Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Strategic Dilemma by Erick San Juan

Strategic Dilemma by Erick San Juan


If we thought that the tension in the contested area in the South China has already subsided due to some factors like change in leadership in some countries in the region, actually it didn’t.

Based on the article of Peter Layton - The South China Sea’s Worsening Strategic Dilemmas, he gave two possible scenarios, negative and positive that might occur in the SCS in the next seven years.

“Alternative futures represent a way for us to think about possible tomorrows. Imagine that the future lies somewhere between the best of all possible worlds and the worst, somewhere between a cooperative and a conflictual state. Neither extreme future is necessarily more likely than the other, but they allow us to think about the spectrum of possibilities. Using the cooperative and conflictual variables creates two possible alternative as follows:

The cooperative future will be considered by many to be wildly optimistic, while pessimistic realists will say that the conflictual world bears some resemblance to where we are now. But the task for policymakers is to steer the future towards the ‘good’ tomorrow and away from the ‘bad’ one. Worryingly, the two major strategic thrusts at the moment, driven by ASEAN and the United States, don’t seem to be moving us in the good direction. .

ASEAN is trying to encourage China to sign a Code of Conduct (COC), an agreement conceived as a binding preventive diplomacy measure that’ll forestall conflict. Talks continue, as they have since 2002. Late 2017 is now the hope-for target date for completion of the code, or at least an agreed draft. China though has long argued—and formalized in various international agreements—that the South China Sea isn’t a multilateral issue and so ASEAN as a grouping has no place discussing it. And in recent years China has convinced Cambodia, Laos and now the Philippines to embrace the PRC’s South China Sea stance, making an ASEAN South China Sea consensus unlikely. More pointedly, why would China sign something that doesn’t advance its interests?”

The year 2017 could be the deciding moment for President Rody Duterte as our country will be the host of the next ASEAN meeting. For obvious reason that PDU30 is now ‘friendly’ with China, and it seems a consensus among ASEAN members is farfetched to encourage China to sign the Code of Conduct, being the host country, our President must consider what the other members’ stand on the COC in relation to the Code of Conduct. He must be sensitive enough not to hurt other ASEAN leaders because he favors China.

The mere fact that we purchased armaments from China, are we going to use them against our neighbors or from our long time ally? If the conflictual theory will prevail, like what I have been saying for quite some time now that if the program is on, yes it can be delayed but it will push through because the man made global crisis by the globalists whose interest is to depopulate the world, another world war is possible.

Our country will play a major role in this future war game for it to happen or not in Duterte’s term, just like what president-elect Donald Trump said about not to meddle in other country’s regime change, in the end the globalists will prevail and leaders will just be pawns in the chessboard of war mongers in the process.

Be wary!

No comments: