TWO RECENT FIRES AN INDICATOR OF LOOMING CONFLICT

We’ll probably never know exactly what sorts of documents were incinerated at China’s Consulate in Houston in the days before the United States forced it to close on Friday, after accusing it of being a hub of espionage. We may also never know what caused this month’s catastrophic fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard, a massive amphibious assault ship that was being fitted out to double as a small aircraft carrier, in the port of San Diego.

What we should know is that the two fires are actually one. We are racing toward a conflict with China we may be ill-prepared to wage.

The closure of the consulate comes on the heels of a quad of bellicose speeches from top administration officials, collectively amounting to a declaration of Cold War against China. Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, painted China’s leadership as unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, spoke of China’s practice in the art of “malign foreign influence”. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hinted the free world may need a new version of Nato, this one aimed at Beijing instead of Moscow.

Given that the source is Team Trump and the timing is an election year, it’s tempting to dismiss the speeches’ warnings as cynical, hypocritical, political — and therefore wrong. Why complain about civil liberties in Hong Kong when we have goon squads in Portland? Why accuse China of trashing global norms when that’s been Mr Trump’s ambition from the beginning? Why characterise Chinese President Xi Jinping as a linear ideological descendant of Joseph Stalin when, as we know from John Bolton, Mr Trump was fulsomely praising him and soliciting his help for his re-election bid?

And why all of this now, when Mr Trump needs enemies both foreign and domestic to rescue his flagging re-election bid?

But the problem with these questions is that — however on point they are as criticisms of Mr Trump — they obscure two hard facts a Biden administration will also confront. The first is that, under Mr Xi, China has become drastically more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad and more shameless about both than at nearly any point since the death of Mao Tse-tung.

This is not a matter of Beijing reacting badly to Mr Trump. Some of China’s biggest digital heists date to the Obama years — including the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management, which gave Beijing the background security files for nearly 22 million current or former US government employees and their family members. China’s outrageous and illegal claims to most of the South China Sea also predate Trump and will fester long after he’s gone.

What stands out now is just how brazen Beijing has become. Take one detail from Mr Wray’s speech: “We have now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours,” he said. In one case, a single scientist, Hongjin Tan, pleaded guilty to stealing an estimated US$1 billion (32 billion baht) in trade secrets from an Oklahoma-based energy company.

Multiply that hundreds if not thousands of times over, and what you have is arguably the largest single theft of foreign property since Germany looted Europe in World War II. Whatever else one might say against the Trump administration, it isn’t lying about China.

But this brings us to the second blunt fact. US power in East Asia is waning. Mr Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the single best hedge the US had against Chinese economic dominance of the region — may, in hindsight, prove to be his single worst policy mistake. He has tried to shake down both South Korea and Japan to pay more for basing US forces: penny ante politics that only raise doubts about America’s reliability as an ally.

And then there’s the degraded state of the US Navy, epitomised by the fire on the Bonhomme Richard. Mr Trump came to office with grand plans to build a 355-ship Navy, up from the current 300. The Pentagon all but admits it has no hope of reaching that goal. Meanwhile, the Chinese Navy has 335 ships, a 55% increase in 15 years.

If the US and the People’s Republic were to come to blows after some incident over some atoll in the South China Sea, are we confident we’d prevail?

When (fingers crossed) Joe Biden is president, he needn’t ask his Cabinet members to deliver philippics against Beijing. But, as George Kennan once wrote about another regime, he must be prepared to confront China with “unalterable counter force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”