Vol. 80/No. 23 June 13, 2016
(lead article)
Obama uses Asia trip to push alliances against China
Washington is especially worried about the Chinese government’s growing naval power, which challenges U.S. imperialism’s domination of the Pacific, a spoil of the U.S. defeat of Japan in World War II.
In the last two years Beijing has been building on reefs, shoals and islets in the South China Sea — through which a third of world maritime traffic passes — to create airfields and in at least one instance, place surface-to-air missiles. At least three times in the past seven months, U.S. warships have deliberately sailed close to these man-made islands. Just a few days before Obama’s trip to Asia, two Chinese fighter jets flew within 50 feet of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane near the islands.
On the first day of Obama’s May 23-25 visit to Vietnam, he announced he was lifting a decades-long ban on U.S. arms sales to Hanoi. Limited military collaboration between the two governments began in 2003.
Obama attempted to rewrite history in his May 24 speech at the National Convention Center in Hanoi, making it sound as if the U.S. war in Vietnam was the result of a misunderstanding.
“Cold War rivalries and fears of communism pulled us into conflict,” Obama said, leaving 3 million Vietnamese dead, as well as 58,315 U.S. soldiers.
He didn’t mention that first Paris and then Washington sent hundreds of thousands of troops to crush the Vietnamese revolutionary fight for independence and a unified nation. Washington was finally forced to pull out in 1975 due to the resistance of Vietnamese freedom fighters, as well as millions of people who took to the streets in the United States and beyond demanding, “U.S. out now!”
Over the last 20 years, as Hanoi welcomed expanded capitalist investment, annual U.S.-Vietnam trade has grown from $450 million to $45 billion, just a little behind China.
The Vietnamese government cautiously sees increased military collaboration with Washington as a protection against the growing economic and military weight of Beijing, which borders Vietnam.
While the Vietnamese government has not forgotten the long war against U.S. imperialism, it has also faced military intervention by the Chinese government. After Vietnamese troops toppled the murderous Chinese-backed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in 1979, they had to repel an invasion by Beijing in which some 10,000 Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed. In 1988 more than 60 Vietnamese sailors died during a clash with Chinese forces over control of part of the Spratly Islands.
As part of the informal agreement between Hanoi and Washington, Vietnam will likely be provided U.S. radars, sensors, surveillance planes, drones and refurbished U.S. Coast Guard patrol ships. The New York Times reports that the U.S. Navy expects to be given increased use of Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay, a recently modernized deep-sea port on the South China Sea.
Visit to Hiroshima
From Vietnam Obama flew to Japan for the Group of Seven summit. On May 27, he gave a speech in Hiroshima, the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited the city, which Washington wiped out with an atom bomb on Aug. 6, 1945.“Death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” Obama said in the opening of his speech at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, referring to the first use of a nuclear weapon in war as if it was a natural disaster.
But the atom bomb did not just fall from the sky — it was a deliberate decision by President Harry Truman to destroy a mostly civilian city. As many as 80,000 people died instantly; the final death toll is estimated at more than 135,000.
And Obama said not a word about the second, more powerful bomb that the U.S. military dropped three days later on Nagasaki that killed between 50,000 and 73,000. More than 20,000 of those killed in the two cities were Korean laborers who had been forcibly conscripted by the Japanese military.
The goal is to “ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons,” Obama claimed. He made no mention that his administration has begun a $1 trillion “modernization” of the U.S. stockpile of some 4,500 nuclear weapons. According to the New York Times, the Obama administration has dismantled fewer nukes than any U.S. president since the end of the Cold War.
Obama’s speech in Hiroshima, with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his side, also bolstered the militarization drive of Japanese imperialism.
Since coming to office in 2012 Abe has increased military spending to $41.8 billion, Japan’s largest ever; lifted a decades-long ban on weapons exports; and passed laws that for the first time since World War II allow its military to undertake overseas combat missions.
While these moves have been welcomed by the Obama administration, they have increased unease in China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, the targets of the brutal Japanese imperialist conquests and colonizations leading up to and during the second World War.
There are more U.S. troops based in Japan than anywhere else outside the United States: 39,000 on Okinawa and other U.S. bases and 14,000 on nearby ships.
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Demand US gov’t destroy its nukes!
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