The 'Quad' is on the rise in Asia-Pacific: Game theory has a prediction about its future

China remade itself into a giant economy, and more and more it enjoys the giant benefits that go with it: national confidence, diplomatic clout and military power.

Other big powers are paying attention. As China has shown new swagger in its dealings with the world, four big democracies — Australia, India, Japan and the United States — have formed a counterbalance.

The future of that "Quad" has tremendous significance, not just in the Indo-Pacific, but everywhere. Decision-makers, risk managers, investors, CEOs, and regular citizens increasingly are aware of rising stakes in a new, global balance of power.

The leaders of the world's biggest economies want to know what's next for the Quad.

A very complex computer algorithm may have delivered the answer.

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Russo-Sino joint military air exercises spark strong protests from Tokyo and Seoul

MOSCOW/SEOUL (Reuters) - Russia carried out what it said was its first long-range joint air patrol in the Asia-Pacific region with China on Tuesday, a mission that triggered hundreds of warning shots, according to South Korean officials, and a strong protest from Japan.

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Chinese Military Buildup in S. China Sea Raises Alarm

HONG KONG — When the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis and four other American warships sailed into the South China Sea last week for what were described as routine exercises, the message was clear: The United States is the dominant military power in the region and plans to keep it that way.

But numerous Chinese naval ships were operating nearby, the United States Navy said, noticeably more than in past years. A Chinese officer told the state-run news media that the ships were there to “monitor, identify, follow and expel” foreign vessels and aircraft, depending on how close they came “to our islands.”

The encounter, which passed without incident, was the latest episode in a wary standoff between the United States and China over two contested island chains known as the Paracels and the Spratlys.

Since taking office three years ago, President Xi Jinping has used the isles to expand China’s military footprint in the region, taking one step after another to build and equip outposts far from the Chinese mainland over protests from its neighbors and from Washington.

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China’s assertiveness leaves its neighbors anxious

A Chinese military expert is explaining to a conference
here what he sees as the benign inevitability of Beijing’s rising power
in the Pacific. “You should trust China,” he says cheerily. “In 10
years, we will be much stronger, and you will feel safer...”

...It is a sign of the times that delegates here talk openly about the danger of war in the Pacific. That’s a big change from the tone of similar gatherings just a few years ago, when Chinese officials often tried to reassure foreign experts that a rising China wasn’t on a collision course with the United States or regional powers. Now, in the East and South China seas, the collision seems all too possible.

Just two weeks ago, U.S. Navy Capt. James Fanell warned at a conference in San Diego that China had been training for a “short, sharp war” to assert primacy over islands claimed by Japan as the Senkakus and by China as the Diaoyus. “I do not know how Chinese intentions could be more transparent,” he said, noting that Beijing’s talk of “protection of maritime rights” was actually “a Chinese euphemism for the coerced seizure of coastal rights of China’s neighbors.”

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Japanese prime minister’s visit to war shrine spurs new tension

SEOUL — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday visited a Shinto shrine that honors Japan’s war dead, including 14 war criminals, and is seen by Asian neighbors as a symbol of the nation’s unrepentant militarism.

The visit to Yasukuni Shrine, the first by a sitting Japanese leader in seven years, raises the prospect of even deeper hostility between an already isolated Tokyo and its neighbors. It also suggests that Abe, after a year of focusing on pragmatic, economic issues, is increasingly willing to play to his conservative base — a group that believes Japan has been unfairly vilified for its wartime past. 

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In East China Sea a tense power struggle is brewing

 WASHINGTON — In an era when the Obama administration has been focused on new forms of conflict — as countries use cyberweapons and drones to extend their power — the dangerous contest suddenly erupting over a pile of rocks in the East China Sea seems almost a throwback to the Cold War.

Suddenly, naval assets and air patrols are the currency of a shadow conflict between Washington and Beijing that the Obama administration increasingly fears could escalate and that American officials have said could derail their complex plan to manage China’s rise without overtly trying to contain it. As in the Cold War, the immediate territorial dispute seems to be an excuse for a far larger question of who will exercise influence over a vast region.

The result is that, as the Chinese grow more determined to assert their territorial claims over a string of islands once important mainly to fishermen, America’s allies are also pouring military assets into the region — potentially escalating the once obscure dispute into a broader test of power in the Pacific.

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Cautiously, Japan Raises Military Profile as China Rises

TOKYO — After years of watching its international influence eroded by a slow-motion economic decline, pacifist Japan is trying to raise its profile in a new way, offering military aid for the first time in decades and displaying its own armed forces in an effort to build regional alliances and shore up other countries’ defenses to counter a rising China.

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Tensions rise over disputed islands

About 50 Taiwanese vessels on Tuesday entered waters near a group of uninhabited islands at the center of a bitter territorial dispute involving Japan, China and Taiwan.

Japanese public broadcaster NHK showed footage of a Japanese coast guard ship shooting water at a Taiwanese fishing boat, while a Taiwanese patrol vessel blasted water at the coast guard ship in reply during an incident near the disputed Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, as they are known respectively in Japan and China/Taiwan.

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As China Flexes Its Muscles Japan Rethinks Its Defenses

TOKYO — Japan is in the midst of a gradual but significant shift to the right, acting more confrontationally in the region than at any time since World War II.

The shift applies strictly to Japan’s foreign policy and military strategy, not social issues, and has been driven both by China’s rapid maritime expansion — particularly its emphatic claims on contested territory — and by a growing sense here that Japan should recover the clout squandered amid two lost decades of economic stagnation.

Japan’s shift can be seen in an increasingly muscular role for the nation’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF), in a push among mainstream politicians to revise key portions of the pacifist constitution and in a new willingness to clash with China, particularly in the East China Sea, where U.S. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said this week he was “concerned about conflict.”

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Amid Rising Tensions Clinton Heads To China

BEIJING — As tensions mount between China and its neighbors over islands in nearby strategic waterways, China has scored some subtle victories, making the United States and its friends increasingly uneasy about the potential for violent confrontations.

China’s dispute with Japan over potentially energy-rich islands in the East China Sea, and with the Philippines over an island that China has effectively blocked to Filipino vessels, will be central in talks between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chinese leaders in Beijing on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday, American and Chinese officials said.

“We will need the nations of the region to work collaboratively together to resolve disputes — without coercion, without intimidating, without threats and, certainly, without the use of force,” Mrs. Clinton said Monday evening after arriving in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.

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Where Nationalism Still Matters

Too often, we see East Asia only from an economic perspective, marveling at the undeniable success of China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and South Korea. Yet these nations have another story to tell, one that owes less to current economic performance than to much older instincts: nationalism and ethnic resentment, the forces that kindled World War I in Sarajevo. Today, those forces underlie disputes in places that we ignore or know nothing about, such as the Senkaku Islands, the Dokdo Islands, and the Spratly archipelago. And those disputes may spark military conflicts between rival Asian countries.

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