Asia Treaty Organization or ATO

Cold War II: China claims that America is a European style imperial power and as such is doomed to fail. In actuality America's global empire in no way resembles a 19th century European colonial empire. How many colonies does America have? Guam and Western Samoa, that's it. America has a global military empire, something new under the sun. No great power has ever been structured this way before, in a way history is not repeating itself.
The bigger they got the weaker they got, as far as old style European empires were concerned. But a military empire or global alliance structure obviously gets stronger as it acquires new members. Today word leaked out that Japan and South Korea are in preliminary moves to create a military alliance. The two Asian powers are rigidly aligned with the US, but not each other.
Once South Korea and Japan are formally aligned, Singapore will push to link itself, Australia, South Korea, Philippines and Japan into a single NATO type alliance with the US at the head. It is surprising how aggressive Singapore has been so far in pushing the alliance formation. The entire Singaporean Army is trained in Australia by the Australian Army and Singaporean troops are deployed in combat zones under Australian command. Talk about pushing for a strong alliance. In any case, this Asia NATO (probably it will be called ATO) structure almost exists now. Chinese symbolic aggression like flying the stealth fighter prototype while Gates was visiting China will hasten the formation of ATO.
As always we are only concerned in making predictions like this to buy or sell stocks. On that note my latest defense stock pick, ITT, is up about 14% today.