The rest of the world is responding in various ways to China's economic growth, and the political and military power that flows from it.
Richard Halloran reports on the possibility of a major restructuring of the US and Japanese defense posture in the Pacific: "A Pacific forces reshuffle" (The Honolulu Advertiser, June 12).
Citing U.S. and Japanese officials, who themselves noted that "no firm decisions have been made", he reports on a potential:
...fundamental revision in the U.S. defense posture that is intended to counter a potential threat from China or to respond swiftly to contingencies elsewhere....
Among other things:
...Japanese officials are considering elevating the Self-Defense Agency to a ministry and renaming Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force as the Japanese Army and the same for the navy and air force. Shedding those postwar names would reflect Japan's emergence from its pacifist cocoon.
In South Korea, the U.S. plans to disband the Eighth Army that has been there since the Korean War of 1950-53, to relinquish command of South Korean troops to the South Koreans, and to minimize or eliminate the United Nations Command set up during the Korean War.
A smaller tactical command would oversee U.S. forces that remain in South Korea, which would be down to 25,000 from 37,000 in 2008. That may be cut further since Seoul has denied the U.S. the "strategic flexibility" to dispatch U.S. forces from South Korea to contingencies elsewhere...
Halloran systematically walks through possible changes for the U.S. Army, Marines, Air Force, and Navy.
via Simon's World and The Marmot's Hole.
Peter Gallagher, in a very interesting post on Chinese trade ("Chinese trade growth in historical, regional context"), points to a new Brookings paper on the "dangers" of an other type of U.S. response to Chinese stimulus: discriminatory trade measures. The last paragraph:
Discriminatory restrictions on U.S. trade with China protect competing domestic industries but also non-Chinese foreign suppliers with an established presence in the U.S. market. For the United States, this means other Asian trading partners, but especially countries that have negotiated free trade agreements with the United States. China’s rapid development of highly competitive exports industries and its WTO accession in 2001 have increased the payoff to having preferred access to the U.S. market. As with earlier discriminatory actions directed primarily at Japan, and with the MultiFibre Arrangement that began with discriminatory action directed at Japan and ended with a global network of managed trade, U.S. trade policy toward China is likely to have complex effects on global trade flows and may produce outcomes far different from those intended. Not surprisingly, discriminatory trade restrictions are costly in terms of overall national and global welfare. Perhaps more surprisingly, they may be ineffective or even counterproductive in protecting production and workers in the affected domestic industries.
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