History Is Playing Games With US

Do you ever feel that history is playing games with you?

I confess to having had a “fall off the chair” moment as I perused the Washington Post web site recently and found an Associated Press story with a Danang, Vietnam dateline reporting that three U.S. Navy ships were being welcomed by the Communist Vietnamese government for a week’s worth of joint naval exercises in the South China Sea. 

“We’ve had a presence in the Western Pacific and the South China Sea for 50 to 60 years, even going back before World War II,” Rear Adm. Tom Carney, who’s leading the naval exchange, told reporters. “We will maintain a presence in the Western Pacific and the South China Sea as we have for decades, and we have no intention of departing from that kind of activity.”

He spoke on the pier in central Danang, once home to a bustling U.S. military base during the Vietnam War, in front of the diving and salvage ship USNS Safeguard. American and Vietnamese flags flapped in the steamy air from the ship, and two guided missile destroyers — USS Chung-Hoon and USS Preble — were visible off the coast.

The two navies will hold exchanges involving navigation and damage control along with dive and salvage training. No live-fire drills will be conducted.”

…“I don’t know when an appropriate time would be for these kind of activities, which are designed to promote friendship and cooperation,” Carney said from the Vietnam pier. “But I don’t think there’s ever a bad time to do those kind of activities.”

Washington has said that the South China Sea, home to major shipping lanes, is in its national interest. China, which has an expanding maritime influence, has designated the area as a core interest — essentially something it could go to war over. Worried smaller neighboring countries have looked to the U.S. to maintain a strong presence in the region.

“The U.S. has made its point and will continue to do so if pressed, but does not appear to be looking for a fight with Beijing on this issue,” said Ralph Cossa, president of Pacific Forum CSIS, a Hawaii-based think tank. “It is not likely to heed or back down as a result of Chinese ‘warnings,’ however, which will likely make Washington feel more compelled to respond.”

If you had been a 20th century Rip Van Winkle and gone to sleep after our ignominious defeat in Vietnam and our withdrawal from Saigon to ships in the South China Sea, and had just woken up and read this story, you would be, well, in such a state of shock that you might well have lapsed into a fresh coma.

The only constant would be the hostility of the “Communist” Chinese to these joint maneuvers (even though today they are the largest capitalist country in Asia and our largest trading partner).

Yes, history does play strange tricks on us.

I have a neighbor, now 90, who was in the Navy in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, “The Day That Will Live in Infamy” – and served continuously on naval ships in every battle in the Pacific right up through the end of World War II. A few years ago his Japanese downstairs neighbor welcomed her father for a visit – and the upstairs and downstairs “old veterans” got together, and over drinks, discovered they were probably shooting at each other that day of infamy.

One could ask if in this One World of ours that this “friendship with former enemies” posits hope in our current confrontation with militant Islam in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran – and other hot spots around the world.

I personally found that note of hope in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times from Jean-Pierre Lehmann, professor of international political economy at IMD, a global business school in Switzerland, and founding director of The Evian Group.

“While prospects for the United States in its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and possibly Libya may be bleak, one can be reasonably certain that ultimately, even if America loses the wars, as was the case with Vietnam, it will win the peace. As that helicopter took off from the roof of the C.I.A. housing complex in Saigon on April 29, 1975, vividly marking the U.S. defeat, who would have believed that three decades later Vietnam would be a member of the World Trade Organization, a thriving market economy and a close trading partner and ally of the United States, and that the “boat people” would be welcomed back with open arms?

America’s biggest threat to the world is not imperialism — even if it can sometimes, as currently in Central Asia, cause havoc; the greatest threat now, as in the past (the 1930s), is American isolationism. As the American economy flounders and unemployment rises, an anti-immigration, xenophobic streak is emerging. The U.S. failure to lead to a successful conclusion of the W.T.O. Doha agenda and other actions and statements in America give rise to justified fears of rising American protectionism.

Having been the world’s leader in globalization, the greatest calamity, for the United States, and the rest of the planet, would be if the U.S. now led the world into de-globalization. Asia is rising, Latin America may be rising; one hopes that Africa and the Middle East will rise. Ultimately, however, the successful and sustained rise of any and all of these regions requires that the United States continues to be open and global.

While it may be unfashionable to say so, the United States remains in the eyes of much of the world the indispensable and irreplaceable country.”

So, yes, take another read of that last line: the U.S. as “indispensable and irreplaceable.” And argue with it if you can.

But I will tell you that the world doesn’t argue with that. Given the legal opportunity, that world would come streaming into our country through every airport and border crossing possible. I’ll talk about our immigration, legal and illegal, in future posts, and how the USA is the # 1 destination for the world – and how as a nation we have been encouraging and discouraging that (weird policies). But how, in totality, what has happened in the last several decades has changed the American population more dramatically, and helped make us a universal near One World nation, than anyone ever imagined.