NO MORAL STRUGGLE, JUST TRADE AND BUSINESS IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (New York: Random House, 2014) ("Just as German soil constituted the military front line of the Cold War, the waters of the South China Sea may constitute the military front line of the coming decades." " There is nothing romantic about this new front. Whereas World War II was a moral struggle against fascism, the Cold War a moral struggle against communism, the post-Cold War a moral struggle against genocide in the Balkans, Africa, and the Levant, as well as a moral struggle against terrorism and in support of democracy, the South China Sea shows us a twenty-first century world void of moral struggles, with all of their attendant fascination for humanists and intellectuals. Beyond the communist tyranny of North Korea, a Cold War relic, the whole of East Asia simply offers little for humanists. For there is no philosophical enemy to confront. The fact is that East Asia is all about trade and business. Even China, its suffering dissents notwithstanding, simply does not measure up as an object of moral fury." Id. at 15.).