Distant Thunder, But The Count Is Five

In a blog dated today, January 22nd, 2013 J. Michael Cole posted the following,  Tensions Mount Between Japan and China.

I encourage you to read it yourself.  In it he discusses growing tensions between Japan and China and the potential implications for the United States and the world.  Obviously I believe his points are worth thinking about, otherwise I wouldn't have started my own post with a link to it.

Now what's this "but the count is five" mean?  It goes back to when I was a kid.  My grandfather was a self-taught scholar in his own right and I benefited from his teachings on not only history but earth science.  We'd go on walks and look at the sky and he'd teach me about astronomy and meteorology, using the biggest and most spectacular prop any educator could ever hope for, the universe itself.

One of the many lessons I particularly remember was to start counting off seconds after hearing a thunder crack.  He taught me that every four seconds meant the actual lightning strike was a mile away, and most likely so was the storm.  So for example if I counted to twelve it meant the lightning was three miles away.  This lesson has come in handy many times in my life, like when hiking a mountain and trying to decide if a storm is far enough off to make it down or if I should seek shelter on the mountain until the storm passes.

We Americans have a tendency to think of tensions between Japan and China as "far off" from us and in many real ways they are, like a storm that's still three miles away we may never even see it reach us, but we live in a much smaller world than we used to.  I say the count is more like five than twelve.  In a mountain hiker's context that's as close to imminent as a storm can be and still not quite be there.

History is full of tensions that, as J. Michael Cole describes essentially, have slowly grown and escalated into full blown wars, and one between the world's second and third largest economies with the likely need of intervention from the world's first, that's no small storm.  There will be no ducking under a rocky over-hang until it passes.

My Analysis Suggests This Bit Of Advice

While it's popular to believe WWI came about because not enough was done to prevent conflict, that's not entirely true.  There is plenty of evidence to support that perhaps too much was done to, in a figurative sense, keep a lid on potential conflicts.  In the process of trying to tamp down conflict around the world, diplomats far too often ignored the forces driving the conflicts.  This made the eventual explosion that was WWI inevitable and very possibly worse than the aggregate of what all the curtailed conflicts might have been.

In short, my advice, for what it's worth would be to identify and address the root causes for the disputes.  Identifying them would be the greatest and most useful task in the near term.  Some are historical and have to do with legitimate issues of national sovereignty.  Some have more to do with just the current 'now' and are driven by politics and greed.

China's might gives it no ultimate right.  Nowhere is the temporal nature of economic and military might better understood than in East Asia.  These things come and go and cannot be a sound way to resolve issues in the long term.  The ultimate right over any piece of territory rests with two things, history and where people live.  Not with who has the biggest guns or the most soldiers.

In the case of the disputed islands there are no established residents so it all falls on history, all that's legitimate.  Unfortunately China's current elite are exceptionally prone to revisionism.  It's also unfortunate that China takes any attempt to correct them as not just a challenge but an insult.

Resolving a conflict with a nation that claims to historically own places it never owned, such as Taiwan, is no easy task, but I think the run up to WWI may have something to tell us.  Just tamping down conflict is a very bad idea, as frightening as instead confronting the issues may be.  It is better to confront ideas now than to fight a war later.  The time may be coming to start getting firm about China's delusions.  A stronger and more potentially assertive Japanese military could be a great prop in this ideological intervention.