The world stood still early in 2020 as the coronavirus rapidly escalated globally, halting social activities, travel and leisure, and slowed down the economy.
World crude oil demand dropped, jobs were cut and the poor got hit harder as governments around the world stared at ballooning budget deficits to provide subsidies and fund health care measures to combat the socioeconomic impact of the highly contagious respiratory disease.
Based on the latest global tallies, more than 1.6 million people have been infected and roughly 20 percent of them got well. More than 100,000 people have died from coronavirus-related diseases.
Global and regional political and economic summits were also reduced to videoconferencing, and handshakes were replaced by elbow-shaking or courteous bows to avoid contact and stop the transmission of the virus, which originated from China late last year.
But there is one activity that appeared immune to the virus, and which the nuclear-weapon states have continued to fund: testing of short-to-medium-range ballistic missiles as the nuclear race resumed after Washington’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty in August last year.
Last year, the United States tested its land-based medium-range cruise missiles from a navy base in California and successfully hit its target 500 kilometers away. Such test was illegal under the 1988 INF treaty signed by then US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
The August 2019 test was repeated in December. This year, the US Navy tested its sea-launched Trident II ballistic missile from an Ohio-class submarine off the coast of San Diego.
North Korea flight-tested its own missile and Russia will hold a trial of the hypersonic 3M-22 Tsirkon anti-ship missile from a stealth cruiser in the Barents Sea.
These missile tests showed how the world is heading toward a more dangerous competition to develop, test, stockpile and possibly deploy conventional and nuclear ballistic missiles to gain global supremacy.
As the world scrambles for funds to fight a common, deadly, but unseen enemy, great powers are awash with cash to test strategic weapons to destroy each other.
The US must stop these ballistic missile tests and return at once to the scrapped INF treaty. The other nuclear-weapons states should abide by the treaty to build a safer and peaceful world.
Washington’s decision to walk away from the treaty was made after it accused Russia of violating the agreement not to develop intermediate-range missiles and deploy them to Europe, a move that threatened North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies.
But Russia claimed the United States violated the treaty when it deployed mobile missile defenses in Europe that are also capable of hitting targets in Russia.
The exchange of accusations of treaty violations between Washington and Moscow is not helping efforts to bring an end to the nuclear arms race. Instead, both sides must focus on pressuring Beijing to join the INF. China is not a signatory to the treaty.
Beijing is another reason President Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the treaty last year. China continues to build its nuclear arsenal and challenge the supremacy of the United States not only in the Indo-Pacific region but in the world.
China’s creeping influence, through its checkbook diplomacy, has reached Africa, South America and the smaller South Pacific Islands. It has a logistics base in Djibouti to ensure that its oil imports are safe from pirates in the Horn of Africa and Persian Gulf.
It has a small presence in Afghanistan and a central Asian state to counter Russian and American presence in the region, as well as in Pakistan to check Indian ambitions in the Indian Ocean as it secures access to the Bay of Bengal by courting support from Bangladesh and Myanmar.
It also has a naval presence in Cambodia, although Phnom Penh has been denying it had granted basing rights to China’s People’s Liberation Army-Navy.
Since the middle of 2016, the Philippines, the oldest security ally of the United States in the region, has pivoted to China, culminating in the termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) that allowed US troops to deploy on rotation basis to America’s former colony for training and exercises.
It dented an imaginary defense line from South Korea and Japan in the north, to Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and Australia in the south. It firmly established China’s widening island-chain defenses in the region – Beijing’s great wall of sand in the South China Sea.
China is now attempting to set up its second island chain in the Pacific by increasing air and sea drills beyond Taiwan and the Philippines and nearer to Guam, raising alarm bells in the Pentagon.
According to DefenseNews, Admiral Phil Davidson has proposed an ambitious $20-billion defense spending spread over six years to counter China’s challenges in the Indo-Pacific region.
Part of the “Regain the Advantage” plan was to strengthen Guam’s defenses by a $1.67-billion defense investment, including the setting up of a defense radar in Palau to detect major surface and sub-surface vessels in the Pacific and a more strategic radar in Hawaii to detect ballistic missile launches.
The plan also places premium on strengthening the capabilities of allies and partners to share the burden of countering China’s rise, particularly its anti-access and area denial (A2AD) operations in the South China Sea.
It plans to step up its Maritime Security Initiative in Southeast Asia and proposes to replicate the same initiative in the South Pacific, starting with intensifying the US Army’s Pacific Pathways exercises in Fiji and Tonga.
At the same, the plan calls for reconfiguration of its forward deployment, realizing its huge bases in Japan and South Korea are very vulnerable to Chinese missile strikes.
It now wants more highly mobile sea-land-air forces in the region and install land-based anti-ship missile batteries around the South China Sea.
Davidson’s “Regain the Advantage” plan is gaining widespread backing in the US Congress with some lawmakers calling it the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), a counterpart to an earlier funding by American lawmakers to counter Russia’s move in Europe, called the European Deterrence Initiative (EDI).
The world has become more dangerous as the United States raises its stakes in the nuclear arms race as well as in countering China’s inroads to its traditional stomping grounds in Asia and Pacific.
The US and its rival must end their destructive rivalries. They must discard their weapons of mass destruction, which are useless against the coronavirus. They must come together and spend their resources to find a cure, a vaccine for the disease.