RIMPAC 2022 comes at a sensitive moment when the US and its allies have stepped up provocative actions in East Asia, aimed mainly at China, a rising power that seemingly challenges US hegemony in the Pacific. However, for many people including Indigenous Pacific Islanders, US militarism remains front and centre in their fight for sovereignty and peace.

The fight to reclaim Okinawa continues despite ferocious opposition from the ruling parties in Japan who take advantage of their power and the fact some Okinawans’ livelihoods depend on base-related employment or business. This resistance is part of a larger movement for Indigenous rights, peace, and justice across the Asia Pacific region.

Okinawans, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, have been fighting to rid Okinawa of US bases for decades, giving rise to one of the strongest peace movements in the world, attracting broad international support. Thus, we were doubly shocked to learn that the Canadian Armed Forces are regularly using US military installations on Okinawa today.

Far from ensuring the safety of Canadians, the government’s prohibition against Huawei and ZTE dangerously aligns Canada with the NSA and other members of the Five Eyes spy network. This coalition of settler-colonial states may parade as the epitome of liberal democracy, but in fact it is based on the ongoing sagas of Indigenous dispossession and the imposition of empire on subject peoples in the Global South.

From Oka to Wedzin Kwa in Canada; from Wounded Knee to Standing Rock in the US; from Te Urewera to Ihumātao in New Zealand; from Kahoolawe to Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, Indigenous peoples are confronting white settler colonialism in the Anglosphere. These ongoing contestations are having huge ramifications globally, revolutionizing international relations, and helping realize “a better world is possible.”

Last week, the CBC ran a piece on “Chinese industrial espionage” during its flagship program The National. According to John Price, the public broadcaster owes the country, and Asian Canadians in particular, an apology for fanning the flames of bigotry and hate. And Justin Trudeau needs to call for a fundamental reassessment of Canadian foreign policy to avoid taking Canada down the road to war.

How China and its peoples handle the challenges ahead demands close and critical attention, but it’s time to lose the attitude. As Noam Chomsky recently suggested, either the “United States and China will work together on the critical issues that we all face, or they will expire together, bringing the rest of the world down with them.” Isn’t that what friends are for?

Recent sabre-rattling over China arises out of an embedded military network known as the “San Francisco” system. Constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War, the network of bilateral alliance was designed to thwart decolonization and assure the Pacific would become an “American Lake.” To this day, the US maintains hundreds of military installations and tens of thousands of troops in the region.

The Five Eyes spy network was established in 1948. Conventional histories portray its formation as the natural culmination of years of wartime collaboration in the fight against fascism. What that story conceals, however, is the common lineage of these countries as settler colonial states formed through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

Far from enhancing Canadian security, CSIS and the Five Eyes are enmeshing this country in a campaign of disinformation and propaganda regarding China reminiscent of the McCarthy era in the United States when government agencies went on a witch hunt against anyone who dissented from US foreign policy. No one should be left alone to take on this formidable arm of settler colonialism.