EUA intensifica cerco militar em volta da China. Tenta cooptar mais paises asiaticos.
"With the emergence of China as the world's second-largest economy and its concomitant renewal of (comparatively minor) territorial claims in the East China Sea and South China Sea, the stage is set for a U.S.-Chinese confrontation of a nature and on a scale not seen since before the Sino-Soviet split of 1960", Rick Rozoff, Stop Nato International. Following the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization throughout Europe over the past thirteen years, every European nation is now a full member of or involved in one or more partnership arrangements with the U.S.-led military bloc (except for Cyprus, which, however, is under intensified pressure to join the Partnership for Peace program). Having thus enforced a cordon sanitaire on Russia's western and much of its southern frontier, it was inevitable that the U.S. and its allies would next move to encircle, quarantine and ultimately confront China. In the past decade the Pentagon has begun conducting annual multinational military exercises in countries bordering China (Khaan Quest in Mongolia, Steppe Eagle in Kazakhstan) and near it (Angkor Sentinel in Cambodia), has with its NATO allies waged war and moved into bases in nations bordering China - Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikistan - as well as nearby Uzbekistan, and, even before the official announcement of the strategic shift to the Asia-Pacific region, acquired the use of new military facilities in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines.
President Obama's current visit to Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's simultaneous trip to Australia, Cambodia and Thailand are exemplary of this trend. Early this year NATO announced the launching of its latest, and first non-geographically specific, partnership program, Partners Across the Globe, which began with the incorporation of eight Asia-Pacific nations: Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Korea.
