CHINA A BIGGER COLD WAR THREAT THAN THE SOVIETS
How the U.S. responds to China’s bid to replace it as the world’s dominant nation may be the story of the 21st century — and at least from Washington’s perspective, things aren’t going well.
With faster growth rates than the U.S., increasingly sophisticated tech industries and bold investments in infrastructure, China is now expected to supplant America as the world’s largest economy in 2028 — much sooner than once assumed.
The assumptions fueled by the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 — that economic prosperity would lead to democratization, as it has in many nations — were wrong as well. Beijing has crushed would-be reformers, increasingly expanding “social credit” systems that use technology to microtrack citizens and punish them for behavior the government doesn’t like — only starting with political dissent — by limiting their access to travel, services, goods and more.
Meanwhile, China’s economic might — and angry responses to outsiders’ criticisms of its human rights abuses — have had a chilling, silencing effect. Up to 3 million Uyghur Muslims have been forced into what amount to concentration camps for “reeducation” in Xinjiang Province since 2018.
In 1980, 65 nations kept their athletes home from the Moscow Summer Olympics to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For the Winter Olympics that begin Feb. 4 in and around Beijing, only “diplomatic boycotts” are planned, in which the bureaucrats of several nations, including the U.S., are staying home. That will show Chinese leader Xi Jinping!
And when it comes to the Chinese military, a series of recent stories have alarmed the Pentagon.
In October, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that China’s recent test of a highly advanced hypersonic weapons system was “very close” to a Sputnik moment — a reference to the Soviet Union’s deployment of the first artificial satellite in 1957 that kicked off the Space Age and triggered panic in the Eisenhower administration. Launched from orbiting rockets and traveling at speeds up to 3,800 mph, hypersonic glide vehicles are seen as ideal for sneak attacks because they are less susceptible to traditional missile detection and defense.
In November, the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that China was completing work on its first modern, advanced aircraft carrier — one that features technology that previously only the U.S. and France have had.
This week, The Wall Street Journal broke the huge story that Beijing was seeking to build its first military base on the Atlantic Ocean in the Central African country of Equatorial Guinea. It already has a base on the Indian Ocean in the East African nation of Djibouti, seeks a second such base in Cambodia and has built seven heavily fortified islands — three with airstrips — in the southwest Pacific Ocean.
What are China’s goals? The most obvious is to intimidate Taiwan — an island nation that broke from mainland China after World War II — to the point where Taipei accepts tacit or explicit domination by Beijing.
But Xi has far more ambitious hopes. He has said publicly that his intent is for China to have the strongest military on the planet, one able to “fight and win” a major war with the United States by 2049.
Having such a distant goal makes sense given how far the U.S. is ahead of China in aircraft carriers, in most areas of military technology, and in the expertise and experience of its military. While it has grown steadily, the annual Chinese military budget is still less than one-third the size of the U.S. budget.
But Americans should not be complacent. Beijing is a more daunting Cold War rival than Moscow. The Soviet economy was never a threat to approach the size of the U.S. economy, as China has now done. And the Soviets didn’t have the scientific chops to launch a serious effort to genetically engineer baby geniuses and super soldiers, as China has been doing for years.
Beijing may also have an advantage that Moscow never did before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991: a U.S. that is so politically divided that it wouldn’t react with bipartisan resolve to an act of war, such as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or to a national catastrophe, such as 9/11.
The isolationist wing of the Republican Party used to be tiny — most notably, Pat Buchanan and Ron
Paul. But Donald Trump convinced many in the GOP that America’s allies take advantage of us. If Trump or someone like him was in charge, would the U.S. even defend Britain, its strong ally for more than a century — much less Taiwan? And if a conventional politician were president, would those on the other side of the aisle in Congress want her or him to win a war — or face an Afghanistan-style quagmire?
These scenarios would have seemed unfathomable in the heyday of Bob Dole, just a generation ago. But in 2021, the intensity of partisanship has warped the nation. When many Republicans and many Democrats consider those in the other party to be enemies, the ancient proverb that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has scary implications for U.S. military and foreign policy.
If war broke out, would those in the party opposite the president’s even want America to win?