HMCS Vancouver and HMCS Winnipeg at Honolulu. Image credit: Richard Guertin/Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. Disclaimer: **The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.**

Written by: Owen Schalk

Since June 29, the US Navy has been hosting its biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) war games, the largest maritime military exercise in the world. With 26 participating countries, the exercise consists of “thirty-eight surface ships, four submarines, nine national land forces, more than 170 aircraft, and about 25,000 personnel.” The purpose of this year’s RIMPAC exercise is to “put on a show of multilateral cooperation, or collective action, against a more assertive China.” Apart from the US, this year’s participants are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga, and the United Kingdom.

The US-led forces will be conducting training operations in and around the Hawaiian Islands and southern California until August 4, and Canada – a founding contributor to RIMPAC – is playing a large role in the anti-China military posturing. Royal Canadian Navy Rear Admiral Christopher Robinson is serving as deputy commander of the maritime task force, while Brig. Gen. Mark Goulden of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) holds “the critical role of RIMPAC 2022” as Commander of the Joint Force Air Component, taking responsibility for “a variety of fighter, transport, air-to-air refuelling, ground attack, rotary wing and tilt rotor aircraft, and maritime aviation assets from six nations.” Additionally, 50 RCAF members are operating alongside the U.S. Air Force’s 613th Air Operations Squadron in the Combined Aerospace Operations Centre (CAOC), which is the “coordination hub for all air tasking orders that facilitate aircraft effects throughout the exercise.”

Canada has also dispatched a CC-177 military transport aircraft to Hawaii’s Kaneohe Bay and sent two Navy frigates to deploy CH-148 Cyclone helicopter detachments. Following RIMPAC 2022, these ships will be deployed to the sea surrounding the DPRK (known as North Korea) to enforce the US-led sanctions regime under Operation NEON, a military presence which Canada is a part of, that led to dangerous confrontation between Canada and China earlier this year.

While Canada claims that its role in Operation NEON is proof of its dedication to human rights and the holding accountable of undemocratic regimes, Canadian naval ships operating under NEON have utilized US military bases on the occupied island of Okinawa. After the Second World War, the US military launched a full-fledged military colonization of Okinawa, dispossessing the population of around fifteen percent of their land while using the island as a launching pad for attacks on the nations of Southeast Asia, storing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons there against the population’s wishes, interfering in Okinawan and Japanese elections to prevent anti-US candidates from winning, and committing numerous atrocities against the uchinanchu (Indigenous Okinawans).

The RCAF’s use of US bases in Okinawa therefore means that Canada, in the words of John Price and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, has “become complicit in the ongoing dispossession of uchinanchu…who, for the past seventy-five years, have continuously fought to regain their lands, stolen by the US military.” It is also one of thousands of reasons why Canada has no right to lecture anyone regarding human rights or democracy.

The Indigenous Okinawans are far from the only people whose livelihoods have been attacked by US-led militarization of the Pacific. Hawaii, the site of the RIMPAC exercises, is under illegal military occupation by the United States, which uses it as an outpost for power projection in the Pacific Ocean despite the opposition of the Indigenous people, or kānaka maoli. RIMPAC forces have even bombed some of the places that are most sacred to the Indigenous Hawaiians, namely the island of Kaho’olawe. Nevertheless, Canadian Brig. Gen. Goulden has asserted that Canada’s contributions to the ongoing RIMPAC war games are about “ensuring a stable and secure Pacific that provides all nations the opportunity to prosper.”

The RIMPAC exercise began in 1971 as a way to bolster US military cooperation with some regional armies, but primarily with imperial Western allies, in the midst of Washington’s defeat in Vietnam. It is telling that the core forces of the first RIMPAC exercises were those of the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, the five settler colonial states which comprise the globe-spanning anti-China surveillance network Five Eyes Five Eyes. The powers behind this secretive intelligence alliance remain the driving force of RIMPAC to this day.

While China had previously participated in several RIMPAC exercises, they were banned by the Trump administration amidst rising tensions in 2018, and Joe Biden has followed suit. His administration even mulled the possibility of inviting the Taiwanese administration to the overtly anti-China war games, but they put the brakes on that provocation shortly before the exercise began. Despite disinviting the Taiwanese administration, however, it is obvious that RIMPAC is meant to directly challenge the regional influence of China and its allies.

The RIMPAC website claims that its exercises are simply concerned with “helping to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific,” while US Pacific Fleet commander Samuel Paparo has asserted that “RIMPAC itself is not oriented against any particular nation-state actor.” Footage obtained by the Empire Files proves this to be a false statement. The video, acquired by journalist Abby Martin while covering RIMPAC exercises in Hawaii, shows US soldiers raiding a simulated North Korean town and firing shots into a building containing portraits of former Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leader Kim Jong-Il and current DPRK leader Kim Jong-un.

This is an extremely provocative action: the US is using RIMPAC to simulate a military invasion of the DPRK alongside the militaries of 26 allied countries. While it is true that the US regularly conducts similar drills with South Korean forces, this footage proves that US plans for a “free and open Indo-Pacific” include the possibility of a multilateral Western invasion of North Korea, a close ally of China which Mao Zedong famously described as the lips to China’s teeth, an evocative description of the strategic tightness of the two states. Given these revelations, it is hardly surprising that an editorial from China’s Global Times accused Washington and its allies of seeking to “stir up trouble and sow discord” in the region through RIMPAC.

Canada’s crucial role in RIMPAC 2022 must be viewed alongside its ongoing “Indo-Pacific” tilt. As explained by by Allan Gyngell for East Asia Forum, this problematic term, is utilised to justify Western encroachment into the South China Sea. Gyngell states that:

“The Indo-Pacific is a framing device, not a geographical reality — its proponents shape it around their different interests.”

The very term “Indo-Pacific” is a relatively new geostrategic construct being pushed by the US-led capitalist axis in its effort to counter China’s economic integration with states near and in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. On June 9, 2022, the Trudeau government created the “Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee,” while over the past year Canadian military exports to key allies in the region have skyrocketed. In particular, Canada is contributing greatly to the remilitarization of Japan, with military exports to the country rising by over 500 percent in 2021 ($42 million to $280 million). This remilitarization is undoubtedly a source of concern for the Chinese and North Korean governments given the devastation wrought upon them by imperial Japan in the early twentieth century (it is worth noting here that Canada assisted Japanese imperialism in the 1930s by supplying Japan’s military with sizeable quantities of nickel for remilitarization and offering diplomatic support for imperial Japan’s occupation of Korea and Manchuria).

The RIMPAC exercise, and the West’s broader militarization of what it calls the “Indo-Pacific,” are an extremely dangerous escalation of pre-existing tensions, especially in light of the wholly predictable catastrophe that NATO expansionism helped incite in Europe. And it is not only the Chinese and the North Koreans who recognize the dangers posed by US-led military expansionism in Asia – the provocative RIMPAC war games have sparked peace protests in the Five Eyes countries of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the US, as well as in Guam, South Korea, Okinawa, Japan, the Philippines, and the Northern Mariana Islands.

All peace-minded individuals must recognize that nothing good will come of these spectacles of military aggression, and that Canada’s extensive participation in RIMPAC 2022 does nothing but aggravate a suite of already delicate geopolitical circumstances.

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Owen Schalk is a writer of short stories, novels, political analyses, and essays on film and literature. His journalistic work covers a wide range of topics including Canada’s domestic and foreign policy, the imperialist and colonial nature of the Canadian state, and Western imperialism in the Global South more generally.

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