China makes us “plane” important

While you’re reading this very column, admirals have dispatched their lieutenants to dig up a bit of information on a place called Tinian. And a place called Saipan. And Guam, too.

As cold tensions with China turn hot in the wake of the botched interception of a U.S. snooping plane, we can expect the CNMI’s strategic location to–once again–get a bit of front burner attention in Washington.

Even if the U.S. doesn’t figure it will need us directly, it has incentive to merely keep anyone else from having military sway in the region. In terms of doctrine, the Navy is still fighting WWII–or was when I was in–and I doubt they’ll ever forget the toll involved in taking islands from the Other Guys. Better, then to keep the other guys out of such places in the first place.

Eventually, though, Uncle Sam is going to reckon he does need this area directly. Korea and Japan offer strategic assets, but I guess it’s theoretically possible than the day comes when they’re no longer willing hosts. You can bet that Uncle Sam will use the spooky specter of a belligerent China as a way to keep the Hermit Kingdom and the Land of the Rising Sun as compliant as possible.

So much for the abstract. As far as the direct impact on us, is it possible that the CNMI and Uncle Sam could view a larger U.S. footprint here with different outlooks? It wouldn’t, for example, take many troops stationed in Tinian to swing the electoral balance over there, given the small voting population and the thin margins in some elections. It’s not too hard to imagine all sorts of acrimony boiling up over the possibility of an active military presence in Tinian.

And it’s also not too hard to imagine the CNMI winding up utterly broke soon, which would have obvious implications if the aforementioned acrimony ever boils up. “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” eh?

If any weirdness along such lines boils up, I’m sure that all sorts of U.S. interests having opinions on the CNMI will wind up converging. They won’t necessarily agree with each other, but they’ll start looking at various facets of the Commonwealth’s existence and relationship with Uncle Sam, and, as we all know, politics makes strange bedfellows. Could we see, say, liberal labor interests hammering out agreements with right wing hawks if the CNMI and China become intertwined topics in the military context?

Meanwhile, China’s political bedfellows are probably not exactly at ease. Rumors persist about the Army and the civvies not seeing eyeball to eyeball about political policy. Perhaps the EP-3 snooper plane interception event is less about a monolithic Chinese policy of assertiveness and more about internal struggles over there manifesting in weird ways. Or perhaps not.

Either way, I think we’re in for a fresh round of scrutiny from Washington–not from labor union types, but from Admirals.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”