naval base will be located between jeju island southkorea and china …
On the small, spectacular island of Jeju, off the southern tip of Korea, indigenous villagers have been putting their bodies in the way of the construction of a joint South Korean-US naval base that would be an environmental, cultural and political disaster.
If completed, the base would house more than 7,000 navy personnel, plus twenty warships, including US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers carrying the latest Aegis missiles?all aimed at China, only 300 miles away.
Since 2007, when the $970 million project was announced, the outraged Tamna people of Gangjeong village have exhausted every legal and peaceful means to stop it.
They filed lawsuits. They held a referendum in which 94 percent of the electorate voted against construction?a vote the central government ignored. They chained themselves for months to a shipping container parked on the main access road, built blockades of boulders at the construction gate and occupied coral-reef dredging cranes. They have been arrested by the hundreds. Mayor Kang Dong-Kyun, who was jailed for three months, said, “If the villagers have committed any crime, it is the crime of aspiring to pass their beautiful village to their descendants.”
Jeju is just one island in a growing constellation of geostrategic points being militarized as part of the “Pacific Pivot,” a major initiative announced late in 2011 to counter a rising China.
According to separate statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, 60 percent of US military resources are being swiftly shifted from Europe and the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region. (The United States already has 219 bases on foreign soil in the Asia-Pacific region; China has none.)
The Jeju base would augment the Aegis-equipped systems in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam and the US colony of Guam.
The Pentagon has also positioned Patriot PAC-3 missile defense systems in Taiwan, Japan (where the United States has some ninety installations, plus about 47,000 troops on Okinawa) and in South Korea (which hosts more than 100 US facilities).
The United States has begun rotating troops to Australia and has announced plans to build a drone base on that country’s remote Cocos Islands. (Also targeted is the gorgeous Palawan Island in the Philippines and the resource-rich Northern Mariana Islands, to name only two more on a long list.)
In a September whistle-stop tour of the region intended to gather more allies, Panetta said the United States hopes to station troops in New Zealand as well, though approval for that has not been granted.
Obama made his own tour just after his re-election, courting Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia and Thailand as potential trade partners and military allies in the encirclement of China.
The United States has even reopened discussions with the brutal Indonesian military, collaboration had been suspended for several years because of human rights issues, in an attempt to influence this key trading partner of China’s.
Adm. Robert Willard, former head of the US Pacific Command (PACOM), gave context to these maneuverings in September 2011.
In a speech at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, he labeled the entire Asia-Pacific region, which covers 52 percent of the earth and is home to two-thirds of its human population, as a “commons” to be “protected” by the United States.
Normally, the word “commons” refers to resources commonly shared and controlled by contiguous parties.
But Willard seemed to have in mind a massive “US commons” that extends nearly 8,000 miles, from the Indian Ocean to the west coast of North America.
Willard’s imperial rhetoric became concrete when current PACOM commander Adm. Samuel Locklear reacted to disputes between Japan and China over islands in the geostrategically vital East China Sea.
From PACOM’s Pearl Harbor headquarters in Hawaii, Locklear initiated joint military exercises involving 37,000 Japanese and 10,000 US troops.
And in October, PACOM sent an aircraft carrier strike group to Manila to show force in the Philippines’ dispute with China over the Spratly Islands.
Less well known is that PACOM activity includes overseeing the South Korean military. This condition dates back to the signing of the 1953 ROK-US Mutual Defense Treaty, which is still in effect.
In fact, US hegemony over the entire region has remained unchanged for more than half a century, locked into an anachronistic Cold War landscape marked by similar bilateral agreements with Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines and a wide scattering of island nations.
The rationale behind this “empire of bases” was once “containment” of communism. Obama’s Pacific Pivot is a turbo-charged update, not to contain communism but to contain China “economically, politically, militarily.”
China has responded by accelerating its production of armaments, including a new aircraft carrier, while courting its own regional allies “especially among countries in the Association of South-East Asian Nations, or ASEAN, like Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia, and others including Russia” in addition to reasserting control of shipping lanes in the South China Sea.
As these two global behemoths shape a new rivalry and arms race, tensions are escalating dangerously, and smaller nations and peoples are being pressured to choose sides. As one activist said, “When the elephants battle, the ants get crushed.”
The question, finally, is this: At a time of economic and ecological crisis, do Americans really want to ramp up costly and dangerous Cold War programs in hundreds of places, thousands of miles away, nearly always against the will of the people who live there and with awful environmental effects?
If not, then now’s the time for wide debate on the Pacific Pivot and all its ramifications.
Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander, The Nation