Threat From China Is Being Hyped
Articles
in the American media usually portray China as a potential adversary,
and recent press coverage is no exception. Stories have appeared
about China’s military hacking into the computer systems of the American
government and business and Chinese oil companies’ reaping of unfair
gains in Iraq on the backs of dead American soldiers. Yet the
threat from China in the popular American mind instilled by such
articles is overblown.
Undoubtedly,
the U.S. military and intelligence services also attempt to hack into
Chinese computer systems; this unseemly fact is glossed over by the
usually nationalist American media. Even if Chinese military
espionage is taken in isolation, it indicates that the Chinese realize a
technological gap exists between China and the West and that they are
having trouble developing technologies themselves.
Similarly, the same conclusions could be reached about the
much-ballyhooed Chinese purchase of Russian military equipment. In
contrast, the United States develops its own military technologies, and
they are the best in the world.
Although
Chinese defense spending has been growing at a double digit annual pace
for a while now, China’s military started from only a low base.
Chinese yearly defense spending is still only a fifth of that of the
United States and the results of that annual disparity have accumulated
over many years in a vastly superior U.S. military force. Also,
much of China’s recent increases in defense spending have been spent
increasing military pay to keep people from defecting to the white-hot
civilian economy and converting a Maoist people’s land army into one
more designed to project power from China’s coasts using air and sea
power. Both of these requirements have constrained the purchase of
new weaponry.
Even
so, China has made gains in its ability to project power, recently
obtaining a small, old Ukrainian aircraft carrier. Yet carrier
operations take a long time to master, and China is still very limited
in its power projection capability. Also, China’s imitation of the
United States in emphasis on carrier forces could be ill advised.
In any naval war, carriers may very well prove vulnerable to submarines
using cruise missiles and torpedoes. To the extent that
pursuing carriers has an opportunity cost for the Chinese in forgoing
more of those potent sea-denial forces, it may lessen China’s ability to
defend itself against U.S. carriers.
China’s
sea-denial forces make up any real threat to the all-in U.S. force of
11 large deck carriers. But of course this threat is to the
American Empire, not the United States itself. The U.S.
carrier-heavy force is deployed far forward in East Asia to contain
China and protect allies, such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and
Australia. Those wealthy allies should be doing more to provide
their own security but will never do so as long as the United States
provides the first line of defense. Japan already has a stronger
navy than China and could do much more if it spent more of its large GDP
on defense. As for Taiwan, being an easily defended island
nation (amphibious assaults are notoriously difficult), it doesn’t need
to match China dollar for dollar on defense spending but merely needs to
adopt a porcupine strategy by being able to deter the same by
inflicting unacceptable damage on the attacker. Finally, an
American retraction of its defense perimeter to Hawaii and Guam would
undoubtedly motivate these four nations, plus others in the region such
as the Philippines and Vietnam, to band together in an alliance to be
the first line of defense against China.
Because
China’s ability to project military power is so limited, the
fears that China is expanding in Africa and the Middle East are
fanciful. For example, recent press articles have implied that
Chinese state-owned oil companies have exploited the American invasion
of Iraq to win oil contracts from the Iraqi government. Because
they don’t have to satisfy private shareholders, those companies can
accept low profit margins on oil contracts that Western companies, such
as Exxon, cannot. To some neoconservatives, such as Victor Davis
Hanson, such failure of America to economically exploit its military
empire is praiseworthy; to other imperialists, it is merely
foolish.
In
any event, such Chinese commercial penetration is little threat to the
United States and may actually be of some help. Because a
worldwide oil market exists and any new petroleum being produced
anywhere lowers the price for everyone, Chinese state-owned companies
may be indirectly subsidizing U.S. oil consumers by bringing to market
oil deposits that would be uneconomical for private firms to find and
pump.
Of
course, implicitly, a worldwide oil market would also obviate the need
for the military forces of the United States, China, or any other nation
to “secure” oil. In my award-winning book No War for Oil: U.S. Dependency and the Middle East,
I explain why it is cheaper to just pay higher prices caused by any
disruption of Middle Eastern oil than to pay for forward-deployed
military forces to attempt to prevent this rare
occurrence.
In
conclusion, the Chinese “threat” is being dragged out and hyped to
attempt to forestall cuts in U.S. security budgets, not because it
severely undermines American security.
Read more by Ivan Eland
This article originally appeared on: Antiwar
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/threat-from-china-is-being-hyped/39152/
