The war that is only in our minds

BY ANTONIO CONTRERAS       APRIL 11, 2019

FOR a country that has been noted for a peaceful EDSA “revolution” and bloodless coup attempts, it is uncharacteristic that many of our leaders, particularly President Rodrigo Duterte, take an extremely bloody view of our options with regard to China. We are made to believe that there are only two things that can happen. We either surrender and acquiesce, or else have to go through a bloody war. And this is a view that is shared by a large number of loyal Duterte supporters.

The dire warnings are emblazoned in our consciousness. And the litany painted for us is a procession of images of certain defeat. We can’t afford to go to war. Engaging China in a shooting war would be suicide. Our soldiers will be massacred by the superior force of the Chinese.

But of course. Engaging China in a shooting war is a road that points to almost certain defeat. It doesn’t take a genius and rocket science to reach this conclusion. It is obvious enough that it doesn’t need any explanation.

However, there is one question that we need to ask. Are we really sure that China would engage us in a shooting war?

And here, the answer may be found in China’s behavior vis-à-vis other governments. If China is a warmonger, it would have annexed Hong Kong and Macau by force and not by diplomacy. It would have invaded Taiwan, which it claims to be its province. It would have sent navy ships to militarily engage Indonesia and Vietnam, both of which have naval ships which on several instances fired at Chinese vessels.

But China, despite its aggressive stance in the West Philippine Sea, is no longer in the habit of engaging other countries militarily. The last military war China fought was with the Vietnamese in 1979. Its military love to flex its muscles but would rather target its own citizens in its crackdown on internal dissent, including people of Tibet and the Uighur Muslim minority that are pushing for self-determination.

China plays a different card in the global arena, and focuses on economic, not military, warfare. It wages an aggressive debt diplomacy which it labels as the Belt and Road Initiative, offering easy infrastructure loans to cash-strapped economies, but embedding conditions that serve Chinese interests, from imposing their own preferred contractors, to insisting that Chinese labor be utilized, to requiring the waiving of immunity over natural resources in the event the debtor country defaults, to making sure that Chinese laws and mediating bodies will be used to settle disputes. This is the Chinese way of waging a war, which is done not by firing a shot but by ensuring that a country will be under the ambit of its economic sphere of control. It doesn’t send military invaders but contractors and workers. It doesn’t annex territories by force of war, but as payments for unpaid loans. After all, war is a costly enterprise with very little economic return compared to debt-trap diplomacy where countries end up under effective Chinese control without firing a single shot. In fact, China engages its main rival, the United States, in a trade war, and not a shooting war.

If there is any aggressiveness shown by China, it is all in the pursuit of image-making and psychological warfare. Its attempt to redraw its boundaries in the West Philippine Sea through the fiction of a nine-dash line, its deliberate intrusion into other countries’ EEZs, including ours, its unilateral exercise of jurisdiction over common areas, and the swarming of its naval militia even in areas like Pag-asa which is already within our national territory are simply muscle-flexing acts that are designed to intimidate.

And woe upon us that we allow ourselves to be intimidated by these bullying tactics, that even our leaders accept the fact that we have no other choice but to acquiesce.

The bully China is also the same China that offers to us the cash that we badly need to build our infrastructures. We are being offered a carrot of loan monies while being intimidated by a stick of territorial aggression. And we succumb to irrational fear of a so-called friend.

It is therefore our own fears and insecurities that bind us to this dualistic choice of bending over to take it from behind with loans that have onerous conditions, because we are afraid that doing otherwise would lead to a bloody frontal war.

This is an imagined fear. It is what China wants us to feel. It is an outdated feeling that would have made sense had we existed during the Cold War.

China has more to lose if it wages war with us, a small, weaker country. Invading even just a portion of our national territory will have the effect of triggering a global political earthquake that will bring into the fray not only the US but all other countries that seek an open passage in the West Philippine Sea.

And the economic costs to China will be as uncertain, if not steep. While a war may conscript countries deeply indebted to China into becoming its allies, there is also a bigger possibility that these countries may seize the moment as an opportunity to simultaneously default on their loan obligations to take advantage of China’s preoccupation with war. And China will be forced to fight a war in many fronts that can easily dissipate its energy and resources.

In the end, there is more reason for China to engage in rational diplomacy, instead of engaging in an irrational war that can expose it to political and economic risks and undermine its position as a global power.

Obviously, the narrative that appears to scare us with the horrors of a war we can’t win if we frontally challenge China is being told by people who benefit from propagating the fear.

https://www.manilatimes.net/the-war-that-is-only-in-our-minds/538460/