Containing China: The US's real
objective By Michael T Klare
Slowly but surely, the grand strategy of
the Bush administration is being revealed. It is
not aimed primarily at the defeat of global
terrorism, the incapacitation of rogue states, or
the spread of democracy in the Middle East. These
may dominate the rhetorical arena and be the focus
of immediate concern, but they do not govern key
decisions regarding the allocation of long-term
military resources. The truly commanding objective
- the underlying basis for budgets and troop
deployments - is the containment of China.
This objective governed White House
planning during the administration's first seven
months in office, only to be set aside by the
perceived obligation to highlight anti-terrorism after
September 11, 2001; but now,
despite President George W Bush's preoccupation
with Iraq and Iran, the White House is also
reemphasizing its paramount focus on China,
risking a new Asian arms race with potentially
catastrophic consequences.
Bush and his
top aides entered the White House in early 2001
with a clear strategic objective: to resurrect the
permanent-dominance doctrine spelled out in the
Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) for fiscal years
1994-99, the first formal statement of US
strategic goals in the post-Soviet era. According
to the initial official draft of this document, as
leaked to the press in early 1992, the primary aim
of US strategy would be to bar the rise of any
future competitor that might challenge America's
overwhelming military superiority.
"Our
first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of
a new rival ... that poses a threat on the order
of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union," the
document stated. Accordingly, "we [must] endeavor
to prevent any hostile power from dominating a
region whose resources would, under consolidated
control, be sufficient to generate global power".
When initially made public, this doctrine
was condemned by America's allies and many
domestic leaders as being unacceptably imperial as
well as imperious, forcing president George H W
Bush to water it down; but the goal of
perpetuating America's sole-superpower status has
never been rejected by administration strategists.
In fact, it initially became the overarching
principle for US military policy when the younger
Bush assumed the presidency in February 2001.
Target: China When first
enunciated in 1992, the permanent-dominance
doctrine did not specify the exact identity of the
future challengers whose rise was to be prevented
through coercive action. At that time, US
strategists worried about a medley of potential
rivals, including Russia, Germany, India, Japan
and China; any of these, it was thought, might
emerge in decades to come as would-be superpowers,
and so all would have to be deterred from moving
in this direction.
By the time George W
Bush came into office, however, the pool of
potential rivals had been narrowed in elite
thinking to just one: the People's Republic of
China. Only China, it was claimed, possessed the
economic and military capacity to challenge the
United States as an aspiring superpower. Therefore
perpetuating US global predominance meant
containing Chinese power.
The imperative
of containing China was first spelled out in a
systematic way by Condoleezza Rice while serving
as a foreign-policy adviser to George W Bush, then
governor of the state of Texas, during the 2000
presidential campaign. In a much-cited article in
Foreign Affairs, she suggested that China, as an
ambitious rising power, would inevitably challenge
vital US interests. "China is a great power with
unresolved vital interests, particularly
concerning Taiwan," she wrote. "China also resents
the role of the United States in the Asia-Pacific
region."
For these reasons, she stated,
"China is not a ‘status quo' power but one that
would like to alter Asia's balance of power in its
own favor. That alone makes it a strategic
competitor, not the 'strategic partner' the
Clinton administration once called it." It was
essential, she argued, to adopt a strategy that
would prevent China's rise as regional power. In
particular, "the United States must deepen its
cooperation with Japan and South Korea and
maintain its commitment to a robust military
presence in the region". Washington should also
"pay closer attention to India's role in the
regional balance", and bring that country into an
anti-Chinese alliance system.
Looking
back, it is striking how this article presaged the
very strategy now being implemented by the Bush
administration in the Pacific and South Asia. Many
of the specific policies advocated in her piece,
from strengthened ties with Japan to making
overtures to India, are being carried out today.
In the spring and summer of 2001, however,
the most significant effect of this strategic
focus was to distract Rice and other senior
administration officials from the growing threat
posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. During her
first months in office as the president's senior
adviser for national-security affairs, Rice
devoted herself to implementing the plan she had
spelled out in Foreign Affairs. By all accounts,
her top priorities in that early period were
dissolving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with
Russia and linking Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
into a joint missile-defense system, which, it was
hoped, would ultimately evolve into a
Pentagon-anchored anti-Chinese alliance.
Richard Clarke, the senior White House
adviser on counter-terrorism, later charged that
because of her preoccupation with Russia, China
and great power politics, Rice overlooked warnings
of a possible al-Qaeda attack on the United States
and thus failed to initiate defensive actions that
might have prevented the attack. Although Rice
survived tough questioning on this matter by the
9-11 Commission without acknowledging the accuracy
of Clarke's charges, any careful historian,
seeking answers for the Bush administration's
inexcusable failure to heed warnings of a
potential terrorist strike on the US, must begin
with its overarching focus on containing China
during this critical period.
China on
the back burner After September 11, it
would have been unseemly for Bush, Rice and other
top administration officials to push their China
agenda - and in any case they quickly shifted
focus to a long-term neo-con objective, the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the projection of
US power throughout the Middle East. So the
"global war on terror" (or GWOT, in
Pentagon-speak) became their major talking point
and the invasion of Iraq their major focus.
But the administration never completely
lost sight of its strategic focus on China, even
when it could do little on the subject. Indeed,
the lightning war on Iraq and the further
projection of US power into the Middle East was
intended, at least in part, as a warning to China
of the overwhelming might of the US military and
the futility of challenging US supremacy.
For the next two years, when so much
effort was devoted to rebuilding Iraq in America's
image and crushing an unexpectedly potent Iraqi
insurgency, China was distinctly on the back
burner. In the meantime, however, China's
increased investment in modern military
capabilities and its growing economic reach in
Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America - much of
it tied to the procurement of oil and other vital
commodities - could not be ignored.
By the
spring of 2005, the White House was already
turning back to Rice's global grand strategy. On
June 4, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave
a much-publicized speech at a conference in
Singapore, signaling what was to be a new emphasis
in White House policymaking, in which he decried
China's ongoing military buildup and warned of the
threat it posed to regional peace and stability.
China, he claimed, was "expanding its
missile forces, allowing them to reach targets in
many areas of the world" and "improving its
ability to project power" in the Asia-Pacific
region. Then, with sublime disingenuousness, he
added, "Since no nation threatens China, one must
wonder: Why this growing investment? Why these
continuing and expanding arms purchases? Why these
continuing robust deployments?" Although Rumsfeld
did not answer his questions, the implication was
obvious: China was now embarked on a course that
would make it a regional power, thus threatening
one day to present a challenge to the United
States in Asia on unacceptably equal terms.
This early sign of the ratcheting up of
anti-Chinese rhetoric was accompanied by acts of a
more concrete nature. In February 2005, Rice and
Rumsfeld hosted a meeting in Washington with top
Japanese officials at which an agreement was
signed to improve cooperation in military affairs
between the two countries. Known as the "Joint
Statement of the US-Japan Security Consultative
Committee", the agreement called for greater
collaboration between US and Japanese forces in
the conduct of military operations in an area
stretching from Northeast Asia to the South China
Sea. It also called for close consultation on
policies regarding Taiwan, an implicit hint that
Japan was prepared to assist the United States in
the event of a military clash with China
precipitated by Taiwan's declaring its
independence.
This came at a time when
Beijing was already expressing considerable alarm
over pro-independence moves in Taiwan and what the
Chinese saw as a revival of militarism in Japan -
thus evoking painful memories of World War II,
when Japan invaded China and committed massive
atrocities against Chinese civilians.
Understandably then, the agreement could only be
interpreted by the Chinese leadership as an
expression of the Bush administration's
determination to bolster an anti-Chinese alliance
system.
The new grand
chessboard Why did the White House choose
this particular moment to revive its drive to
contain China? Many factors no doubt contributed
to this turnaround, but surely the most
significant was a perception that China had
finally emerged as a major regional power in its
own right and was beginning to contest America's
long-term dominance of the Asia-Pacific region. To
some degree this was manifested - so the Pentagon
claimed - in military terms, as Beijing began to
replace Korean War-vintage weapons with more
modern (though hardly cutting-edge) Russian
designs.
It was not China's military
moves, however, that truly alarmed US policymakers
- most professional analysts are well aware of the
continuing inferiority of Chinese weaponry - but
rather Beijing's success in using its enormous
purchasing power and hunger for resources to
establish friendly ties with such long-standing US
allies as Thailand, Indonesia and Australia.
Because the Bush administration had done little to
contest this trend while focusing on the war in
Iraq, China's rapid gains in Southeast Asia
finally began to ring alarm bells in Washington.
At the same time, Republican strategists
were becoming increasingly concerned about growing
Chinese involvement in the Persian Gulf and
Central Asia - areas considered of vital
geopolitical importance to the United States
because of the vast reserves of oil and natural
gas buried there. Much influenced by former
national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski,
whose 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American
Primacy and Geostrategic Imperatives first
highlighted the critical importance of Central
Asia, these strategists sought to counter Chinese
inroads. Although Brzezinski himself has largely
been excluded from elite Republican circles
because of his association with the much-despised
administration of Democratic president Jimmy
Carter, his call for a coordinated US drive to
dominate both the eastern and western rimlands of
China has been embraced by senior administration
strategists.
In this way, Washington's
concern over growing Chinese influence in
Southeast Asia has come to be intertwined with the
US drive for hegemony in the Persian Gulf and
Central Asia. This has given China policy an even
more elevated significance in Washington - and
helps explain its return with a passion despite
the seemingly all-consuming preoccupations of the
war in Iraq.
Whatever the exact balance of
factors, the Bush administration is now clearly
engaged in a coordinated, systematic effort to
contain Chinese power and influence in Asia. This
effort appears to have three broad objectives: to
convert existing relations with Japan, Australia
and South Korea into a robust, integrated
anti-Chinese alliance system; to bring other
nations, especially India, into this system; and
to expand US military capabilities in the
Asia-Pacific region.
Since the
administration's campaign to bolster ties with
Japan commenced a year ago, the two countries have
been meeting continuously to devise protocols for
the implementation of their 2005 strategic
agreement. In October, Washington and Tokyo
released the Alliance Transformation and
Realignment Report, which is to guide the further
integration of US and Japanese forces in the
Pacific and the simultaneous restructuring of the
US basing system in Japan. (Some of these bases,
especially those on Okinawa, have become a source
of friction in US-Japanese relations, and so the
Pentagon is now considering ways to downsize the
most objectionable installations.)
Japanese and American officers are also
engaged in a joint "interoperability" study, aimed
at smoothing the "interface" between US and
Japanese combat and communications systems. "Close
collaboration is also ongoing for cooperative
missile defense," reports Admiral William Fallon,
commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Command
(PACOM).
Steps have also been taken in
this ongoing campaign to weld South Korea and
Australia more tightly to the US-Japanese alliance
system. South Korea has long been reluctant to
work closely with Japan because of that country's
brutal occupation of the Korean Peninsula from
1910-45 and lingering fears of Japanese
militarism; now, however, the Bush administration
is promoting what it calls "trilateral military
cooperation" among Seoul, Tokyo and Washington. As
indicated by Admiral Fallon, this initiative has
an explicitly anti-Chinese dimension.
America's ties with South Korea must adapt
to "the changing security environment" represented
by "China's military modernization", Fallon told
the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 7. By
cooperating with the US and Japan, he continued,
South Korea will move from an overwhelming focus
on North Korea to "a more regional view of
security and stability".
Bringing
Australia into this emerging anti-Chinese network
has been a major priority of Condoleezza Rice, who
spent several days there in mid-March. Although
designed in part to bolster US-Australian ties
(largely neglected by Washington over the past few
years), the main purpose of her visit was to host
a meeting of top officials from Australia, the US
and Japan to develop a common strategy for curbing
China's rising influence in Asia. No formal
results were announced, but Steven Weisman of the
New York Times reported on March 19 that Rice
convened the meeting "to deepen a three-way
regional alliance aimed in part at balancing the
spreading presence of China".
An even
bigger prize, in Washington's view, would be the
integration of India into this emerging alliance
system, a possibility first suggested in Rice's
Foreign Affairs article. Such a move was long
frustrated by congressional objections to India's
nuclear-weapons program and its refusal to sign on
to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Under US law, nations such as India that
refuse to cooperate in non-proliferation measures
can be excluded from various forms of aid and
cooperation. To overcome this problem, Bush met
with Indian officials in New Delhi last month and
negotiated a nuclear accord that will open India's
civilian reactors to International Atomic Energy
Agency inspection, thus providing a thin gloss of
non-proliferation cooperation to India's robust
nuclear-weapons program. If the US Congress
approves Bush's plan, the United States will be
free to provide nuclear assistance to India and,
in the process, significantly expand already
growing military-to-military ties.
In
signing the nuclear pact with India, Bush did not
allude to the administration's anti-Chinese
agenda, saying only that it would lay the
foundation for a "durable defense relationship".
But few have been fooled by this vague
characterization. According to Weisman of the
Times, most US lawmakers view the nuclear accord
as an expression of the administration's desire to
convert India into "a counterweight to China".
The Pacific build-up
begins Accompanying all these diplomatic
initiatives has been a vigorous, if largely
unheralded, effort by the Department of Defense
(DoD) to bolster US military capabilities in the
Asia-Pacific region.
The broad sweep of US
strategy was first spelled out in the Pentagon's
most recent policy assessment, the Quadrennial
Defense Review (QDR), released on February 5. In
discussing long-term threats to US security, the
QDR begins with a reaffirmation of the overarching
precept first articulated in the DPG of 1992: that
the United States will not allow the rise of a
competing superpower.
This country "will
attempt to dissuade any military competitor from
developing disruptive or other capabilities that
could enable regional hegemony or hostile action
against the United States", the document states.
It then identifies China as the most likely and
dangerous competitor of this sort. "Of the major
and emerging powers, China has the greatest
potential to compete militarily with the United
States and field disruptive military technologies
that could over time offset traditional US
military advantages" - then adding the kicker -
"absent US counter-strategies."
According
to the Pentagon, the task of countering future
Chinese military capabilities largely entails the
development, and then procurement, of major
weapons systems that would ensure US success in
any full-scale military confrontation. "The United
States will develop capabilities that would
present any adversary with complex and
multidimensional challenges and complicate its
offensive planning efforts," the QDR explains.
These include the steady enhancement of such
"enduring US advantages" as "long-range strike,
stealth, operational maneuver and sustainment of
air, sea and ground forces at strategic distances,
air dominance, and undersea warfare".
Preparing for war with China, in other
words, is to be the future cash cow for the giant
US weapons-making corporations in the
military-industrial complex. It will, for
instance, be the primary justification for the
acquisition of costly new weapons systems such as
the F-22A Raptor fighter, the multi-service Joint
Strike Fighter, the DDX destroyer, the
Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, and a new
intercontinental penetrating bomber - weapons that
would just have utility in an all-out encounter
with another great-power adversary of a sort that
only China might someday become.
In
addition to these weapons programs, the QDR also
calls for a stiffening of present US combat forces
in Asia and the Pacific, with a particular
emphasis on the US Navy (the arm of the military
least used in the ongoing occupation of and war in
Iraq). "The fleet will have a greater presence in
the Pacific Ocean," the document notes. To achieve
this, "The navy plans to adjust its force posture
and basing to provide at least six operationally
available and sustainable [aircraft] carriers and
60% of its submarines in the Pacific to support
engagement, presence and deterrence."
Since each of these carriers is, in fact,
but the core of a large array of support ships and
protective aircraft, this move is sure to entail a
truly vast buildup of US naval capabilities in the
Western Pacific and will certainly necessitate a
substantial expansion of the US basing complex in
the region - a requirement that is already
receiving close attention from Admiral Fallon and
his staff at PACOM. To assess the operational
demands of this buildup, moreover, this summer the
US Navy will conduct its most extensive military
maneuvers in the Western Pacific since the end of
the Vietnam War, with four aircraft-carrier battle
groups and many support ships expected to
participate.
Add all of this together, and
the resulting strategy cannot be viewed as
anything but a systematic campaign of containment.
No high administration official may say this in so
many words, but it is impossible to interpret the
recent moves of Rice and Rumsfeld in any other
manner. From Beijing's perspective, the reality
must be unmistakable: a steady buildup of US
military power along China's eastern, southern and
western boundaries.
How will China respond
to this threat? For now, it appears to be relying
on charm and the conspicuous blandishment of
economic benefits to loosen Australian, South
Korean, and even Indian ties with the United
States. To a certain extent, this strategy is
meeting with success, as these countries seek to
profit from the extraordinary economic boom now
under way in China - fueled to a considerable
extent by oil, gas, iron, timber, and other
materials supplied by China's neighbors in Asia.
A version of this strategy is also being
employed by President Hu Jintao during his current
visit to the United States. As China's money is
sprinkled liberally among such influential firms
as Boeing and Microsoft, Hu is reminding the
corporate wing of the Republican Party that there
are vast economic benefits still to be had by
pursuing a non-threatening stance toward China.
China, however, has always responded to
perceived threats of encirclement in a vigorous
and muscular fashion as well, and so we should
assume that Beijing will balance all that charm
with a military buildup of its own. Such a drive
will not bring China to the brink of military
equality with the United States - that is not a
condition it can realistically aspire to over the
next few decades. But it will provide further
justification for those in the United States who
seek to accelerate the containment of China, and
so will produce a self-fulfilling loop of
distrust, competition and crisis.
This
will make the amicable long-term settlement of the
Taiwan problem and of North Korea's nuclear
program that much more difficult, and increase the
risk of unintended escalation to full-scale war in
Asia. There can be no victors from such a
conflagration.
Michael T Klare
is a professor of peace and world security studies
at Hampshire College and the author of Blood
and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's
Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (Owl
Books, 2005).
