(09-16-2020, 04:51 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(09-16-2020, 11:59 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: The resources/assets of Southeast Asia have long been of interest to outside powers.
Awhile back I came across a web site that suggested that SE Asia will be contested by China and Japan.
I’m not so sure it is cost effective to use violence to acquire resources and territory anymore. A point I often make. Nukes. Insurgent proxy wars. China may not have figured it out yet. Most of their neighbors are nervous. They are a potent force, but they have antagonized a lot of people.
Wars of aggression are problematic these days, though.
World War II ripped apart the assumptions of colonial rule. Small cadres of colonial administrators and business operators and executives could not overpower the much larger populations of British India, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies as such people did after those lands were taken out of Japanese domination at the end of WWII. If small countries acting in nationalist individualism could easily be drawn into the Nazi orbit through intrigue or conquest, colonial empires in southeast Asia and western Oceania were vulnerable to brute-force overthrow by the Japanese who could dedicate themselves to a large army and navy for such a purpose.
Nukes and ICBMs scare the hell out of even those leaders who have them. If you wonder why the US and the Soviet Union were able to agree on non-proliferation, it was because both countries did not want others, including those with defensive agreements or alliances with them (either way) to get nukes or ICBMs.
Were the colonial empires in southeastern Asia still intact, China would be in an excellent position for 'liberating' them. The ethnic Chinese populations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam are much larger than the small number of colonial officials and resource-extractors from the First World in those countries. Ethnic Chinese that the Japanese treated brutally were a natural fifth column against the Japanese in World War II. (It is easier to win the peace with kindness than with brutality. The British and Americans could keep the peace upon conquest, and their fascist enemies couldn't keep the peace. That ultimately decided World War II.
This said, any country in the Pacific basin that mistreats the ethnic Chinese badly is at risk of a Chinese military response without help from any other country against such a response. I don't see anyone stupid enough to do anything so amoral and suicidal.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
