“In a desert, an oasis is life saving. And in a vast ocean of blue, a little spot becomes extremely important for survival or defense or power projection,” Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), explained in a podcast this month.
Japan was well aware of this axiom in the early 1900s, when it acquired the administration of a vast stretch of the central Pacific Ocean — offering a series of outposts from which it could cut off its rival, the US, from east Asia. Today, it’s China that’s eyeing economic and diplomatic inroads into a pivotal area stretching east of the Philippines, from Palau to Micronesia to the Marshall Islands.
www.bloomberg.com
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