development as to how we can speed that up,” Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, said. “We’re behind our adversaries.”
Without denying that, Austin said “we have to be careful” because “hypersonic is a capability, sir, but it’s not the only capability.” He added, “I have engaged industry” to “make sure that they’re leaning into” hypersonic development.
Dear Friends in the Pacific
During this NATO glorification week there are alternative views not being heard. Tonight hear from people in the Asia Pacific views on NATO and RIMPAC. Sorry for the late notice about this webinar tonight at 5pm AEST. I hope some of you can participate and please share widely
Register at: https://bit.ly/3xKZdcl
Annette
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| m. +61 431 597 256 | a. PO Box 573, Coorparoo QLD 4151
| w. ipan.org.au | fb. Facebook
New Zealand opposition to RIMPAC 2022
An Official Information Act request, made public by peace activist Valerie Morse, showed as well as more than 60 staff that crew the HMNZS Aotearoa, there were 34 naval personnel, nine army soldiers, and 35 others from across the force attending.
An activist group has called on the Government to withdraw the Defence Force from RIMPAC, criticizing the exercise as jeopardizing peace.
Marco de Jong, a member of the Cancel RIMPAC coalition, said New Zealand should “maintain principles distance” from the exercise and participate in alternative security arrangements for the region, such as that of the Pacific Island Forum.
“New Zealand draws its international standing from its place and influence in the Pacific. Playing American lapdog is equivalent to authoritarian apologist and jeopardises New Zealand interests.”
HILO Cancel RIMPAC protests planned
Wed. July 13, 2022, 3:30-5PM at the Hilo airport/highway intersection 3:30-5PM
Sat. July 23, 2022, 10:30- noon on Hilo Bayfront near the Kamehameha Statue
UH Hilo “Cancel RIMPAC “forum on Thursday, July 14, 2022, 5:30-7:30 PM with a range of speakers (list still in formation) The forum will also be live-streamed.
Still trying to get a schedule of RIMPAC bombing events at Pohakuloa to plan protests there. Stay tuned.
ARTICLES
Foreign Policy in Focus:
US AND NATO ESCALATE TENSIONS WITH ASIA-PACIFIC WAR GAMES
Civil society opposition to U.S. militarization of the Pacific is growing.
By Ann Wright | June 29, 2022
https://fpif.org/us-and-nato-escalate-tensions-with-asia-pacific-war-games/
While the world’s attention is focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, halfway around the world in the Pacific Ocean, U.S. and NATO confrontation with China and North Korea is increasing dramatically.
Ever since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia,” which was created in part to take the spotlight off the decision to surge troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the failed U.S. war policies in the Middle East, U.S. military naval and air presence in the Western Pacific has been steadily increasing. During the Obama administration, Washington used “freedom of navigation”—an integral part of the Law of the Seas treaty that the United States has failed to ratify—to send large numbers of U.S. naval ships into contested areas in and around the South China Sea. Under the Trump administration, freedom-of-navigation armadas sailed in an even more confrontational manner.
Now, during the Biden administration, NATO countries have joined in the armadas as British, French, and German navies have sent ships to join with U.S. aircraft carrier groups of more than 20 ships. For the first time, the UK’s only aircraft carrier, the Queen Elizabeth, sailed into the Pacific to participate in war maneuvers off the coast of China.
The Trump administration ramped up confrontation with China by sending the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat to visit Taiwan in the history of the 40-year-old U.S. policy of “One China,” according to which Washington does not recognize Taiwan diplomatically. Trump’s actions deeply angered Beijing.
The Biden administration has dramatically increased the number of high-level diplomats visiting Taiwan. Its encouragement of congressional delegations to visit has infuriated the Chinese even more. The Chinese response to U.S. actions has been to send over 50 military aircraft across the narrow Taiwan Strait to the edge of Taiwan’s air defense zone in a show of potential military action.
The confrontation over Taiwan expanded in mid-June 2022. After China claimed that the Strait does not qualify as international waters, that Beijing has sovereignty over the zones extending from both Taiwan’s and China’s shores to the middle of the Strait, the United States said it would not stop conducting military operations there.
Although the United States does not have a defense agreement with it, Taiwan has always purchased U.S. weapons and U.S. military trainers regularly visit Taiwan. President Biden has responded to media questions about the prospect of an invasion by China with statements such as “We will defend Taiwan,” statements that his advisors have had to walk back. Since 2010, the United States has announced more than $23 billion in arms sales to Taiwan. In 2022, U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan so far total $1 billion and are for Patriot missiles and howitzers.
RIMPAC War Games
Adding to the tensions in the region, NATO countries and “partners” are joining the massive Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval war exercises. Held every two years since 1971, 2022 RIMPAC will feature 38 ships from 26 countries, four submarines, 170 aircraft, and 25,000 military personnel practicing naval war maneuvers in the Hawaiian waters from June 29 to August 4. Additionally, ground units from nine countries will come ashore on the islands of Hawai’i in amphibious landings.
Forty-five percent of RIMPAC participants are either in NATO or have NATO ties. Eight of the 26 RIMPAC countries are NATO members—Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The four other participating countries are Asia-Pacific “partners” of NATO: Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. The other countries participating in 2022 RIMPAC are Brunei, Chile, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tonga. With participation of India for the first time in RIMPAC, all four members of the Quad—U.S., Japan, Australia and India—will be war gaming in the Pacific.
In previous RIMPAC war exercises, both China and Russia have been invited to participate, but neither is invited this year. Russia participated in RIMPAC for the first time in 2012, but after issues in Ukraine in 2014, Russia was not invited back, but China did receive a 2014 invitation. China had four ships in RIMPAC in 2014 and five ships in 2016. Congress passed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act in December, 2021, which included a provision that Taiwan would be invited to participate in future RIMPAC exercises, but ultimately no invitation was extended for the 2022 RIMPAC.
RIMPAC military war exercises have dangerous, intended or unintended, consequences that put the Pacific region at ever increasing risk of military confrontation and destruction. Major cities in Asia—Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, and Pyongyang— could be destroyed in an exchange of ballistic missiles. The same holds true for major U.S. cities.
Civic Opposition to RIMPAC
Many citizens of the 26 RIMPAC countries do not agree with their country’s participation in the war games, calling them provocative and dangerous for the region.
The Pacific Peace Network, with members from countries/islands across the Pacific including Guåhan, Jeju Island, South Korea, Okinawa, Japan, Philippines, Northern Mariana Islands, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Hawai’i and the United States, demand that RIMPAC be cancelled, calling the naval armada “dangerous, provocative and destructive.”
The network’s petition states that
RIMPAC dramatically contributes to the destruction of the ecology system and aggravation of the climate crisis in the Pacific region. RIMPAC war forces will blow up decommissioned ships with missiles endangering marine mammals such as humpback whales, dolphins and Hawaiian monk seals and polluting the ocean with contaminates from the vessels. Land forces will conduct ground assaults that will tear up beaches where green sea turtles come to breed.
The petition rejects “the massive expenditure of funds on war-making when humanity is suffering from lack of food, water and other life-sustaining elements. Human security is not based on military war drills, but on care for the planet and its inhabitants.”
Other citizen groups in the Pacific region are adding their voices to the call to cancel RIMPAC.
In its statement about RIMPAC, the Hawai’i-based Women’s Voices, Women Speak declared that “RIMPAC causes ecological devastation, colonial violence and gun worship. RIMPAC’s ship sinking, missile testing, and torpedo blasting have destroyed island ecosystems and disturbed sea creatures’ wellbeing. This convening of military personnel promotes toxic masculinity; sex trafficking and violence against local populations.”
In a June 14, 2022 opinion piece in the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the only state-wide newspaper in Hawai’i where the headquarters of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is located, three local activists with the Hawai’i Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines wrote:
We are one with the people of Hawaii in opposing the U.S.-led wars, for which Balikatan (US-Philippine ground war maneuvers) and RIMPAC are warmups. As it is, our governments bring together the people of Hawaii and the people of the Philippines to prepare for war, death and destruction. Military posturing in the Asia-Pacific also risks nuclear war and the potential extinction of the human species. We must instead work toward global cooperation to address the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss; to build toward peace, life and coexistence.
The “No to NATO” organization, with membership in all the NATO countries, challenges NATO war policies through public outreach by webinars and community events in the cities where NATO meetings occur, the latest being in June 2022 in Madrid, Spain.
Together, these efforts decry the preparations for war and work instead for a more peaceful world.
