The Red Yellow Peril
A trio of articles appeared today that build upon the apparently inexorable drive toward a military confrontation between the United States and Red China.
One is the most overt indicator yet of Beijing's impending invasion of Taiwan:
China's national legislature on Monday overwhelmingly approved a law authorizing a military attack to stop Taiwan from pursuing formal independence, a day after President Hu Jintao told the 2.5 million-member People's Liberation Army to be prepared for war.
Commenting on this story, Mark Noonan over at GOP Bloggers speculates that this may be more than the usual sabre rattling:
[I]f China's economy is even more wobbly than some reports indicate, then the Chinese government might need a foreign crisis in the near term to deflect attention from it.
Not to mention a second golden goose to go with Hong Kong.
However, that would mean either war with America, or a humiliating U.S. back-down that would destroy the Bush Administration's hard-won international credibility in the GWOT. Recalling the PLA's downing of an American recon plane near Hainan Island in early 2001 and the White House's flaccid reaction to the provocation does little to inspire confidence in that regard.
The ChiComms are clearly doing their part to prepare for this inevitable clash, as Wes Vernon discusses at some length:
[Consider] a recent warning by Lisa Bronson, a Pentagon security director. At a recent conference that included FBI and CIA officials at Texas A&M University, she was quoted as warning that "China has somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 front companies in the U.S., and their sole reason for existing is to steal, exploit technology." She added it is difficult to assess what technologies that China has already obtained through front groups, spying, etc...
To put this in some perspective: If the Pentagon estimate is correct, there is a spy network in this country that – in numbers at least – surpasses even the Soviet penetration during World War II, when communist operatives were able to maneuver postwar strategy to the benefit of Joseph Stalin and stole atomic secrets before the rest of the world even knew of the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb...
Whereas that spying of 60 years ago concentrated most heavily on government, in 2005 spies for the Chinese Communist government are running – at a minimum – 2,000 so-called "private" companies, presumably with potential links to the U.S. government or to those who may have sensitive contracts with the government. That at least is the goal. This is spying that seeks to steal technology secrets for the express purpose of building a war machine that someday may be turned against us.
Perhaps sooner than we think, if James Pinkerton's parallel of Red China's current spiral toward superpower status and a global showdown with the U.S. with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s is any indication:
When great military powers and great national egos are in tension, it doesn't take much to start a war. In Beijing's worldview, Taiwan's continuing "rebel" status is made possible only because of foreign intervention. Hence the March 7 headline in China Daily, yet another government publication: "Lay off Taiwan, U.S. and Japan told." And now a headline from The Associated Press, just on Monday: "China's president tells army to be prepared for war."
Like Germany in the 19th century, China in the 21st century is demanding its place in the sun. Today the world is witnessing a clash of national interests with no easy, peaceful solution. And it's a reminder that sometimes calamities are obvious as they go rushing down the rails, long before they reach their collision point.
The one other glaring parallel, which Pinkerton doesn't mention but Vernon does, is the complete unwillingness of the West, bordering on a mass Stockholm syndrome, to even recognize, much less publicly acknowledge, that there is a ChiComm problem of any kind, never mind a burgeoning threat that could plunge the world into Armageddon. Adolph Hitler's bid for world power, which was also clearly telegraphed, was similarly ignored by Western democracies that simply did not want to confront unpleasant possibilities, thus making those possibilities virtual certainties.
It's rather shocking to think of President Bush being relegated to the realm of the appeasers (though that's been the U.S. foreign policy status quo for a generation where Red China is concerned), but after his throwing in with the EUnuchs' embarrassingly craven attempt to buy off the Iranian mullahs' nuclear ambitions, coupled with his Administration's always lame-assed diplodiddling on the North Korean equivalent (the lynchpin of which amounts to begging those same ChiComms to lean on Pyongyang to give in), the jarring juxtaposition ceases to be quite so stark.
Perhaps that's a little harsh; it may be that the Bushies are so sold on "people power" that they're counting on the tide of democracy solving all our foreign policy problems, from Syria to Iran to North Korea, and including the PRC. Unfortunately, in the latter case they had their color-coded revolution sixteen years ago - in Tiananmen Square - and we all know how that one turned out. Somehow a sequel just doesn't seem very likely.
And even if it was, there would be less and less time in which to allow the ripples of democracy to do their work. Bad Guys, unfortunately, are not without the ability to learn from the examples of others. The lesson of the fall of Saddam Hussein is clear, and it isn't the one we want them to learn: get nukes as fast as possible. North Korea did (courtesy of Bill Clinton), which is why Bush43 is more or less compelled to persist with futile diplomatic five-knuckle-shuffling; Iran soon will, if they don't already, changing the Middle East equation unimaginably for the worse; and the possible masterminds of this international roguery in Beijing are far more than just nuclear-armed, if Lev Navrozov's warnings can be believed.
Perhaps Mr. Navrozov summed things up best in the aforelinked essay:
[T]he key target, to ensure security, is to defeat those roguish Sunni guerrillas in Iraq, then to conquer the roguish Shia Iran, and convince the rogue North Korea (with the help of our dear, good, peaceful friend China) to stop producing those roguish nuclear weapons.
As for the West, it reminds me of the lady from Niger who fell in love with a tiger and decided to ride him.
A lady from Niger
Loved and rode a tiger.
She ended up inside him,
And with a smile on his lips.
UPDATE/BUMP to 3/16: Tom Donnelly echoes this "beware Red China" warning in today's Weekly Standard. The salient grafs are these:
But even as proliferation mania distorts U.S. policy toward the Korean peninsula, it also fuzzes our China strategy beyond recognition. The combination of September 11 and North Korean nukes puts us in the position of begging for Chinese help on two fronts where they can't or won't do much and diverts our attention from those issues where China is of greatest concern; we've taken Chinese priorities as our own. Little wonder that Beijing wants to string out the Six Party Talks to eternity and has been trying to portray its repression of Turkic Uighurs in western China as actions against Islamic terrorists.
In short, the United States continues to look through the wrong end of the telescope. We're thus blinded to a whole host of worrying developments that reveal China's progress as a geopolitical - and increasingly global - competitor. The Chinese "legislature" just passed an "anti-secession law" that not only "legitimizes" an attack on Taiwan but greater internal repression as well; the Beijing government sees secessionists everywhere. China is beginning to string together a necklace of client states in the oil-rich Middle East - Iran and Sudan, to name two - and even into the Americas, cozying up to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Venezuela supplies about 13% of daily U.S. oil imports, and just as Beijing fears the U.S. Navy's ability to sever China's connection to international energy markets, China wouldn't mind being able to return the favor with Chavez's help.
One can just see the PRC picking its spot with painstaking care, and then intervening against us at the worst possible moment, to devastating effect. And despite all these "birth pangs," as it were, we'll have never seen them coming, because we consciously chose not to.
To modify a Mel Brooks line from History of the World Part I, "It's good to be the ChiComms"....
One is the most overt indicator yet of Beijing's impending invasion of Taiwan:
China's national legislature on Monday overwhelmingly approved a law authorizing a military attack to stop Taiwan from pursuing formal independence, a day after President Hu Jintao told the 2.5 million-member People's Liberation Army to be prepared for war.
Commenting on this story, Mark Noonan over at GOP Bloggers speculates that this may be more than the usual sabre rattling:
[I]f China's economy is even more wobbly than some reports indicate, then the Chinese government might need a foreign crisis in the near term to deflect attention from it.
Not to mention a second golden goose to go with Hong Kong.
However, that would mean either war with America, or a humiliating U.S. back-down that would destroy the Bush Administration's hard-won international credibility in the GWOT. Recalling the PLA's downing of an American recon plane near Hainan Island in early 2001 and the White House's flaccid reaction to the provocation does little to inspire confidence in that regard.
The ChiComms are clearly doing their part to prepare for this inevitable clash, as Wes Vernon discusses at some length:
[Consider] a recent warning by Lisa Bronson, a Pentagon security director. At a recent conference that included FBI and CIA officials at Texas A&M University, she was quoted as warning that "China has somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 front companies in the U.S., and their sole reason for existing is to steal, exploit technology." She added it is difficult to assess what technologies that China has already obtained through front groups, spying, etc...
To put this in some perspective: If the Pentagon estimate is correct, there is a spy network in this country that – in numbers at least – surpasses even the Soviet penetration during World War II, when communist operatives were able to maneuver postwar strategy to the benefit of Joseph Stalin and stole atomic secrets before the rest of the world even knew of the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb...
Whereas that spying of 60 years ago concentrated most heavily on government, in 2005 spies for the Chinese Communist government are running – at a minimum – 2,000 so-called "private" companies, presumably with potential links to the U.S. government or to those who may have sensitive contracts with the government. That at least is the goal. This is spying that seeks to steal technology secrets for the express purpose of building a war machine that someday may be turned against us.
Perhaps sooner than we think, if James Pinkerton's parallel of Red China's current spiral toward superpower status and a global showdown with the U.S. with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s is any indication:
When great military powers and great national egos are in tension, it doesn't take much to start a war. In Beijing's worldview, Taiwan's continuing "rebel" status is made possible only because of foreign intervention. Hence the March 7 headline in China Daily, yet another government publication: "Lay off Taiwan, U.S. and Japan told." And now a headline from The Associated Press, just on Monday: "China's president tells army to be prepared for war."
Like Germany in the 19th century, China in the 21st century is demanding its place in the sun. Today the world is witnessing a clash of national interests with no easy, peaceful solution. And it's a reminder that sometimes calamities are obvious as they go rushing down the rails, long before they reach their collision point.
The one other glaring parallel, which Pinkerton doesn't mention but Vernon does, is the complete unwillingness of the West, bordering on a mass Stockholm syndrome, to even recognize, much less publicly acknowledge, that there is a ChiComm problem of any kind, never mind a burgeoning threat that could plunge the world into Armageddon. Adolph Hitler's bid for world power, which was also clearly telegraphed, was similarly ignored by Western democracies that simply did not want to confront unpleasant possibilities, thus making those possibilities virtual certainties.
It's rather shocking to think of President Bush being relegated to the realm of the appeasers (though that's been the U.S. foreign policy status quo for a generation where Red China is concerned), but after his throwing in with the EUnuchs' embarrassingly craven attempt to buy off the Iranian mullahs' nuclear ambitions, coupled with his Administration's always lame-assed diplodiddling on the North Korean equivalent (the lynchpin of which amounts to begging those same ChiComms to lean on Pyongyang to give in), the jarring juxtaposition ceases to be quite so stark.
Perhaps that's a little harsh; it may be that the Bushies are so sold on "people power" that they're counting on the tide of democracy solving all our foreign policy problems, from Syria to Iran to North Korea, and including the PRC. Unfortunately, in the latter case they had their color-coded revolution sixteen years ago - in Tiananmen Square - and we all know how that one turned out. Somehow a sequel just doesn't seem very likely.
And even if it was, there would be less and less time in which to allow the ripples of democracy to do their work. Bad Guys, unfortunately, are not without the ability to learn from the examples of others. The lesson of the fall of Saddam Hussein is clear, and it isn't the one we want them to learn: get nukes as fast as possible. North Korea did (courtesy of Bill Clinton), which is why Bush43 is more or less compelled to persist with futile diplomatic five-knuckle-shuffling; Iran soon will, if they don't already, changing the Middle East equation unimaginably for the worse; and the possible masterminds of this international roguery in Beijing are far more than just nuclear-armed, if Lev Navrozov's warnings can be believed.
Perhaps Mr. Navrozov summed things up best in the aforelinked essay:
[T]he key target, to ensure security, is to defeat those roguish Sunni guerrillas in Iraq, then to conquer the roguish Shia Iran, and convince the rogue North Korea (with the help of our dear, good, peaceful friend China) to stop producing those roguish nuclear weapons.
As for the West, it reminds me of the lady from Niger who fell in love with a tiger and decided to ride him.
A lady from Niger
Loved and rode a tiger.
She ended up inside him,
And with a smile on his lips.
UPDATE/BUMP to 3/16: Tom Donnelly echoes this "beware Red China" warning in today's Weekly Standard. The salient grafs are these:
But even as proliferation mania distorts U.S. policy toward the Korean peninsula, it also fuzzes our China strategy beyond recognition. The combination of September 11 and North Korean nukes puts us in the position of begging for Chinese help on two fronts where they can't or won't do much and diverts our attention from those issues where China is of greatest concern; we've taken Chinese priorities as our own. Little wonder that Beijing wants to string out the Six Party Talks to eternity and has been trying to portray its repression of Turkic Uighurs in western China as actions against Islamic terrorists.
In short, the United States continues to look through the wrong end of the telescope. We're thus blinded to a whole host of worrying developments that reveal China's progress as a geopolitical - and increasingly global - competitor. The Chinese "legislature" just passed an "anti-secession law" that not only "legitimizes" an attack on Taiwan but greater internal repression as well; the Beijing government sees secessionists everywhere. China is beginning to string together a necklace of client states in the oil-rich Middle East - Iran and Sudan, to name two - and even into the Americas, cozying up to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Venezuela supplies about 13% of daily U.S. oil imports, and just as Beijing fears the U.S. Navy's ability to sever China's connection to international energy markets, China wouldn't mind being able to return the favor with Chavez's help.
One can just see the PRC picking its spot with painstaking care, and then intervening against us at the worst possible moment, to devastating effect. And despite all these "birth pangs," as it were, we'll have never seen them coming, because we consciously chose not to.
To modify a Mel Brooks line from History of the World Part I, "It's good to be the ChiComms"....
posted by JASmius at 2:50 PM
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