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06/02/2005
The U.S. and China
Foreign affairs expert and author Robert D. Kaplan has a piece in
the June 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled “How We
Would Fight China.” Following are a few of his thoughts.
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“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.
It’s military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast
learner .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.”
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“The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the
latter half of the twentieth century is dead .
“The second thing to understand is that the functional substitute
for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is indeed up and
running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM .
its leaders understand (that) the center of gravity of American
strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East .
“The third thing to understand is that, ironically, the vitality of
NATO itself, the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold
War in the Pacific .In its posture toward China the United
States will look to Europe and NATO, whose help it will need as
a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a force to patrol
seas more distant than the Mediterranean and the North
Atlantic.”
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“Otto von Bismarck, the father of the Second Reich in
continental Europe, would recognize the emerging Pacific
system. In 2002 the German commentator Josef Joffe argued
that in terms of political alliances, the United States has come to
resemble Bismarck’s Prussia. Britain, Russia, and Austria
needed Prussia more than they needed one another, Joffe wrote,
thus making them ‘spokes’ to Berlin’s ‘hub’; the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan exposed a world in which America can forge
different coalitions for different crises. The world’s other
powers, he said, now need the United States more than they need
one another.
“Unfortunately, the United States did not immediately capitalize
on this new power arrangement, because President George W.
Bush lacked the nuance and attendant self-restraint of Bismarck,
who understood that such a system could endure only so long as
one didn’t overwhelm it. The Bush administration did just that,
of course, in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which led
France, Germany, Russia, and China, along with a host of lesser
powers such as Turkey, Mexico, and Chile, to unite against us .
“(But) PACOM represents a much purer version of Bismarck’s
imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration
created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in
‘Diplomacy’, Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a
point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology.
He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by
recognizing that when power relationships are correctly
calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.
“Only a similarly pragmatic approach will allow us to
accommodate China’s inevitable re-emergence as a great power.
The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first
century into a battlefield.”
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“The relative shift in focus from the Middle East to the Pacific in
the coming years will force the next American president, no
matter what his or her party, to adopt a foreign policy similar to
those of moderate Republican presidents such as George H.W.
Bush, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. The management of risk
will become a governing ideology .’Getting into a war with
China is easy,’ says Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret who
developed the weapons strategy for the Afghan resistance in the
1980s as a CIA officer ‘You can see many scenarios, not just
Taiwan – especially as the Chinese develop a submarine and
missile capability throughout the Pacific. But the dilemma is,
How do you end a war with China?’
“Like the nations involved in World War I, and unlike the rogue
states everyone has been concentrating on, the United States and
China in the twenty-first century would have the capacity to keep
fighting even if one or the other lost a big battle or a missile
exchange. This has far-reaching implications. ‘Ending a war
with China,’ Vickers says, ‘may mean effecting some form of
regime change, because we don’t want to leave some wounded,
angry regime in place.’ Another analyst, this one inside the
Pentagon, told me, ‘Ending a war with China will force us to
substantially reduce their military capacity, thus threatening their
energy sources and the Communist Party’s grip on power. The
world will not be the same afterward. It’s a very dangerous road
to travel on.’”
Kaplan writes that the United States needs to deter China from “a
geographic hub of comparative isolation – the Hawaiian Islands
– with spokes reaching out to major allies such as Japan, South
Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and India.”
“Whatever we say or do, China will spend more and more money
on its military in the coming decades. Our only realistic goal
may be to encourage it to make investments that are defensive,
not offensive, in nature.”
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Today, the United States deploys 24 of the world’s 34 aircraft
carriers; the Chinese deploy none. Its navy and air force will not
be able to match ours for decades. Kaplan:
“The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of
engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought
in the Pacific during World War II .Instead the Chinese will
approach us asymmetrically, as terrorists do. In Iraq the
insurgents have shown us the low end of asymmetry, with car
bombs. But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of
the art. That is the threat.
“There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less
advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity
with us. According to one former submarine commander and
naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over
every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian
Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military
power depends on naval projection – that is, on the ability of a
carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire
a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the
Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and
moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of
naval missile range – all the while developing an offensive
strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that
supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier.
The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile’s hitting a U.S.
carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and
psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the
Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a
way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-
missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers.
“With an advanced missile program the Chinese could fire
hundreds of missiles at Taiwan before we could get to the island
to defend it. Such a capability, combined with a new fleet of
submarines (soon to be a greater undersea force than ours, in size
if not in quality), might well be enough for the Chinese to coerce
other countries into denying port access to U.S. ships .Then
there is the whole field of ambiguous coercion – for example, a
series of non-attributable cyber-attacks on Taiwan’s electrical-
power grids, designed to gradually demoralize the population.
This isn’t science fiction; the Chinese have invested significantly
in cyberwarfare training and technology.”
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One of the keys for the United States is Andersen Air Force
Base, on Guam’s northern tip. Kaplan:
“No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry
as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time.
Andersen also stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the
Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world.”
Guam is not Okinawa. It is American soil, a U.S. territory.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in construction funds are being
allocated here. Having been to Guam myself on numerous
occasions, I’ve seen our taxpayer dollars at work and in this
instance it’s money well spent.
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“We will have to continually play various parts of the world off
China, just as Richard Nixon played less than morally perfect
states off the Soviet Union. This may well lead to a
fundamentally new NATO alliance, which could become a
global armada that roams the Seven Seas. Indeed, the Dutch, the
Norwegians, the Germans, and the Spanish are making
significant investments in fast missile-bearing ships and in
landing-platform docks for beach assaults, and the British and
the French are investing in new aircraft carriers. Since Europe
increasingly seeks to avoid conflict and to reduce geopolitics to a
series of negotiations and regulatory disputes, an emphasis on
sea power would suit it well. Sea power is intrinsically less
threatening than land power. It allows for a big operation
without a large onshore footprint. Consider the tsunami effort,
during which Marines and sailors returned to their carrier and
destroyers each night. Armies invade; navies make port visits.”
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Hott Spotts will return June 16.
Brian Trumbore
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