Developments in Asia-Pacific Threaten Global Security

Alan Cai

January 13, 2023

With President Biden meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, it is once again important for the subject of security in the Indo-pacific region to be revisited and to discuss its lasting impacts around the globe. The island nation has in recent years built up its military drastically and has shifted from its generally neutral stance for the first time since the end of the second world war.

Through meetings with the leaders of Canada and the United States, Japan has communicated its willingness for deeper cooperation with the west, specifically with the United States and its close allies. During his meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Kishida asked Trudeau for a stable supply of Canadian liquified natural gas(LNG). The United States and Canada are currently exporting large amounts of natural gas worldwide to alleviate pressure from Russian embargos.

Nations not directly importing natural gas from the Russian Federation are also affected by the embargo because gas constraint has hiked prices on the global market and caused an industry-wide shortage. Thus the release of the United States' strategic reserves for petroleum or increasing natural gas drilling, or that of any nation, would drastically rein in the runaway prices of energy.

It must be noted that Japan is also hosting the G7 summit this year. The G7(group of seven nations including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan itself) is an intergovernmental cooperation forum consisting of the world’s foremost democracies including the aforementioned countries and the European Union as a non-enumerated member. The summit will take place in Hiroshima, where the Little Boy, the first of two nuclear weapons ever deployed in the war, was used.

China has made numerous threatening statements and aggressive gestures toward Taiwan and has strengthened its correspondence with Russia. The current era seems somewhat eerily similar to the beginnings of major wars in the previous century. The Great War was started, in a large part, from a shaky rivalry of alliances while the Second World War was preceded by aggressor countries slowly taking territory and utilizing appeasement to their advantage. Both wars began after a period of arms buildup by one or both sides.

Russia’s continued insistence that it had “liberated” parts of Ukraine is also of additional concern. War, whether cold, hot, or proxy, is always the ultimate evil. Unfortunately, it seems as if the lines have been drawn and the theaters have been opened to set the stage for the next massive global conflict. No living human could possess the wisdom necessary to predict what it might look like but perhaps Benjamin Franklin may provide some good words of caution: “There never was a good war, or a bad peace.”