The Sleeping Bear Awakes

There's an arms race underway, maybe it's more than one.


On the side of the West, it's pretty much limited to the United States where George Bush has been picking up the pace of testing and development of new aircraft, nuclear weapons, anti-missile systems and a myriad of advanced technologies. Looking at all of the lethality rolling out of American factories the one word on everyone's mind but almost no one's lips is - China.


China is seen as a competitor to America as a natural result of it's newfound wealth and industrial might. Along with new factories, China sought to modernize its military. The Chinese have been whittling down the size of their massive army but making rapid strides in developing their air and naval forces. To do this the Chinese have relied heavily on fairly modern, highly capable weaponry purchased from Russia but lately a new generation of Chinese-made ships and aircraft has begun to emerge.


Because China is a good sea voyage away from the US and because the American military presence in that region has been shrinking ever since the fall of South Vietnam, Washington has sought to find other means of containing the People's Republic. This has been accomplished by developing an alliance with another emerging industrial power, India.


The United States is rearming, China is rearming, so is India. India already has a highly capable army and air force. Like China it has equipped its forces with the best the Russians sell, along with a smattering of aircraft, etc. from the West. The big deal for India is the rapid expansion of its navy to become a true "blue water fleet." The Indian navy is looking to add about 40-warships to its fleet in order to allow it to maintain a region of influence extending all the way over to the Sakhalin islands which, entirely coincidentally, would mask China's entire coastline.

A powerful Indian navy presents China with several problems. One is the challenge it poses to China's sea routes to the Middle East and the dwindling oil bounty for which the two are competing. Another is having a foreign and not entirely friendly navy establishing a maritime blockade threat. India doesn't have to do anything to provoke China with that one.

America, China and India - all racing in the quest for more and better. Bad as that is, it's about to get worse. Russia, flush with new found oil wealth and an increasingly autocratic government, has decided it wants in. Moscow has announced plans to begin acquiring new ICBMs (in case you've forgotten - intercontinental ballistic missiles), new submarines and even possibly new aircraft carriers.

The Russian military has languished on a scrap heap since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 and we all breathed a sigh of relief for that. For all its woes, Russia still maintains 1.13 million in uniform.


Where is this headed? Who knows? As Gwynne Dyer noted in his book Future Tense the Bush administration has worked very hard to undermine the United Nations and the international treaties and protocols associated with it, paving the way for a return to 19th century secret alliances, hostility, distrust and even paranoia.


Ladies and gentlemen, there is the true Bush legacy.