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The Soviet Threat to Western Chokepoints
| Article
# : |
10044 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
1,837 Words |
| Author
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Stephen A. Garrett
Stephen A. Garrett is professor of international policy
studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in
Monterey, California. |
The recent political turmoil in the Philippines obviously raised a number of issues for American foreign policy. Among these were the effect of developments in that country on the American strategic position in the Far East and, more generally, the ability of the United States to deal with Soviet challenges in that part of the world. At issue were the two major American military installations in the Philippines, the air base at Clark Field and the naval facilities at Subic Bay. It has been a consistent American concern that a political upheaval in the Philippines would deny use of these facilities to the United States, and Washington has recently been giving serious consideration to possible alternative sites to Clark and Subic. It was happy news from the American perspective that newly installed president Corazon Aquino indicated that she would honor the current agreement on the bases, which runs until 1991, although she declined to say what her position would be after that point.
President Reagan, in his most recent press conference, offered an assessment of the military significance of Clark and Subic as far as American security interests in the Pacific were concerned, and in so doing he raised an interesting issue in the ongoing debate about Soviet global military strategy. The president referred to sixteen major maritime "chokepoints" around the world and suggested that the Soviets would set the closing off of these chokepoints as a prime objective in the event of war. The chokepoints may be broadly defined as critical canals or straits that control what are called sea lines of communication (SLOC). Maintaining these SLOCs is vital to the West in peacetime since they provide the basic avenues by which critical raw materials (for example, oil) are transported to ports in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States. In
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