US / Vietnam Naval Exercises in South China Sea Rattle the Chinese

The Chinese are already discomfited by the spectre of U.S.-South Korean naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, but now their anxiety is increasing over the U.S. plans for drills in the South China Sea.

The giant nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington has docked in a Vietnamese port in preparation for week-long naval exercises between the two countries. They will focus on non-combatant operations such as sea rescues, according to VOA.

With the U.S. and Vietnam having been at war in the 1970s, no other exercise like this have ever taken place. What’s motivated them now is China’s increasingly belligerent attitude involving its claim to the entire South China Sea that we reported on several weeks ago. (See ‘U.S. and China are Headed for a Generational Crisis War.’

As we described in that report, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chastised China at an ASEAN meeting for its claims to the islands of the South China Sea, particularly the Paracel Islands and the Spratly Islands. It turns out that the South China Sea issue was on the ASEAN agenda because Vietnam put it there, in order to turn the world spotlight on the issue, and apparently they’ve succeeded.

China has reacted angrily, and several countries in the region are asking for help from the U.S. in countering China’s threats. Among these, the Philippines and Malaysia have laid claim to the Spratlys, and Vietnam has laid claim to the Paracels.

Thus, the United States has been expanding its military relationships with Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, according to Retired US Navy Adm. James A. Lyons, writing for the Washington Times. In particular, Lyons recommends leasing sophisticated military hardware to the Philippines, including a squadron of F-16 fighters and T-30 supersonic trainers.

In response, China has conducted its own military exercises in the South China Sea. And a new article in the Beijing Review details the “Historical and legal evidence [that supposedly] proves China’s indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea.”

Generational Dynamics predicts that China and the U.S. will be on opposite sides in the coming Clash of Civilizations world war. Whether it will begin in the South China Sea, or on Taiwan, or in Central Asia or elsewhere cannot be predicted, but the end result is certain.

There is a current U.S. strategy that brings the U.S. and Vietnam into this kind of military cooperation, but from the point of view of the Vietnamese, this is just incremental step in a long history.

Vietnam’s last generational crisis war was the the civil war of the 1960s and 1970s. The war was not fought against the Americans, though the Americans were there, supporting the South Vietnamese. It was fought between the North and the South, and the Americans were irrelevant.

In fact, generational crisis wars between North and South Vietnam have occurred regularly, every 70-90 years, since North and South Vietnam have had different ethnic origins. North Vietnam (Vietnamese Kingdom) was originally populated by ethnic Chinese, while South Vietnam (Champa Kingdom) was populated by Polynesian settlers from Indonesia and Malaysia. These ethnic differences resulted in one crisis war after another over the centuries, whether the Americans were there or not.

Generational crisis wars in 1471 and 1545 finally ended the Champa Kingdom in the south, and also drove out the Chinese Army from the north. However, the country remained partitioned until the Tay-Son rebellion, 1771-1790, the most celebrated military event in Vietnamese history. In its explosive climax in 1789, the Vietnamese troops repelled a much larger Chinese army in a brilliant battle that united the country for the first time.

The generational awakening era that followed the Tay-Son rebellion changed the country enormously. The 1800s were the high point of literary culture in Vietnamese history, and, thanks to the French, Christianity bloomed, with hundreds of thousands of Catholic conversions from Confucianism and Buddhism. That lasted until the next crisis war, the French conquest of Indochina in 1865-1885.

Under the French, the Catholic Church flourished, opening missions, schools and hospitals all over the country.

Vietnam’s next awakening era featured riots and demonstrations directed at the French colonialists, and the rise of Ho Chi Minh. Ho took part in the founding of the French Communist Party in 1920, and formed the Revolutionary Youth League in Vietnam in 1925. Ho led numerous anti-colonial uprisings in the following decades, and during WW II, Ho formed the Viet Minh political / relief organization, for people starving to death thanks to confiscation of goods by the occupying Japanese.

After WW II, Ho Chi Minh led the effort to drive the French from Vietnam, and succeeded with human wave assaults against a large French encampment at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

With the French gone, Vietnam was once again partitioned into North and South. Ho controlled the North, with support from the Soviet Union and China, and over half a million Catholics migrated from the North to the South. America feared that South Vietnam would also fall under Communist control.

This was the time when America had fought two world wars, and was desperately fearful of a third one on the horizon, this time with the Communists. It was considered essential to stop Communism before it could become too threatening, and so America endeavored to stop Communism from spreading from North to South Vietnam. America began providing advisors in the 1950s, growing to full-scale armed intervention in the 1960s. The North-South crisis civil war finally ended in 1974, with Hanoi’s victory, followed by Hanoi’s reign of terror.

Today, Vietnam is well into one more generational awakening era. When President Bush visited Vietnam in 2006, the young people of Saigon (they don’t call it Ho Chi Minh city) lined the streets and cheered wildy, expressing admiration for America, and also hostility towards their Hanoi masters.

Today, even Hanoi wants to be friends with America, to counter threats from China in the South China Sea. Thus, Hanoi’s two historical enemies were South Vietnam and China. America was involved in the most recent conflict with the first of these, and is now getting involved with the coming conflict with the second.

And so, the cycle of life takes one more click forward. The Vietnamese don’t give a shit about us, but we’re still policemen of the world, and we will do what we have to do, in the South China Sea and elsewhere.