The South China sea stuff is indeed China throwing its weight around, sure, but need I remind you that China's foreign interventions has been far more restrained than, say, the US (Iraq 1 and Iraq 2, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama) or Russia's (Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria) even in the last three decades.
Going back slightly further, Japan invaded and occupied half of China and killed millions of Chinese people over the course of a decade, while it was the US that invaded, nuked, and then occupied Japan, even though the US never suffered civilian casualties from Japanese attack. Yet you don't see the Chinese government crying out for bloody revenge, do you?
One the one hand, we have China asserting claims to sea resources and sea lanes there are right in its back yard, where it has a legitimate strategic and national interest. On the other, we have the outright invasion, occupation, and overthrow of sovereign governments. Which country is objectively more peaceful?
If you read more history of China, you will also notice that the Han ethnicity prefers letting others adopt Hans customs and cultures instead of actively adopting or adapting to foreign cultures. That's another striking characteristics in my opinion.
Also, 80,000 Chinese soldiers invaded Vietnam in 1978, with the intention to take Hanoi. It was by no means a minor skirmish.
The US had repeatedly sworn to not cross the 38th parallel in the past. Once the US decided to invade North Korea proper, Truman's promises to stop at the Yalu River no longer seemed credible to China's government. Note that Beijing is very close to Manchuria, and both the Manchus and Japanese invaded China along this route in the past.
The US has certainly threatened war against any foreign powers that interfered anywhere in the entire Western hemisphere [3] -- not sure how anyone can then turn around and fault China for reacting to American troops driving right up to its Manchurian border. Remember this was in 1951, the Cold War was getting warmed up, and the US had nuked Japan only a few years earlier. No responsible Chinese government could have ignored the very real and credible threat of another invasion.
The Vietnamese invasion has an interesting history -- the PLA invaded, failed to achieve its main objectives, then marched right back less than a month later. Certainly not a full-scale invasion nor an occupation, considering the proximate cause was to 'punish' Vietnam for invading Cambodia.
[1] http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Hao%20Chinas%20Decision.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#China_intervenes_.2...
""" Qing dynasty rule in Tibet began with their 1720 expedition to the country when they expelled the invading Dzungars. """
""" For several decades, peace reigned in Tibet, but in 1792 the Qing Qianlong Emperor sent a large Chinese army into Tibet to push the invading Nepalese out. """
""" As the Qing dynasty weakened, its authority over Tibet also gradually declined, and by the mid-19th century its influence was minuscule. Qing authority over Tibet had become more symbolic than real by the late 19th century,[35][36][37][38] although in the 1860s the Tibetans still chose for reasons of their own to emphasize the empire's symbolic authority and make it seem substantial.[39] """
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet#From_1950_to_present [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%9351)
If it's the former, I don't think the US will be joining it any time soon. US military grand strategy depends on its ability to deploy marines with its navy anywhere swiftly in the world. That's why the Panama Canal was built: to allow the US Navy to swiftly move between Oceans to reallocate force posture. This is why the United States rejected the UNCLOS court juristiction over its boobytrapping the coastal regions around Nicaragua - the US refuses to be bound by this international law (the other major one, I would suggest, is the International Criminal Court/Rome Statues).
If you mean the second, the Chinese have argued that this is a territory dispute, in which case UNCLOS itself (article 299, IIRC) agrees it has no authority.
Certainly UNCLOS is a major aspect to understanding the South China Sea situation, and should be linked.
I think the US bombing various places is a bit more nuanced than it seems at first sight. For example, our military action in Libya - which is entirely contained to one coastal town - is with the support of the Libyan government, the vast majority of the Libyan people, and the United Nations. It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.
I personally don't support our airstrikes in Pakistan, but they have definitely been effective (although at a devastating price to civilian lives that I find unacceptable.)
In some cases, the US government is an unimaginable force for evil; we've dropped chemical weapons on a civilian population as recently as 2004, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah - one of the worse battles of modern times. In others, it's an unimaginable case for good.
For example, during the Indian Ocean tsunami, governments around the world donated billions of dollars. America promised unimaginable quantities of food, fresh water, and support. Within days, American aid began arriving - in the form of two aircraft carriers, basically floating cities. During the crisis period, American forces delivered the daily food requirements for 100,000 people every 24 hours.
In the end of March 2005 - remember, the tsunami was in December 2004 - the Indonesian and Sri Lankan governments reported that they had received precisely none of the money promised by foreign governments. They did report receiving some food; the Thai government in particular received many donations of rice from the governments of Israel and China. To demonstrate how pants-on-head stupid that was, Thailand is the world's largest exporter of rice, and that year they had their largest crop of rice in all history.
So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.
Libya is a failed state. There is no recognized, coherent government of Libya.
> It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.
I don't think this is the case. But if it were, it would be an argument ad populum - a logical fallacy.
> So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.
I think this is exactly right. It depends on how America chooses to use its power.
Today, it looks a lot like containment, of aggravating and funding extremist elements, of playing proxy war, of pursuing its interests behind a cloak of public relations.
The American incentive at this point of world history is to prevent, at all costs, other countries from becoming influential enough to challenge American decision making.
That's not just on the battlefield. America has been trying to block countries from lending money, from industrializing, and even from building independent news media industries. It has refused to join international institutions of law, such as the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court, it has an overt first strike nuclear policy - the only of its kind in the world.
The United States faces a choice:
A.) allow other nations to grow, in a completely peaceful and benign manner, wealthy and strong enough risking that it will no longer a hegemon capable of making unilateral global decision making.
OR
B.) disrupt the growth of regions of the world, delaying the growth of competitor states, guaranteeing America maintains its 'critical leadership role' in the world.
Judging by actions rather than words, America chooses, and will continue to choose B. America is the country with the incentive to start wars.
The world should be multi-polar, and where it there is need for violence to rectify or prevent violence, it should be under international leadership with international decision making.
Of course, given the current state of Libya, there aren't exactly pollsters walking around asking peoples' opinions on the Sirte strikes. But given the bipartisan support, it's pretty clear that they have good support in Libya itself. The fact that the UN supports the strikes - especially given that the UN can't even say "water is wet" without someone vetoing - says something about their international support.
I agree that America has been blocking countries from doing some pretty basic stuff. I recently traveled to Iran, and the American sanctions have shaken the country to the core.
But even things that seem obviously good are in fact horrible ideas. Every tiniest change in our laws affects the outside world in a massive way. In 1993, Tom Harkin, the junior Sentator from Iowa, introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which prohibited the importation of products that have been produced by child labor. Sounds simple, right? Who on earth is in favor of child labor? There were concerns about the effectiveness of the bill. Well, as it turns out, the bill was devastatingly effective. In 1993, Bangladeshi employers, in fear of losing lucrative American contracts, dismissed over 75% of child laborers in the textile industry. In 1997, UNICEF investigated what happened to these children after being laid off. They found that most children found themselves in much worse situations: crushing stones (leading to horrible particle inhalation illnesses), scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution.
Things aren't always as simple as they seem, especially when you're as big as America. Smaller countries, like the Netherlands, can take grand actions like banning child labor imports, or banning arms exports to Saudi Arabia, or establishing relations with countries the US is at war at (e.x. North Korea.) But the tiniest little movement by the US can completely shake the world. Think about that the next time America seems to face a clear choice between good and evil.
Hah. Their aggression in/with South China Sea, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, India is just fake news right?