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America's Irreplaceable Ally
(Jerusalem Post) Caroline Glick - In "How We Would Fight China," in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly, military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan analyzes the encroaching specter of a cold war between the U.S. and China. Kaplan quotes a U.S. Marine general in the Pacific Command who explains that the nascent U.S. strategy for dealing with China will be based on multilateral military cooperation. The U.S. is quietly building deep military alliances with countries such as Singapore, India, Australia, Japan, and Thailand, which will all play key roles in containing China. Kaplan also notes the technological gap between the U.S. military and these crucial allies in the Pacific. This week it was reported that following Israel's misguided sale of Harpy aerial drones to China, Washington is now demanding control over Israel's weapons exports to India and Singapore. Yet what Israel's cultivation of its own bilateral strategic ties with countries like Singapore and India shows is that when Israel is behaving in a strategically responsible way, it is also advancing America's strategic interests. Israel was wrong to sell weapons systems to China. But the damage done to U.S. national security interests has been effectively brought under control. The damage that the U.S.'s increasingly hostile position toward Israel is doing to U.S. national security interests will not be so easily contained. Why would Singapore or India or any other U.S. ally trust an America that would abandon Israel? And how will the U.S. be more secure if it increases its dependence on Arab regimes that are inherently hostile to it and everything it stands for?