Seoul, South Korea
CNN
—
This is the greatest arms race Asia has ever experienced. The nuclear powers and one rapidly developing nation, the world’s three largest economies and decades-long allies, are all vying for dominance in some of the world’s most contested land and sea areas. .
In one corner is the United States and its allies Japan and South Korea. In another corner, China and its partner Russia. And third, North Korea.
Each wants to be one step ahead, and is caught in an uncontrollable vicious circle. After all, one person’s deterrence is another’s escalation.
Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CNN: “East Asia will continue to see these dynamics swirling. There is no military, no arms control,” he said.
The Japanese leader’s visit to Washington last week only served to underscore that point. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who just met with U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday, expressed his concerns over China’s military activities in the East China Sea and ballistic missile launches over Taiwan. Landed near Japan in August.
Kishida warned Beijing to “change the international order” and said it was “absolutely necessary” for Japan, the United States and Europe to unite against China. His words came days after US and Japanese ministers ominously spoke of “the continued and accelerated expansion of (China’s) nuclear arsenal.”
But according to North Korea and China, the aggressor is Japan. They have seen the Japanese government recently commit to doubling defense spending while acquiring weapons capable of hitting targets within Chinese and North Korean territories. The purported concerns are only heightened by the announcement days ago of plans for new deployments of US Marines to Japan’s southern islands, including new mobile anti-ship missiles aimed at deterring a preemptive strike from Beijing. right.
For the United States and Japan, such moves are about deterrence. To Beijing, they are escalating.
China claims its concerns are based on historical reasons. It states that Japanese forces control vast swaths of Asia and fear Tokyo returning to World War II-era military expansionism, in which China bore the brunt.From 1937 The eight-year conflict with Japan, ending in 1945, killed about 14 million Chinese and displaced up to 100 million.
Beijing argues that plans involving Japan’s acquisition of long-range “counterattack” weapons like Tomahawk missiles that can hit bases inside China show that Tokyo is again threatening peace in East Asia. are doing.
Critics, however, suspect that China has a secondary motive to try to fill its historical wounds.
They argue that despite Beijing’s vocal rejection of U.S. and Japanese concerns about its military’s rapid growth, Japan has built up its navy and air force in areas around Japan while claiming the Senkaku Islands, uninhabited islands under Japanese control in the East China Sea, as sovereign territory.
In late December, Japan announced that it had been 334 days in 2022 that Chinese government vessels had been spotted in the contiguous waters around China’s island known as Diaoyu Dao. From December 22 to 25, the Chinese government vessel spent nearly 73 straight hours in Japanese territorial waters off the island in her longest territorial waters violation since 2012.
China is also raising the temperature by strengthening cooperation with Russia. A State Department official recently told CNN that not only has this spurred part of the US-Japan deal, but given the close ties between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. , said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “sent things into warp drive.” Relations for the Beijing Olympics.
Russia has also demonstrated its military prowess in the Pacific, including in December when it joined Chinese ships and aircraft in live-fire exercises in the East China Sea for a week.
Beijing’s aggression is particularly notable in relation to Taiwan, an autonomous island of 24 million people that the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled but claims as its own territory.
President Xi has refused to rule out the use of military force to bring the islands under Beijing’s control, and China has expressed concern over the islands, especially since then-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August. It has stepped up its offensive military activities in the vicinity. In the days following Pelosi’s visit, China conducted unprecedented military exercises around the island, fired multiple missiles near its territorial waters, and sent fighter jets to harass it.
Last week, China deployed 28 fighter jets over the Taiwan Strait, including J-10, J-11, J-16 and Su-30 fighters, H-6 bombers, three drones and early warning and reconnaissance aircraft. sent to the central line. The exercise was similar to Christmas Day, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army sent 47 of his aircraft across the Central Line.
In the midst of these developments, the resolve of the United States remains unwavering.Washington continues to approve a growing list of military sales to the island, in line with its mandate under the Taiwan Relations Act.
The story of cooperation on the Korean peninsula, a thousand miles north of Taiwan, is a faint fading light.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants an “exponential increase” in his country’s nuclear arsenal from 2023, building a fleet of “super-large” mobile rocket launchers capable of hitting any point in the south with nuclear warheads. doing. .
In a report on Thursday, South Korea’s Korea Defense Analytical Institute (KIDA) said Kim’s plans could appear in 300 weapons over the next few years.
This is a big step up from 2022, when the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated it had 20 assembled nuclear weapons and enough fissile material to reach 55.
The 300 nuclear warheads leapfrogged North Korea ahead of the long-established nuclear powers of France and Britain, trailing only Russia, the United States and China in SIPRI’s nuclear stockpile rankings.
Such possibilities have led South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol to vow to build up its own military.
In remarks reported by Yonhap News this week, Yoon said, “The key to preventing an attack is to firmly build a (military) capability that can counterattack 100 times or more than 1,000 times if attacked. It’s the most important way,” he said.
He even raised the possibility of South Korea building its own nuclear arsenal, suggesting that his country could “deploy tactical nuclear weapons or possess its own nuclear arsenal.”
The idea that the Korean peninsula has even more nuclear weapons, even if those weapons belong to allies, is something that US leaders are very alarmed about.
The development of nuclear weapons also means that South Korea will lose some of the moral advantages it has occupied for its adherence to the 1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which North Korea has repeatedly violated.
To assure its allies, the US has made it clear that Washington’s support for South Korea is “irregular” and that all US military assets are on the table to protect South Korea.
“The United States will not hesitate to honor its extended deterrence commitments to (South Korea) by using all of our defense capabilities, including nuclear, conventional and even missile defense,” said Mike Mike. Admiral Gilday said at a virtual forum at the Institute of Korean American Studies (ICAS) on Thursday.
Gilday cited the visit of a US aircraft carrier to the South Korean port of Busan last year as an example of US assistance to South Korea. But what Pyongyang sees as a threat is just one of Washington’s most powerful warships on display in North Korea’s backyard.
And the spiral continues.
Yet, as the Asian arms race accelerates, one thing that has become clear is that the United States, Japan, and South Korea will engage collectively rather than as isolated individuals.
The presence of Kishida and other Japanese leaders in Washington over the past week provided ample visual evidence of that.
In his speech at ICAS, Admiral Gilday said of the trilateral cooperation: “Hopefully[it]will convince potential adversaries that action is not worth taking.”
Patience is needed in the face of constant pressure from adversaries, he added.
“We should not be deterred and nervous about what it takes for us all to come together.”
