Politics & Power Quote by Jim Costa

The line is built like a policy memo, but it’s really a permission slip for a new Cold War vocabulary: China is framed not simply as a competitor, but as the primary organizing threat around which “peace and prosperity” must now be arranged. Costa’s phrasing does the classic political two-step - it presents escalation as precaution. “In view of” sounds sober and reluctant, while “growing military strength and intentions” quietly expands the indictment from capabilities (measurable) to motives (speculative), making the case harder to falsify and easier to sustain.

The key move is geographic and moral at once. “Safeguard Asia’s permanent peace” pretends permanence is achievable through alignment, a rhetorical upgrade that turns an inherently unstable region - with its own rivalries and histories - into a single perimeter to be defended. Then “all Asian countries” is an aspirational sweep that smooths over the reality that many Asian states hedge, trade heavily with China, or reject binary bloc politics. The quote flatters their agency while drafting them into a coalition.

“Join forces with other democratic countries” shifts the argument from Asia-specific security to a civilizational frame: democracies vs. an implied authoritarian adversary. The payoff phrase, “global community of democracies,” is deliberately warm, almost NGO-like, masking the strategic content: tighter military interoperability, supply-chain coordination, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic discipline. It’s democracy as branding for containment, calibrated for an American audience that prefers values-talk to power-talk, and for allies who want U.S. commitment without admitting they’re signing up for confrontation.