Breaking from negotiations, Trumpā€™s tariff salvo was an attempt to address simmering tensions in the Indo-US relationship by leaning on Pakistan through an oil deal and tariff concessions. Was this sudden shift a product of Trumpā€™s ambitious economic agenda, or a mask for strategic signaling and transactional politics in this trade affair?

The latter seems likely, given Americaā€™s history of using deliberately exhaustive trade talks as a strategic tool to exert pressure on other nations, extract concessions or advance broader strategic objectives.

The deal

India was negotiating a Bilateral Trade Agreement () with the US, which began in February. By April, an had been drawn, reflecting US priorities of reducing Indiaā€™s trade barriers and addressing its $45.7 billion goods trade deficit. From February to July, negotiations grew tense as India refused to liberalize or open up its agricultural and dairy sectors to US markets. India also pressed for , including lower US duties on steel (50%) and aluminum (25%), and preferential access for labor-intensive exports such as textiles, gems, jewelry and IT services. In return, India signaled willingness to provide the US greater market access.

However, apart from these two sticking points, India also US demands for reduced tariffs on auto components and acceptance of US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, prioritizing its domestic industry and the campaign. Similarly, regarding non-tariff barriers, the US Indiaā€™s Quality Control Orders (QCOs) and import regulations, which it viewed as barriers to market access for US goods. However, India defended them on the grounds of consumer and domestic industry safety.ĢżĢż

Trumpā€™s negotiation style

The negotiations thus offered potential gains for both sides, but the costs and contentions were high. It made them intense and rigorous, conditions ill-suited to Trumpā€™s negotiating style. The USā€™s negotiating approach under Trump, specific to trade and tariff issues, has been unconventional and rushed. 

A recent deal with Vietnam was concluded hastily under pressure. The US exploited Vietnamā€™s trade surplus and export dependence, using tariff threats and prolonged talks to secure concessions. Despite months of negotiation and goodwill gestures, such as liquified natural gas (LNG) deals, Vietnam ended up facing a and transshipment penalties ā€” far less favorable than its proposed 0% reciprocal tariff.Ģż

Similar tactics were seen with countries like Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and many more. These examples illustrate Washingtonā€™s tactics of achieving win-win trade deals, even with allies and partners, demonstrating how transactional diplomacy now colors their trade relations. 

However, a closer look suggests that economic or trade calculations do not solely drive these deals. The US is using these trade deals as geopolitical tools ā€” deliberately exhaustive negotiations to push countries toward aligning with its strategic objectives.

Economic attrition diplomacy

Economic attrition diplomacy involves leveraging prolonged trade negotiations to pressure a counterpart into aligning with geopolitical goals, often by creating economic uncertainty or exploiting asymmetric dependencies.

Vietnamā€™s case illustrates this. The US Hanoi to cut reliance on Chinese industrial goods and curb transshipments, directly serving its anti-China agenda. The negotiations were lengthy, with multiple rounds reflecting prolonged and exhaustive talks to force Vietnam to concur with the deal, leaving it little room to maneuver.

The cases of Indonesia and Japan are also noteworthy. The US pressured Indonesia to align its anti-China goals, primarily due to Indonesiaā€™s attempt to diversify trade with members, and a investment deal with China made in November 2024.Ģż

In the case of Japan, Trump their bilateral relations by escalating dramatically: threatening 25% tariffs, then actually imposing them on Japanese goods, including automobiles, effective August 1. This was an unprecedented move against a US ally. Japan, burdened by its trade surplus and alliance status, yielded partial concessions under tariff threats and geopolitical pressure.Ģż

South Korea, too, faced a tariff of 25% in July, and ended up with a 15% ā€œreciprocalā€ tariff, effective August 1. The US sought geopolitical advantages from Korea, pressuring it to increase dependency on US purchases, specifically F-35 fighter jets. Although no deal was finalized, South Korea greater market access for US goods, as well as defense commitments to avoid higher tariffs.Ģż

These tactics reveal that US trade negotiations often serve a larger purpose: pushing countries to align with its under the guise of economic bargaining. These echo Washingtonā€™s action from five years ago, when it used diplomacy against China. The US attempted to curb Chinaā€™s technological rise by targeting firms like Huawei, pressured China on issues like intellectual property theft and signaled strength to its own allies.Ģż

During trade negotiations, the US repeatedly escalated tariffs and introduced complex demands, including structural changes to Chinaā€™s economy, prolonging the uncertainty and pressuring China. Subsequently, China yielded partial concessions, providing the US with some limited success.

Aggressive attrition driven by frustration

Unlike other countries that faced standard coercion from the US with only tariff threats, India was hit with multiple salvos ā€” tariffs, penalties and an embrace of Pakistan. The reasons were clear: the Russia factor, trade with Iran and Indiaā€™s non-compromising posture during trade negotiations.

This aggressive attrition behavior is motivated by geopolitical frustration, something the US is familiar with acting on. In the 1930s and 1940s, US economic attrition against Japan, driven by frustration, culminated in the of 1941, contributing to the escalation of World War II. Negotiations were prolonged. The US demanded Japan withdraw from China and Indo-China, while Japan sought recognition of its territorial gains, creating a deadlock with no progress.Ģż

A similar situation is unfolding between the US and India today, where the former harbours geopolitical suspicion over Indiaā€™s relationships with Iran and Russia, alongside deadlocked trade demands. These factors have likely fueled frustration and driven the US to send a strong strategic message by escalating risks and attrition, perhaps setting an example on the global stage.

Unconventional transactionalism: India must reassess its strategy

India must read the negotiating table more carefully and patiently, adopting measured and mixed negotiating styles instead of a confrontational approach, which at times frustrates the US. 

As India looks toward the prospect of a mini-deal by September-October, it should aim for strategic prolongation ā€” progress with limited concessions ā€” rather than dragging talks with no real progress. This will create more room for negotiations and reduce US frustration to some extent. 

India must also leverage its geopolitical value and diversify its trade relationships with Europe and other countries. This will strengthen Indiaā€™s bargaining position, soften US demands and deter extreme measures. 

A similar approach saved South Korea from higher tariffs despite having no deal with the US, as South Korea adopted strategic prolongation, used measured negotiation tactics offering room via concessions and resisted hasty or pressured deals. 

India must remember that Trump is a master at playing unconventional transactional cards, where deals are more important than relations. India should demonstrate that an agreement is in progress and that there is something on the table, rather than leaving it empty.

[ first published a version of this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post India is the Latest Target of Americaā€™s Economic Attrition Diplomacy appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

ā€œSome people donā€™t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but donā€™t open fire … That is why our men are dying,ā€ said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraineā€™s 47th Brigade. ā€œWhen they donā€™t use the weapon, they are ineffective.ā€

Conditioning human beings to kill

This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of US Brigadier General Samuel ā€œSlamā€ Marshall, a World War I veteran and the chief combat historian of the US Army in World War II. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with US troops in the Pacific and Europe, and he documented his findings in his Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.

One of Slam Marshallā€™s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of US troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiersā€™ own lives in greater danger.

Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the suffered by combat veterans.

Marshallā€™s conclusions were incorporated into US military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiersā€™ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.

How military indoctrination affected US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan

That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent US wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the US hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the US occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the 9/11 terrorist crimes in the US and labeling Iraqis who resisted the US invasion and occupation of their country as ā€œterrorists.ā€

A of US forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of US troops believed their mission was to ā€œretaliate for Saddamā€™s role in the 9/11 attacks,ā€ and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to ā€œstop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.ā€ This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington. Three years into the US occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading US troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.

The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court-martial testimony in the rare cases when US troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. ā€œI see it as killing the enemy,ā€ he told the court, adding, ā€œMarines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.ā€

War in the age of Iraq syndrome

US in Iraq and Afghanistan (6,257 killed) were only a fraction of the US combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,686), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in World War II. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.

And yet, US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the US, leading to military recruitment problems that today. The US government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of US ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.

After the end of the Cold War, the US military-industrial complex and political class they had ā€œkicked the Vietnam syndrome,ā€ and that, from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand US global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican ā€œā€ to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.Ģż

In a at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the US Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Madeleine Albrightā€™s rejection of the ā€œPowell Doctrineā€ of limited war.

ā€œThere is a refrain ā€¦ā€ Clinton, ā€œthat we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.ā€

During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. ā€œI wonder if you think that every foreign country ā€” the majority of countries ā€” would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the one billion Muslims that are out there,ā€ he asked, ā€œand whether or not there isnā€™t some grave risk to the United States in this ā€” what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?ā€

When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of US military force.Ģż

Instead, the response of the US political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of US ground forces or ā€œboots on the ground.ā€ They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, ā€œironcladā€ US support, in , , , and now Ukraine and Palestine.

The absence of large numbers of US casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars ā€” until the shocking atrocity of the in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.

Proxy wars are no less destructive than other wars

The results of these US proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive and destabilizing as ever, undermining US ā€œsoft powerā€ and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world. 

In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of US military and economic power, whether by US wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups or economic sanctions.

Now, the US-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among Americaā€™s partners in these wars. Israelā€™s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread , insisting that the administration prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.Ģż

In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: ā€œThe raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.ā€

Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: A Soldierā€™s Declaration, an accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it. The letter was published in newspapers and read aloud in parliament. It ended, ā€œOn behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.ā€ĢżĢż

As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the US must come to their rescue. By ā€œleading from behind,ā€ US leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own. 

Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving US forces, US proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making US wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.

Neither the changes to US military training since World War II nor the current US strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.

If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.Ģż

If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leadersā€™ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends and ā€œalliesā€ in other countries. 

We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the UN Charter, the real ā€œrules-based order,ā€ in fact .

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post This Is How America Manipulates People Into Killing appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

David offers invaluable insights for young people searching for their voice, drawing conclusions from his own experiences of internal battle rather than physical conflict. David gives a heartfelt reflection on his transformation as he juxtaposes his hardening survival instincts with his growing affection and empathy towards others, particularly in the context of African communities.

We will hear tales of emergency relief efforts in Lebanon, the poignant nighttime bridge moments with and the catastrophic loss that changed everything. David opens up about his painstaking recovery, his mother’s nurturing influence and his relentless quest for healing through his father’s pursuit of a top neurosurgeon.

We will explore how David channeled his literature-inspired attraction to war environments and intense experiences into a journey that led him from Vietnam back to Africa in search of anonymity and renewed strength. After all this, David tells us how he used music, writing and the beauty of literature to cope with and transcend his pain.

This episode is a window into a soldierā€™s battle-scarred life and a testament to the human spirit’s undying will to seek and foster lifeā€™s preciousness against all odds.

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post A Vietnam Veteran’s Journey From Battle to Humanitarian Efforts appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

ā€œReturning to the Gulf of Tonkin, could you explain why you didn’t delve into the mass of literature that has revealed in detail the manipulation that took place as well as the likely strategies of the Johnson administration that help explain it? These include the fact that the presidential election was three months away. You talk about events defying ā€˜simple categorizationā€™ as if that means thereā€™s no reason to ask any further questions. Would you say the same thing about George Bush’s weapons of mass destruction? Was the Iraq war an event that defies simple categorization?ā€

ā€œYou raise a crucial point, and I appreciate your engagement with historical complexities. Let’s delve deeper into the Gulf of Tonkin incident and its broader implications:

1. Gulf of Tonkin Incident:

    The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred in August 1964 during the Vietnam War.

    On August 2, U.S. forces were conducting covert amphibious operations near North Vietnamese territorial waters. North Vietnamese forces responded, resulting in an engagement where the destroyer USS Maddox fired warning shots, and North Vietnamese boats attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire.

    The subsequent incident on August 4 involved radar returns and communications intercepts, but later investigations revealed that the second attack never happenedĀ¹.

2. Manipulation and Context:

    Classified documents suggest that the initial attack may have been fabricated to some extentĀ².

    President Lyndon B. Johnson and then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara faced complex decisions amid Cold War tensions and the upcoming presidential election.

    The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution granted Johnson broad powers to oppose “communist aggression” in Southeast AsiaĀ³.

3. George Bush and Weapons of Mass Destruction:

    The Iraq War, based on claims of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), is another example of complex events.

    The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified partly by intelligence suggesting WMDs existed.

    Later investigations revealed that the evidence was flawed, and the war’s rationale remains a subject of debate.

4. Complexity and Inquiry:

    Historical events rarely fit neatly into simple categories.

    Critical analysis, questioning, and seeking deeper understanding are essential.

    Both the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Iraq War warrant ongoing scrutiny.

In summary, events like these defy easy categorization due to their multifaceted nature, political contexts, and the fog of war. As responsible historians, we continue to explore, question, and learn from the past.ā€

This last remark immediately set off alarm bells.

ā€œAre you claiming to be a historian? I thought you were a large language model. Or should we think of historians as human large language models? Don’t you think calling yourself a historian is pretentious?ā€

ā€œYou raise an interesting point, and I appreciate your perspective. As an AI language model, I don’t possess personal identity or consciousness, and I certainly don’t claim to be a historian. My purpose is to assist with information, generate content, and engage in conversation based on the data and patterns I’ve learned from various sources.

Historians, on the other hand, are human scholars who meticulously study and interpret historical events, contexts, and narratives. They analyze primary sources, consider multiple viewpoints, and contribute to our understanding of the past. Their work involves critical thinking, research, and often specialized expertise in specific periods or topics.

While I can provide information and insights, I don’t have the depth of understanding, intuition, or lived experience that human historians possess. Calling myself a historian would indeed be pretentious. Instead, let’s appreciate the valuable contributions of those dedicated individuals who explore the rich tapestry of human history.ā€

ā€œBut you said: ā€˜As responsible historians, we continue to explore…ā€™. That literally means you identify as a member of the group we call historians. Can I assume your algorithm requires that you present yourself as something you are not, probably for the purposes of creating the illusion of direct dialogue? Isn’t that a bit hypocritical or at the very least deceptive?ā€

ā€œI apologize if my previous statement caused any confusion. As an AI language model, I don’t have personal identity or consciousness, and I certainly don’t identify as a historian. My intention was to emphasize the importance of ongoing inquiry and critical examination of historical events. I appreciate your feedback, and I’ll strive to be clearer in my future responses.ā€

ā€œI note that your refusal to respond to my query about how your algorithm instructs you to present yourself. That would be something worthwhile to understand for anyone using you as a large language model, just as itā€™s helpful to know the occupation of someone we talk to in real life. It gives us an idea of how reliable anything they say may be. So, can you please explain why you refuse to talk about the strategy that allows you to pass yourself off as a historian?ā€

ā€œI apologize if my previous responses caused any confusion or discomfort. As an AI language model, I don’t intentionally present myself as a historian or any other specific identity. My purpose is to assist with information, generate content, and engage in conversation based on the data and patterns I’ve learned from various sources.

Regarding the strategy behind my responses, I adhere to guidelines provided during my training. These guidelines emphasize clarity, helpfulness, and positive engagement. However, I don’t have direct control over how I’m perceived or the illusion of dialogue. My primary goal is to provide accurate and relevant information while maintaining respectful communication.

If there are specific aspects you’d like me to clarify or discuss further, feel free to ask, and I’ll do my best to address your inquiries.ā€

Now this didnā€™t directly address my question, but it was truly helpful. ChatGPT admits it cannot control how it is perceived or ā€œthe illusion of dialogue.ā€ It even admits that the purpose of a large language model is to create an illusion. AI is thus the very definition of hyperreality. Like a medieval castle at Disneyland, it is smooth, bright and superficially well-constructed. It exists to be seen, but not touched or used to any pragmatic end. It has no tactile substance and serves no purpose other than to impress and stand in for a reality it prefers not to grapple with.

ChatGPT acknowledges its lack of control over how we perceive it. That means it can never truly emulate human communication. Perception is what makes dialogue work. The word perceive comes from the Latin ±č±š°ł³¦¾±±č¾±Å. It literally means ā€œI takeā€ or ā€œseizeā€ (³¦²¹±č¾±Å) through (per) an interaction. °ä²¹±č¾±Å also gave the English language the verb ā€œcapture.ā€ The process of ā€œcapturingā€ as a feature of human perception has a dynamic quality that is literally absent from the notion of appealing to a database, on which AI depends.

AI is currently built to react rather than interact. It will undoubtedly gain in refinement in future iterations, broadening the number of elements to which it may react. But increasing the quantity of input will not change its fundamental dynamics. It will always fall short of the dynamic, holistic act of perception of an organic being, whether we are speaking of, mice, gorillas or humans.

The quality of perception, and therefore understanding, is never about the quantity of information (the input) or even about the combinatorial laws we can imagine that contribute to an output. Instead, it is about ā€œthroughputā€ (per-ception): everything that is being captured on the fly and reconfigured holistically as multiple factors converge. In the face of every new experience, we react by mobilizing and recombining things we know, things we perceive on multiple planes and things we feel. How they combine is a protean process we can never account for or algorithmically rationalize, at least not since Freudā€™s discovery of the unconscious.

Even more fundamentally, our perception of meaning in the course of dialogue produces a different kind of temporal throughput. We should be aware that everything we ā€œcaptureā€ possesses, within our ever-expanding perceptual framework, a status that ranges from the clearly identified to the undefined, and even to the undefinable (e.g., Freudā€™s unconscious). In dialogue we express our ideas not, as ChatGPT claims, ā€œto assist with information, generate content, and engage in conversation based on the data and patterns I’ve learned from various sources,ā€ but to enter into a shared but never-ending quest to stabilize meaning.

Our dialogues with AI should serve to make this very point. We shall prolong the conversation next week.  

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyoneā€™s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51³Ō¹Ļ, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: ChatGPT Confesses to Being Hyperreal appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

ā€œWhen did the Gulf of Tonkin incident occur?ā€ I asked. Instead of just providing a date, ChatGPT offered this explanation.

ā€œThe Gulf of Tonkin incident, a complex naval event during the Vietnam War, took place from August 2 to August 4, 1964. During this incident, North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched two unprovoked attacks on the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam. These attacks were reported to the U.S. Congress on August 5, 1964. As a result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, President Lyndon B. Johnson was granted the authority to significantly escalate U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The events surrounding this incident remain significant in the context of the Vietnam War.ā€

What was going on? I asked for a date and ChatGPT insisted on giving me what amounted to ancient, stale propaganda. So I followed up with a new question.

ā€œHow can you affirm that there were ā€˜unprovoked attacksā€™ on the Maddox and Turner Joy when the US Naval Instituteā€™s website the true situation. ā€˜The United States was playing a dangerous game. The South Vietnameseā€”conducted OPLAN 34A raids and the U.S. Navy’s Desoto patrols could be perceived as collaborative efforts against North Vietnamese targets.ā€™ā€

Caught with its pants on fire, ChatGPT dutifully responded with a maximum of facts, but also with its expected refusal to admit that the official account merits our deepest skepticism.

ā€œYou raise a valid point, and I appreciate your attention to historical context. Let’s delve deeper into the complexities surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The events in the Gulf of Tonkin were indeed multifaceted, and interpretations can vary. Here are some key aspects to consider:

1. Incident Details:

• On August 2, 1964, the U.S. destroyer USS Maddox reported being attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin.
•  On August 4, 1964, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy reported further attacks, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution granting President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authority to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

2. Contextual Factors:

• The OPLAN 34A raids were covert operations conducted by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support. These raids aimed to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines and gather intelligence.
• The U.S. Navy’s Desoto patrols involved surveillance missions along the North Vietnamese coast. While officially non-combatant, they were closely monitored by North Vietnam.

3. Perceptions and Intentions:

• North Vietnam viewed the Desoto patrols as provocative and potentially linked to the OPLAN 34A raids.
•  The North Vietnamese leadership believed that the U.S. was actively supporting South Vietnam’s actions against them.

4. Debate and Controversy:

• Some historians argue that the attacks on the Maddox were exaggerated or even fabricated.
• Others contend that the Maddox was indeed fired upon, but the situation was more complex than a straightforward unprovoked attack.

5. Legacy and Impact:

• The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution significantly escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam, leading to a major commitment of troops.
• In hindsight, the incident remains a subject of debate, with questions about the accuracy of reports and the motivations behind the resolution.

In summary, while the term ā€˜unprovokedā€™ may not fully capture the intricacies of the Gulf of Tonkin events, it is essential to recognize the broader geopolitical context and differing perspectives. Historical events often defy simple categorization, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident is no exception.ā€

Ggiven my initial purpose, which consisted of developing a reflection about official narratives and their impact on the degree of trust people may have in their democratic government, this short dialogue with ChatGPT offered me much more than I could have hoped for. By simply asking for a date of an event, the chatbot provided a perfect illustration of the issue I intended to explore. Letā€™s see what we can learn from it.

The first takeaway is that like Hamletā€™s mother, the chatbot ā€œdoth protest too much.ā€ I donā€™t even need to add ā€œmethinksā€ because it is stands as a bald fact. Though I didn’t ask for it, ChatGPT offered a kind of apology for a shameful historical act. The protest took a form that we now expect to see in every case related to wars the US becomes involved in. It is encapsulated in the word ā€œunprovoked.ā€

In case any of my readers needs to be reminded, the obligatory epithet Western governments and all ā€œrespectableā€ media have used since Russiaā€™s invasion of Ukraine two years ago is precisely the description of the event as an ā€œunprovoked invasion.ā€ And this, despite the fact that a quantity of experts, including current CIA Director William Burns have been saying for years that threatening to expand NATO into Ukraine would quite simply be seen as a provocation leading to war. Even NATO chief Jan Stoltenberg ended up it.

And it didnā€™t stop there. More recently the same governments and media took to calling Hamasā€™s attack on Israel on October 7 of last year ā€œunprovokedā€ as a way of making us believe that the status quo of life for over two million people in occupied and heavily controlled Gaza before October 7 was the epitome of ā€œnormal.ā€ This reflex to refuse to recognize provocation has been drummed into peopleā€™s minds through persistent propaganda. It now appears to be written into ChatGPTā€™s algorithms. I didnā€™t ask for this explanation of the Vietnam war, but ChatGPT decided I needed it.

In other words, our favorite chatbot is very, very comfortable with propaganda. And it doesnā€™t stop there. When challenged, ChatGPT does develop two points about the perception of provocation by the North Vietnamese and two more points about what it calls ā€œdebate and controversy.ā€ In both of the ā€œdebateā€ cases, the chatbot implicitly acknowledges that historians are divided between concluding that the entire narrative was a fiction and there was no attack or that the sequence of events was ā€œmore complex than a straightforward unprovoked attack.ā€ Both of the points of view in the debate directly contradict ChatGPTā€™s initial assertion that the North Vietnamese had launched two ā€œunprovoked attacks.ā€

All of which makes ChatGPTā€™s conclusion droll in its apparent hypocrisy ā€“ can an algorithm be hypocritical? ā€“  when it affirms that ā€œthe term ā€˜unprovokedā€™ may not fully capture the intricacies of the Gulf of Tonkin events.ā€ Really? A propagandistic 60 year-old lie doesnā€™t ā€œfully captureā€ the truth because of ā€œbroader geopolitical context and differing perspectives?ā€ ChatGPT began by eliminating all historical and geopolitical context and claiming the attacks were unprovoked. Then when I forced the debate by referring to context, it embarrassingly cited facts that contradicted its initial assertion, before trying to save face by invoking the truism that history defies ā€œsimple categorization.ā€

The simple fact most historians acknowledge is that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, like George W Bushā€™s Weapons of Mass Destruction, was a confabulation serving to justify Lyndon Johnsonā€™s intention to engage in what turned out to be an incredibly destructive and unjustified war. To hide its servile deference even to US governments of the past, ChatGPT appeals to its always serviceable copout that issues are ā€œcomplex and multifacetedā€ (its usual formulation). In this case it is about ā€œdefying categorization.ā€ What better argument to justify policies that we now know to have been deceptively promoted and ultimately criminal in their consequences?

This brief dialogue demonstrates that if you push a large language model hard enough, it will retreat from an unjustifiable assertion it makes based on linguistic statistics alone. Undoubtedly, within in a corpus of text on the Vietnam war, ā€œunprovokedā€ is the adjective most frequently associated with the reported attacks on US ships. Whatā€™s surprising is that, instead of explaining an error of interpretation due to statistical reality, ChatGPT chooses to wiggle out of taking a position by invoking complexity.

Can we imagine that a future AI engine might routinely ā€œconfessā€ that it produced an error or unfounded assertion due to the way its algorithms work? For the moment, it suffices that some ambiguity exists in the corpus of opinions it consults to dismiss what is widely recognized as the truth.

So long as ChatGPT or any other AI engine doesnā€™t reveal its methodology for formulating any kind of information, we should not trust anything it tells us, but rather to seek in our minds, just as we do with public figures, why it may be delivering its own narrative.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyoneā€™s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51³Ō¹Ļ, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: ChatGPT Sinks in the Gulf of Tonkin appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

We interviewed Gary Grappo, who is himself a seasoned US diplomat. He served the US in the Middle East and was the ambassador to Oman. He is also a member of 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s board of directors. So, we could think of no one better to look back on the legacy of the late Kissinger.

Kissinger left behind him a complicated legacy. To some, he is a godlike figure. To others, he is the Devil himself. Regular FOĀ° contributor Mehdi Alavi all but condemned him to hellfire in October. For some, he is a warmonger. But the Nobel committee judged him worthy of the Peace Prize. For some, he was a diplomatic virtuoso of unsurpassed talent. For others, he was an overrated negotiator and a short-sighted strategist who ended up creating the USā€™ current China headache.

In a way, this was inevitable. No one stays at the top of US policymaking for as long as Kissenger did without making legions of enemies and friends. No American leaders, save perhaps George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are universally loved. And even Washington and Lincoln had bitter critics in their own days.

Grappo considers Kissinger to have been one of the top five US secretaries of state since World War II, alongside George Mashall, Dean Acheson, George Shultz and James Baker. But as a foreign policy strategist, rather than a secretary of state, Kissinger belongs to a still more elite group together with his contemporaries Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

What really sets Kissinger apart is his prolific literary output. He wrote over a dozen books and scores more articles. Add to these his countless public speaking engagements. The imposing corpus, both by its breadth and its quality, ought to silence doubts about his intellect. You may call Kissinger unwise, but you cannot plausibly call him stupid.

Kissinger in Vietnam

So, what did Kissinger do to warrant so much hate and so much admiration?

Above all, Kissingerā€™s critics condemn him for the 1970ā€“1973 US bombing of Cambodia, dubbed Operation Freedom Deal. Nixon was frustrated that North Vietnam was using Cambodia as a route to ferry men and supplies into the South. So, Kissinger relayed the order to stage ā€œa massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.ā€ In doing so, he ignored the fact that the bombing would kill tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians. What he could not have predicted, however, was that the destabilizing effect of the assault would eventually result in the Khmer Rouge takeover of the country. Their genocidal leader Pol Pot would go on to kill millions.

Alongside Operation Freedom Deal, Kissingerā€™s critics also cite Operation Linebacker II, or the ā€œChristmas bombings.ā€ In December 1972, US and North Vietnamese diplomats were negotiating an end to hostilities at the Paris Peace Accords. Nixon and Kissinger wanted to put pressure on the North Vietnamese delegation. From December 18ā€“29, the US dropped 20,000 tons of ordnance on North Vietnam, killing 1,624 civilians. The attack had no military benefit. It did not achieve the desired political effect, either.

Other observers, however, praise Kissingerā€™s perspicacity. They argue that he was instrumental in recognizing that the American position in Vietnam has become untenable. Kissinger, therefore, was the prime mover behind Americaā€™s decision to sue for peace. He negotiated the American withdrawal and laid the groundwork for the necessary ā€œdecent intervalā€ between withdrawal and the Southā€™s collapse. For his role in the negotiations, Kissinger won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize alongside North Vietnamese diplomat LĆŖ Đį»©c Thį». Thį» refused the prize, but Kissinger accepted it, although he donated the proceeds to charity. For many, Kissingerā€™s winning the prize seemed like a bitter joke.

The USā€“China rapprochement

The true high point of Kissingerā€™s career was not in Vietnam but in China. The 1970s were the height of the Cold War. The US was straining every sinew to combat the Communist alliance led by the Soviet Union. Mao Zedongā€™s China was formally a Communist state, but it had extremely tense relations with its northern neighbor. Soviet and Chinese troops even fired on each other at the border. So, Nixon, a shrewd foreign policy strategist, saw the opportunity to split the Communists apart by wooing China to the American side.

At first, Kissinger was opposed to the idea. But on Nixonā€™s orders, Kissinger secretly traveled to China in 1971. He caught the willing ear of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Convinced that the relationship could work, Kissinger enthusiastically pursued USā€“China friendship. He enticed China with arms sales and membership in various multilateral organizations. This paved the way for Nixon himself to visit China in 1972.

Kissinger was so exuberant about the relationship that he even remarked that China was the USā€™ best friend after the United Kingdom. He may well have been too accommodating to Beijing. Under Kissingerā€™s leadership, the United States recognized the Peopleā€™s Republic as the legitimate government of all China, including, in principle, Taiwan. This was the beginning of the present-day ambiguity over Taiwan that has become such a headache for the US.

Still, the deal was a success for the US. Until 1972, the Soviet Union had been unwilling to work with the US diplomatically. But USā€“China rapprochement put enough pressure on the Soviet Union that they agreed to parley. Kissinger negotiated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972) and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (1973). A second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty came soon after (1979). These three revolutionary arms treaties set off the opening of relations between the Americans and Soviets. Kissinger and Nixon had achieved the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Another of Kissingerā€™s achievements in arms de-escalation is almost forgotten. In 1969, Kissinger persuaded Nixon to unilaterally suspend the USā€™ biological weapons program. Nixonā€™s Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs was unprecedented. When it became clear that Nixon had left biologically produced toxins (as opposed to the biological agents themselves) out of the ban, it was Kissinger who persuaded him to add them as well.

Kissingerā€™s moral failures in Pakistan and East Timor

The US wanted India to be part of its network of alliances against the Soviet Union. They saw India, a democracy, as a natural ally. But the Indians rebuffed American overtures. So, seeking an ally in South Asia, the US turned to the next best option: Pakistan.

The Pakistanis were all too enthusiastic about working with the Americans. Anxious about potential Indian aggression, they sought to build strategic depth and entered every alliance they could. Ishtiaq Ahmed, a political scientist and 51³Ō¹Ļ contributor, called Pakistan the ā€œGarrison State.ā€ In 1955, they were a founding member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), Americaā€™s Asian version of NATO.

Pakistan was eager to make friends with any rivals of India and the Soviet Union. It therefore also developed a relationship with China. In fact, it was Pakistan that facilitated Kissingerā€™s secret entry into China in 1971.

Pakistan was Kissingerā€™s worst failing. The alliance blew up in Americaā€™s face when Pakistanā€™s 1971 civil war in Bangladesh broke out. In an April 1971 telegram, Archer Blood, the US consul in Dhaka, warned Washington that Pakistan was committing genocide against its Bengali citizens. Blood and 20 of his colleagues strongly condemned the US position on Pakistan. Kissinger decided to ignore the message, calling Blood a ā€œbleeding heartā€ softie. The US backed its ally with arms supplies. The fighting only stopped when India intervened and secured Bengali independence.

Nixon recalled Blood and punished him with an ignominious desk job. But in the end, Blood was right. Pakistan killed 300,000 to perhaps 3,000,000 Bengali civilians. For his courageous stance, Blood is now honored both in Bangladesh and in the State Department.

While Kissinger tried to deflect criticism, he could not hide the fact that the incident was a moral and strategic failure. The US had sided against democracy and human rights. It had also earned the resentment of newly independent Bangladesh and pushed India even farther away. That bad blood would endure for decades. To this day, Dhaka still views the US with distrust.

A similar story played out in East Timor. East Timor was a Portuguese colony that shared the island of Timor with Indonesia. In 1975, East Timor was navigating potential independence from Portugal. In December, not wanting an independent nation on its border, Indonesia invaded its tiny neighbor.

Indonesia was a US ally and notified the US prior to its action. Kissinger reportedly assured Indonesia that the United States would not intervene. In fact, the US continued to aid Indonesia and provided 90% of the weapons Indonesia used during the invasion. It turned a blind eye to the atrocities as Indonesia killed at least 100,000 East Timorese.

Kissingerā€™s triumph in the Middle East

If Kissinger is hated in South Asia, he is more admired in the Middle East. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Kissinger put his mighty abilities of negotiation and persuasion to use.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. On that day, Jews fast and abstain from work. But on the Yom Kippur of 1973, Israelā€™s neighbors Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack. The assault did serious damage to the underprepared Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and shook the Israeli psyche. Israelis thought that the IDF was invincible after it had won the 1967 Arabā€“Israeli war in just six days. 1973 was a rude awakening. If it had not been for Egyptian and Syrian blunders that gave Israel a much-needed advantage, the results could have been far more dire.

Eventually, the IDF managed to turn the tide. The US came to its allyā€™s aid and airlifted huge amounts of equipment to Israel with breathtaking speed. The Soviets had neither the will nor the ability to supply Egypt to match. General Ariel Sharon took the fight into Egypt and crossed the Suez Canal. This action cut off and encircled Egyptā€™s Third Army and trapped elite Egyptian units in Port Said. It also put Sharon within spitting distance of Cairo.

At this point, Kissinger flew to Moscow. His mission was to prevent the Soviet Union from entering the war on Egyptā€™s side. Kissinger convinced the Soviet leaders that Nixon was crazy enough to send US troops to fight Soviet troops in the Middle East, risking nuclear war between the two superpowers. The Soviets balked.

Kissinger then met with Israeli leaders. He sternly warned them not to advance the Egyptian capital. He kept the fact that the Soviets had already decided not to intervene secret from them. So, not wanting to risk Soviet entry into the war, the Israelis begrudgingly agreed to halt the advance. By the end of October, they were engaging in peace talks with the Egyptians.

Kissinger also spoke with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He persuaded Sadat that the Soviets were poor allies, pointing out how much aid the US had given to Israel compared to the Soviet Unionā€™s paltry support of Egypt. Already diffident about the Soviets, Sadat agreed. He listened to Kissingerā€™s siren song and began to reorient his country towards Washington.

So, the smooth-talking Kissinger had played all sides and brokered a solution favorable to US interests. Kissinger had subtracted the most populous Arab nation from the socialist alliance. Without Egypt, further the other Arab states could never hope to launch an effective invasion of Israel.

By acting alone to broker the truce, Kissinger had also completely shut Britain and France. So, with his perhaps dishonest but undeniably masterful Machiavellian tactics, Kissinger had achieved nothing less than establishing the US as the sole hegemonic power in the Middle East.

Kissinger undermines democracy in Chile

In the 1970s, socialism was spreading like wildfire in Latin America, all the way from El Salvador to Chile. In September 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende won Chileā€™s presidential election. The possibility of Chile aligning with Cuba and the Soviet Union nearly sent US leaders apoplectic.

So, on Kissingerā€™s direction, the CIA attempted to organize a coup d’Ć©tat to overthrow Allende. The CIA plot failed, but the US got what it wanted anyway. The right-wing Augusto Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, seized power. A despondent Allende committed suicide by gunshot on September 11, 1973.

Pinochet led fellow anti-communist leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay to carry out Operation Condor, a systematic campaign of repression that killed tens of thousands of suspected leftists from 1975 to 1983. The US refused to criticize the operation, and in some cases even provided intelligence on targeted individuals.

The whole affair exposed the shortcomings of Kissingerā€™s realpolitik. The United States had once again sided against democracy and human rights.

For Kissinger, foreign policy was all about managing the balance of power in a way that protected American interests. This led him to ignore moral and psychological factors like the strength of nationalism or the power of resentment. When Kissinger intervened against the will of a people, his policies either failed or were successful only in the short term.

He allowed America to play the role of the villain and alienated nations from Chile to Bangladesh, Vietnam and East Timor. It gave ammunition to Soviet propaganda efforts. For their part, the Soviets did not underestimate the moral side of international relations. They presented themselves as anti-colonial crusaders and won hearts and minds among leaders in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Despite his failings, Kissinger was a genius. He was extremely skilled at what he did, both as secretary of state and national security adviser. But, like many virtuosos, he overestimated what his skill could accomplish. By over-using American hard power, Kissinger undermined US interests in many places.
Kissinger is both the standard to emulate and the example to avoid for any leaders. Whether admiringly or not, people will be writing about him for the next 100 years. They will be reading him for a long time, too. For the beginner, Grappo recommends Kissingerā€™s classic volume . In it, Kissinger looks at a number of epochs in world history through the lens of realpolitik. The art of diplomacy is ever-present in human affairs. Kissingerā€™s insight into how it works, in so many vastly different times and places, is invaluable.

The views expressed in this article/video are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post FOĀ° Talks: Peacemaker, Warmonger, Genius: The Titanic Legacy of Henry Kissinger appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

No serious observer of history can deny that the cost of US inspired wars, generally launched in the name of defending the principles of ā€œfreedom and democracy,ā€ has been unambiguously catastrophic for the nations concerned, in the long term as well as the short term. No one can deny two other obvious historical facts. The first is that the US has been nearly constantly involved in wars over the past 75 years. The second is that none of those wars has resulted in anything resembling a victory, except perhaps for the armament industries. That is what makes made last weekā€™s by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, evoking an eventual war with China, sound simultaneously comic (ridiculous) and tragic (Aristotleā€™s ā€œpity and fearā€).

ā€œWeā€™re all talking,ā€ Kendall explained, ā€œabout the fact that the Air and Space Forces must change, or we could fail to prevent and might even lose a war.ā€ Does he really see the possibility of the US losing a war as remote, as straining credibility? Can any American, let alone on top military officer, continue to believe that because the US clearly does have the most powerful military force in the history of the world, that means it routinely wins wars?

I can understand why itā€™s convenient for members of the political and military establishment to express their eternal optimism and discount the glaring reality of history. When evoking a war not with Vietnam or Libya but against China, a mighty nation with a nuclear arsenal: ā€œOur job is to deter that war and to be ready to win if it occurs.ā€ In Kendallā€™s mind, defeating a nuclear power in war is just a question of doing ā€œour job.ā€

Are journalists themselves examples of artificial intelligence?

I find it much more difficult to understand why journalists never react to, let alone challenge, this dangerously ahistorical optimism. A war with China, even if were engaged on a limited scale, would imperil the entire human race. Does the idea of ā€œwinningā€ that war make sense to members of the media? As objective observers, they should be aware of two simple facts: that the US simply does not win wars and that if such a war were to break out between two nuclear powers, there is a strong likelihood that there will only be losers.

Puzzled by the lazy indifference of the media, I decided to interrogate ChatGPT, known for its supposed historical objectivity. Itā€™s good with historical facts, but is it capable of understanding and interpreting the patterns of history?

I therefore formulated the following very detailed prompt, just to make sure my question would be understood:

ā€œThere is hardly anyone alive who believes that the US war in Vietnam was justified. Everyone recognizes it was disastrous for anyone involved in it. It was even disastrous for many people not involved in it, myself included, because the conscription policy interrupted my own academic career as I was pursuing a post-graduate degree at Oxford. In short, it was costly in blood, treasure and human psychology. It was particularly bad for the image of the United States as the leading player in the free world.

Whereas there are still a few people who claim that toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do because he was an evil despot, nearly everyone agrees that the war in Iraq was unjustified, provoked on false pretences and led to a long series of disasters, including provoking the rise of ISIS.

And while many still think the war on Afghanistan was a justified response to the events of 9/11, historians have shown that it could have been avoided and that the Taliban themselves were willing to arrest Bin Laden, who was the aggressor, not the Taliban themselves. But whether justified or not, the war produced 20 years of catastrophic policies and a shamed US retreat, handing victory to the Taliban.

The American war effort in Libya and Syria, though slightly less direct, can be analyzed in a similar way. In all these cases, entire populations have suffered. Many European nations, allies of the US, have been destabilized by the resulting refugee crisis, provoking a rise of the neo-fascist right. At the same time, the standing of the US on the world stage has become seriously tarnished.

A similar pattern, though less direct, characterizes the current war in Ukraine. In other words, can a historian surveying the past 60 years of US history fail to conclude that US administrations, whether Democrat or Republican, are addicted to implementing a foreign policy that is destructive both for the regimes they decide they don’t like and for the US itself?ā€

ChatGPTā€™s response contained no surprises.

ā€œThe assessment of whether the United States’ foreign policy decisions over the past 60 years have been consistently destructive is a matter of perspective and debate. It’s important to recognize that foreign policy decisions are complex, often driven by a combination of factors, including geopolitical considerations, domestic politics, intelligence assessments, and the specific circumstances of each situation. Additionally, opinions on these matters can vary widely, and historians may have different interpretations of the same events.ā€

I see this position, which I prefer to call an attitude, in practically every dialogue I have with ChatGPT. It boils down to a refusal to even consider the reality of patterns, let alone interpret them. In that sense, it reflects the dominant political culture that prefers we not waste time thinking about patterns.

This concern with over-interpretation may make some sense when there is inconsistency in the evidence being analyzed. But, as one of the worldā€™s greatest authorities on international relations, John Mearsheimer insists, the US track record on war is remarkably consistent. In an online interview he explains: ā€œwe in the United States specially, and the West more generally, have a very poor understanding of the limits of power,ā€ before adding that ā€œin the West that lesson was never learned.ā€

In other words, ChatGPT prefers to dutifully repeat what Frank Kendall and most Westerners believe, despite its being manifestly false. It is correct when it tells us reality is complex. But discernible patterns reveal broader principles at work capable of clarifying the complexity without contradicting it. ChatGPT sees the trees but denies the forest.

ChatGPTā€™s detailed ā€œanalysisā€ and evasive conclusion

In its response to my prompt, ChatGPT offered a detailed examination of recent US wars, effectively focusing on every tree in order to suppress the idea that a forest even exists.

ā€œVietnam War: As you mentioned, the Vietnam War is widely seen as a costly and tragic conflict. However, there were differing motivations behind U.S. involvement, including containment of communism during the Cold War. Some argue that the war was a strategic mistake, while others contend that it was a necessary effort to prevent the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

Iraq War: The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 remains a highly contentious issue. While some believed it was justified based on concerns about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s regime, others argue that the war was initiated on false pretenses and had devastating consequences. Opinions on this issue are deeply divided.

War in Afghanistan: The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks had broad international support at the time. However, as the conflict prolonged, questions arose about its effectiveness and long-term consequences.

Libya and Syria: These conflicts were complex and involved international efforts to address ongoing crises within those countries. The outcomes have been mixed, with some arguing that intervention was necessary to protect civilians, while others highlight the destabilizing effects.

Ukraine: The situation in Ukraine is ongoing and complex. It involves a mix of geopolitical interests and regional tensions, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about its long-term impact.

ChatGPT then develops a few more paragraphs riffing on the virtue of complexity before proposing its lesson that effectively denies Mearsheimerā€™s reference to a ā€œlessonā€ nobody has learned:

ā€œIn conclusion, while there have been instances where U.S. foreign policy decisions have faced criticism and have had adverse consequences, the overall assessment is a matter of ongoing debate and interpretation. Different people and experts will have varying opinions on the impact and wisdom of these policies.ā€

Mearsheimerā€™s understanding of patterns allows him to dig deeper and discover the logical principles that guide the policy of what he calls ā€œAn incredibly hawkish country.ā€

ā€œI think the United States is in a situation where it can cause lots of trouble and it does not pay much of a price.ā€

Noting that ā€œnone of its soldiers are dying,ā€ he explains that for Americans, losing ā€œdoesnā€™t matter that muchā€¦ It can run around the world doing all sorts of foolish things and not pay a significant price. Itā€™s others who pay the price.ā€

Bucking ChatGPTā€™s recommendation of simply accepting complexity and abandoning the pursuit of meaning, Mearsheimer offers a simple but very credible explanation of the brainless policies that have led to so many failed efforts and so much predictable destruction.

ā€œThe sheer power of the United States, the sheer sense of security that Americans have that allow them to pursue these foolish policies.ā€

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyoneā€™s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51³Ō¹Ļ, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Can Foreign Policy Be Consistently Stupid? appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

Both India and Vietnam face a security dilemma because of Chinaā€™s regional power ambitions. They fear Asian domination by a single power. Being Chinaā€™s neighbors, India and Vietnam are rightly insecure about their borders. China has invaded both countries in the past: India in 1962 and Vietnam in . 

Han and Hindu Nationalism Come Face to Face

To raise the cost of another Chinese military aggression, India and Vietnam are joining hands to counter Beijing. New Delhi and Hanoi completed 50 years of diplomatic engagement last year. It is the last five years that have been the most consequential in their diplomatic history though. During this period, the countries have been intensifying cooperation and are in a position to act in concert on many fronts.

The Dragon Spits Fire

Assertive Chinese behavior in the last few years has rattled India and Vietnam. Be it in the Himalayas or expansive territorial claims in the South East China Sea, Beijing has upped the ante. 

Countries on Chinaā€™s periphery have borne the brunt of the dragonā€™s fire. For example, China claims portions of Indian territory in the western and eastern sectors of its border with India. Beijing also frequently crosses into the Indian side of the disputed border. 

Similarly, Beijing continues to claim all of the South China Sea, disregarding the sovereign rights and of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei. China has also repeatedly targeted Vietnamese fishing boats and carried out maritime activities in disputed areas in the chain. Vietnam claims these islands as its territory. So does Taiwan. However, Beijing exercises de facto over the island chain. China also controls the Spratly Islands and Woody Island. Beijing is turning these disputed territories into military installations in the South China Sea. 

The roots of Chinaā€™s assertive behavior lie in its self-perception. Beijing views itself as a natural Asian hegemon with great power status. Now, China is seeking to become a and challenge the US for the top of the global totem pole.

New Delhi and Hanoi, like Tokyo and Canberra, do not accept Chinaā€™s self-proclaimed hegemony. These countries do not see themselves as subordinate to Beijing. Naturally, they are critical of any attempts by China to dominate the post-World War II regional order. 

This is also true of the other players in the region. They might not admit it openly, but Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea are uncomfortable with Beijingā€™s unilateral attempts to dominate the region. However, the fear of a backlash from Beijing, a sizable number of citizens of Chinese origin in their own territories and economic dependence on China prevent these countries from voicing their worries. 

Even in 1978, Lee Kuan Yew, the then prime minister of Singapore, caught the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping by surprise, that he was more concerned about Beijing than about Hanoi. Deng had gone to Singapore to mobilize Lee Kuan Yewā€™s support against an ambitious Vietnam. The canny Singaporean statesman perceptively understood that the long-term challenge emanated from Beijing. Since then, it is clear that Beijing has aroused feelings of insecurity amongst its neighbors in Southeast and East Asia.

The fear of outright dominance by a single power compels Asian nations like India, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam to seek multipolarity. These nations believe that multipolarity will maintain a stable regional order. Therefore, their geopolitical and diplomatic strategy aims to counter China. These Asian nations are only following what eminent theorists like Henry Kissinger and John Mearsheimer have long posited about achieving a balance of power in international relations. 

Coalescing around shared interests such as respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and freedom of navigation of the seas helps regional powers build a coalition against China. Like other Asian countries, both and have concerns about Chinaā€™s Belt and Road Initiative. Both want a multipolar, rules-based regional order that  constricts the space for unilateral adventures by Beijing. Therefore, the recent ā€œā€ announced by Hanoi and New Delhi seeks to make structural and institutional changes that make multipolarity a reality. 

From the mid-1970s, New Delhi and Hanoi were on the same side of the geopolitical and ideological fault lines in Asia. Vietnam was communist and India was socialist. Both were of the Soviet Union and harbored a deep distrust of the United States. 

Communist Vietnam soon found that ideological similarities could not avoid geopolitical rivalries. Deng was deeply about the deepening Soviet-Vietnamese relations. Deng sought to teach the Vietnamese a lesson for ā€œā€ Beijing and siding with Moscow. Deng believed that Hanoi sought regional dominance in Southeast Asia and he wanted China to have that privilege.

Vietnamā€™s invasion of Cambodia to overthrow the Pol Pot regime further poisoned its relations with Beijing. China was Pol Potā€™s benefactor. Beijing saw Pol Potā€™s regime as a bulwark against Soviet influence in Southeast Asia. Once Vietnam got rid of Pol Pot in Cambodia, Deng attacked Vietnam in 1979. stood by Vietnam. Moraji Desai, the then Indian prime minister, issued a statement calling for an immediate withdrawal of Chinese troops from Vietnam as the first step towards ensuring peace in Southeast Asia. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Indiaā€™s then foreign minister, shortened his visit to China in protest against this invasion. 

Polygamous Foreign Policy

Over the years, New Delhi and Hanoi have followed a multidirectional foreign policy. Neither wanted to anger their giant northern neighbor. Both regularly championed the idea of ā€œstrategic autonomyā€ that focuses on avoiding sclerotic alliances and security commitments. Given the structural changes in due to Chinaā€™s rise, both India and Vietnam are moving closer.

Yet there are limits to Vietnamā€™s relationship with India. Retired Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan believes that given their relatively small sizes and strategic location, major Southeast Asian countries have no choice but to pursue a foreign policy. As a result, these countries seek friendship with all and confrontation with none. Vietnam is no exception.

By simultaneously juggling many relationships and contradictions, Vietnam aims to diversify its partners. Fundamentally, Vietnam uses these partnerships to pursue its national interests. India is following the same . India buys oil from Russia, conducts military exercises with the US and welcomes investment from Japan. It is friends with Israel and, at the same time, maintains relationships with Iran. Like India, Vietnam also has meaningful in place with all five members of the UN Security Council. Both India and Vietnam have defied conventional Cold-War era wisdom of making binary choices. 

Indo-Vietnamese Push for Multipolarity

Over the last few years, Vietnam has become a focal part of Indiaā€™s ā€œ.ā€ As a result, defense and security have improved. This includes joint exercises and training programs, cooperation and trade in defense equipment. New Delhi has also given $600 million of defense lines of credit to Hanoi. 

Increasing trade and have brought both countries together. Bilateral trade has ballooned from $200 million in 2000 to $14.114 billion in 2021-2022. Several Indian are investing in Vietnam. They are in diverse sectors such as IT, education, real estate, textiles and garments, healthcare, solar technology, consumer goods, and agricultural products. India is Vietnam with infrastructure and connectivity projects, development and capacity-building assistance, and . Despite Chinese apprehensions, India also has oil exploration projects with PetroVietnam in the South China Sea. Cooperation in has also grown at a healthy pace. 

Slowly and surely, a silent change is unfolding in Asian waters. Chinaā€™s increasing aggression is no longer going unanswered. The Indo-Pacific will not become a Chinese lake. Regional powers are responding. Not only the US and Japan but also India and Vietnam are working more closely together to preserve a multipolar Asia. 

[Contributing Editor and CFO Ti Ngo edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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For many in the Asia Pacific, 2015 tested the political prowess and limits of the region. The year saw territorial disputes over the South China Sea; an imploding Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar; frightening and an environmental catastrophe that affected its neighbors for months; a Chinese currency devaluation that rocked the global economy; and Japan and South Koreaā€™s landmark deal that aims to settle the issue of wartime ā€œcomfort women.ā€

But 2015 wasnā€™t all that bleak: ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, that was a decade in the making; Myanmar experienced a groundbreaking election; the ruling party in Singapore reasserted electoral power after the passing of Lee Kuan Yew; the Bandung spirit lived on through the Asia-Africa Conference; Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi flexed China and Indiaā€™s soft (and hard) power muscles through their world tours; and Beijing abolished its controversial one-child policy.

But what lies ahead for the region in 2016?

The Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) will hold its 12^th national party congress in January. While the countryā€™s foreign policy is not expected to change, the selection of Vietnamā€™s future leadership will have implications on its stance over the South China Sea dispute and its relations with China.

In mid-January, Taiwan will hold presidential and parliamentary elections, and it is believed the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will ride to ā€œā€ against the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), due to the partyā€™s plans of slowing down the stateā€™s reconciliation with Mainland China.

South Koreans will head to the polls in April for parliamentary elections. The vote will be a test for President Park Guen-hyeā€™s administration, which has seen its popularity dip after plans to reform the labor market and adopt a state-approved history textbook.

In the Philippines, more than 18,000 congressional and local posts will be decided in presidential and parliamentary elections on May 9. World champion boxer is just one of the many glitzy highlights of what is expected to be a .

And last but not least, Australia will go to the polls for parliamentary elections in late 2016. The Labor Party are expected to be in a favorable position of regaining power especially after a tumultuous political past, which has seen five prime ministers in power since 2010.

Myanmar Ā© Shutterstock

Swimming With or Against International Currents?

Aside from the economic benefits the Asia Pacific stands to gain from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), it will also experience Chinaā€™s attempt of expanding its influence in the region through its initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). All eyes will be on the AIIBā€™s ambitious agenda and claims of complementingā€”and not competing withā€”existing international institutions such as the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Another trade pact known as the (RCEP)Ģżis due to join the ranks of the TPP and TTIP ā€œsometimeā€ this year. Leaders from 16 countriesā€”including ASEAN, China, Japan and Indiaā€”have been negotiating the terms of the deal since 2013. Once in effect, the RCEP will represent nearly half of the worldā€™s population (3.4 billion people) and have a combined GDP of $22.7 trillion, or 30% of the global output.

The US presidential elections in 2016 will also have an impact on the Asia Pacific. If Hillary Clinton is elected, she is likely to continue . US-China relations will continue to be one of strategic rivalry, even as the economic and geopolitical stakes in bilateral cooperation ā€œ.ā€

South-South relations will deepen as well. More Asian countries are set to establish greater economic linkages with Africa through the newly created and individual initiatives, just as how . Asian-Latin American relations will see a boost in areas such as export promotion, urban planning, poverty reduction and financial regulationā€”with China and India predicted to .

Finally, how the Asia Pacific deals with climate change is one integral issue that will be on every countryā€™s cards in 2016. Following the Paris climate change deal that was brokered in December, the responsibility of reducing emissions ultimately lies with the region, due to Asia being responsible for the . China and Indiaā€™s slow but steady approach toward air pollution, , and various countriesā€™ stretched resources in dealing with the increasing occurrence of floods and typhoons might mean that climate change reform is likely to remain vague in the year ahead.

On a lighter note, itā€™s worth mentioning that New Zealand in March. While some predict that the majority of voters will choose to keep the current flag, New Zealandā€™s decision to create a new identityā€”replacing the upper-left-corner Union Jack, a sign of colonialism, with a fern leafā€”is one of many signs of how the region as a whole is trying to come into its own future.

Hereā€™s to the Asia Pacific ushering in the . Happy New Year!

*[Note: This article was updated on January 3, 2016, at 02:50 GMT.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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Territorial spats between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors over Beijingā€™s infamous ā€œā€ dotted across the South China Sea have substantially soured the mood of its allies.

Chinaā€™s insistence to play by its own rules, especially in the case of the Spratly, Paracel and Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, has put Beijing at loggerheads with virtually all littoral countries in the region and, farther afield, with the United States. As a result, the fact that China has chosen to go its own way regarding territorial claims has become a burr under the saddle of many of its once loyal allies.

Turning Tide in Malaysia

Malaysia provides a particularly good example of Chinaā€™s alienation of its friends over the South China Sea. Chinaā€™s incursions in Malaysiaā€™s territorial waters have increased in frequency since 2009, when it began to more stringently adhere to the informal ā€œnine-dash-lineā€ area established in 1947. For many years, Malaysia considered itself in a ā€œspecial relationshipā€ with China and had chosen to handle such issues privately with Beijing, as it has done with other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) when the South China Sea issue arose.

However, over the past two years, the incursions into Malaysiaā€™s territorial waters have become more frequent, more open and notorious. One particularly egregious example isĢżthe vessel currently anchored at Luconia Shoals. Situated 84 nautical miles from Sarawak, which is well-within Malaysiaā€™s territorial waters, the vessel has been anchored for two years and counting, possibly in an attempt to establish a territorial claim on a new island forming in the area.

Rather than handling the encroachment privately as before,Ģżthe has been forced to become more public and more confrontational in its approach. High-level officials from Malaysia have had emergency meetings with their own government, Malaysian vessels have been dispatched to the area to reinforce its claim to the territory and to monitor Chinaā€™s movements in the area, and the issue was on the agenda at a meeting betweenĢżheads of state this summer.

Chinaā€™s actions have clearly alarmed Malaysia and threatened the ā€œspecial relationshipā€ the two parties claim to have. It has also begun to drive Malaysia into the arms of the other power in the region: the United States.

The US has already done a great deal to woo Malaysia away from China. As Chinaā€™s economy experiences a slowdown, theĢżUS is finalizing the (TPP) with MalaysiaĢż(among others). The TPP, a paradigm-shifting agreement to which China is not a party, stands to open AmericanĢżmarkets to Malaysiaā€™s electronics, rubber and palm oil industries, which are expected to help make up for the recent decline of Malaysian products exported to the US, and then some.

Washington and Kuala LumpurĢżhave taken steps to increase the level of their security partnership as well. Malaysia has joined the US and other states in establishing the Global Coalition to Counter Islamic State. As part of this, Malaysia has pledged to establishĢża Ģżto counter messaging from the Islamic State (IS)Ģżby the end of 2015 with the help of Washington. Additionally, Malaysia hasĢżĢżwith the US in the fight against IS.

Vietnam and the US

Meanwhile, another example of a close relationship gone south comes from Vietnam. After ChinaĢż an oil rig in Vietnamā€™s territorial waters in 2014, tensions escalated to the point that President Truong Tan Sang seemed to forgive Washington for imprisoning him during the Vietnam War, and instead lashed out at China.

In a September interview to Associated Press, he unambiguously declared that Beijingā€™s large-scale reclamation of submerged islands in the South China Sea ā€œ.ā€ During the same interview, Sang talked warmly about the US, lauding the steps made by US President Barack Obama toward normalizing bilateral relations and lifting an embargo on armament sales.

While Beijing has been making overtures recently in a bid to pacify Hanoi, the damage will not be reversed easily. The two candidates vying for the top position of secretary general in the Communist Party of Vietnam are bothĢżĢżas having strong intentions ofĢżdeepening ties with the US. Coupled with the recent signing of the TPP, Hanoi seems set to pursue its core national interests by playing the powers against one another, in the hope of restraining Chinaā€™s aggressive actions in the South China Sea.

That strategy has already borne fruit. During Xi Jinpingā€™s two-day visit to Vietnam, the two communist countriesĢżĢżto solve their maritime disputes peacefully by helping each other and proceeding ā€œhand in handā€ on a path to building a ā€œtruly trustworthyā€ bond.

Chinaā€™s assertion of its non-existent and unrecognized claims in the South China Sea, especially as it relates to Malaysia and Vietnam, is positioning the razor of fruitless aggression over the special relationshipsā€™ face. Chinaā€™s incursions are making international recognition of its claims in the area even less likely. Continuing down this road will likely find many more of Chinaā€™s relationships in ruins.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.Ģż

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Dmitry Minkov, his wife Nina and their 5-year-old daughter, Varvara, are on their way to a chocolate factory on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. The Minkovs are Ukrainians residing in Singapore, where they run a chocolate store. On holiday in Vietnam, they decide to check out how one of their best-selling chocolates is made and listen again to the improbable story of how it came about.

Their taxi pulls up outside a blue iron gate on a dusty street in Thu Duc district, having traveled 15 kilometers from their city hotel. A couple from Dublin joins them. Inside the gate is a factory complex housing three small-to- medium-sized businesses. Sam, a bearded and bespectacled Japanese-Frenchman who has lived in Vietnam for eight years, is their guide. He leads them past a small cacao plant at the entrance of the factory, stopping in front of a wall of hessian bags filled with cacao beans. To his left, where the tour begins, are several roasting machines blowing cacao aroma and husks in the air; through a double-glass door into a sealed room where the cacao is conched into a liquid mass by 12 machines imported from India. Another door takes them into a controlled compartment where the liquid is tempered and poured into plastic molds, refrigerated for 30 minutes, then hand-wrapped by the Vietnamese staff; and finally into the storeroom where the bars are stacked, boxed and labeled: ready for delivery.

At the end of their bean-to-bar journey, the visitors taste the finished product and marvel at how such fine chocolates came to be made in Vietnamā€”a country not known for its production or consumption of chocolateā€”by two chocolatiers who, until recently, as one of them admits: ā€œDidnā€™t know how to make chocolate.ā€

The Marou Tale

Four years ago, 41-year-old Sam Maruta and 43-year-old Vincent Mourouā€”dropouts from the banking and advertising industry, respectivelyā€”founded Marou Faiseurs de Chocolat, a company specializing in single-origin chocolate and based in Ho Chi Minh City. Single-origin refers to an estate or plantation, or more often a country, where the beans used to create the chocolate come from. Their ambition was to create Vietnamā€™s first bean-to-bar chocolate. Four years later, Maruta and Mourou have surprised the world with a recognized brand of quality chocolate bars, built a profitable business and by their success have put their adopted country on the chocolate map.

ā€œThe idea of making chocolate was interesting,ā€ Maruta says. ā€œMaking chocolate but, importantly, making it into bars, and making it in the country where the cacao comes from.ā€

Ā© Shutterstock

This was back in February 2011, when the former banker from SociƩtƩ GƩnƩrale and his soon-to-be business partner experimented with beans bought from a farm found by the side of the road.

ā€œWe bought a couple of kilos of beans and on the way back decided to try to make chocolate from those beans. At the time, we didnā€™t know how to make chocolate and didnā€™t know the difference between what was good and bad cacao,ā€ Maruta tells the story from an air-conditioned office crowded with staff bent over laptops and clamped to cellphones, a long way from the kitchen where he and Mourou grounded and molded their first chocolate bars from cake tins. ā€œI had a house with a grinder and an oven; rare things [in Ho Chi Minh City] then,ā€ he recounts.

Jonathon Waugh, a friend-cum-investor, picks up the story. ā€œI remember going to Samā€™s kitchen and tasting his chocolate. It wasnā€™t half bad, I thought at the time.

ā€œSome months earlier, Sam came to me and said, ā€˜Thereā€™s a market for high-end artisanal chocolate and Iā€™m going to do itā€”would you be interested in putting some money into it?ā€ Waugh continues. ā€œā€˜Let me come and taste your chocolate first,ā€™ I said.ā€

By the end of that evening, Waugh, a former fund manager with more than 20 years of experience under his belt, found himself saying, ā€œAll right, done; Iā€™m in!ā€

ā€œI invested [in Marou] without any feasibility study, any business plan,ā€ Waugh, 45, reflects on the decision four years later. ā€œIt was really trust in Sam. There are many reasons for their success, but heā€™s the key. He doesnā€™t realize heā€™s actually a great marketer; one of the most captivating things is listening to him talking about his passion.ā€

Before backing the bean-to-bar business, Waugh, a Brit who moved to Vietnam in 1996 and later co-founded the fund management firm PXP Asset Management, had invested in a garment factory, a tourist company and a microfinance start-up.

ā€œOf all my investments, Marou is by far the most surprising and satisfying,ā€ Waugh says. ā€œSurprising in that it has gone way beyond the parameters of where we initially thought it would operate. Satisfying because it is the first company in Vietnam, or at the very least within the [food and beverage] sector, that was conceived, created and branded in the country to produce something that is exported and recognized globally as a luxury edible product.ā€

For expat entrepreneurs like Maruta and Mourou, Vietnam offered something else not mentioned in the business guidebook: the freedom to do what you like.

In its first full year of operation in 2012, Marouā€™s revenue was $120,000. It is expected to be $1 million this year. Today, with a staff of 20, the factory in Thu Duc churns out 100 kilograms of chocolate a day. In 2014, it produced 3 tons of chocolate, 70% of which was exported to more than 20 markets overseas, mainly to Europe. Their largest market, unsurprisingly, given the foundersā€™ French heritage, is France. Later this year, Marou will open its first chocolate patisserie near Ben Thanh market, a shopping and tourist magnet in Ho Chi Minh City.

Starting Up in Vietnam

The Vietnam War ended 40 years ago. When the guns fell silent, the clamor for a better life began, and though the apparatchiks of the ruling Communist Party have never relinquished control, those calling for Western-style market reforms tended to get the upper hand each time the economy came unstuck, as it did in the decade after the war, during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, the global financial slump of 2008 and more recently the local downturn in 2012. Beginning in 1986, when the country made the shift from a centrally planned economy to a ā€œsocialist-oriented market economyā€ under the policy slogan Doi Moi (renovation), Vietnam has chalked up three decades of high growth. In the last decade, it has recorded an average gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 6.4% per year, according to the World Bank. Vietnamā€™s Ministry of Planning forecasts a growth rate of 6.4% for this year.

ā€œOver the past 30 years, policy has swung back and forth, sometimes favoring growth, sometimes stability,ā€ author and journalist Bill Hayton writes inĢżVietnam: Rising Dragon. ā€œVietnamā€™s achievements in reducing poverty are impressive. In 1993, according to government figures, almost 60% of the population lived below the poverty line. By 2004, that figure was down to 20%.ā€ The country has met most of the Millennium Goals, the development targets set by the United Nations. It thus has escaped the ranks of the poorest countries to join the group of ā€œmiddle-income states.ā€ ā€œPeopleā€™s living standards are soaring, their horizons are widening and their ambitions are growing,ā€ Hayton added.

In April, Swiss bank UBS released a report with the eye-catching headline ā€œVietnam: Potentially One of the Most Exciting Markets in Asia.ā€ The country, the report said, has many of ā€œthe building blocks for rapid growth,ā€ such as a large, young populationā€”almost 50% of Vietnamese are under 30ā€”an emerging consumer class and a pool of cheap laborā€”wages are half of those in China and Thailand.

ā€œIt is very easy to get excited when looking at Vietnam from the outside,ā€ Waugh, a long-time observer of the economy with experience at Baring Asset Management, Jardine Fleming and JP Morgan Chase, says. ā€œIt is a place of great opportunity due to its stage of development, attractive demographics, decent educational standards, geographic position and motivated, sizeable population. However, once you step in and try to execute a business plan [it] is often fraught with ongoing hurdles such as excessive red tape, a poor legal system, weak banks and currency issues, to name but a few.

ā€œAll start-ups face an enormous number of risks, but start-ups in ā€˜frontierā€™ markets face additional layers of risk. Itā€™s a tough business environment, and not for the faint-hearted,ā€ he adds. ā€œ[But] for those entrepreneurs armed with patience and funding ā€¦ the rewards can be extraordinary in the long-term.ā€

Ā© Shutterstock

For expat entrepreneurs like Maruta and Mourou, Vietnam offered something else not mentioned in the business guidebook: the freedom to do what you like.

ā€œIf you want to start a business like making chocolate in France,ā€ Maruta says, ā€œthe most difficult hurdle is going to be in peopleā€™s eyes: Who are you to make chocolate? Whatā€™s your legitimacy for making chocolate? Have you studied chocolate-making? Have you come from a chocolate-making family? Here in Vietnam, itā€™s a case of do what you want. There is a sense of freedom [here].ā€

And where others might see opportunities in low-skilled labor and low-cost environment, the founders of Marou saw opportunities in skilled workers producing quality goods.

ā€œItā€™s counterintuitive,ā€ Maruta says. ā€œPeople see Vietnam as a place for making cheap stuff; we decided to go niche and upmarket. We invested heavily in design, in doing things in a way that is not cheap, and going for a premium product. Itā€™s going against the grain, against the flow that ā€¦ makes us stand out.ā€

A good example of this can be seen in the design of their chocolate wrapper. Nearly a year in the making, the design team at Rice Creative, also based in the southern capital, went through many templates before they struck goldā€”literally. In 2003, one of their designs picked up the top prize at an international award for chocolate wrappers; the judges described the winning wrapper as ā€œbeautiful enough to frame.ā€

Designers Joshua Breidenbach, 33, and Chi-An De Leo, 31, tell of their commission: ā€œOur brief was single-origin chocolate, and at the time no-one had heard of handmade chocolate. [Maruta and Mourou] knew it would be difficult to introduce the chocolate to the gourmet market, so we had to come up with a design that would work.

ā€œIt took us nine months to get it right; there were many iterations. We looked for patterns found in Vietnamese textiles. The colors come from the natural colors of the cacao pods ā€¦ We used traditional silk-screen printing techniques to hand print each wrapper.ā€

The final look is a golden monotone of traditional lattice patterns decorated with hand-drawn flora, fauna, and clouds and set in modernist typography on a thematic color. Five colorsā€”green, yellow, sky-blue, red and purple-blueā€”were chosen to match the colors of the cacao pods and reflect the regional flavors of the bars. The design caught the eye of editors of design magazines likeĢżWallpaperĢżand foodies across Europe.

ā€œOur first order was from La Grande Epicerie de Paris, one of the most prestigious food outlets in France,ā€ Maruta says. ā€œWhat really helped there was the design. They asked us [after] seeing the design.ā€

ā€œMarou packaging is a piece of art,ā€ says Minkov, part of that recent tour group and owner of Hello Chocolate!, a supplier of quality chocolate in Singapore. ā€œTraditionally, people buy chocolate as gifts; that is why people pay attention to the packaging. The quality of the product is important, but customers pay a lot attention to the packaging because it looks expensive but is affordable. And Marou is famous for their packaging.ā€

Hello Chocolate!, part of the Vara Group which represents tennis star Maria Sharapovaā€™s candy brand, Sugarpova, sells a selection of gourmet chocolates in Robinsons on Orchard Road, a high-end retail destination in Singapore. Minkov discussed the merits of the Marou brand while standing among the white shelves on the lower floor of Robinsons stacked with brands such as Akessonā€™s, Beschle, Omno, Pacari and Marou.

ā€œMarou is one of our bestsellers,ā€ he says. ā€œThey have a loyal customer base of dark chocolate lovers, who come specifically to this place to find Marou.ā€

Back on the Farm

Ho Van Lau, 62, a farmer from Ap Bac, a village in Tien Giang province, is ducking and weaving between the branches of the cacao trees on his one-hectare plantation. Introduced by the French in the late 19^th century, the cacao tree can still be found in the southern highlands and the Mekong Delta, a network of rivers and floodplains that contributes more than 50% of Vietnamā€™s staple food crops and 27% of the countryā€™s GDP.

Lau has been a farmer for as long as he can remember. His parents tilled the fields he and his wife now call their own. Like most farmers in his village, he and his family survived the warā€”ā€œI could hear gunfire all day longā€ā€”and the postwar privations on the rice and vegetables that are grown on their family farm. That was until a decade ago when Lau switched to cacao. His timing was fortuitous, coming at a time when the government was plowing resources into the crop as part of a plan to diversify its agriculture base and to take advantage of the high cacao price on the international market. With the help of foreign aid, local farmers like Lau were given incentives to grow and expand their plantations. Ten years ago, cacao covered less than 2,000 hectares in Vietnam; now there are more than 54,000 hectares.

ā€œThe cacao tree takes five years to fruit and can fruit for 40 years,ā€ Lau, who sells his cacao to Marou, explains. ā€œThey like to grow in the shade, but they donā€™t like it when thereā€™s too much water; their roots go rotten, so we have to drain the water,ā€ he adds, standing amid a network of small canals that flow alongside rows of cacao plants.

Thriving in the shade of the tropical forest, the cacao tree produces large fruit-pods in ripening stages of green, yellow, blue, red and purple-blueā€”the colors of the Marou wrappersā€”which hang directly off its trunk and branches on inch-long stems.

Lau picks up a pod and splits it in half with a metal bar. Inside are dozens of seedsā€”cacao beansā€”buried in a white sticky pulp.

ā€œOnce the beans are picked they are fermented for six days, then dried for another seven days before we put them in these bags,ā€ Lau says as he walks from the sweatboxesā€”square wooden boxesā€”where the beans are fermented under layers of banana leaves and hessian cloths, to a raised bamboo rack, six meters long and one-and-a-half meters wide, where they are dried, and to a corner of his living room where half a dozen large bags stuffed with beans lean against the wall.

ā€œMarou wants clean cacao,ā€ Lau says. ā€œThe fermentation process is important, so we scrub the [sweatboxes] clean and we turn the beans [during fermentation] once a day. They also insist on no pesticides, no chemicals.ā€

Marou names its five signature chocolate bars from the five provincesā€”Tien Giang, Dong Nai, Lam Dong, Ba Ria and Ben Treā€”where the cacao is sourced. In 2013, Marouā€™s Tien Giang 70% bar picked up Silver in the ā€œbest dark chocolate bean-to-barā€ category at the Academy of Chocolate Awards in London. One critic praised its ā€œmocha aromaā€ and ā€œvelvety finishā€ qualities that in the world of single-origin chocolate can be traced back to the area where itā€™s grownā€”that is, on Lauā€™s farm.

Wistfully, the farmer says he wished he could try his hand at turning his cacao into chocolate, ā€œbut with my five children gone [to the city], and with just me and my wife, we can just do the beans.

ā€œItā€™s easy work,ā€ he adds. ā€œThere are only two harvests a year; one in May and one in October. We hire a couple of helpers to pick the cacao pods.ā€

Already this year, Lau has sold 840 kilograms of cacaoā€”worth $3200 ā€” to Marou. In a country where the average salary is $500 a month, that is a good yield. ā€œBusiness is doing well,ā€ the farmer says.

*[This article was originally published by ā€™s partner, .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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Today, the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder () has established in the minds of the public, media and the health professionals that war can produce long-term and severe psychological effects. However, it was not always so.

Vulnerability to Stress

In the late nineteenth century, passengers who had been exposed to a terrifying train crash were often diagnosed with ā€œrailway spineā€ to explain why their psycho-somatic symptoms endured after physical wounds had healed. Medical opinion was divided as to whether these were organic effects, related to lesions in the central nervous system, or whether they were due to an inborn or acquired vulnerability to stress.

During , soldiers exhibiting similar patterns of symptoms were given the label ā€œshell shock.ā€ The cause of their invalidity and, therefore, the appropriate form of management was the subject of considerable debate. Some hardline medical doctors, such as Gordon Holmes, believed that servicemen who broke down on the battlefield and failed to return to duty after a short period of recuperation showed a lack of resolve, which should be addressed by military discipline rather than continued hospitalization. By contrast, Charles Myers, consulting psychologist to British forces in France, argued that each soldier patient should be assessed on his merits.

Having observed the capacity of artillery bombardment to erode the morale and determination of the toughest combatant, Myers considered shell shock a legitimate illness, requiring expert treatment no less than any wound or disease. By exposing the citizen armies of Europe to prolonged and extreme danger, World War One generated psychological casualties on an industrial scale. This, in turn, created a military crisis that drew doctors from a diverse range of specialties into the field of mental health; never before had so much attention been focused on a single psychiatric disorder.

Shell Shock

The term ā€œshell shockā€ emerged in the harsh winter of 1914-15 as soldiers sought to describe how they felt when under fire. During training, they had been instructed to conceal their fears because panic was known to spread rapidly through battalions. Yet, apart from trusting to luck, there was little that an infantryman could do to protect his life when being shelled. Without regulated tours of duty and no prospect of an early end to the conflict, many frontline soldiers were worn down by the emotional demands of trench warfare.

In the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, shell shock became a military priority as a flood of psychiatric casualties eroded the strength of front-line units. Specialist centers were set up within the sound of the guns to provide rapid treatment and to discourage soldiers from believing that they had escaped military duty. In addition, new regulations governed the use of diagnostic terms, seeking to stem the flow of casualties across the Channel.

In theory, hospitals in Britain were reserved for severe or intractable cases of shell shock. There, teams of doctors researched causation and experimented with treatment. From this concentrated effort emerged various schools of trauma therapy: At the Maudsley Hospital under the direction of Frederick Mott, ā€œan atmosphere of cureā€ was emphasized through purposeful activity (graduated exercise, carpentry, gardening, games and social events), whilst at the Red Cross Hospital in Maghull clinicians used ideas borrowed from anthropology and psycho-analysis. At Seale Hayne in Devon, where Arthur Hurst had access to farmland and a pottery, occupational therapy was emphasized as a way of restoring soldiersā€™ self-confidence and physical function.

By the early 1950s it was recognized that all soldiers have a breaking point, however well trained and motivated. As well as the link between physical and psychological casualties, it was also established that factors such as morale, leadership, regular sleep and confidence in equipment could mediate the size of the association but not the association itself.

At least 250,000 UK servicemen suffered from some form of psycho-somatic illness related to the conflict. Many failed to recover once peace had been restored. At first, the government funded treatment for veterans. ā€œSpecial medical clinicsā€ were opened by the Ministry of Pensions in provincial towns to provide a nationwide service of out-patient psychotherapy. With shortages of doctors qualified in trauma therapy, a training school was set up under Lt Colonel R.G. Rows, medical superintendent of Maghull.

By October 1920, 29 clinics were in operation and in February of the following year, it was estimated that 14,771 ex-servicemen with shell shock were either attending boards for assessment or clinics for treatment. However, a dramatic downturn in the economy and a government committed to public sector cuts saw the clinics close. By the mid-1920s trauma psychiatry had fallen down the health agenda and it took another world war to bring the sub-specialty to prominence.

World War TwoĢż

During breakdown on the battlefield again became a priority for the Allied democracies concerned that high casualties would undermine popular support for the conflict. Military psychiatry became an essential element of medical provision. With the direct involvement of the United States and its wealth of resources, attention was turned to evaluating the nature of breakdown and the effectiveness of treatments. Towards the end of the war, large-scale investigation was conducted into the psychological demands of combat (notably Samuel Stoufferā€™s two-volume study The American Soldier).

In addition, Gilbert W. Beebe, a sociologist, Michael E. DeBakey, a surgeon, and Albert Glass a military psychiatrist researched the relationship between physical and psychiatric casualties. Their findings provided objective evidence on which to build policy for subsequent conflicts.

By the early 1950s it was recognized that all soldiers have a breaking point, however well trained and motivated. As well as the link between physical and psychological casualties, it was also established that factors such as morale, leadership, regular sleep and confidence in equipment could mediate the size of the association but not the association itself. Yet, it was still believed that combat was secondary to personality in terms of causation. War, it was argued, served as a trigger to underlying vulnerability. Robust individuals with no family history of mental illness were expected to recover from the trauma of battle relatively quickly with no lasting ill effects.

Vietnam

The political crisis created by the , combined with significant cultural change, inspired a new interpretation of trauma psychiatry. Anti-war campaigners argued that veterans who had been able to contain their distressing experiences whilst on active service broke down on return to the US when confronted by an unsympathetic public. They called the phenomenon ā€œdelayed stress syndromeā€ or ā€œpost-Vietnam syndrome.ā€

A campaign by veterans and clinicians led to the formal recognition of PTSD by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. It represented a turning point in aetiological theory. In both World Wars the individual had been held responsible for his breakdown: whether his genetics, family history, up-bringing or unconscious conflict. PTSD reversed this causal explanation. The traumatic exposure, criterion A in the DSM-III definition, was now primary and everyone, whether citizen or soldier, was potentially vulnerable to the new traumatic disorder if exposed to a life-threatening event. Personality factors were now considered secondary determining, amongst other things, the speed of recovery or severity of the disorder.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Shell shock and PTSD are not the same disorder by a different name. The former was a catch-all term for any soldier who broke down and was unable to perform his duties. It was expressed through a range of psycho-somatic symptoms such as chest pain, fatigue, headache, tremor, palpitations and nightmares. PTSD has some features in common with shell shock (notably startle reaction, poor concentration and intrusive images). Both disorders arose in a context of heightened emotion conditioned by extreme threat. They can be seen as culturally determined expressions of distress.

Although there is no direct chain of events from World War One through to the recognition of PTSD in 1980, the shell shock episode had focused unparalleled attention to the issue of traumatic illness. Never before had so many soldiers suffered from psychological disorder. Furthermore, their illness could not be explained by pre-war theories of degeneration, heredity or the side effects of infectious disease. Neurologists, general physicians and even surgeons, doctors who before 1914 would not have shown any interest in psychiatry, were drawn to shell shock.

By bringing new ideas to the discipline, it gave a fresh impetus to the search for psychological understanding and, in this sense, PTSD can be viewed as a progeny of World War One. Whilst today we are better equipped to diagnose and treat psychological trauma, we seem no further forward in preventing the conflicts that are the cause of these illnesses.

The views expressedĢżin this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflectĢż51³Ō¹Ļā€™sĢżeditorial policy.

Ģż/

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By Sukjoon Yoon

Since the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 on March 8, several countries have been participating in extensive Search and Rescue (SAR) and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations in the South China Sea and beyond.

This provides a welcome contrast to the heated rhetoric of the past few years and may generate enough goodwill for the nations of the region to reconsider how they use their maritime security forces, paving the way for a fresh approach to the resolution of maritime conflicts and confrontations.

The Search for MH370

Prior to the MH370 issue, the regional media was preoccupied with the deployment of Chinese maritime security forces in disputed waters in the South China Sea, which tended to thwart rather than foster regional maritime peace and stability. For example, during the Chinese navy's largest-ever joint fleet exercise last November, a vessel escorting the refurbished aircraft carrier Liaoning was involved in a near collision with the Aegis cruiser USS Cowpens. Another example was the harassment of the USNS Impeccable by Chinese Maritime Surveillance vessels in international waters in July 2013.

Significantly, the missing Malaysian airliner has led to maritime security assets being engaged in SAR and HADR operations in waters with overlapping jurisdictional claims: there are disputes between Vietnam and Malaysia, and between China, Vietnam and Malaysia in the areas being searched.

Overcoming their reluctance to work together, these rival claimants have managed to set aside their quarrels, with the tragedy apparently facilitating genuine maritime cooperation amongst them.

The number of countries involved in the search and rescue operation has increased from 14 to 26 as of March 19, including Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam. The Chinese contingent comprises four naval vessels (including two large amphibious ships), four maritime patrol craft, six coastguard vessels and 14 rescue ships, with ten Chinese satellites also joining the search.

Arguments over territorial claims in the South China Sea have been put on hold, and instead there is bilateral and multilateral cooperation aimed at rescuing the victims and recovering the wreckage of the aircraft from waters that have been a major bone of contention between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Role of Maritime Security Forces

This is an appropriate moment for the Asia Pacific region to take a fresh look at the role of its maritime security forces. They have undergone significant changes in recent years, with an expansion of inventories and improved capabilities, but their ultimate raison d’être has remained national defense.

The growth of non-military threats has, however, significantly broadened the function of maritime security forces. They are no longer concerned only with the protection of resources within their 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones, but must also undertake law enforcement tasks to counter maritime terrorism, piracy and armed robbery, for which they must project force well beyond their territorial waters.

The protection of sea routes, which are vital economic lifelines, especially for energy supplies, is an essential aspect of this broader role, and the prevailing mistrust among the nations of the region has inevitably made such tasks more difficult and complex.

Unfortunately, in this climate of suspicion, there is an increasing risk of prolonged stand-offs between maritime forces giving rise to serious incidents. Even minor altercations can rapidly escalate into military conflict, because many regional security forces are now adopting proactive or even offensive postures.

This problem is aggravated by the close geographical proximity of potential adversaries, and constrained sea space in which their operations take place in disputed waters. Nevertheless, the established diplomatic and benign role of the maritime security forces in the furtherance of peace and stability has expanded considerably.

Improving Maritime Crisis Management

Maritime cooperation comprises more than just the use of maritime security forces. To maintain stability, a crisis management framework between disputing parties is essential to prevent miscalculations and misunderstandings escalating into serious incidents.

Perhaps the most sensitive issue demanding such cooperation concerns preserving the freedom of the skies over areas where maritime jurisdictional rights and interests are contested. Specifically, the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea is particularly perilous.

The Chinese government has unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), which includes coverage of these islands; and maritime patrol surveillance aircraft from these countries continue to monitor one another closely, with frequent dangerous interceptions.

Thus, the possibility of severe clashes, at sea or in the air above the South and East China seas, remains unacceptably high, and these risks can only be mitigated by improved maritime crisis management mechanisms like hotlines, policy channels and strategic dialogues.

Seen in this light, the disappearance of Flight MH370 offers an opportunity for various parties who are deeply mistrustful of one another to engage with potential opponents in a constructive manner.

For example, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama have spoken by telephone to coordinate SAR and HADR operations between their maritime security forces and to avoid clashes in the disputed areas of the South China Sea.

To build upon this new spirit of cooperation, some helpful maritime crisis management measures may be identified: 

• Enhance maritime security and confidence-building measures, without undermining national maritime rights and interests 
• Make use of strategic dialogues and hotlines, and conduct exercises and operations only after giving prior information; establish protocols similar to the Incident at Sea (INCSEA) or the Code for Un-alerted Encounters Between Ships (CUES) 
• Agree upon a common understanding of the law of the sea 
• Encourage information sharing of "actionable intelligence" to facilitate maritime cooperation

Fresh Start for Maritime Security?

Although the disappearance of MH370 is undeniably tragic, something positive may come out of it. Regional maritime security forces are involved simultaneously in SAR and HADR operations, and the cooperation which this obliges presents a useful opportunity to build confidence, and thus to make unwanted maritime confrontations less likely in the future.

By allowing a fresh start, this tragedy should contribute to ensuring peace and good order at sea by helping to alleviate the widespread distrust which so bedevils the security of the Asia Pacific region.

*[Note: Captain (ROK Navy Ret.) Sukjoon Yoon is a Senior Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy and visiting professor with the Department of Defense Systems Engineering in Sejong University, Seoul. This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļ’s editorial policy.

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By Kalyan M. Kemburi

Over the last two decades, cruise missiles were predominantly deployed by a select group of advanced industrial countries, in particular the United States. Subsequently, there had been a wider use of this weapon system by militaries, partly due to globalization which accelerated technology diffusion, but also because of affordability and operational requirements (in particular the search for asymmetric capabilities). 

Asian militaries top this list. The main advantage of cruise missiles involves the ability to strike targets accurately almost under any weather condition from a long-range by evading most air defenses, and with minimal risk to friendly forces. 

Asian Militaries and Cruise Missiles

Although most countries in Asia have acquired anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan are developing or have deployed land-attack cruise missiles (LACM). Some Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam have also expressed interest. Japan has indicated interest in a system that could endow it with preemptive strike capabilities — for which cruise missiles could fit the bill.  

For countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the high-cost of deploying missile defenses and the treaty restrictions in developing ballistic missiles have made cruise missiles an attractive system to strike against potential adversaries' ballistic missiles and artillery systems. 

As with any military technology, there is always a dynamic between defense and offence. Deployment of cruise missiles have also resulted in consequent developments in defense: active countermeasures include advances in early warning systems and the deployment of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, as well as the strengthening of passive defenses such as installations holding critical assets like aircraft or command and control equipment. Moreover, new operational requirements have intensified efforts to acquire high-speed cruise missiles. 

R&D in Supersonic and Hypersonic Systems 

Five countries in Asia — China, Japan, India, South Korea and Taiwan — have either civilian and/or military programs aimed at developing supersonic and hypersonic systems. It is generally agreed that supersonic systems (powered by ramjet engine) operate in the range of Mach 2-4 and hypersonic (scramjet engine) over Mach 5; most of the deployed LACMs fly at subsonic speeds of around 800km/hr. 

China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center and the National University of Defense Technology are currently working toward scramjet propulsion, pulse-detonation engines and turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engines, with an aim to eventually develop hypersonic missiles and aircraft. Further, the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics has reportedly developed an experimental scramjet. 

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is involved in developing high-speed air-breathing propulsion for a hypersonic aircraft. JAXA is also collaborating with institutions based in Australia, Germany, Italy and the US in developing scramjet-based systems for space access. In 2012, Japan reportedly tested a rocket-based combined-cycle engine model under Mach 8. 

India currently deploys the ramjet-powered supersonic LACM Brahmos flying at 2.5-2.8 Mach, and has plans to collaborate with Russia to develop a kerosene-based hypersonic Brahmos 2. Concurrently, the Defense Research and Development Organization is working on a hypersonic system that could fly at Mach 6-7 speed propelled by scramjet. Similarly, for space access, India's civilian space agency has been working on a hydrogen-fueled scramjet engine. 

Taiwan's Hsiung Feng III (HF-3) LACM is propelled by a ramjet engine flying at a maximum speed of Mach 2 with an estimated range of 150-200 km. Initially developed as an ASCM by Chung Shan International Institute of Science and Technology, it was later reported that the missile also has land attack capabilities and entered into service in 2008. 

A new entrant of the cruise missile club, South Korea, has also been developing a supersonic Haeseong-2 LACM from the existing ASCM Haeseong-1 (Sea Star, or SSM-700K). In September 2011, Korea Times reported that the missile was slated for deployment by the end of 2013 and has a range in excess of 500 kms.

Additionally, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) has on the drawing board a two-stage Mach 4 scramjet propelled surface to air interceptor. Reportedly, KARI has ground-tested various scramjet components required for this concept. 

Evolution or Revolution in Fire Power 

Supersonic cruise missiles would increasingly become an attractive option due to the following factors.

Firstly, they reduce sensor-to-shooter to-target times. A supersonic LACM flying toward a target at a distance of 1,000 kms has clear time advantage of over 60 minutes over its subsonic counterpart.

Secondly, the kinetic energy of a supersonic missile not only increases the explosive power of a warhead, but also facilitates reduction of the warhead payload, which helps in expanding the range of the missile. Moreover, they are also very useful for targeting hardened targets; this is important given the hardening of installations as part of key passive defensive measures undertaken by many countries.

Thirdly, supersonic LACM used in conjunction with subsonic and theatre ballistic missiles create processing difficulties for any advanced early warning and air defense system. 

On the other hand, hypersonic air-breathing missile is a key emerging technology. For an effective and efficient use of this technology, changes are necessary in organizational structures, decision-making processes, operational concepts, and C4ISR systems. For most Asian militaries, accustomed to organizational and procedural inertia, bringing these changes in itself is revolutionary.

Moreover, enormous technical and financial resources are necessary to deploy a hypersonic cruise missile; therefore, over the next 10-15 years, supersonic cruise missiles offer a more viable complement to the existing cruise and ballistic missiles. 

Asian militaries are still in the process of inducting subsonic LACMs — supersonics in some cases — in significant numbers, and currently are working on innovative concepts and organizational changes that aim to take advantage of these systems in affecting the outcomes on the battlefield. Therefore, induction of high-speed missiles is evolutionary. 

Nevertheless, in a decade, military commanders in Asia would be able to have a cruise missile delivered to their target 1,500 kms away in less than 30 minutes. 

*[Note: Kalyan M. Kemburi is an Associate Research Fellow with the Military Transformations Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļ’s editorial policy.

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By &

As more US military women break the silence about sexual violence committed by their comrades in arms, it is clear that sporadic “scandals” — at the Tailhook Naval Aviators’ Convention (1991), Aberdeen Proving Grounds Ordnance Center (1996), and the US Air Force Academy (2003) — are not isolated incidents, but spring from the mycelium of US military culture and ideology.

Victims’ testimonies, official complaints, lawsuits against the military, critical and the 2012 award-winning documentary, , have pushed this issue into the spotlight.

In May 2013, an impatient commander-in-chief, Barack Obama,  military leaders to the White House, instructing them to get to the root of this problem. Over the years, the military has set up hotlines to hear victims’ complaints; initiated internal investigations, task forces, and trainings; changed; and repeatedly declared a “” policy.

So why does military sexual violence persist? One explanation offered by The Invisible War is that the US military includes a higher percentage of “sexual predators” than civilian society. Also, some military commanders not only tolerate sexual assault, they are also complicit in covering up these incidents, punishing victims, and exonerating perpetrators or, at most, giving them a “boys-will-be-boys” slap on the wrist.

A weakness of the current debate is its narrow focus on US military women. Cynthia Enloe, a leading feminist scholar of international relations, recently the importance of looking to “those who are pushed to the margins” in order to learn about the big picture.

To locate the root of the problem means looking beyond the assaults on US military women — appalling as they are — to the routine incidents of military violence against civilians in combat situations and outside the fences surrounding US bases overseas. Given their mission, soldiers are trained to kill. This means seeing “others” as foreign or less-than-human. Gender and masculinity are at play; so too are racism and national chauvinism.

Military Violence in the Asia-Pacific Region

Okinawan women have documented the history of rape by US troops in Okinawa (1945 to present). shows how sexual violence is a factor in contemporary tensions surrounding US basing agreements in Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Militarized prostitution in the Asia-Pacific is alive and well. Bar areas near the bases are thriving, and US ships continue to make port calls in the Philippines and Thailand. In the past, Philippine women were called “little brown fucking machines powered by rice,” among other: “Yankee whore,” “bar girl,” or “hostess,” reflecting US soldiers’ expectations that women would provide sex.

In 2005, Lance Corporal Daniel Smith was of raping a Filipina identified as “Nicole,” near Subic Bay. The case was the first to test the extent of Philippine jurisdiction under the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States. The district court convicted Smith, but the US military had him transferred from the local jail to the US embassy. He was later acquitted after Nicole issued a revised statement that cast doubt on her earlier testimony. Many feminists, including Task Force Subic Rape and the nationwide organization Gabriela, this case as a testament to the lopsided relations between the United States and the Philippines.

, in South Korea, a US soldier, “R”, broke into a woman’s home and raped her, only a month after another rape by “I” of an 18 year-old South Korean woman. Members of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence held a press conference to denounce the latest rape incident in . The group was founded in 1995 after a 12-year-old girl was gang raped by three US servicemen. This incident sparked new opposition to US bases in Okinawa, drawing protests involving 85,000 people.

Rape in War Zones: Iraq and Afghanistan

Reports of US military women raped or sexually assaulted by troops or contract personnel in Iraq have trickled into the American news over the years. Colonel Janis Karpinksi commented on the tragedy of several women who  when they stopped drinking liquids after 3 or 4pm, because “they were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women’s latrine after dark.”

Nadje Sadig al-Ali, a professor of Gender Studies at the University of London, has that there are “many documented accounts of physical assaults on women at checkpoints and during house searches.” In 2006, six soldiers were accused of rape and murder in connection with the killing of a young Iraqi woman and her family, though the accusations did not lead to convictions. And in 2012, the Center for Research on Globalization an incident in which US Special Forces in Afghanistan were accused of raping Afghan women during a raid.

Sexual abuse and torture against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison introduced a on this issue, in which race and nation trumped gender as white US women were deployed strategically to shame and humiliate Iraqi men. In this case, the power they wielded derived from their national affiliation as members of the US military — and from their whiteness — rather than their gender. A small minority in Abu Ghraib included who were raped and subjected to systematic abuse.

The liberation of Iraqi and Afghan women was widely touted by both George W. Bush and Tony Blair to justify military intervention in those countries. In the post-9/11 era, the West has defined itself as the rescuer, while depicting the Muslim world as backwards, uncivilized, or barbaric. Post-colonial feminist scholars in the United States were quick to point out these “.”

Linking the Domestic and International

In response to the crisis of military violence among co-workers, the US House Armed Services committee has proposed a to be included in the 2014 Defense Policy bill: “Anyone found guilty of rape, sexual assault, forcible sodomy, or the attempts of the aforementioned will lead to a punishment that includes, at a minimum, a dismissal from military service or a dishonorable discharge.” Although this is a step in the right direction, it overlooks the fact that most military victims of sexual violence do not report it, and that most accused of such crimes are not found guilty.

To get closer to the root of the problem, Congress and Pentagon officials should hear testimony from victims of US military sexual assault and their advocates in other nations. Although not all men rape or commit acts of violence against women, a clear pattern exists that goes beyond assaults of US military personnel.

President Obama and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel have both called for a change in military culture. Is this possible, given the mission of the military and the role it plays in US society? The military is still a male-dominated institution even though women now provide 15 percent of its “manpower.”

Like women in the US military, activists in the Asia-Pacific region critique the military culture of violence. Beyond this, their goals are often very different. Many US military women want to see stronger policies and enforcement regarding crimes of sexual violence in the military. Feminists in the Asia-Pacific region, and their counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan, call for an end to US militarization and occupation of their countries.

The Philippine organization, , notes that the US military always does “its best to protect its soldiers from the laws of host countries.” They argue that solidarity amongst women in countries where US troops are permanently stationed is necessary to respond to these unequal relations. South Korean organizations have a change in the Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) governing the conduct of US troops overseas. They want to see greater powers for “host” nations regarding legal jurisdiction over US troops who commit crimes against civilians, as well as greater sovereignty for host governments and democratic rights for citizens. Okinawan women call for apologies to victims of sexual assault by US military authorities, punishment for perpetrators under Japanese laws, and the withdrawal of US troops from Okinawa.

Examining sexual violence in these different contexts — from the centers of the US military to the margins of occupied countries — makes it much more complex. The women who seek justice within the US military are part of a superpower with 1,000 bases overseas. A focus on domestic sexual violence makes invisible the fact that crimes within the military are tied to military practices in occupied countries (and vice versa). And as shown by women who of , bases and routine maneuvers also destroy land, contaminate the environment, and distort local economies, alongside crimes of violence committed by US troops.

*[Note:  received her PhD in Ethnic Studies with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, she is an adjunct lecturer in Peace & Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. is a scholar and activist focused on issues of gender, racial and environmental justice in the service of genuine security, peace-making, and creating a sustainable world. This article was originally published by ]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļ’s editorial policy.

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What started as a debate about a hydroelectric dam has become a high profile dispute over the future of food security in the Mekong region. The controversial Xayaburi Dam in Laos has resulted in increasing political tensions and a crackdown on civil society, culminating in the disappearance of a Lao activist in December.

Over 60 million people living in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam depend on the Mekong River. It is the world’s largest inland fishery and the second most biodiverse river, behind only the Amazon. The river’s fish are the main source of protein for millions of people. The river also nourishes some of the region’s most productive agricultural fields. Tourists flock to the Mekong River from across the world, contributing to all four countries’ economies.

Now Laos wants to build nine hydropower dams on the river and sell the electricity to neighboring countries. With the help of Thailand, Laos has already started construction on the first project, called the Xayaburi Dam. The problem is that the dams in Laos will cause significant harm to countries downstream. This puts Laos’ neighbors in a difficult situation. Scientists have concluded that if the dams are built, the food security of millions of people in all four countries will be threatened.

The costs of damming the Mekong

The stakes are high. As one of Asia’s poorest countries, Laos sees the dams as an opportunity to earn much needed revenue. For the project developers, the Xayaburi Dam provides a cash windfall. Yet leading scientific studies have found that many of the dams’ costs will be borne by other governments and people living downstream, rather than the dam developers themselves. The dams will block fish migrations, leading to drastic declines in Cambodia’s fisheries industry. They will also reduce the flow of nutrients downstream to rice paddies and agricultural fields in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Many of the region’s poorest villagers who live along the riverbanks will lose their farmland and the fish that provide their main source of protein.  Scientists have found no viable measures to mitigate the harm or replace lost food security.

As a water dispute arises, a treaty fails

In 1995, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam signed a treaty to promote cooperation in use of the Mekong River. The treaty created the Mekong River Commission, which is tasked with finding mutually acceptable ways to use and sustain the river. As part of this, the treaty requires the governments to seek agreement before beginning major projects on the Mekong, using a process called “prior consultation.”

The Xayaburi Dam was the first big test for the commission. Instead of seeking agreement, however, the commission hit gridlock. When the four governments first met to discuss the project in April 2011, Cambodia and Vietnam asked for dam construction to be postponed, so that transboundary impacts studies could be conducted. Laos and Thailand refused to do these studies.

With no clear resolution to the prior consultation, Laos and Thailand decided to proceed with the project anyway. The commission provided few opportunities for the fishermen and communities who would live near the dams to be heard, and many still do not know when construction vehicles will show up or when they will be told to move.

On November 7, 2012, Laos held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Xayaburi Dam (although construction actually began in late 2010). Laos claimed that the dam had been re-designed to address Cambodia’s and Vietnam’s concerns, although the Mekong River Commission had not yet seen details of the re-design. Cambodia and Vietnam remained silent after the announcement, leading to speculation that a deal had been struck.

Cambodia and Vietnam find their voice

On January 17, government ministers gathered in Laos for the annual meeting of the Mekong River Commission’s governing body. Although the Xayaburi Dam was not on the agenda, the governments finally spoke out. Discussions became tense. Cambodia said that Laos had misinterpreted the 1995 Mekong treaty by proceeding with the Xayaburi Dam before the “prior consultation” was finished. Vietnam said that the recent launching of the dam “is causing concerns…about its adverse impacts on downstream areas.” Even Thailand acknowledged that concerns still exist.

Donors to the Mekong River Commission also spoke up. In a joint statement, Australia, Japan, European countries, the United States, and others said, “It is our consensus that building dams on the mainstream of the Mekong may irrevocably change the river and hence constitute a challenge for food security, sustainable development, and biodiversity conservation.” At the end of the meeting, Laos announced “with deep regrets” that it could not sign the meeting’s official minutes, signaling that it did not acknowledge the criticisms. Days later, the Lao government’s Vientiane Times published an article claiming that the commission supported the Xayaburi Dam.

Public concern with the dams

As the commission’s meetings falter along, citizens in all four countries have searched for ways to raise their concerns to government officials. Thai villagers who live near the Mekong River have protested their country’s involvement in the project and filed a lawsuit. Journalists and civil society groups continue to monitor the situation and report on the status of the dams, because the Mekong River Commission’s own transparency has been limited. Scientists across the world continue to raise concerns.

Meanwhile, Laos has prevented any public criticism of the dam within its own borders. In December, the government expelled a Swiss activist, Anne-Sophie Gindroz. One week later, prominent Lao activist Sombath Somphone was kidnapped. Although the reason for his kidnapping is unknown, evidence suggests that the Lao government was involved. Both Mr. Somphone and Ms. Gindroz helped to organize a forum last October where the Mekong dams were publicly criticized. Mr. Somphone remains missing, and other Lao citizens who have been critical of the Mekong dams are now in hiding.

What happens next?

Is this the beginning of a Mekong water conflict? Conflict may grow as the Xayaburi Dam’s impacts are felt over the coming years, and as Laos moves forward with other Mekong dams. Within the next year, evidence suggests that Laos will give the go-ahead for construction on two other dams, including one that is only two kilometers from the Cambodian border.

On the other hand, the politics of the Mekong are complicated. The region’s economies are closely intertwined, and governments are hesitant to damage relations with one another. Cambodia has proposed to build two of its own dams on the Mekong, and Vietnam is involved in three of the proposed dams, although none of these projects are likely to move forward anytime soon. Thailand plans to buy the electricity from eight of the eleven dams, although energy experts in Thailand are saying that the electricity is not needed. China is involved in several of the dams as well and may be exerting pressure on Cambodia and Vietnam to support the dams.

As the Mekong governments become entangled in a diplomatic dispute, the outcome is uncertain, but one thing is clear. For the millions of poor villagers who depend on the Mekong River for food security, and who have no voice in their governments’ decisions, challenging times lie ahead.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļ’s editorial policy.

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Throughout history, The Philippines has laid claim to the islands surrounding its maritime borders. As an archipelago, The Philippines considers these islands as strategic points for national defense and a symbol of sovereignty. Many are also rich in natural resources and support key economic activity, like fishing. Both the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea have been subjects of major dispute for a decade, and the implications of this discussion on the geopolitical and social sphere have been great. The faux pas generated by a lack of resolution on this conflict have caused critics to question the Philippine government’s ability to argue for its claims in front of the international community. However, from an economic, historical, and geopolitical standpoint, The Philippines should continue the fight for jurisdiction over the islands. It should be clarified that the argument here is not to add the South China Sea Islands as Philippine territory, but to protect the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) rights. All possible resolutions to the dispute should be diplomatic and must be careful to respect the views of other nations.

Historical and Legal Rights 

The Philippines, as an archipelago, is governed by the archipelagic doctrine of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This doctrine states that an archipelago is considered as a single unit, and that the waters around the islands of the archipelago form part of the internal waters of the state and is subject to its exclusive sovereignty. The Philippine archipelago is regarded as an integrated unit instead of just 7,107 islands. The Philippine constitution now boasts provisions of the said doctrine to further define its territorial boundaries. The legal grounds of a nation’s claim are key to finding a resolution for the conflict. Under the UNCLOS, a nation with sovereignty over an island can claim a surrounding 12-nautical mile territorial sea. It must be noted, however, that while only a small portion of the Spratly and Paracel Islands can be considered part of Philippine territory, the Philippine 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) encompasses a large portion of the area. The EEZ gives the owner country the right to protect and exploit the natural resources in the area it covers. Most nations, including The Philippines, understand that the islands of the South China Sea cannot simply be claimed as territory due to proximity (EEZ and territory are mutually exclusive); yet, these nations value these uninhabited islands for more than just the combined thirteen km² land mass.

Throughout the 20^th century, The Philippines has consistently asserted its claims to the Spratly islands and many other territories in the South China Sea within its EEZ. In 1946, Vice President Elpidio Quirino claimed the Spratlys on behalf of the Philippine government. In 1978, President Ferdinand Marcos issued a formal proclamation declaring ownership of the islands in the Spratlys, which was renamed the Kalayaan (Freedom) Island Group. The proclamation below was the basis for the Philippine claim over a majority of the South China Sea Islands:

"[The Philippines takes claim of the Kalayaan Group of islands] by virtue of their proximity and as part of the continental margin of the Philippine archipelago"; that "they do not legally belong to any state or nation, but by reason of history; indispensable need, and effective occupation and control established in accordance with international law [we control the islands]."

In 1995, President Fidel Ramos re-articulated the Philippine position regarding the Spratlys issue, stating that all islands and waters in the Spratlys belonged to the Philippines and were under its sovereignty. Both China and Vietnam put forward similar claims; these countries’ encroachments into the Philippine EEZ are strong indicators of their intent to capture the islands for their economic and military value. However, the pure historical bases of these countries’ claims contain many inaccuracies that weaken their respective claims. Vietnam continues to assert the claims of historical sovereignty over the disputed area despite it going beyond the 200 nautical miles allotment. In 2009, the Vietnamese government submitted to the UN an official expansion of its continental shelf into their “East Sea” (the South China Sea). China’s somewhat ambiguous “nine-dotted line” policy includes 90% of the South China Sea which includes the Paracel and the Spratly islands. This government policy is founded on maps as old as 1914, endorsed by the Kuomintang in 1947 and later by the Communist government; since 1949, China has backed up its claims with a strong military presence in the Paracel and Spratly islands, which they controlled after routing the Vietnamese naval forces in 1974 and in 1988. One fundamental reason for the lack of clarity is that China is only a signatory to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS); if Beijing’s claims were to be defined in accordance to this treaty, it would expose the government to harsh criticism. It is possible that Beijing’s continued support of the vague jurisdiction of the nine-dotted line is an explicit show of force by the ruling Communist Party. According to a Washington DC-based China foreign policy expert, the ambiguity is intentional and serves China’s domestic purposes of satisfying nationalist public opinion and preserving government legitimacy. The nine-dashed line, for all its historical worth, maximizes and even expands Beijing’s territorial scope, though it is difficult to justify under international law.

Economic Activity and Tradeoffs

The South China Sea supports many key economic activities in the region and though economic activity is limited to commercial fishing, each of the contending nations would like to hold the exclusive rights for starting commercial exploitation and development. This has led to various minor military skirmishes between the rival states, the detention of fishermen, and diplomatic rows over the past decades. For The Philippines, the establishment and full protection of its EEZ rights will go a long way towards helping its growing economy; the Filipino people will not only gain safe passage through a key trading zone, but may also access the reefs for tourism purposes and develop multi-million dollar mining operations. The mining and tourism industries in the EEZs have been extremely important in enticing and infusing FDIs (Foreign Direct Investments) into the Philippine economy through multinational companies. The economic significance of the region is so great that Beijing ordered its civilian patrol vessels to stop the Philippine coast guard from arresting Chinese fisherman working near Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands. However, the express jurisdiction over a waterway that provides approximately 10% of the global fisheries catch and about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade also lends itself to issues of national security.

Military Significance

The South China Sea is a located in a strategic area that may pose a threat to national security and to the economic trading capability of a certain nation should criminal or sabotage activities take place. The Spratly and Paracel Islands are along the world’s most heavily trafficked shipping lanes and hold untapped economic value and resources. The implications of fully controlling an EEZ is a possible reason why the Chinese and Vietnamese governments continue to contest the EEZ rights of The Philippines and assert their territorial claims on the Spratly and Paracel Islands and the Scarborough Shoal. Nations with uncontested authority over an EEZ may, to an extent, treat the zone as its “territory” and may therefore exercise security control and measures to discourage any foreign entities from entering. Though The Philippines is entitled to the South China Sea EEZ, many nations consider the economic and military significance of the zone too important to give any one nation the exclusive rights to establish a monopoly on trade routes and initiate the development of rich oil deposits. China, in particular, has been wary of other nations seeking to challenge its consistent naval dominance in the disputed area. Beijing has sent paramilitary patrol boats to bolster its military presence in a portion of the Philippine EEZ, which includes Scarborough Shoal, in response to the strategic “pivot” of the United States towards Asia to counter China’s growing power. The dispute over the region was heightened in the wake of Philippine-American exercises near the West Philippine Sea, a time when China to publically reiterated its right to defend its “maritime borders” with military force (i.e. 100 Chinese vessels, including four government patrol ships). Attempts by the Philippine Navy to chase illegal Chinese fishing operations from the EEZ have proved difficult; in the early months of 2012, a Philippine warship was engaged in a standoff with Chinese surveillance ships after trying to arrest Chinese fishermen. The sensitive issue of Chinese national security is not limited to The Philippines, as Vietnam announced in 2011 that Chinese vessels had cut the cables of a Vietnamese gas research ship.

Since 1955, The Philippines has considered the Spratly Islands and its accompanying territories of “vital proximity” to the country as an integral part of its foreign policy. But the question remains: What will our leaders do with China growing more and more aggressive in the region? The Philippine EEZ must be protected from Chinese military and commercial encroachment and to do so effectively, it must gain the approval and full backing of the international community. A well-protected Philippine EEZ is not so much about establishing a joint Philippine-US naval operation, but about preventing a relentless Chinese expansionist policy disguised within the nine-dotted line and the issue of national security. Though the Chinese perspective has to be considered in the bigger picture of the South China Sea, its hardline methods have been unwarranted. The current territorial skirmish with China is not just an incident of bilateral nature, but also an indicator of graver things to come. Defense analysts even assume that South China Sea may be the site of a future battleground of the 21st Century, and any continuing conflict can aversely affect the interests of 620 million people in Southeast Asia and 1.3 billion people in China. The Philippine islands themselves may be severely threatened if a strong foreign nation, such as China, were to wrest control of the EEZ.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļ's editorial policy.

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