"To provoke China into a military confrontation today is to trap it into an arena where the US is still superior. The American chess pieces of 800 overseas military bases, gunboat diplomacy in air, land, and sea, and military technology are more than 20 years ahead of China, and are further bolstered by the $850 billion proposed US defense budget for 2023. The US continues to surround China in the Indo-Pacific with bases, carrier fleets, and submarines bristling with conventional and nuclear missiles.
Fortunately, China does not want to fall into the trap that doomed the former Soviet Union in an arms race or commit the mistakes of past colonial big powers.
But this fierce geopolitical competition between the US and China inevitably involves the Philippines because of its geostrategic location. Will we continue to be a de facto US aircraft carrier and part of the US nuclear infrastructure? The Mutual Defense Treaty, the Visiting Forces Agreement, and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement make us part of the offensive island chain of encirclement against neighboring China. There is now an agreement with the US-firm Cerberus for it to take over Hanjin Shipyard at Subic that will allow the regular repair, refueling, and docking of the US Navy."
"In 1945 nuclear weapons were used in armed conflict for the first and only time. 355,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by two nuclear bombs.
Two. That number alone puts in stark perspective the world’s current arsenal of about 13,000 nuclear weapons.
And yet in many ways the 13,000 weapons held globally represents progress; it’s less than a quarter of the more than 63,000 weapons in circulation in 1985 during the cold war.
But what John F Kennedy said in 1961 at the United Nations is as urgent now as it ever was: 'We must abolish these weapons before they abolish us.'"
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