Hawaii becomes hot spot for geopolitical strategizing

In one of the last interviews I had with him before he died, Hawaii’s U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye talked about America’s foreign policy and one of his great concerns.

Here in Hawaii our big-picture worries may include dengue fever, Hawaiian Electric’s merger and everything about the city’s rail line, but there are bigger fears out there.

Although Inouye died in December of 2012, his worries in late October and the national foreign policy worry today are the same: China.

China then and China now has its eyes on the strategic passage through the South China Sea. When Inouye was observing China’s military buildup, it was because of the shakedown cruise of its first aircraft carrier.

Today the Pentagon worries that China is building islands out of sand bars in the South China Sea, putting surface-to-air missiles, radar facilities plus fighter jets on the new territory, which is also claimed by other countries.

“China is clearly militarizing the South China Sea,” Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., America’s top military officer in the Pacific, said during a congressional hearing last week in Washington.

“You have to believe in a flat Earth to think China’s goal is not to militarize the area and achieve hegemony in East Asia,” Harris said.

China was fast to respond and managed to drag Hawaii into the fray.

“There is no difference between China’s deployment of necessary national defense facilities on its own territory and the defense installation by the U.S. in Hawaii,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said last week.

Not so fast, responded Hawaii Congressman K. Mark Takai, who said Hawaii is part of the U.S. “and no other nation currently has pending claims against it.

“What China has done is not the same, and any comparison made of this nature are only meant to distract from their actions attempting to forcefully change the long-standing territorial status-quo of the Asia Pacific.”

Hawaii is also involved in some saber-rattling with North Korea, a government that Inouye dismissed as “a bunch of terrorists” in a 2010 interview with a national publication.

Last week, however, there were new reports that the military is looking at Kauai’s Barking Sand missile test facility as the location for a permanent installation of the Aegis Ashore missile defense system. Kauai is already the site for the missile tests and the thinking is that with North Korea conducting some sort of nuclear test, which the country claimed was a hydrogen bomb, it was time to make the test missile system operational.

Although the Navy issued a statement saying that a missile defense system in Hawaii is not in the plans, Harris was quoted in a January “Stars and Stripes” report that a permanent facility to shoot down missiles from North Korea has its advantages.

“We have to weigh all the pluses and minuses and all of that when we’re talking about the defense of the homeland,” Harris said. “The site in Hawaii may be a good opportunity.”

All in all, since Inouye’s death, Hawaii’s place in the Pacific seems just a bit more dangerous.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.