China sole focus of House committee

Voracious reading — “I am reminded of Andrew Gordon’s masterful book ‘The Rules of the Game’ about the decline of the Royal Navy before the Battle of Jutland” — fuels the fluent writings of Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis. Their distilled essence is: People who are serious about national security should immediately speak loudly so the nation can carry a big military stick. To qualify for the “marathon” competition with China, the United States must “win the sprint” right now.

After Princeton and before earning a Georgetown Ph.D., Gallagher served seven years as a Marine, learning Arabic, and, during two Iraq deployments, learning the cost of good intentions combined with muddy thinking. Now 38 and in his fourth congressional term, he chairs the House’s newly created and instantly most important committee. Its single subject is China — meaning, practically, the Chinese Communist Party.

Deterrence failed regarding Ukraine, with a huge cost in blood and treasure; a comparable failure regarding Taiwan would be immeasurably more catastrophic. About this, Gallagher’s thinking is congruent with that of scholars Hal Brands ( Johns Hopkins) and Michael Beckley (Tufts) in “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China.”

Demography, the authors say, dictates China’s destiny, which is decline. The danger zone is not this century — the marathon — but this decade, when China, “a falling power” facing an “ugly” future, might lunge through a closing window of opportunity for aggression.

China, Brands and Beckley write, is at “the intersection of ambition and desperation,” the latter because China’s 37-fold real gross domestic product growth 1978-2018 is certain to be followed by a prolonged contraction. By 2050, almost one-third of the nation will be over 60. Because of the long echo of the ruinous “one-child policy” (1980-2016), China’s population, they write, “will be just half its current size by the end of the century and perhaps as soon as the 2060s.”

Gallagher believes China’s recklessness might increase as its dynamism wanes.

There should be more surge capacity in munitions manufacturing. “On any given missile system,” Gallagher writes, “roughly 30 percent of the material requires lead times on restocking that may run beyond a year.” U.S. policy should protect Indo-Pacific nations from “Finlandization,” a Cold War term for large authoritarian powers reducing nominally independent countries to functional subservience.

Defeating an amphibious invasion of Taiwan would require U.S. strikes against China’s coastal facilities, according to Gallagher. So crucial military munitions plants on the U.S. mainland should be hardened against potential retaliatory strikes by China’s precision weapons with conventional explosives.

The House Select Committee on China was created by a bipartisan vote of 365-65. All of the opponents were Democrats, probably wary lest China’s threat complicates the progressive agenda of devoting ever more national resources to multiplying dependent domestic constituencies. Some congressional Republicans, speaking loudly (if vaguely) for frugality, would provide the nation with a smaller military stick rather than touch the twothirds of the budget devoted to entitlements. To both factions, Gallagher cites another Marine who does not mince words, former defense secretary Jim Mattis: “America can afford survival.”