And that seems to be a delusion the entire western world has been indulging in for a long time - the idea that the East is coy and submissive, and therefore feminine, while the West is brash and aggressive, and therefore masculine. Well, the mirage is fading and the roles reversing even as I write.
If you ask me, the process started during the Second World War when the Yanks had their Asian baptism of fire fighting the ferocious Japanese who contested every inch of ground with banzai and kamikaze attacks.
A few years later, lightly-armed Chinese troops pushed American forces half-way down the Korean peninsula, resulting in the longest retreat in US military history.
The final blow came when the US army was kicked out of Vietnam after losing the longest war they had ever fought. This is after a merciless genocidal campaign to bomb Vietnam "back to the stone age".
By the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military had dropped more than 7 million tons of bombs-- more than twice the total tonnage dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War 2--on a country roughly the size of New Mexico. This is almost one 500 pound bomb for every man, woman, and child in the country. Twenty million bomb craters are all over Vietnam. (http://rwor.org/)
Have a look at this image from Google Earth. This is just one area in Laos. Each point represents one US air attack, meaning 20 to 40 bombs. The stacks represent multiple attacks.
The US often used B52s ...
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and napalm.
This is a famous photo of a Vietnamese girl who had to tear off all her burning clothes after she was hit by napalm.
And this is the same person, many years later. Her name is Kim Phuc. She cannot perspire through the damaged skin on her back.
I really have to take my hat off to the Vietnamese people. How many countries can absorb such punishment from the USA and still stand up?
Yet after inflicting all that inhuman savagery on a poor developing nation, the US still managed to lose the war. If I were them, I would quickly conclude there is no way to win another land war in East Asia. The meek and gentle Oriental is not what he seems when you push him too far.
With China's peaceful rising and the West's financial self-destruction, the traditional roles played by East and West are reversing. We are watching history unfolding before our eyes.
[From a gentleman in Kuala Lumpur (5 May 2009):
The US probably knows that too. That is why they have coined the term 'smart power'. That points to a more comprehensive and coordinated usage of all resources, including asymmetric warfare strategies, in their arsenal in the future. No longer will they just use manned huey helicopters or strato-fortresses and phantoms. And carrier groups are just open targets for capitation torpedoes in the high seas. Only the unseen offer new grounds. Man-less drones and cruise missiles such as used in Afghanistan and Lebanon, as well as the future of nanobot military technologies coupled to virtual reality throw-off camouflage and high frequency laser satellite guns .... these are the future possibilities. They are predicated on what they think their adversaries will be thinking..namely the less technology, the more the need to concentrate manpower. So that when manpower is concentrated, the target is magnified, and the use of manless destroy technologies become more efficient on kill ratios besides being more politically acceptable back home while shoring up the military-industrial complex that has been the cause of worldwide destabilisation over the last century.]
