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2 China-risers should pause for
breath By Tom Engelhardt
Tired of Afghanistan and all those messy,
oil-ish wars in the Greater Middle East that just
don't seem to pan out? Count on one thing: part of
the United States military feels just the way you
do, especially a largely sidelined navy - and
that's undoubtedly one of the reasons why, a few
months back, the specter of China as this
country's future enemy once again reared its ugly
head.
Back before 9/11, China was the
favored future uber-enemy of secretary of defense
Donald Rumsfeld and all those neo-cons who signed
onto the Project for the New American Century and
later staffed George W Bush's administration.
After all, if you wanted to build a military
beyond compare to enforce a long-term Pax
Americana on the planet, you needed a nightmare
enemy large
enough to justify all the
advanced weapons systems in which you planned to
invest.
As late as June 2005, neo-con
journalist Robert Kaplan was still writing in the
Atlantic about "How We Would Fight China", an
article with this provocative subhead: "The Middle
East is just a blip. The American military contest
with China in the Pacific will define the
twenty-first century. And China will be a more
formidable adversary than Russia ever was." As
everyone knows, however, that "blip" proved far
too much for the Bush administration.
Finding itself hopelessly
bogged down in two ground wars with rag-tag
insurgency movements on either end of the Greater
Middle Eastern "mainland", it let
China-as-Monster-Enemy slip beneath the waves. In
the process, the navy and, to some extent, the air
force became adjunct services to the army (and the
marines). In Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance,
navy personnel far from any body of water found
themselves driving trucks and staffing prisons. It was the
worst of times for the admirals, and probably not
so great for the flyboys either, particularly
after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began
pushing pilotless drones as the true force of the
future. Naturally, a no-dogfight world in which
the US military eternally engages enemies without
significant air forces is a problematic basis for
proposing future air force budgets.
There's no reason to be surprised then
that, as the war in Iraq began to wind down in
2009-2010, the "Chinese naval threat" began to
quietly reemerge. China was, after all, immensely
economically successful and beginning to flex its
muscles in local territorial waters.
The
alarms sounded by military types or pundits
associated with them grew stronger in the early
months of 2011 (as did news of weapons systems
being developed to deal with future Chinese air
and sea power). "Beware America, time is running
out!" warned retired air force lieutenant general
and Fox News contributor Thomas G McInerney while
describing China's first experimental stealth jet
fighter.
Others focused on China's "string
of pearls": a potential set of military bases in
the Indian Ocean that might someday (particularly
if you have a vivid imagination) give that country
control of the oil lanes. Meanwhile, Kaplan, whose
book about rivalries in that ocean came out in
2010, was back in the saddle, warning: "Now the
United States faces a new challenge and potential
threat from a rising China which seeks eventually
to push the US military's area of operations back
to Hawaii and exercise hegemony over the world's
most rapidly growing economies." (Head of the US
Pacific Command Admiral Robert Willard claimed
that China had actually taken things down a notch
at sea in the early months of 2011 - but only
thanks to American strength.)
Behind the
overheated warnings lay a deeper (if often
unstated) calculation, shared by far more than
budget-anxious military types and those who wrote
about them: that the US was heading toward the
status of late, great superpower and that, one of
these years not so far down the line, China would
challenge us for the number one spot on the seas -
and on the planet.
The usefulness of a
major enemy You know the background here:
the victor in the Cold War, the self-proclaimed
"sole superpower" ready to accept no other nation
or bloc of nations that might challenge it (ever),
the towering land that was to be the Roman Empire,
the British Empire, and the Vulcans rolled into
one.
Well, those dreams are already in
history's dustbin. If opinion polls are to be
believed, a gloomy American populace now senses
that the sun has set on American fantasies of
ultimate dominance with what seems like record
speed. These days, the US appears capable of doing
little with its still staggering military might
but fight Pashtun guerillas to a draw in distant
Afghanistan and throw its air power and
missile-armed drones at another fifth-rate power
in a "humanitarian" gesture with the usual
destruction and predictable non-results.
Toss in the obvious - rotting
infrastructure, fiscal gridlock in Washington,
high unemployment, cutbacks in crucial local
services, and a general mood of paralysis,
depression, and confusion - and even if the
Chinese are only refurbishing a mothballed 1992
Ukrainian aircraft carrier as their first move
into the imperial big time, is it really so
illogical to imagine them as the next "sole
superpower" on planet Earth?
After all,
China passed Japan in 2010 as the globe's number
two economy, the same year it officially leaped
over the United States to become the world's
number one emitter of greenhouse gases. Its growth
rate came in at something close to 10% right
through the great financial meltdown of 2008,
making it the world's fastest expanding major
economy.
By mid-2010, it had 477,000
millionaires and 64 billionaires (second only to
the US), and what's always being touted as a
burgeoning middle class with an urge for the
better things. It also had the world's largest car
market (the US came in second), and the staggering
traffic jams to prove it, not to speak of a
willingness to start threatening neighbors over
control of the seas. In short, all the signs of
classic future imperial success.
And those
around the US military aren't alone in sounding
the alarm. Just this month, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) quietly posted a report at its
website indicating that by 2016, the "age of
America" would be over and, by one measure at
least, the Chinese economy would take over first
place from the American one.
With growing
fears in the military-industrial complex of future
cuts in the Pentagon budget (even though, as of
now, it's still rising), there will undoubtedly be
increased jockeying among the armed services for
slices of the military pie. This means an
increasing need for the sort of enemies and
looming challenges that would justify the weapons
systems and force levels each service so
desperately wants.
And there's nothing
like having a rising power of impressive
proportions sink some money into its military
(even if the sums are still embarrassingly small
compared to the United States). In the Chinese
case, it also helps when that country uses its
control over rare earth metals to threaten Japan
in a dispute over territorial waters in the East
China Sea, begins to muscle neighbors on the high
seas, and - so rumor has it - is preparing to name
its refurbished aircraft carrier, which might be
launched this summer, after the Qing Dynasty
admiral who conquered the island of Taiwan.
The unpredictability of
China Still, for all those naval and air
power types who would like to remove American
power from a quicksand planet and put it offshore,
for those who would like to return to an age of
superpower enmity, in fact, for all those pundits
and analysts of whatever stripe picking China as
the globe's next superstar or super evildoer, I
have a small suggestion: take a deep breath. Then
take this under advisement: we've already been
through a version of this once. Might it not be
worth approaching that number-one prediction with
more humility the second time around?
As a
start, let's take a stroll down memory lane. Back
in 1979, Ezra Vogel, Harvard professor and Asian
specialist, put out a book that was distinctly
ahead of its time in capturing the rise to wealth
and glory of a new global power. He entitled it
Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, and in
praising the ways Japanese industry operated and
the resulting "Japanese miracle," the title lacked
only an exclamation point. Vogel certainly caught
the temper of the times, and his scholarly
analysis was followed, in the 1980s, by a flood of
ever more shrill articles and books predicting (in
fascination or horror) that this would indeed
someday be a Japanese world.
The only
problem, as we now know: 'tweren't so. The
Japanese economic bubble burst around 1990 and a
"lost decade" followed, which never quite ended.
Then, of course, there was the 2011
earthquake-cum-tsunami-cum-nuclear-disaster that
further crippled the country.
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