Monitoring Desk
WASHINGTON: A year after the Russia/Ukraine war, China president, Xi Jinping’s backing of Rusia’s Vladimir Putin has opened the door for the US and alliance in the Pacific to shore up sometimes frayed ties to the detriment of Beijing.
According to CNN, in the previous few months alone, Japan has pledged to double defence spending and acquire long-range arms from the United States. South Korea has acknowledged that stability in the Taiwan Strait is key to its security; the Philippines has announced fresh United States base access rights and is talking about joint patrols of the South China Sea with Japan, Australia, and the United States.
Those might be the initiatives, but they are away from the only events that have left China increasingly isolated in its backyard as it dclined to condemn the invasion of a sovereign country by its alliance in Moscow while keeping army pressure on the self-ruled island of Taiwan.
Analysts said that all these things would have likely happened without the Ukraine war, but the war and Beijing’s backing of Moscow, has helped grease the skids to get these US projects done.
Take the condition of Japan, a country limited in its post-World War-II constitution to “self-defence” forces. Now it’s going to purchase long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles from the United States, arms that could strike well inside China.
“I myself have the strong sense of urgency that Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow,” Fumio Kishida, Prime Minister of Japan told a main defence conference in Singapore the previous summer.
In December 2022, Kishida followed that up with a plan to double Tokyo’s defence spending while acquiring arms with ranges well outside Japanese territory.
“The Japanese citizens have certainly taken notice of the circumstance in Ukraine, and it has made them feel vulnerable as a nation,” said John Bradford, a senior fellow at the Singapore’s S. Rajaratman School of International Studies.
The nation that Japan feels signifficantly vulnerable to is China.
The People’s Liberation Army of China has been growing and modernizing its forces for years. On Sunday, China announced its military budget for 2023, which will rise by 7.2 percent. It marked the first time in the past decade that the army budget growth rate has risen for three consecutive years.
“The forces should intensify army training and preparedness across the board, develop latest army strategic guidance, devote greater energy to training under combat situations and make well-coordinated efforts to strengthen military work in all domains and directions,” outgoing Premier Li Keqiang said in a report on the budget.
