Let’s Talk About Sovereignty
It only counts if you’re with the good guys
General Mark Milley, the top military officer of the U.S., visited Indonesia and made a very interesting statement yesterday. He said:
“The message is the Chinese military, in the air and at sea, have become significantly more and noticeably more aggressive in this particular region.”
It’s not so much what he said, rather than when and where the General said it, in view of the Indonesian president’s two-day visit, starting today, at Beijing, in order to meet the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. President Joko Widodo will be the first foreign leader to individually meet his Chinese counterpart in two years.
General Mark Milley has issued a subtle warning to Indonesia on behalf of the U.S.
The message to the Solomon Islands was much more clear, when its secret security deal with China was announced last April.
Would. Not. Be. Tolerated.
Last time I checked, the Solomon Islands was a sovereign country. It says so in Wikipedia. And yet not only did the U.S. and Australia clearly state that they would not tolerate a naval (or any other) base in an independent country over which they have no control, but Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare of the Solomon Islands was forced to clarify that the new security pact with China would not allow it to build a military base on his country, for fear of making his citizens “targets for potential military strikes.”
I have so many questions.
Are we at war with China? Isn’t Russia being condemned for “not respecting the sovereignty of independent countries”? Is any country’s sovereignty dependent solely on allying with the “right” side after all?
Is the message of the U.S. “you can do whatever you like, as long as you don’t do anything I don’t like”?
Is any nation’s sovereignty worthless unless it bears Uncle Sam’s seal of approval?
I hate to say “I told you so”, but… scratch that. Actually I don’t hate it at all, because some of you are just not listening. This is not a secret truth that some random writer on Medium discovered. Many people, respected international relations scholars such as Professor John. J. Mearsheimer and others told you so. In fact, forget about all of them. You can check out what the Monroe Doctrine is on a government website.
The Monroe Doctrine is the best known U.S. policy toward the Western Hemisphere. Buried in a routine annual message delivered to Congress by President James Monroe in December 1823, the doctrine warns European nations that the United States would not tolerate further colonization or puppet monarchs. The doctrine was conceived to meet major concerns of the moment, but it soon became a watchword of U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere.
Imagine then, that Great Britain disregarded this warning and attempted to install a friendly regime in Mexico. After all, just a few years before President Monroe’s speech, Mexico was looking for literally any European monarch to lead it. How would the U.S. react to the blatant disregard of its warning?
This policy led the U.S. into a series of interventions, coups or even invasions in order to control the Western Hemisphere. What began as a way to stop European countries from expanding in the American continent and the islands surrounding it, later morphed into the policy of toppling any regime that might not be friendly to the U.S., sovereignty be damned.
And yet, the U.S. denies that any other nation has a similar right, even at its very border. Russia can’t have a say on Ukraine’s chosen alliances. Russia can’t stop Ukraine from joining NATO if it so wishes. Oddly, it seems that neither Indonesia, nor the Solomon Islands, nor for that matter any other country in SE Asia has a right to ally with China if they so wish.
We are being told that a Chinese base in the Solomon Islands is unacceptable, as it would be within 2,000 km (1,200 miles) off the NE Australian coast. On the basis of that distance, the sovereignty of the Solomon Islands is nonchalantly waived.
Ukraine is on Russia’s very border. 2,000 km vs 0.
The most prominent example used until now to display how the U.S. treated its own sphere of influence (the entire Western Hemisphere, no less) was too far back to be convincing to some. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened 60 years ago. The U.S. has changed, some argued. It’s Russia that is stuck in the old days of the mighty USSR.
However the newer Bush Doctrine was used as a means to expand the transformed Monroe Doctrine policy to include the Persian Gulf. The plan was to spread democracy to the Middle East, thus pacifying this historically troubled region, while populating it with useful allies. The influence of Iran and Russia was to be diminished in favour of the U.S. Nevermind that Iran is part of the Middle East itself. Nevermind that Russia had strategic interests in Syria, which it would never simply abandon.
It’s very clear that the U.S. considers not just the Western Hemisphere as its own turf, not just the Persian Gulf, but also Eastern Europe, SE Asia and the Indian Ocean.
In fact, it’s probably fair to assume that its goal is to extend its sphere of influence to the whole planet, leaving just four holes, the size of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. That’s the endgame of the policy of containment which the U.S. is again now fully pursuing, once the democratization experiment in the Middle East brought disastrous results.
Did anyone really think that these countries wouldn’t push back?
