Thinking About China

Simplicius the Thinker has a new essay out—shorter than his SitReps—that examines an article by Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting. The article purports to rethink Anglo-Zionist foreign policy in terms of how the world actually is:

A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is

Biden and the Search for a New American Strategy

I think Simplicius gets this basically right. This is about the Anglo-Zionists getting smacked upside the head by reality. On the other hand, the fact perhaps a few Anglo-Zionists recognize that America’s control over the world is more limited than they heretofore thought doesn’t mean that their fundamental attitudes have changed. Nor does it mean that this dawning realization is a majority view among Anglo-Zionists. The article is actually, in major part, an exercise in blame shifting. I’ll try to get to that a bit later. For purposes of this post, suffice it to say that there are no signs of any fundamental rethinking of Anglo-Zionist policy towards China.

The Anglo-Zionist policy towards China remains predicated on the notion that China is an expansionist military threat to the Anglo-Zionist empire—a hostile military threat, not just an economic threat to Anglo-Zionist hegemony. That notion is probably more in the nature of a rhetorical justification for the dominant Anglo-Zionist policy prescription, which is always war. If China were presented as having attained economic ascendancy by having out competed the US, thanks in no small part to the stupid policies of the Anglo-Zionists themselves, the American people would be likely to recoil at the proposed solution to our economic difficulties: War.

As it is, the Anglo-Zionists—led by Janet Yellen, Blinken, and Jake Sullivan (who has been associated with Ben Rhodes)—adopted an openly confrontational attitude toward China from the get go. That has persisted and been exacerbated by high US military officials openly predicting war with China by 2025 or turning the Taiwan Straits into a “hellscape” for China, should China deploy troops to its island province. Xi Jinping appears to understand what’s going on. He is reported to have said recently that he sees the US as attempting to sucker him into a first move towards Taiwan. Inconveniently for the Anglo-Zionists, neither China nor the residents of Taiwan have much inclination to participate in turning the island into a “hellscape.”

To illustrate what continues to pass for strategic thinking in DC—no least among GOPers—I’ll paste in several longish tweets which were sparked by a tweet by a former Trump defense official, Elbridge Colby (seriously, who names their kid Elbridge?). Colby’s tweet approved a very hawkish view expressed by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall with regard to China. Colby’s views are of interest because he could return to a new Trump administration. Interestingly, he was also close to the Jeb! campaign, but was nixed by Neocons for the usual reasons:

According to a person familiar with the campaign's internal deliberations, Mr. Bush's political operation raised concerns about Mr. Colby's published views on Iran.

Mr. Colby has prominently advocated against a military strike on Iranand has called for the Republican Party to move closer to its roots of pragmatism and containment.

Specifically, Mr. Colby has argued that an open-ended military attack against Iran could be a worse outcome than a nuclear-armed Iran and that containing a nuclear Iran was both "plausible and practical."

Colby appears to be a Mearsheimer-ish self proclaimed “realist”, as we read in this actually rather interesting Politico article from 4/2023:

Elbridge Colby Wants to Finish What Donald Trump Started

Meet the conservative intellectual seeking to remake the GOP’s foreign policy.

Elbridge “Bridge” Colby is, as Donald Trump might say, straight out of central casting for a member of D.C.’s foreign policy elite. He has degrees from Harvard and Yale, a membership to Washington’s Metropolitan Club and the kind of coiffed hair and clipped accent that you’d expect from an American blue-blood. So pristine is his pedigree — his grandfather was head of the CIA — that a lightly fictionalized version of him appears in the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s memoir of his undergraduate years at Harvard, titled Privilege.

But Colby, far from being a deep state darling, is the intellectual leader and rising star of an insurgent wing in the Republican Party rebelling against decades of dominant interventionist and Reaganite thinking.

For years, Colby has held that China is the principal threat abroad, and that the United States should focus on Asia to the near-exclusion of everywhere else — including Russia and Ukraine.

So, with that in mind:

Robert Manning:

Yep. The emerging DC zeitgeist seems to be: Don’t accept the legitimacy of CCP govt. China can’t change. War is inevitable. The debate is how best to weaken China & prepare for war.

— with a mature nuclear state & No.1 trade & capital exporter.

Bon chance

Elbridge Colby:

This, from Frank Kendall, is the only prudent policy vis a vis China.

“Today the intelligence couldn't be clearer. Whatever its actual intentions may be I could not say, but China is preparing for a war and specifically for a war with the U.S.” 1/

It’s patently clear that no can say with confidence what Xi Jinping will do. It simply cannot be known with confidence.

But we *can* see their massive preparations for war with America. That’s the key thing to focus on.

That doesn’t mean war is inevitable. To the contrary. 2/

But it means we have to act as if it could very well happen and thus laser focus on deterring it while giving Beijing sufficient incentives to keep the peace. 3/

Dale Copeland

Bridge, This is pure incendiary alarmism in its worst form (i.e., designed to rile up a base) and you know it. You had been getting more reasonable in your posts, and I've applauded these posts. And now this.

Let's dissect this a bit, shall we?

First, this is literally just one man's opinion, nicely cherry-picked from one of the most right-wing hawkish rags out there, the Washington Free Beacon. (See below its banner, which includes two bombs on each side, and a slogan, "Covering the Enemies of Freedom the Way the Mainstream Media Won't".) I notice you ignore all the other opinions in the Pentagon, let alone the State Department or CIA, that suggests that China is indeed "building up" -- and has been doing so for 33 years (after the shock of 1991 Gulf War; see Rush Doshi, Long Game) -- but that it is not clear whether it is for deterrence or for limited war against small states or for the "war" you are suggesting ("direct" war with the United States itself).

This is truly a shameful display of deliberate alarmism -- one that even goes against your own previously stated "theory" of what you think China is going to do with its buildup. Your argument in the book (Strategy of Denial, 2021) although you may now have a strategy to deny its core premise, is this: China is a rational actor trying to absorb Taiwan and Southeast to get "regional hegemony" without a war with the US. But Frank Kendall's comment is talking about China "preparing for a war with the United States." So which is it? Regional expansion without a direct US-China war, or readying for "the big one"? (And doesn't Kendall have to be implying that China thinks it can "win" such a direct war, and thus must be pretty irrationally driven by status and glory -- as opposed to your assumption of a rational Xi Jinping?)

Second, once again you are mixing up an "interpretation" of a fact -- that China's obvious buildup over 30 years may be a readying for war with the US -- with the fact itself (China's buildup). I believe you remember the security dilemma logic of defensive realism (Jervis, Glaser, Walt, Wheeler, etc.) that I helped teach you back in 2018-19 as you were preparing your book. …

In short, there are always at least two interpretations that A can make of B's military buildup -- and Kendall's view is just the first, and has no "pride of place" relative to the second. You know this, of course (unless you've forgotten our lessons on realism and the deterrence model vs spiral model). But to now present only the former model and say to the world, "Watch out! China's buildup means it is readying for war with America!!!" is simply disingenuous and dangerously provocative. …

Third, are you not aware that if all of this Kendall-type alarmist talk is actually real, by which I mean people in your own party actually believe it, that the only rational response of the United States is to strike now while we still have an overall strategic advantage? That is, preventive war against China itself. (!!). Perhaps I'll remind you why you brought me in as your personal consultant on realism from December 2017 until you left the DOD in June 2018: as you said in your late November introductory email, you were an admirer of my book The Origins of Major War, were reading my Economic Interdependence and War, and you wanted to know how my dynamic realist argument applied to current US policy with China. Well, Bridge, one of the core conclusions of both books is that when dominant states believe themselves to be in deep decline versus a rising and clearly aggressive state, they are very likely to initiate all-out preventive wars to solve the problem of the rising threat before it is too late.

…

In sum, these kinds of posts only make you look like a crazed alarmist who is likely to advocate war with China should you ever get a high-level position in some future US administration. Perhaps this is indeed your deeper views now -- views that represent a huge shift from the moderate and reasonable person dedicated to creating a full-spectrum deterrent posture without war when you convinced me to work pro-bono for you for six months. But I hope this is just a "technique" you're pulling out to enflame your base. While that's bad enough, at least it wouldn't be a reflection of a person who truly believes China "wants" a direct war with the United States and thus would be "rational" to advocate a preventive strike against the rising threat (arguments made from 1945 to 1953 in the US, and taken seriously by both Truman and Eisenhower, as you know from reading chapter 6 of Origins of Major War).

Arnaud Bertrand

Americans don't realize just how disastrous this would be if that's indeed the case. And Manning, a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, is very well connected in DC so I think we should probably believe him.

A war is essentially won on 3 things:

1) Industrial capacity

2) Morale

3) International support

1) Industrial capacity

I think everyone realizes just how far ahead of the US China is in terms of industrial capacity. Think of the war in Ukraine: Russia's industry is managing to keep pace and even surpass what the whole of NATO is producing and sending to Ukraine. Yet Russia is a crazy 20 times (!) smaller than China when it comes to industrial capacity. We're talking about a country that's the literal factory of the world, they can produce at an unprecedented scale in history.

Notwithstanding the fact that if there was a war with China, Russia would have zero qualms about sending weapons to China, and notwithstanding the fact that in case of war, it's a question mark whether European countries would so happily to do the same and send weaponry to fight China as they do now for Ukraine (see below regarding "international support")...

2) Morale

It's funny that they question the "legitimacy of CCP govt" because there is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that if the US were to attack China, support of the Chinese population for their government and defending their country would be total. You would see 100% support, guaranteed. The notion that the Chinese people secretly want the West to coup their government and install a US-style liberal democracy in its stead is a complete illusion.

And I am not quite sure the inverse would be the same and that Americans would so happily support their government in such an illegitimate crusade based on a hubristic desire for hegemony that has brought them so little benefit over the years...

3) International support

Let's play this out and let's imagine that this "plan" goes through, that the US ramps up its hostility against China all the way to war.

Do you seriously think that the world would side with the US? They didn't even side - in their large majority - with the West with regards to Ukraine, in a war where even though there was considerable provocation with NATO expansion, it's still pretty clear that Russia violated the UN Charter. And they side with the US even less with regards to Gaza...

In the case of this war China, where the reason for the war would be completely illegitimate however you look at it - as Manning writes, simply because they don't like the government and, more than anything, don't want to be number 2 - do you really think the world would side with America? No way, not in a million years!

All the more because, in this case, this would be a war against a country that's the first trading partner of the immense majority of the world's countries. Why on earth would a country decide to sever relations with its first trading partner simply for the purpose of perpetuating a US hegemony everyone is anyhow largely fed up with? Just nonsensical.

Conclusion: the US wouldn't just lose this war, just like it's lost all its other wars lately, but such a crusade would dramatically precipitate its pariah-isation from the global community with all the consequences that this would entail for what remains of its power, and Americans' standards of living.

The good news is that everything points to the fact that China doesn't want war and vastly favors peaceful coexistence, which it argues for constantly. That option is therefore very much open.

It's also incidentally what Henry Kissinger argued for in the conclusion of his last book ("Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy"), published not long before he died. Kissinger can and should be condemned for plenty of things, but one thing everyone can agree on is that he understood geopolitical power dynamics.

His conclusion on China and the US was that "the key issue for the future of the world is whether the two behemoths [China and the US] can learn to combine inevitable strategic rivalry with a concept and practice of coexistence". He didn't believe that the "liberal and universal rules-based order" could perdure because "there is no final resolution, not to speak of a military one, to great-power competition". He believed that "an unrestrained technological race, justified by the ideologization of foreign policy in which each side is convinced of the malevolent intent of the other, risks creating a cataclysmic cycle of mutual suspicion like that which started the First World War, but with incomparably greater consequences".

His final conclusion: "all sides are thus now obliged to reexamine their first principles of international behavior and relate them to the possibilities of coexistence."