The International Order and China As Threat

There’s an interesting article at Foreign Policy in Focus that challenges the notion that China poses a superpower military threat to the United States or will do so in the foreseeable future:

China has become the bête noire of U.S. security policy, the new universal enemy to replace the Soviet Union.

Its economic power and rapid military build-up, after all, make it a much more credible long-term threat than Putin’s Russia or the Islamic State. When policy pundits and military men want to spread alarm about the decline of America and beat the drum for increased defense spending, their scary enemy of choice is China.

Take James Jay Carafano, a retired military man and a policy pundit at the right-wing Heritage Foundation who raises the possibility of “a U.S.-China Nuclear War.” He argues at The National Interest that keeping the peace between China and the United States “requires significantly recapitalizing the U.S. armed forces.” This is necessary, he says, to assuage the doubts and insecurities of America’s allies. He argues that Washington “has to close any gap in military power that the Chinese might think could be exploited.”

Read the whole thing.

Back in the early days of the George W. Bush Administration there was a persistent attempt to cast China as a threat to U. S. security not that the Chinese didn’t give us cause for believing that. That was put on the backburner during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but I see that, clearly, it’s an idea of which some people never tire. It makes sense. If the kind of war you want to prepare to fight is great power high tech war (and there are still plenty of Pentagon folks who’ve based their careers around planning for great power high tech war), there are really only two candidates for opponents: China and Russia. Since the prevailing wisdom on those two countries is that Russia is the declining power and China the rising power, China it is.

I think that’s far-fetched not only for the reasons expressed in the article but for demographic reasons, social reasons, and economic reasons. The number of people of working age, coincidentally the same age as fighting age, has actually started to decline in China, just as I pointed out a decade ago. To send people to war China would need to use the young people it needs to work in its factories. These are the same singletons who, due to the One Child Policy, are the sole support of their aging parents. There would be significant resistance to numbers of young people fighting and dying. Keep in mind that China is still a Confucian society.

Finally, the United States is China’s largest trading partner and largest source of foreign exchange, something China desperately needs to purchase the raw materials for its factories and to keep its vehicles powered. The Chinese leaders aren’t crazy. They don’t want to go to war with the U. S. It would be terribly bad for business.

Is it impossible that we will go to war with China? No. I just think it’s very unlikely.

In considering why the idea that China is a major security threat to the United States is so resilient I think you need to go back to some models of the international order. One idea is that everything is guided by the United Nations and that without Security Council approval war is obsolete. In my view that model is fatuous. The permanent members of the Security Council, the ghosts of the World War II Allies, include the U. S., China, and Russia. Lack of Security Council approval has not been a barrier to any of their going to war in the past and I can’t believe it will be so in the future.

The second model, sadly one that is quite prevalent in the United States, could be thought of as the “Pax Americana model”. In that model there is room for only one power, not just one superpower, but one power and we’re it. No other country has interests or will be allowed to pursue them. I think that’s the context for the notion that China is a security threat to the United States. It’s only a threat if we view any interest by any country that is even tangential to our own as a threat.

The model that I prefer is an old one: spheres of influence. The idea goes back at least to 1885 when the Earl of Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote a letter to his opposite number in Germany outlining how the two countries should divvy Africa up into “spheres of action”. During the Cold War the same concept was referred to as “spheres of influence”. Eastern Europe was the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Western Europe was ours.

China and Russia, just to pick two countries at random, have interests. Not only should we expect them to pursue those interests but interests can be ranked. Russia is more interested in Ukraine than we are; China is more interested in North Korea.

Japan is much more interested in pursuing its own interests and, possibly, remaining free of limitations that might be imposed on it by China, than we are. In my view we should expect China to act to secure its interests, Japan should act to secure its own, and we should not conflate Japanese interests with U. S. interests. They have points of intersection but they aren’t identical. Japan is quite capable of looking after themselves and we should not only recognize that we should welcome it.

Viewed in that light China is no threat to the United States. It is merely another country that has interests just as Japan is. Just as India is. Just as we are.