Nothing trendy about it – when I look at the long list of American invasions and regime changes, at the multi-national disasters they left behind in Indo-China and now in North Africa and the Middle East I realize that the Americans are not in Chinese waters for world peace. I wait for the day the Chinese and the Russians start playing in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

And of course, the Chinese motives for wanting to control a body of water that provide the sole source of harbors for several Asian nations (that they are already directly threatening) and moving to do so with military buildups and threats to all nations in the area is somehow “American wickedness”?.

Beating a social drum that’s trendy with your local peers isn’t the same as objectively assessing genuine threats. A knee-jerk equivalence of “the U.S. motive is always bad” disavows the reality of the world and a great number of things the U.S. has done in it.

If you think China is a more noble and trustworthy nation to lean on, I’d invite you to revisit that imagining say, fifteen years from now.

Yep, like always. Brave Americans, wicked Chinese.

New dawn for Philippine-China relations?
By

Richard Javad Heydarian