By Peter Huessy, Senior Warrior Nuclear Weapons Analyst
Foreign Policy is a journal of international affairs that likes to take issue with what it sees as conventional wisdom. This month they publish an essay taking issue with the growing concern in the United States—deemed not justified—over the direction of the Chinese government under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Michael Hirsch a columnist for the Journal worries Washington is unnecessarily headed toward a cold war with China rather than an alternative cold peace.
Hirsch admits of Chinese aggression against the United States but dismisses it as any sign China wants to dominate the competition between the two nations, let alone seek hegemonic primacy. As evidence he advises Xi apparently “pleaded” with US industrial leaders to make investments in China (now declining for the first time in decades), on top of a near $700 billion in annual trade, and that these are indicators China is totally accepting of the current international economic system (which many believe China has been trying to undermine and destroy.)
What Hirsch dismisses is the long ago adopted unrestricted warfare strategy of the CCP against the United States. Apparently, the reports of its adoption were fables.
Hirch tells us the surveillance and sky balloons hovering over top US strategic nuclear facilities were “errant”—not designed to surveil the USA and just coincidentally crossing the entire United States and “spying” on our most sensitive military bases.
The author also writes that the United States strategic modernization program is in “response” to the Chinese nuclear buildup—implying the build is also errant because the Chinese nuclear build-up is obviously being exaggerated.
Actually, the strategic modernization was fully agreed to in 2010 at the time of the New START agreement not in response to China but to replace an aging and rusting strategic nuclear deterrent, and one strictly limited by arms control limits. The companion Nuclear Posture Review of 2010 in fact hardly thought of China as a nuclear threat, emphasizing the cooperative nature of the relationship with both nations, especially in dealing with nuclear threats from terrorist organizations.
At that time, experts such as Rick Fisher, Mike Pillsbury and Brad Thayer were warning about the emerging Chinese threat and were largely ignored by the drive-by media.
It is puzzling that Hirsch embraces David Sanger’s new book on China as Sanger correctly explains the US mistakenly believed that bringing China into international organizations (largely created by the West) would modify China’s actions internationally as well as soften its internal security mix, although Hirsch thinks not only will China embrace this international system but needs it to survive.
And with respect to emerging top technologies, Sanger in an interview with Ivo Daadler explains that some experts believe with respect to mastering new emerging technologies, such as AI, you cannot be in China’s camp and the US camp together. “You have to choose” he declares. That doesn’t fit into Hirsch’s narrative either.
Now Hirsch also says many Chinese economic plans under the Belts and Roads Initiative are failing. And that the Chinese economy is in trouble. Both are true–witness the loss of $6 trillion in market cap value of its stock market.
But does that lessen the threat?
The USSR often failed to accomplish its goals such as taking over the ROK (1950) and El Salvador (1963-91). But the cost to the US and its allies were huge—2 million dead Koreans and 35,000 dead American soldiers. And millions of injured and displaced. Followed shortly thereafter by the Soviet against South Vietnam and all of Indo-China.
The Soviet economy largely failed to improve the living conditions of its people over long decades of economic stagnation during the Cold War. But the USSR was no less of a military threat. And it took the US nearly half a century to get US policy right and collapse the Soviet Union empire.
Yet the conventional wisdom of the time was the economy of the USSR was at least 45% of the United States and as such not subject to being undermined. Ambassador Kenneth Galbreath famously ridiculed President Reagan’s planned economic takedown of the USSR by proclaiming the Soviets made highly efficient use of their manpower and would not be affected by Reagan’s plans.
Yet despite its economic weaknesses, the Soviets were successful in using terrorism and wars of national liberation to flip some 20 nations from pro-USA to pro communist bloc from 1969-80. They caused serial mayhem worldwide especially as the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism, recruiting Cuba, Syria, Iraq, Libya and North Korea, (and now Iran) all having continued as elements of the past few decades of international trouble for the United States and its allies.
At the very end of the essay the author tells us to remember the lessons of détente but not to do so 20 years too late. Unexplained is whether Hirsch is proposing that the US should adopt detente with China but to do so 20 years prior to when we similarly adopted detente with the USSR?
That “détente” proposal alone shows how uninformed the author is. In many respects we have “détente-plus” with China—the US embraces investment in China including as Bill Gertz explained recently, using US government pension funds through Black Rock to buy stocks in Chinese military companies.
Proposals to be aggressive in taking down China are not met with enthusiasm in Wall Street or in the current US government—although Congressional assessments on China have been well done and accurate now for decades.
Detente didn’t end the Cold War. It actually prolonged it and served the interests of the USSR. Reagan rejected detente (to the horror of the media and the “smart” folks in academia) and as an alternative adopted what became an economic war against the USSR underneath an umbrella of peace through strength.
Is that possible with China given the extensive economic ties between China and the Western industrialized world? That is what the USA has to determine. IWP’s John Lenczkowski has a well thought out plan how to meet the challenge of the Chinese war against the USA. Hirsch seems unaware of it. And Strategic Command head Anthony Cotton has underscored that while the Cold War strategy of Reagan cannot necessarily be adopted wholesale with respect to China, China remains a very significant strategic threat to the United States.
As Hirsch does, declaring our future with China as a choice between Cold War or Cold Peace helps nothing. The issue is what is China trying to accomplish. Does China want to pursue “unrestricted” war with the US? We didn’t persuade the Soviets to stop fighting. We destroyed their economic ability to do so. That Cold War lasted a half century. And détente—if that is a Cold Peace—didn’t work. And only by 1981 did we get the strategy right. The US does not have decades to get things right with China.
The issue is what China does and intends to do. And what is in its most secret declarations.
For sure, the lack of transparency in China policy is not helpful. But we know the PRC is building 360 new silo-based ICBMs (which Hirsch recognizes), and now are developing a new mobile ICBM. And over and over again, Xi tells his politburo and his colleagues that China will be the world’s economic and military hegemon no later than 2049, 100 years after the PRC’s founding. Its Navy is now the world’s largest. According to HASC Chairman Rogers, the Chinese air force will soon be the world’s largest, while the USAF is now the smallest and oldest in history.
The US financed China’s huge economic growth since 1970 and under th
e assumption the Chinese government would moderate its authoritarian and dictatorial policies.
The US got that spectacularly wrong.
The PRC had their own World Bank coterie of experts that planned the de-industrialization of the USA.
The National Security Agency (NSA) head told the NDUF in 2009 that China was stealing $600 billion in intellectual property annually just from USA industry.
The PRC bribes US academic big shots with $50,000 a month cash to steal research paid for by the USA government and industry. [Must be the CCP version of peaceful coexistence!]
And murders prisoners to “harvest” and sell their organs worldwide for profit.
Hirsch may think these actions of China are just as a competitor with the United States—much as Burger King is a rival to McDonalds. And he may believe the can manage the “competition” with China without war or military hostilities.
But this depends upon whether China sees military hostilities as necessary to achieve their goals. After all, the Chinese leadership under Mao killed 65 million of their own people to seek and then keep power. And Xi Jinping has full embraced the Mao legacy. How many Chinese people is he willing to risk to achieve his objective of the world’s hegemon? After all, Mao when informed a nuclear war with China would kill hundreds of millions of Chinese, he shrugged and said that was no problem as Chinese women would “make that up” in a couple of generations.
David Sanger of the New York Times whose new book on China, Russia and the United States (a book Hirsch strangely embraces) correctly notes that when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 the US did not even apply sanctions until a year after the invasion. And provided only blankets in lieu of military assistance. And he further explains that despite the invasion, Chancellor Merkel of Germany embraced the Russian gas supplies through the Nordstrom pipeline. In an April 24th interview, Sanger wonders whether Putin would not have reasonably concluded Ukraine was available for the taking. Just as Xi Jinping might conclude the same with respect to Taiwan.
