We Don’t Need A War With China
By I don’t know how to have a war against China.
Yes, I know about China’s militarization of the South China Sea and the sword-rattling against Taiwan. We can have naval battles over enhanced sandbars. And attacking a heavily militarized, mountainous island is not trivial.
But let’s say China attacks Taiwan. Whether they take it or not, then what?
I haven’t seen Clausewitz quoted for some time. War is the continuation of politics by other means. So which politics justify a war? China’s nuclear buildup? That’s been proposed before: Nuke ‘em before they get as many as we have. But they have about 500 nuclear weapons and we have 1500 deployed and more in reserve. Economic reasons? Are you kidding?
And what would victory look like? What is the objective? An American march into Beijing to demand surrender from Xi Jinping?
Taiwan is pretty much the only reason for a war, and that’s up to China. So far, they seem to recognize how difficult that would be.
But we have folks in the US practically salivating for a war. Or, lacking that, heavy duty economic conflict. Crush them economically! Or all the books proclaiming that we have a NEW COLD WAR with China.
There are indeed problems with China. They would like to export their system of authoritarian capitalism to the rest of the world, or at least gain positive appreciation for it. They control supplies of things like strategic minerals. They have been ramping up their military, including those bases in the South China Sea and their nuclear arsenal. Paul Krugman and Anne Stevenson-Yang describe poor internal economic decisions that result in dumping products on the international markets.
THE NEW COLD WAR is a particularly poor way to describe the situation between the United States and China. China has some aspects of the Soviet Union – a controlled economy and human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet – but it is integrated economically into many parts of the world, including the United States and Europe.
The Cold War was marked by proxy wars – in Angola, Vietnam, and Afghanistan for example – whereas the United States and China have avoided such entanglements and likely will continue to do so, unless China strikes Taiwan. China’s support of Russia in Ukraine and of North Korea’s nuclear buildup have a level of difficulty for China that the Soviet Union’s clients seldom offered.
It’s prudent to prepare for a war, in case China tries to take Taiwan, but the United States military, famously as large as the next eight or ten in line, combined, should be prepared without extra gobs of money. US and other ships have regularly made passage through the waters that China might want to contest.
The nuclear buildup is not surprising. The US should be (and, I think, is) attempting to talk to China about arms control, although that topic is particularly difficult with Russia’s warlike stance.
On the economic side, Krugman attributes Biden’s tariffs against Chinese products to a stand against China’s exporting their economic difficulties to the world. It would seem that economic issues can be managed without resort to war.
Michael Hirsh, in a long article in Foreign Policy, calls the situation “a cold peace,” which seems more appropriate. China has its own problems – in the economy and in its attempts at outreach to other countries through economic development. Its language isolates it; even Russia is not moving to require Chinese in its schools. Its ideology and thoroughgoing surveillance have had a mixed reception in other countries.
The leap to expecting a war over Taiwan and casting what President Joe Biden calls a competition into a cold war militarizes foreign policy thinking in a way that is more likely to lead to a war. Tariffs, yes, and diplomacy that works toward reining in other sorts of competition, like avoiding an arms race.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner