For our national survival, Pinoys must unite against return of US bases

THE disturbing—and frightening—news that we get to learn is that, while the entire world is grappling to find a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s military planners are busying themselves in war planning against China.

A report in the Internet mentioned that last year, when the world is being savaged by the virus, especially Americans, the US Air Force was focused with its “war simulation exercises” involving the US and China where, unfortunately, the outcome is that China would beat the US military.

But more revealing, the article mentioned that over the past decade, US Imperialism has been focusing its attention towards a war with China, spending billions of dollars in the process in order to come up with a “scenario” where it could beat China in the battlefield.

Weeks earlier, ‘Nikkei Asia’ reported that as part of its war preparations against China, the United States plans to install missile defense systems and other offensive weapons in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, which US military planners described as their ‘first island chain of defense’ against China.

This is again revealing because this plan cavalierly took into consideration the “consent” of those affected. Or will this be a case of, ‘we-are-installing-weapons-in-your-soil-whether-you-like-it-or-else!’

We couldn’t care less about Japan and Taiwan, both of which owed their existence and prosperity to the protection and patronage of US Imperialism since the end of the Pacific War in 1945.

However, we do care a lot, as we should be, over the US plan to classify the Philippines as their first island chain of defense (read: offense) in its armed containment of China—regardless of what we think of the matter.

Pres. Duterte has warned during his last SONA that a return of US bases here would inevitably involve us in a war where we have no stake or interest to protect or to gain but where we would be simply annihilated as a race of people and as a nation.

In so many of its wars of aggression where defeat is staring at the US in the face as in Korea and Vietnam, we now know that the US military was stopped only at the last minute from dropping atomic weapons not on the Koreans or the Vietnamese, but on the Chinese!

What would stop US Imperialism now from “nuking” China when it is a war with China that it is planning for more than 10 years now?

Now also a nuclear armed power, how would China react knowing that the first atomic weapon that could reach its mainland is from a US submarine anchored at Subic Bay? Will it not retaliate in kind? What is going to happen to us then?

For the sake of our national survival, we must prevent the return of US bases.