(President Obama- center- does a photo op with ASEAN leaders. The dispute in the contested islands left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. Photo Reuters).
It is getting just cold enough at the end of November that I am starting to get happy-feet thoughts about going someplace warm. Talking to ENS Socotra about duty in Asia naturally turned my mind that way, and then, in the chill thin sunlight and crisp breeze at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday, I had to consider the harsh reality of how we came to be an Asian power, and exactly how we are becoming not one.
(No one does a ceremony like the United States Marines.)
The Marine who was being laid to rest was one of Mac and Dad’s generation, which is swiftly leaving us. This Marine won the Silver Star on Iwo Jima long ago, and I wanted to honor his memory. His son Ralph provided a press clipping about that awful day when steel rained down on black sand, and The Marine took it upon himself to suppress some of that awful rain by improvising explosive charges and crawling across that sand to detonate them at the cave entrances from which the Imperial Japanese troops were firing, sealing up five entrances and trapping the enemy underground- forever.
He was a Private, First Class, and hence did not rate the horses and gun carriage, but the Marines of today did him proud. It is a special thing to be one of The Few, and it was an honor to be part of the final farewell.
But I was drawn back to thinking about Asia, and have a hankering to go back again. I saw an article in the Asia Times that made me wonder what I will think of it when I see it.
I noted that the President took a post-election jaunt to Burma. I have always wanted to go back and stay at The Strand without hauling bags for a Congressional Delegation. The luxury of that Colonial-era gem of a hotel stays with me. It would be fun to just hang out, maybe get up-country. Visit Cambodia and Laos, places that were off limits in the time when I lived and traveled out there.
I am thrilled that people are talking about a strategic pivot to Asia. The Marines are going to rotate through Australia- a ticklish maneuver that has to respect Aussie sovereignty and not poke the Chinese in the eye. The Navy is going to re-position forces to the Pacific. It is about time.
(One of my modern heroes: The Lady who stared down the SLORC at the 20th ASEAN Summit. Photo Reuters.)
When the President traveled, the spotlight was on his talks with The Lady- Aung San Suu Kyi. Her long years of house arrest were over, and she was free as the hard-line military government I met as The SLORC mellowed and began to open up to the outside world.
There was more to it, though, and it was not a story that the media felt like talking about.
The Asia Times did though. I can’t evaluate it properly, nor do I vouch for it as the gospel of anything. But here is what the article claimed
“Post-US world born in Phnom Penh” was the title, and in it a columnist named Spengler, a pen name adopted by a former leftie-turned-La Rouche supporter named David Goldman. He took the “Spengler” name from the German philosopher Oswald Spengler, whose 1930s masterwork was entitled “the Decline of the West.”
As Spengler, Goldman looks at issues in the Far East from an Asian perspective, distinguishing his commentary from the mainstream English-language media, whose reporting is generally by Westerners, for Westerners, just as the coverage of the meeting between the Nobel Peace Prize-winning President and Burmese dissident icon.
I certainly thought that is what the trip was about. Spengler hastens to disagree.
He is biased, of course, but then all the Western media is. Here is what got my attention: Spengler claims that among the triumph of the meeting with The Lady, the United States suffered the “worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation.”
That is a bold assertion. By that, Spengler claims that at the 20th ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh “fifteen Pacific nations whose population amounts to half of all the people on earth agreed to form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.” If it sounds like the old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, you would be correct, since it excludes the United States.
The un-reported story is that President Obama attended the summit to sell a Trans-Pacific Partnership that excluded the Chinese. That initiative died without a whimper, and ASEAN nations will be joined by China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to form the new partnership.
I am all for regional peace and prosperity. I hope that the tension over claims to the islands of the East and South China Seas does not erupt in violence. I hope Spengler is just a doctrinaire jerk and that he is wrong, with all his squiggly charts showing trends going all the wrong way for the States. It makes the Asia Pivot in foreign and military affairs a little suspect. Asia may just be going its own way after 67 years with the American titan in the middle of everything.
I had to think about that, standing in the chill, watching the Marines fold the flag over the ashes of one of their comrades, a hero who with his buddies made his time in Asia the beginning of an American Century.
If Spengler is to be believed, that might be changing. The ‘pivot’ will make it interesting, don’t you think? I wonder if it is enough.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com