The US is using its blueprint from to plan for confrontation with China over Taiwan, an analyst says.
Semi-official recognition of Taiwan's claim to independence from mainland China — in breach of the official US 'One China Policy' — have raised tensions between Washington and Beijing. Meanwhile the Biden administration has only escalated the trade war with China begun by Donald Trump.
Dr David Oualaalou told Sputnik that Washington was "trying to woo and suck in all the other countries in the region, from New Zealand to the Philippines to Indonesia, Malaysia,"
"To a degree, of course, South Korea and Japan are already gone," he added. "And the whole reason for it, because the United States wants to so-called contain China."
But Oualaalou said the "containment policy" would fail as it was now too late. "That might have worked 30 years ago. China has moved fast forward and there is no way. It's too late for that."
The commentator agreed that the US lacks an aggressive military proxy like Ukraine to use against China.
"Vietnam is smart enough to know that they're going to have to maintain their neutrality as part of ASEAN," the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and diplomatically rebuffed US President Joe Biden's attempts to draw it into an alliance against China, Oualaalou said, adding that the only ASEAN member firmly in the US orbit was the Philippines.
European countries are also unenthusiastic for a fight with China after the economic damage wrought by Western sanctions on Russia in response to its military operation in Ukraine — but are also wary of angering the US.
"They don't have the guts to come forward and say enough is enough," Oualaalou said. "You look in France, you're looking at the German economy is going down, you're looking at the UK is going down. All of them, economically, are suffering massively."
"They don't want to be in another Ukraine there," he stressed. "If Philippines thinks, or Taiwan or whomever think, that we're going to come to their aid, they are mistaken."
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