Peril Over the Spratlys.

According to the media, (especially the American media which insists on playing advertising videos on its web pages while you’re trying to concentrate on the bloody words) WWIII is about to break out over some islands called the Spratlys in the South China Sea. The Chinese are building an airstrip on a piece of reclaimed land by way of demonstrating their sovereignty over the area, and the Americans are falling back on good old gunboat diplomacy in response.

(We Brits are quite jealous, actually. Gunboat diplomacy used to be one of our very favourite hobbies, and we haven’t been best mates with the Chinese ever since they tried to sink HMS Amethyst – one of our very favourite gunboats – in 1949.)

But anyway, there’s something I don’t quite understand here. This piece of reclaimed ‘land’ appears to be actually just a big beach, which hardly seems substantial enough for a military landing strip, and leads inevitably to the line:

It’s sand, not land, and hard to understand (sung to the tune of the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.)

I can’t help wondering, you see, whether a sand bank sitting in the western Pacific Ocean would be a very sensible place to be eating breakfast the next time a tropical typhoon routinely passes by. And then there’s the Ring of Fire which produces tsunamis… and so on and so forth. But I’m sure the Chinese engineers know what they’re doing, and maybe what they’re really doing is building a mere token and aren’t actually intending to station a dozen or so real aeroplanes which cost a billion yen apiece on a beach in Destruction Alley.

Or are they? I don’t know, do I? No, I don’t.

I do, however, have a solution to propose. Why don’t we stop calling it the South China Sea, and instead call it the North Indonesia Sea? Then the Chinese could go back to eating their American burgers, the Americans could go back to wearing their Chinese shirts, and the world could breathe again. The alternative hardly bears contemplating:

If a Sino-American war really does break out over the Spratlys, I suppose the rest of NATO would have to get involved. And then I wonder how long it would be before Mr Putin, who probably loves a power vacuum, would become Emperor of Europe.

That’s today’s fantasy, for what it’s worth.