The pivot to Asia
=================

Asked about American naval exercises with the Philippines conducted outside Philippine waters, John Kiriakou placed them in a policy he traces to one administration: "it''s this unnecessarily provocative pivot to Asia that started with Barack Obama."

The relationship it is built on

"We have a very, very long relationship with the Filipino government. It''s had its ups and downs. We used to have the biggest air force base in the world there, Clark Air Force Base. We used to have the biggest naval base in the world there, Subic Bay. We don''t any more. But now we''ve moved much more closely toward the Filipinos, and vice versa, in the last ten years or so."

On the meeting that followed the Japanese prime minister''s state visit, with the Philippine president arriving the next day, his reading is flat: "the meeting was all about confronting China. The whole thing was about confronting China, not about protecting the Philippines, not about protecting Japan, but about being proactively provocative against the Chinese."

The history he says is being forgotten

"One of the things that I think many American policy makers forget is that it was the Chinese who were attacked by the Japanese, and the viciousness of that attack, which lasted from the 1930s into the middle of the 1940s, is a part of the Chinese DNA. Chinese children are taught about the viciousness of the Japanese occupation. It''s the Chinese that are more worried about what the Japanese might do to them than the reverse."

His conclusion is a question rather than a prediction: "why we''ve decided to confront the Chinese like this in the South China Sea of all places, or in the Straits of Taiwan, or on an island that''s only six miles off the coast of mainland China, by putting a thousand US troops, I just don''t get what the end game is."

An aside on the Marcos family

Asked whether the frozen assets of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. might bear on the current president''s alignment, Kiriakou recalled the period first-hand: "I was a senior in college when Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown in the People Power movement. It was very, very powerful. And you''re right, that whole family was under sanctions. I remember that Imelda had something like, what was it, 10,000, 20,000 pairs of shoes, while people were living in poverty and squalor in her country. How in the world that family came back, I have no idea."

See also

- China as economic threat
- Barack Obama
- The permanent multipolar world
- Djibouti
- The US overseas basing footprint
