Global Courant
Is the Monroe Doctrine About to Meet the Xi Jinping Thought?
Cuba, the island in the Caribbean Sea and Cold War remnant that has been isolated from its northern neighbor for most of the past 60 years, has agreed to let China build an electronic spy base on its territory, according to the Wall Street Journal.
China is willing to pay Cuba “several billions of dollars” to enable the construction of the eavesdropping station, the Journal said Monday.
Such an agreement would indicate China’s willingness to incur US wrath by deploying a military intelligence service 90 miles off the US coast. It would be an expression of Beijing’s anger at US moves to “curb” China by building new military alliances or replenishing old military alliances in the Western Pacific.
In short, it would indicate that Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants to show that China can show military muscle in the Caribbean, if only in the form of electronic spy equipment.
The US government denied the contents of the report. If it were acknowledged to be true, President Joe Biden would be under great pressure to respond.
The Monroe Doctrine is a dogma of American foreign policy that dates back to the early 19th century. It was intended to prohibit European colonial powers from threatening the US through other hemispheric countries.
It last gained notoriety in 1962, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev attempted to supply communist Cuba with nuclear weapons. Khrushchev declared the doctrine dead when he shipped nuclear missiles to Havana.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy invoked the doctrine and mounted a naval blockade of Cuba. The Soviet ships retreated.
Comrades: Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro (left) and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev show solidarity at a post-Cuban missile crisis meeting in Moscow. Photo: US Naval Institute
As a young politician, Biden always aped JFK’s speaking style. Now he may face attempts to replicate the outcome of the missile crisis.
Washington was made aware of the espionage plan between Cuba and China a few weeks ago, the Journal report said. Installing a spy station would allow Beijing to collect electronic communications from military bases in Southeastern US states and monitor shipping traffic.
China is not shy about building its own alliances. It has built a strategic partnership with Russia and is unwilling to criticize Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Beijing also made a small effort last year to expand its sea reach well beyond the Pacific Ocean. It signed a security agreement with the Solomon Islands, north of Australia. The accord focuses on building the islands’ defenses along with providing humanitarian aid.
It also includes a clause allowing China to conduct naval visits to perform logistical replacements, and to send Chinese troops to “protect the safety of Chinese personnel” employed there.
Earlier this year, what the US government identified as a Chinese “spy balloon” flew over US territory and over several military bases and facilities. US President Joe Biden ordered it shot down as it left the Atlantic.
American sailors fish the collapsed Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic Ocean off South Carolina. Photo: US Navy
Biden, who recently tried to ease tensions with China, had one of his top officials, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, sent to Vienna for talks with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi.
After the Sullivan-Wang meeting, Biden expressed his desire to strengthen relations with China and blamed the recent tensions on “the silly balloon that carried two boxcars worth of spy equipment.” He added that relations would “start to thaw very soon”.
China delivered no similar happy talk. Wang previously said he had focused on the issue of Taiwan, whose future as part of China is a “solemn position” and none of Washington’s business.
A rapid arrival of warm relations seems unlikely, even though last year’s US National Defense Strategy paper blandly referred to China as a “competitor” and Biden has gone just far enough beyond that to call it a “stiff competitor.” Washington’s current view of China seems better described by action than by boring diplomatic language.
This year, Washington deepened its military alliance with South Korea by agreeing to deploy nuclear-armed submarines there and inviting Korea to participate in regional nuclear planning.
In return, Seoul agreed not to build its own nuclear weapons. (The US fears some sort of tit-for-tat nuclear exchange between the South and Communist-ruled North Korea.)
Not long after the Korean accord, Japan, alarmed by Chinese naval activity nearby, said it would increase defense spending to two percent of its gross domestic product by 2027. The increase meets a long-standing commitment by Japan and its NATO partners in 2014; Japan’s pledge calls for a 60% increase over current defense spending.
Meanwhile, the Philippines said it allowed US troops access to four military camps, increasing the US presence in the Southeast Asian island nation.
Last year, the US, UK and Australia agreed to build a fleet of at least eight nuclear submarines in Australia. While production of the advanced submarines will take several years, it was another sign of rapid and wide-ranging naval expansion in the Pacific under US leadership.
If the Australian deal wasn’t enough of a signal to build a watery Great Wall against China, Papua New Guinea and the US signed a preliminary security cooperation pact. It is designed to bolster Papua New Guinea’s defense forces – a “natural progression” in US-Papuan contacts, the State Department wrote.
To complete the frantic renewal of Pacific military assets, the United States approved the sale of $619 million in new weapons to Taiwan, including missiles for its F-16 military jet fleet.
While the speed of alliance formation is unusual, the Biden administration’s moves represent the realization of a more than a decade-old US desire to create a military “pivot to Asia” to confront China.
President Barak Obama tried to turn things around during his two terms in office that ended in 2017. Obama increased the US Navy’s presence in the Western Pacific by 60%, but further efforts were hampered by budget constraints and US involvement in wars in Afghanistan. Iraq and Libya.
Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, focused less on a military pivot than on changing trade imbalances, curbing China’s intellectual property theft, and Chinese influence over American universities.
Biden’s policies have drawn steady criticism from Beijing. The US alliance with Japan, for example, “will pose a threat not only to China, but also to North Korea and Russia in the region. China is right to take strategic action to respond,” Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert, told China’s Global Times newspaper.
China expressed both bewilderment and opposition to the US military interest in Papua New Guinea. “China believes that the rest of the world should pay more attention and support to development and prosperity in Pacific island nations,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin. “We are against bringing geopolitical strife to the Pacific Islands region.”
In general, Chinese critiques of US and allied movements focus on opposing attempts to “restrain” China and what Beijing denounces as continued promotion of a “Cold War mentality” and “bloc building.”
The use of economic strength has been China’s main tool of influence. The fruits of the Belt and Road initiative extend all over the world. In this sense, Beijing has entered the American backyard of Latin America, supposedly off-limits to potential enemies.
Take Brazil, the continent’s largest country. Over the past 20 years, China “has gone from being practically irrelevant to Brazil’s economy to becoming the country’s most important economic partner, both in trade and, more recently, in direct investment and finance,” the United States Institute of Peace wrote in a recent report. .
The benefits for Brazil include the export of major commodities, especially meat and soy. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shares some geopolitical views with Xi that are dear to the Chinese leader. During his recent state visit to Beijing, Lula called for replacing the US dollar as the word’s main trading currency with another basket of currencies. China wants the same.
Lula also joined Xi’s statement of neutrality on the war against Ukraine, though he stated that “Putin should not have invaded.”
And Cuba? Trade with China seems to be stuck in a classic imbalance between a poor country selling low-priced goods to import industrial products. Cuba exports sugar, tobacco and nickel to China; China sells machines, electronics and medicines to Cuba.
The initial response from US officials to the Journal’s report said it contained some inaccuracies, but the officials declined to specify what those might be or comment on the general thrust of the article.
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos F. Cossío said in a press conference that the Journal had reported “fallacies promoted with the deceptive intent to justify the unprecedented tightening of the blockade, destabilization and aggression against Cuba and to mislead public opinion in the United States and the world.”
This article appeared for the first time in Daniel Williams’ newsletter Next War Notes. It has been republished with permission.
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