Thursday, July 21, 2005

Watch China

Following on Bill's post below on the growing economic rift between China and the United States comes an article by Max Boot describing the seriousness of the conflict we find ourselves in with China, and will continue to find ourselves in, over the course of the next decade or two. It's important reading. Here's an excerpt:

[China] recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).

Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" - clearly a red, white and blue enemy - would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed," leading to "social panic, street riots and a political crisis." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."

This isn't just loose talk. There are signs of this strategy being implemented.

The question we have about the U.S./Chinese conflict is that, aside from the dispute over Taiwan, it's hard to see how our interests are at odds. Conflict is usually born of competition for resources, especially land. There may be competition for oil between the two nations, but it doesn't seem that it is severe enough to drive China to initiate a war with us. There is an ideological contest between communism and capitalism, but China is moving toward a mixed economy that would appear to blunt the sharper edges of that rivalry. Moreover, the American market has been the main reason for China's economic success. Why would they wish to jeopardize that?

There may be something else in China's strategic thinking that is inducing them to prepare for war with the U.S. China aspires to be a world hegemon and sees the United States as the only obstacle - military, ideological, or economic - in their path. Thus, in their view, either they defer their dream of world dominance or they accept the inevitability of war with the United States. Perhaps they have opted for the latter.

The twenty first century looks like it may be even more bleak and less peaceful than the twentieth.