I am pessimistic about America’s future because of the threats posed by China and Russia. Russia seems to have bitten off more than it can chew in Ukraine, but that doesn’t make Russia a weak adversary given its ability (and willingness) to engage in no-holds-barred cyber war and nuclear blackmail. What Russia needs is a staunch and powerful ally (or two or three).
Which brings me to China. In “Are We on the Road to Another Pearl Harbor?” (The American Spectator, November 19, 2022), Francis P. Sempa reviewed
The Road to Pearl Harbor: Great Power War in Asia and the Pacific [Naval Institute Press] which is part history and part a warning that history may be about to repeat itself with another great power war in Asia and the Pacific. The book, which is edited by John Maurer of the Naval War College and Erik Goldstein of Boston University, brings together historians and strategists who provide provocative insights into the origins, evolution, and outcome of World War II in Asia and the Pacific and aspects of that war that, in the editors’ view, “illuminate the dangers that currently confront American leaders.”
History, of course, never exactly repeats itself, but it remains the greatest teacher of human behavior….
the jewel in this collection of fine essays is Toshi Yoshihara’s examination of China’s views of a future war in the western Pacific. Yoshihara, who taught strategy at the Naval War College and who currently works at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is perhaps the nation’s foremost expert on the Chinese navy. He has mined open sources for the views of Chinese military strategists, including Chinese naval officers, and warns that the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) views on future warfare in the western Pacific are consistent with a Pearl Harbor–like first-strike attack on U.S. naval ships and facilities in the region, especially our “logistical infrastructure” at the Yokosuka naval base in Japan, the home of the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
The PLA, Yoshihara writes, “is predisposed to delivering a decisive first blow against U.S. forward-deployed forces in the western Pacific, particularly those in Japan.” Chinese doctrinal writings, he notes, emphasize surprise attacks and offensive campaigns at the outset of war. Chinese strategists call this part of a “counterintervention strategy” designed to strike American targets that pose the greatest threat to China’s important coastal hubs along the “Beijing-Tianjin, Shanghai-Nanjing, and Guangzhou-Shenzhen corridors.” And the PLA has steadily acquired the precision-strike arsenals (long-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles), especially the DF-21C, a conventionally armed intermediate-range ballistic missile that, Yoshihara notes, is capable of hitting any target on the entire Japanese archipelago, and the DF-26 missile which can deliver both conventional and nuclear warheads up to 4000 kilometers.
Yoshihara explains that attacks on U.S. naval forces based in Japan would only be “one element of a larger campaign” of strikes that would likely include our airbases at Iwakuni, Yokota, and Misawa in Japan, and Kadena on Okinawa, as well as cyber warfare attacks designed to interrupt our military communications. But like Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, even a successful initial Chinese attack on U.S. forces and facilities “could very well prove strategically counterproductive, if not disastrous, for Beijing,” Yoshihara suggests, by drawing in Japan, the world’s third-largest economy with a powerful navy, on the side of the United States, thereby awakening two “sleeping giants” that together could spell doom for the PLA and the communist regime.
For more than a decade, America’s political leaders have talked about a strategic “pivot” to Asia without providing the necessary forces in the region to match the rhetoric. Meanwhile, the current administration in Washington promotes “engagement” with China even as war clouds gather in the western Pacific. Just as in the 1930s, the road to another Pearl Harbor could be paved with good intentions.
On the same day, John Woudhuysen wrote about “The Coming Conflict with China” (spiked):
[W]e can only hope the growing rivalry between the US and China doesn’t boil over anytime soon. But while talks are preferable to conflict, they don’t preclude it….
… America has imposed wide-ranging sanctions on China and, historically, sanctions have formed a significant prelude to conflict. The ban on semiconductor technology certainly seems like a provocative escalation from the Biden administration….
Washington’s determination to continue selling arms to Taipei rankles Beijing. As did this year’s Western naval manoeuvres near Taiwan, and the establishment last year of the Aukus nuclear-powered submarine alliance between Australia, the UK and the US.
Still, there are points at which American and Chinese interests align. Economic worries mean that both share an interest in the Russian war against Ukraine not getting out of hand….
The Kremlin’s humiliating withdrawal from Kherson may have made Xi think twice again about Taiwan. As Biden remarked in Bali, a Chinese invasion does not look imminent; a slow, attritional tightening of Beijing’s screws on the island looks the more likely prospect. But the loss of Taiwan to nationalists in 1949 still weighs heavily on the Chinese psyche. If Xi does not take the island back sometime over the five-year term he has just embarked upon, he will have some explaining to do.
Of course, war on Taiwan would likely turn out disastrously for Beijing, because of the integration of China’s trade, supply chains and foreign direct investment with the West – all of which would be threatened by an invasion. By the same token, this integration is also crucial for the West. This is why many Western leaders are preaching a more cautious path when it comes to relations with China….
As ever, China’s conduct abroad, from Britain to Latin America to Africa and even the Arctic, seems to grow heavier, more cack-handed and more lurid with every passing year. Conversely, another debacle for American imperialism, like the one it suffered last year in Afghanistan, could well embolden Xi to get a whole lot tougher with Taiwan….
… As much as we hope cooler heads will prevail, war is not a rational exercise. Arms build-ups, nautical intrigues, air drills and Chinese infringements on Taiwanese airspace have an inexorable and lethal logic of their own.
China isn’t building a formidable naval force and acquiring bases around the South China Sea (and elsewhere) for the sake of doing nothing. Perhaps, in the spirit of Donald Trump, China means to make itself independent of trade with the West. Having done so, it could then seize control of the South China Sea and the countries that ring it. Western leaders could attribute China’s fait accompli to geopolitical destiny. (Shades of Hong Kong and the rest of the British Empire.)
This would avert a war — for the time being — but it would also allow China to build its military forces and extend its influence to other parts of the globe. Bit, by bit, Western influence and economic dealings with the rest of the world would be subsumed by China. And in league with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, it could use military and economic blackmail to contain the West — and even to dictate its internal political arrangements.
As I said here:
If there isn’t a de facto surrender by the West — marked by significant concessions on trade, sanctions, and the scope of military operations and influence — there will be a World War III.
But I fully expect concessions by weak-kneed Western leaders. The concessions will be sugar-coated for domestic consumption and packaged in the form of measures (rationing, lock-downs) to fight the crises du jour, be they a pandemic, inflation, a depression, or the ever-popular threat of incineration by a temperature rise of a degree or two.
There is, however, a way to avert subjugation and to remain engaged with the rest of the West, if not the wider world outside of the new axis of evil:
Prevent … a concerted economic-military attack on U.S. interests — by possessing more than enough means to end it quickly. Which translates into deterring it in the first place (but ending it quickly if deterrence fails.)
This is neo-isolationism in the sense that it eschews military adventures that aren’t worth the price paid by Americans. But it is not isolationism of the old-fashioned kind. Forces would be deployed forward (in space, on land, and in the oceans) to shorten reaction times and remind our adversaries that we are there, big stick in hand. Americans and American businesses would continue to be engaged with the world, in travel and trade, with the exception that America would become (once again) energy-independent.
But the time to do what it takes — to arm America to the teeth and replace its leftist “leadership” — is running short. And the Chinese (and their potential allies) know it.
The “useful idiots” in the West — the “progressives” who are preoccupied with the transformation of the old order into universal “wokeness” — either don’t understand the situation or don’t care. They probably believe, foolishly, that they will be wined and dined in Beijing and Moscow when the new world order is in place. Good luck with that! Daniel Greenfield sums it up:
A proper Marxist regime has little use for militant minorities, feminism, gay rights, police defunding, transgender bathrooms, pipeline protests, abortion, or any of the other issues the radicals have been using to waste our time. If you doubt that, go look at how many of any of the above you can find in China, Cuba, or North Korea….
After a brief permissive period, the Soviet Union criminalized homosexuality and insisted on traditional marriages and roles for women. Those feminists who resisted were soon shown their place with one of the more notorious free love figures being forcibly married off by Lenin…. [“Obama and the Broken Nation He Made Come Of Age”, Front Page Magazine, June 25, 2021]
Related posts:
Turning Points in America’s History
A Grand Strategy for the United States
An Addendum to “Grand Strategy”: Neo-Isolationism
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