中文
By Andrew Korybko
The U.S. launched a new anti-China "containment" platform on June 24 alongside Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the UK dubbed "Partners in the Blue Pacific" (PBP). Their joint statement indicates that it'll concentrate chiefly on the Pacific Islands region and allegedly focus on comprehensively expanding their cooperation with a view towards supporting regionalism. In reality, however, the PBP is really just an unofficial expansion of last September's AUKUS anti-China alliance with Australia, the UK, and the U.S.
Japan is remilitarizing at an alarming rate in contravention of its strictly pacificist constitution while New Zealand has recently jumped on the anti-China bandwagon following Beijing's clinching of various cooperation pacts with the Pacific Island countries. Nevertheless, they're formally against nuclear weapons and the proliferation of this technology, which explains why they're reluctant to officially join AUKUS since nuclear cooperation is one of its key elements.
Be that as it is, those two countries are also the U.S. junior partners so it naturally follows that they'd seek some form of cooperation with that declining unipolar hegemon's latest alliance sooner or later. AUKUS Plus, which is what the PBP can functionally be described as, will primarily focus on the Pacific Islands region in order to "contain" China through economic means but it can't be taken for granted that it won't evolve into other forms with time or expand its scope across the Asia-Pacific either.
It would be mutually beneficial for all the countries involved if AUKUS Plus remained a purely economic platform that doesn't try to aggressively squeeze Chinese companies out of the region but instead concentrates exclusively on improving the living standards of the people inhabiting the Pacific Islands states. That, however, is a wishful fantasy since nothing that the U.S. leads is ever truly devoted to the universal good of mankind.
Rather, AUKUS Plus should be seen as a strategic cooperation platform first and foremost that's disguising its real intent with unconvincing rhetoric about mutually beneficial cooperation. Its real purpose is to comprehensively expand Japan and New Zealand's full-spectrum coordination with AUKUS, beginning in the economic and humanitarian dimensions but then inevitably evolving into military and political ones in a doomed-to-fail attempt to maximally "contain" China in the Asia-Pacific.
Even though their grand strategic goal will certainly never be attained, it can still disrupt the region in the meantime. That's why it's imperative to expose the PBP's real nature as AUKUS Plus so that everyone in the Asia-Pacific can learn what it's truly about. This won't be the end of that anti-China alliance's unofficial expansion either since there's already talk about other countries informally cooperating with it in the coming future.
For instance, the Republic of Korea just announced that it's planning to establish a mission to NATO's headquarters in Brussels that will likely result in that American mutual defense ally slowly but surely expanding its joint military cooperation with that bloc's U.S. and UK members who collectively comprise two-thirds of AUKUS. From there, it's just a proverbial hop, skip, and a jump away from participating in the PBP or whatever other version of AUKUS Plus might eventually be unveiled by that time.
The trend to, therefore, pay attention to is that the U.S. is clandestinely creating a regional anti-China alliance in the Asia-Pacific under various monikers that nevertheless all share the common denominator of attempting to "contain" the Asian giant. These geopolitical projects are all destined to fail but can still contribute to destabilizing the region before that happens. They must thus be exposed for what they truly represent in order to avert that scenario by pressuring prospective members not to participate in them.
Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst.
