One goal of American foreign policy these days is to guarantee that America has options for counterbalancing rising Chinese power in the Far East. American officials would never state such a goal in so many words, as that would be obnoxious and unnecessarily provocative. Officially, we welcome China's rise as a partner in guaranteeing global stability and prosperity, and so forth. But if there were any doubt that the United States were engaged in a competition with China for East Asian sympathies, Hillary Clinton's efforts over the past six months to align America with southeast Asian countries and Japan against Chinese maritime territorial claims should have dispelled them. Incidents like the shelling attack are quite helpful for American diplomacy, because they are blamed partly on China's failure to restrain its psychotic North Korean nephews. The damage to Chinese prestige put the Financial Times's Geoff Dyer in mind of the laments he heard from a Chinese official during Barack Obama's world tour this fall:
As Barack Obama was visiting Asia earlier this month, his friendly reception in country after country provoked a somewhat forlorn response from one Chinese official. “Look around the world, the US has dozens of well-established alliances,” he said. “We only have one.”
That one being...North Korea. Events like the shelling attack on South Korea enhance American relations with South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, and to some extent Indonesia, India, Thailand, and any other country that worries about how China will behave in its region. In other words, when North Korea goes nuts, American soft power grows. Unfortunately, that kind of American soft power is based on the availability of American hard power. Countries turn to America in the face of North Korean madness because America is the only country that can dispatch a carrier task force into the Yellow Sea.
It's all well worth reading, at least before you invest in a bomb shelter.
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