The Coming Global Disorder

Commentary ^ | October 2012 | Bret Stephens

[arthurus]

Woody Island is a speck of land in the middle of the South China Sea, not quite a square mile in size. Over the past 80 years it has been occupied by French Indochina, Imperial Japan, the Republic of China, the People’s Republic of China, South Vietnam, and, after a brief war in 1974, the People’s Republic again. Now known as Yongxing to the Chinese (or Phu Lam to the Vietnamese, who still lay claim to it), the island has an airstrip, a harbor, and a few hundred Chinese residents, none native-born, many of whom make their living as fishermen.

An obscure tropical island may seem an odd starting point for an essay on the coming global disorder. Yet great conflicts have been known to flare over little things in faraway places. “On the morning of July 1, [1911,] without more ado, it was announced that His Imperial Majesty the German Emperor had sent his gunboat the Panther to Agadir to maintain and protect German interests,” wrote Winston Churchill in his history of the First World War. The proximate causes of the German foray to this deserted Moroccan bay “were complicated and intrinsically extremely unimportant.” But the real purpose of the kaiser’s move was to test—and, he hoped, to break—Britain’s alliance with France and, perhaps, scope out the possibility of establishing a German naval base in the north Atlantic. “All the alarm bells throughout Europe,” Churchill recalled, “began immediately to quiver.”

Could another Agadir crisis be lurking in the South China Sea?

[2ndDivisionVet]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2938162/posts

[VanDeKoik]

If we just made everything we needed here in the U.S. and Canada, I wouldn’t care if they all blew themselves to hell over those rocks.

We could make a killing selling supplies to either side.

[tumblindice]

"Woody Island"

[Former Proud Canadian]

North America has the energy resources, agricultural resources and manufacturing resources to provide us with everything we need. No other area on earth has the physical and human resources found in North America.

All we are lacking is the political will to put them to use.