China Needs Thailand as an Ally Against U.S.

Eric Zuesse

China needs to build a canal across Chumphon and Ranong Provinces of Thailand, to cross from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, like the U.S. had built the Panama Canal to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. Existence of this canal would not only shorten China’s west-bound shipping-times, but it would eliminate the necessity for China to protect the much longer shipping-route through the Strait of Malacca, and so it would doubly reduce China’s shipping-costs and thereby increase Chinese trade with India, and with Europe and Africa. China seems to have noticed this. Whatever inducements the U.S. offers to the Thai Government in order to buy its continued allegiance, China will need to offer it even more, in order for this canal to become a reality. That would be a bargain for China, because this deal with Thailand would be worth perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in otherwise-necessary Chinese defense-spending in order to protect itself against the U.S. blocking China’s ships in China’s own neighborhood (the South China Sea).

The U.S. Government is determined to become the dictator to all of the world’s other Governments, so that international law won’t be from any ‘United Nations’ but purely from whatever the U.S. Government decides. The World-War-II U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR’s) original conception of the United Nations evolving into a universal democratic global federation of nations, each one of which would have supreme sovereignty over its own internal affairs so that no empires would exist after WW II, and so that the U.N. would ultimately become the sole owner of all nuclear weapons and would be concerned only with international and no intranational matters, and would legislate only internationally and never intranationally, was rejected by his immediate successor, President Harry Truman, who, on 26 July 1945, set out for the U.S. to become instead the world’s first-ever universal and all-encompassing empire, though he didn’t really have any clear idea of that, and he was only doing what the advisors whom he trusted recommended, which was shaped actually by the controlling owners of America’s largest international corporations, who sought such a transcendent U.S. global empire. They craved an all-encompassing international U.S. dictatorship; and, now, China  and Russia are, yet again, the leading two nations that are resisting this (but Iran is definitely another). The idea that the Post-WW-II Cold War was about ideology instead of about raw U.S.-UK imperialism to take over the world, was just a lie from the agents of U.S.-and-allied aristocrats, and even the U.S. Marshall Plan for Europe was 100% a device to weaken the Soviet Union. This fact became subsequently confirmed in private by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush on the night of 24 February 1990 when he started informing America’s European vassal-states to continue the Cold War against lone Russia after the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance and its communism would all end, as happened in 1991 — the end of the Cold War, on Russia’s side, but secret continuation of it on America’s side.

Now that the U.S. Government, after the 9/11 attacks, has cast aside the U.N.’s authority on matters of international law, the few countries that still resist the U.S. Government’s dictates are pretty much on their own, unless they can unite and peel away some of the U.S. Government’s key allies, such as Turkey or in Europe. But right now, China needs a future alliance with Thailand more than ever was the case before.

Thailand was, in fact, the first U.S. conquest in Asia other than Japan. This conquest was achieved by means of the CIA’s first coup. It occurred in 1948 and established the essential off-the-books funding of the CIA by means of skimming from the opium-heroin trade, which then was centered in southeast Asia and especially in Thailand. President Truman looked the other way, but the Wall Street lawyer and founder of FDR’s OSS against the Nazis, Bill Donovan, now become America’s Ambassador in Thailand, was unleashed as an operative of the newly established successor to the OSS, the CIA, in Thailand, where the local aristocracy were greatly in fear of the possibility of an advancing communism and were therefore very open to alliance with the Truman Administration.

Ever since that time, Thailand has been an American vassal-state. In The West (U.S. and allied aristocracies), the press focuses on Thailand’s alleged ‘democracy’, as if the Thai public actually control the Thai Government. However, that press or ‘journalism’ is controlled by America’s (and their allied aristocracies’) billionaires, who own, advertise in, and otherwise control, all of the mainstream, and most of the non-mainstream, ‘news’-media in their countries, which constantly lie to their respective publics — some to Tory or Republican, and others to Labour or Democrat, audiences, etc. — so as to stir nationalistic sentiment for ‘our’ Government, and against each selected ‘enemy’ government (for “regime change” there), and so to continue the taxpayer funding of the billionaires’ international policing force, or military, such as to harass China’s ships in the Strait of Malacca.

At least four possible routes are being considered for this proposed canal. An online poll of Thais, published on 14 February 2018, asked simply “Should Thailand build the Kra Canal?” and the results were 73% “Yes”; 3% “Not yet”; 25% “No.”

India imports far more from China than from any other country, but exports more to U.S. than to any other country. Obviously, therefore, a Kra Canal would lower India’s import-costs, which would be good for India. However, not all Indians are in favor of it. Here are highlights from a recent Indian news-report that’s hostile about this proposed canal, the “Kra Canal”:

Thailand’s move on Kra Canal alarms New Delhi as route will boost Chinese naval power in Indian Ocean

The Prime Minister of Thailand has ordered the country’s National Security Council to begin examining the feasibility of proposals to build the 120-km Kra Canal, which would slash 1,200 km off the route Chinese warships now take to reach South Asian ports.

“Thailand’s move on Kra Canal alarms New Delhi as route will boost Chinese naval power in Indian Ocean”

5 November 2018

Pushed by his country’s powerful military junta, Prime Minister of Thailand Prayut Chan-o-cha has ordered the country’s National Security Council to begin examining the feasibility of proposals to build a 120-kilometre mega canal that would slash 1,200 kilometres off the route Chinese warships now take to reach South Asian ports — dramatically enhancing the superpower’s ability to project power in future Indian Ocean wars.

Private investors from China have already committed $30 billion for the construction of the Kra Canal, first conceived of almost 350 years ago. Longhao, a Chinese construction company involved in the government’s controversial island-building work in the South China Sea, will be given the responsibility for the work, Indian government sources told Firstpost. …

Former Thai military commander Thawatchai Samutsakorn, who is vice-president of a private-sector consortium pushing for the Kra Canal, told The Bangkok Post that government committees to study the project will be set up before elections in February 2019.

“After the polls, when we have Opposition parties, they will oppose the campaign without taking into account the potential benefits to the country and the public,” he said.

Geo-politics

From China’s point of view, the Kra Canal offers a means to secure its expanding demand for West Asia’s hydrocarbons against overcrowding in the Strait of Malacca — the world’s busiest maritime lane through which an estimated 84,000 ships pass every year, carrying around 30 percent of the global trade transit. The World Bank estimates that over 140,000 ships will seek to transit through the Strait of Malacca annually by the end of the decade, far in excess of its capacity of 122,000 ships. …

Some in Thailand’s strategic establishment fear that Chinese investment in the project will, inexorably, erode the country’s sovereignty — a fear founded on the experience of Egypt and Panama, where the canals led to decades of foreign control.

“The history of the Panama and Suez canals shows that despite the unquestionable economic advantages of a canal, one country’s funding of its construction on the territory of another country usually leads to the spread of significant influence by the first country,” scholar [Director of NATO member Croatia’s Military Security and Intelligence Agency, Brigadier General] Ivica Kinder has pointed out.

Those concerns that “Some in Thailand’s strategic establishment fear that Chinese investment in the project will, inexorably, erode the country’s sovereignty” may reasonably be assumed to be sourced from agents of the U.S. aristocracy, individuals who currently control Thailand’s foreign policies. (All of the article’s cited ‘experts’ are U.S-allied.) However, inasmuch as China will definitely need to control its own neighborhood in order to have any chance at all to survive as an independent nation when the U.S. aristocracy are determined to control the entire planet, the only alternative for China’s Government other than to move forward with the Kra Canal, would be to not commit whatever resources are needed in order for this project to go forward; and, in that case, there will inevitably be a war in the Strait of Malacca between U.S. and Chinese forces, and that would be far costlier.

The way that China’s protecting its right to navigate in its region is being treated in U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media is as its constituting aggression by China against the United States. For example, on 4 May 2018, CNN headlined “White House warns China on growing militarization in South China Sea”. Reuters headlined “U.S. says will be consequences for China’s South China Sea militarization”. Such warnings by the U.S. regime and its propagandists are not treated as constituting aggressive moves by the U.S. regime against China. This is how U.S. propaganda-media are. It’s as if China were to issue “warnings” about U.S. “militarizing” the Caribbean Sea — it’s simply ludicrous. The U.S. regime, and its propaganda-media (both domestic ones such as CNN, and foreign ones such as Reuters) aren’t embarrassed to be deceiving their public so blatantly. This is routine, for the U.S. regime. They treat their own audiences as being idiots. And that public keep accepting it, instead of cancelling their subscriptions to the media which treat them in this insulting way.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.