Posted on 05/10/2005 6:11:01 PM PDT by hedgetrimmer
The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was
For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It's not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but also of its rear base—stretching far back into Central Asia—from which it may eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific. In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of "soft" power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium.
How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War—which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations—it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns.
The calculus is simple. They mostly they'll ever get is a cheap shot with no lasting military value, and in return we have all the excuse we need to scuttle every piece of hardware to leave China by sea or air. And we have the ability to play that game for a long time. Other factions in China will overthrow the government while our boys get some exciting target practice off their coastline. We wouldn't even have to land there, we simply create the situation where other internal power factions eat their own.
The Chinese know this. The Chinese also know we aren't the French, and that in a real fight we have both institutional competence, technological prowess, and raw intestinal fortitude to be a very, very expensive enemy.
Let me put it another way: The Chinese outnumber us 3-to-1. Can you remember a war when the US military didn't have a battlefield conversion ratio vastly higher than that?
It was the Shimonesky Treaty that allowed Japan to have Taiwan. The San Francisco Treaty is when Japan gave Taiwan to us although Chiang Kai Shek and 2 million of his Nationalists fled there, while we were busy facing off against Stalin.
Give them a few decades.
Hard to dodge something moving at the speed of light. If you can see it, you can hit it.
Hehehe- Mad Magazine predicted this scenario in the early '60s- fat, pampered Americans easily overtaken by lean, hungry Chicoms. Of course, Mad was written by hard lefties so, what the hell me worry?
2) Impose 200% tariffs on all Chinese goods.
3) Support democratic reform with hard dollars.
4) Embargo all pro-chinese puppet states (south America)
5) Let the civil war take care of it's self.
Why would we want to do all this now? These steps would definitely start a war. These are all good things we can threaten to do, or do, IF China provokes us directly or attacks our interests anywhere. If that happens, we should do all that AND MORE...if not, let's continue to advance the demise of the Chicom govt and bring China into our camp as an ally.
You're right, South Koreans, Vietnamese, Eastern Europeans, Iranians, Chinese, etc., have made wonderful Americans.
We're a country of immigrants. Everyone here came from some place else. Even Native Americans -- they just beat the rest of us by a few hundreds of years.
My mother's family fought in the American Revolution - my fathers side still had accents from the old country. What makes an American isn't a skin color, or a home country, but a belief in human dignity and freedom. Like you, I'm sorry there are freepers who don't 'get it'.
If I was China I would give the technology to North Korea for ICBM's. When North Korea decides to gamble they launch just one or two ICBM's that explode high above the United States.
The EMP blacks out the power grid, ruins most automobiles, fries all electronics. Think of the big Northeast blackout all over the country and lasting for months instead of days.
The Chinese then wait to see what our response to North Korea is. If we leave North Korea a smoking ashtray they hold off on invading Tiawan and they will make a forture resuppling us with electronics to replace our fried ones.
If on the other hand we is so focused on our domestic chaos that our response to North Korea is feeble. They invade Tiawan and North Korea takes South Korea. They also end up making a forture resuppling us with electronics to replace our damaged equipment.
Either way after the EMP pulse there is a good chance that someone else will take our place as leading economy.
I think the technology of the future will be unmanned drones and technology that will be able to control the processes of the earth such as weather and harmonic frequencies....AKA earthquake creation.
I have no doubts that the US is so far ahead in these technologies that the governments of the world would not and could not resist our NEW WORLD ORDER.
Our order is better than theirs that's for sure.
For the flying things, meet AEGIS. You just cant escape, baby.
So what's left? Chinese subs? Oh please
Bingo! That's why this whole scenario is very unlikely.
Actually, they only need hold out and absorb sea going munitions punishment long enough for their brigades of light mechanized infantry, disgorged by container ships at ports right next to some of our our critical naval facilities, to finish wrecking mayhem on them...
Although unlikely, I do agree. If anything happens between US and China, it will NOT be a long, protracted Cold War scenario. Everyone has learned their lesson there. Any military confrontation would be an attempt by either/both sides to neutralize or eliminate the other from the world stage as a military and economic power.
If we can avoid that, then I predict China will be our #1 ally within 20-25 years.
Me and my family is of Polish, with a little Norwegian and Scottish and Native American descent.
You are right on that. 100% of us is immigrants or descendants of immigrants.
Ummm... China is FAR from a homogeneous society. They have many competing regional power factions. The communists can no longer control that country with an iron fist, they have to walk the tightrope so that they don't create an opening that one of the other power centers can exploit. It is not like the old days.
Far more than the US, the current Chinese government fears other factions within their country. The US government does not face a realistic threat of overthrow within its own borders. The Chinese government does. More than anything, this is the single biggest reason China does not want to get into a serious fight with the US; China might survive but that current government won't, which is practically the same thing as far as they are concerned.
Take out the communist leadership, and I truly believe the other almost 1 billion Chinese long for freedom enough that the war would end rather quickly.
Excellent analysis, and I agree 100%. China would quickly become our most powerful ally, especially against Islam.
The challenge is for us to get to that level without the war.
I hope it's just a matter of getting rid of the current Chinese leadership. The problem, though, is that they've been very successful economically.
*snort*
roger that.
Why do you think Europe is mono-cultural?
Exactly!
the current Chinese government fears other factions within their country
Including their own military.
The US government does not face a realistic threat of overthrow within its own borders. The Chinese government does. More than anything, this is the single biggest reason China does not want to get into a serious fight with the US;
Right again. Excellent analysis.
A couple yrs old but
A Dangerous Dance with China
William R. Hawkins
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
The recent meeting between President George W. Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Beijing was cordial, but uneventful. The biggest news was how well Jiang danced with First Lady Laura Bush. Behind this facade, however, is a two-step dance of another sort.
Beijing is clearly not prepared to give an inch on any of the issues which divide the two Asian powers. On key matters – proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, missile defense, and Taiwan – the two sides remained at loggerheads.
Even benign statements, such as Jiang’s “We want the Korean Peninsula to have peace and stability,” were indicative of conflicting views. In diplomatic language “peace and stability” means a continuation of the status quo, in particular the survival of the heavily militarized North Korean dictatorship. China supplies North Korea with components and expertise for its ballistic missile program and uses Pyongyang to covertly smuggle Chinese missile technology to other rogue states.
In regard to the survival of another “axis of evil” regime, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Jiang again endorsed the status quo saying, “I think as I made clear in my discussion with President Bush, just now, the important thing is that peace is to be valued most.” A number of reports indicate that Chinese experts are helping to rebuild Iraq's air defense and radar systems, using advanced telecommunications to link them with underground command centers.
Beijing has recently held naval maneuvers in the East China Sea to bully Taiwan. And Chinese interceptors have again been harassing American patrol aircraft flying over the South China Sea, recalling the crisis of last April when a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane was forced down on Hainan island.
A prominent circle of Chinese military thinkers and Communist intellectuals believe that Beijing needs to demonstrate its strength, rather than look meek in the wake of the American demonstration of power in Afghanistan.
Yet, Beijing’s claims to great power status are built on sand. China lacks the economic development it needs to support the regime’s ambitions to dominate Asia and overthrow American “hegemony.”
Peter Nolan is Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge University and a consultant to many American corporations operating in China. In a recent study published in the Cambridge Economics Journal, Nolan argues that while large Chinese enterprises have undergone extensive change, they are still behind American firms in such strategic sectors as aerospace, telecommunications, advanced manufacturing and energy generation.
Here is where the second step of U.S.-China minuet comes in, turning the exercise into a dance macabre. President Bush has ample evidence to confirm his earlier characterization of Beijing as a “strategic competitor.” Yet, he continues to facilitate the transfer of money, industrial capacity, and technology to China in ways that will aid its development as a threat to the United States and its Asian allies.
Just before Bush left for China, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick spoke to the U.S.-China Business Council. After praising the council’s influence in Congress for keeping the U.S. market open to Chinese exports, Zoellick laid out the benefits to China from “opening” to foreign investors: “One quarter of the world’s desktop computers are already manufactured in China, and one half of the world’s CD-ROMs. Within this decade, China will become the world’s largest supplier of IT [information technology] hardware. It will be the location of choice for IT assembly. It is becoming a design and development partner, and will challenge Taiwan as a semiconductor production center.” Rather than view these trends with alarm, Zoellick declared, “China’s spectacular growth in the last twenty-five years....could serve as a model to others.”
Since the Beijing summit, Commerce Secretary Don Evans has announced a trade mission to China in late April. Evans will take business executives from a number of sectors, including telecommunications, energy, information technology, and construction equipment to Beijing and Shanghai.
Telecommunications is a critical strategic industry in the age of “information warfare” as shown by the kind of sophisticated military operations U.S. forces are conducting in Afghanistan and elsewhere. China clearly wants similar capabilities, and sees American firms as the source for the needed technology and expertise. Two of the leading suppliers to Beijing of telecommunications are Motorola and Global Crossing.
Motorola is perhaps the largest single foreign investor in China, with over $1.5 billion placed in both production and research facilities. Global Crossing formed a joint venture with China’s Hutchison Whampoa in 1999. The new enterprise, which centers on Global Crossing’s broadband capabilities, has laid some 250,000 miles of fibre optic cable throughout China.
When Global Crossing initiated restructuring under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on January 28, Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Technologies Telemedia made a $750 million cash investment for a joint majority stake in the company.
What has been the Bush Administration reaction to the high-tech development of China by these two corporations? Recently, President Bush appointed Christopher Galvin, CEO of Motorola, and Thomas Casey, a former CEO of Global Crossing still affiliated with the company, to seats on the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. NSTAC deals with the government's ability to protect America’s information infrastructure from threats and vulnerabilities that might endanger the country's national and economic security.
Both Galvin and Casey have every incentive to continue sharing telecommunications technology with China rather than have its proliferation controlled in the name of national security. Indeed, Casey represents a firm now mainly in foreign hands. Their “advice” will surely be to turn a blind eye to the practices of their own companies in helping China.
The Bush Administration has not been able to choose between the need to protect American security from a rising China, and its desire to please corporate supporters who are helping China rise. President Bush needs to decide who is going to lead on the foreign policy dance floor, before somebody trips and falls.
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