Is a Cold War II with China Inevitable?

Today, the four premier leaders of The Quad -- the U.S., Australia, India and Japan -- conduct their first summit, by teleconference.

The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is an informal strategy forum of the major Indo-Pacific democracies that some wish to see evolve into an Asian NATO to contain China, as NATO contained the Soviet Union for 40 years of Cold War.

Next week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan meet their Chinese counterparts midway between Beijing and Washington -- in Anchorage, Alaska.

The Chinese are said to have sought out the two-day meeting since before the inauguration of Biden.

And understandably so. For while the Chinese are hoping for a reset of relations after a troubled last year with the Trump administration, leaders of both U.S. parties -- to compensate for decades of congressional indulgence of Beijing --suddenly seem to be on their muscle.

Consider. During the transition, the Biden foreign policy team gave a war guarantee to Manila to fight alongside the Philippines in any clash with the Chinese over disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea.

Tokyo was informed that its mutual security treaty with the United States that dates to the 1950s covers the uninhabited Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. But Beijing also claims these islands as her own.

On the eve of his taking office, Blinken said he agreed with Mike Pompeo's view that China's brutal repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang constitutes "genocide" and crimes against humanity. That latter charge is what the Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg.

How can the United States send athletes to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, if the Chinese are still crushing Hong Kong and committing crimes against humanity in western China that compare to the worst Nazi crimes of World War II?

Testifying before Congress this week, four-star Admiral Phil Davidson, retiring commander of the Indo-Pacific, called for new defensive missiles to protect Guam against Chinese DF-21 and DF-26 missiles. China calls these missiles "Guam killers."

The admiral also called for the U.S. to develop intermediate-range missiles that can be fired from Guam and allied territory closer to China. Describing the need for offensive missiles to hit Chinese targets, Davidson said, "If I can't score some runs, I can't win the game."

"Over the past year, Beijing has pursued a coordinated campaign of diplomatic, information, economic, and -- increasingly -- military tools to isolate Taipei from the international community and if necessary compel unification with the (Peoples Republic of China.)"

Chinese warplanes have lately flown in formation toward the island of 25 million, which Beijing claims as its national territory -- a claim President Nixon seemed to concede in the Shanghai Communique after his Peking summit of 1972.

"Our commitment to Taiwan is rock-solid," was how the Biden State Department answered China's aggressive moves.

If we don't establish rules of the road for U.S. and Chinese ships and planes in the East and South China Sea and Taiwan strait, how do we indefinitely avoid the kind of collision that could turn into a shooting war?

In this widening and deepening confrontation, China is not backing down. She makes no apologies for the crackdown in Hong Kong or the concentration camps of the Uighurs. She continues to stonewall about how the coronavirus escaped from Wuhan to kill 500,000 Americans and many times that number worldwide.

Meanwhile, Chinese bombers, fighters, warships and patrol boats approach closer and closer to planes, vessels and territory of America and her friends and allies. Nor has China surrendered a rock or reef or shoal in the South or East China Sea.

Last week, Blinken called China the "biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century," the only country able "to seriously challenge the stable and open international system."

And in America, whatever your political party, "standing up to China" seems to be a winning posture. But where is all this going? Where does all this end?

Beijing is not apologetically but proudly Communist. It believes its system has been proven superior in this century. It does not believe in an equality of ideologies, religions or peoples. It openly rejects American democracy as a failed and failing system, and rejects any suggestion of American primacy in creating a "rules-based international order."

And if it continues to grow in real and relative terms for the next two decades as it did in the last two decades -- given that China has four times the population of the United States -- it could emerge not only as the dominant power in Asia and the Indo-Pacific but in the world.

And what can we do to assure that does not happen -- short of a war that could be disaster to us both, as World War II was for the British as well as the Germans.

How do we decouple from a country that provides necessities of national life -- such as pharmaceuticals -- for our people?

Yes. I have posted this on other threads, so you might have seen my reference to this chapter in a book I read.

There was an excellent book I read: “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept” by Gen. Robert Spalding (Ret.) who was the JCS specialist on cyberwarfare.

There is a chapter in that book that is both gut-wrenching, yet morbidly fascinating in which a company that developed a “green” product and was bringing it to market, getting ready to make an IPO, suddenly began having problems. Here is an excerpt from that chapter (Take the time: it is WELL worth reading):

“Corporate espionage and intellectual property (IP) theft rarely get talked about. If a jewelry store or a museum is robbed, the cops are called. The newspapers report on the heist and talk about the value of what was stolen. It becomes a quantifiable event - “a $ 2 million haul” or a “$10 million painting.” Everyone talks about the crime at work, on Twitter, on late-night TV. When suspects are identified, a manhunt ensues

But with corporate espionage and IP theft, there is usually a cone of silence

Done well, corporate theft is invisible. It involves copying documents, engineering plans, chemical formulas, computer codes, raw data. That’s different from stealing a Picasso off a museum wall. Imagine stealing the painting and replacing it with an excellent forgery, though, one so good that it takes a whole year for an expert to notice the original has vanished.

This kind of delayed “we’ve been robbed” reaction happens all too often in the corporate world, but the reaction is muted. Reporting the theft can lower investor confidence, hurt company morale, and tip off competitors. A number of well-known auditing and accounting companies—Ernst & Young, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG—conduct private investigations into suspected corporate espionage. The level of CCP-sponsored attacks these firms encounter varies from the most basic—bribing employees to copy documents, placing students at research institutes and pressuring them to steal—to sophisticated, multioperative hacking raids and full-blown intelligence operations

In 2014, the chairman of a large hedge fund sent me a privately commissioned briefing about illicit Chinese activity in US corporations. The briefing was stunning in scope and detail. And the information it contained shook my view of the world to its very foundations. The most disturbing slides detailed an assault to gain control of a proprietary technology that a fledgling firm had developed.

The method of attack reminded me of the sophistication of an air campaign. It was perfectly choreographed to create subtle misdirection and open up a target for a blitzkrieg. The operation highlights the enormous amount of resources the CCP will dedicate to sabotaging corporate rivals to obtain control over coveted technology.

Here’s what happened

An American chemical company, owned by a private equity firm, had patented some groundbreaking green technology and was growing at a steady clip. Its owner began developing a five-year plan to take the company public

But suddenly, the company started missing its earnings targets. The problems appeared to be in sales—orders were down—and in logistics, the division that handled the flow of products. The sales guy was fired, but the bleeding continued.

The owners met with the leadership team and warned them to fix the issues, because continued shortfalls would put the planned IPO in jeopardy. Not long after that, the company received an unsolicited offer from a Chinese company. The offer shocked the owners—it was 30 percent below what the value should have been, had it not been for the shortfalls. Management was stunned: How did these suitors make such an accurate valuation without company data? It seemed like they knew about the recent losses

The owners hired investigators

They discovered that not only had the chemical company been hacked, but so had the private equity firm that owned it. The hackers knew the company’s earnings targets and red lines in terms of what was unacceptable to the owners

The level of sabotage was, on a spy craft level, brilliant

The email servers were selectively hacked, so that when the company would send out solicitations for orders, hackers would delete them before they were sent

Similarly, when orders came in, some of them never made it into the sales team’s inbox—because the hackers pulled them out

The selective sabotage was enough to hurt sales but not enough to trigger an investigation

Meanwhile, the hackers also damaged back-end logistics. When an order came in for, say, a thousand units, hackers would change the number to nine hundred. When the shortfall was discovered—usually after the order was shipped or about to be shipped—a backorder would be created. This subtle move created added costs for labor, delivery, and other sectors, which impacted the bottom line

It was a dazzling operation. Subtle, almost imperceptible.

The only entity that would have the resources and sophistication to execute such an elaborate ruse would be the state. This sinister operation crystallizes the level of economic warfare that China was engaged in

It wasn’t just stealing—copying documents is the corporate equivalent of a smash-and-grab robbery.

This was a strategic sting on a number of levels. At some point, the CCP had set industrial policy and made green technology a priority. Once the American chemical start-up was identified, someone spearheaded an operation that required both intelligence planning, hacking by the People’s Liberation Army, and oversight and analysis by a Chinese-owned business. The goal was to sabotage and devalue an American company in order to acquire it at a below-market price, to obtain technology that the CCP considered vital

It was nothing less than a government-sanctioned assault on an American company.”

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