Tag Archives: foreign policy

US and China’s Strategy

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Last week, Stratfor Global Intelligence published an assessment of the People’s Republic of China’s emerging strategy for dealing with the outside world.  In sum, there are three basic tenets to the developing strategy:

  • Paramount among them is the maintenance of domestic security.
  • The PRC’s industrial base, by design produces more than its domestic economy can consume, so the PRC must export goods to the rest of the world while importing raw materials.
  • The third strategic interest is in maintaining control over buffer states.

These are sequential interests; that is, each depends on the one prior, and internal security is, as Friedman writes, paramount.  Internal security in a nation of vast wealth and wealth mobility differences between, in China’s case, the coastal regions and the interior depends on keeping the people employed.  (On a related side note, it’s useful to recognize that these differences are exacerbated, among other things, by growing cultural differences between a coastal region that trades externally and so is exposed to the influences of the West and of the Republic of Korea and Japan on the one hand, and an impoverished interior, on the other, that still is “old-school” and is seen, also, as existing to supply those coastal regions with goods for export trade).  Thus, a need not only for export customers exists, but relevant to this post, a need for ensuring China’s sea lane security.  That third imperative is driven by a need to protect the population of core Chinese—Han China—which is concentrated in those coastal regions and the eastern third of China that is near those coastal regions.  Among other buffer states, the PRC count Tibet, and they would like to count the Republic of China sitting off the southeastern coast on Taiwan (which, by the way, sits on the northern mouth of the South China Sea and the southern mouth of the East China Sea).

As alluded to above, sea lanes for trade are important to Chinese economic, and so domestic, security.  Overland trade routes are both physically fraught with danger, given the terrain that must be crossed and the distances involved, and politically fraught: the countries that control that land aren’t entirely sympathetic to Chinese interests.  Those sea lanes, though, must pass through the South or East China Sea.

Mainland China has historically had difficulty depending on others for its own sustenance, originating from China’s view that it sits at the center of Heaven and so has no need of outside cooperation—the cooperation should move in the other direction.  This position has gone through a number of evolutions but remains essentially the same: we’ll go it alone, thank you very much; you’re welcome to come with us if you wish.  The view of not depending on others also is smart: what others might give, they can also take away, and then where would a dependent state be?  So China looks to securing, itself, its sea lanes, rather than depending on the British, and for the last 80 years,  the US—to maintain freedom of the seas.  China looks, though, not for freedom, but dominance over its seas as the optimal means of maintaining security.

Unable to engage the US Navy in a direct confrontation, though, China is developing other means of countering our Navy; although Friedman suggests that those alternate means are flawed.

While China has a robust land-based missile system, a land-based missile system is inherently vulnerable to strikes by cruise missiles, aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles currently in development and other types of attack. China’s ability to fight a sustained battle is limited.  Moreover, a missile strategy works only with an effective reconnaissance capability.  You can’t destroy a ship if you don’t know where it is.  This in turn necessitates space-based systems able to identify U.S. ships and a tightly integrated fire-control system.

Friedman is right that this alone is insufficient, and he points out that China also is looking for sea ports in friendly (or at least “tradable with”) nations that are on the other end of some of those sea lanes.  China is paying, for instance, for most of or the construction of a sea port in Gwadar, Pakistan, as well as looking for similar accesses to ports in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.  But having anchorages on either end of the sea lane doesn’t address the security of the lanes themselves.

It’s easy enough, the thinking goes, to effect a blockade of China by sitting on the outside edge of the two Seas, but until those anti-shipping missile sites have been taken out, even at that range, the blockading ships would be at risk.  (I discount the reduction in risk from the ships being mobile targets: even given the relatively slow flights of cruise missiles, ships are even slower; besides, en route and target area guidance systems—even on board ones—aren’t that hard to do anymore.)

For our part, the US is in the beginning stages of implementing a major strategic change and moving to emphasize the Pacific, and in particular the PRC, and deemphasizing Europe and the Atlantic.  DoD is intending to realign our military so that, for instance, 60% of our Naval assets will be focused on the Pacific and China, vice the current 52%.

But what does this mean in practical terms?  DoD, under President Obama’s instruction, is reducing its ship total from 285 as of last September to 220 by 2020, including a reduction from 11 carriers to 8, 53 attack submarines to 40, and eliminating altogether our guided missile submarines.  Worse, the average age of our Navy’s ships will be allowed to increase from its current 14 years to 19.  From a back of the envelope estimate, that “increase” of 52% to 60% of the Navy’s assets concentrating on the Pacific results in an actual reduction from 148 ships to 132.

It also ignores another part of the equation: while we’re busily becoming a threat (in Chinese eyes) to China’s nearby sea lanes, what about China’s more distant sea lanes—the ones that pass through the Indian Ocean, the North and South Atlantic, the Panama Canal?  And what about our own, more nearby sea lanes—those traversing the same North and South Atlantic Oceans and the Panama Canal?  And the Indian Ocean, which is important to us not only for commerce, but to support our allies and friends in the Middle East, western Asia, eastern Africa?  And to get to our allies and friends that form the rim of the South China Sea and to support our own Navy operating in theater?

So the question for the Chinese, and for our administration, comes down to this: in the event of a conflict between the PRC and the US that gets serious enough that we’d need to consider a blockade, what happens next?

China will look at the conflict between us and northern Korea and between us and Iran over whether either of those two should possess nuclear weapons (and in one case, then destroy, utterly, a life-long ally of ours), and it will decide to press ahead with its actions and run a US blockade, at gunpoint, if needs be—even with their inferior navy.  Indeed, given our administration’s repeatedly demonstrated penchant for shaking its finger very firmly at our adversaries and then accommodating them, on what basis would China take our Navy’s still superior capability seriously?  When have northern Korea or Iran—or Israel recently—taken our capabilities seriously?  What is the value of military superiority, or capability of any sort, when there is no will to use it, and China, northern Korea, Iran, and now Israel know that?

Our Feckless Foreign Policy

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The Progressive line on American foreign policy was first brought to light by Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 when he insisted, with a straight face, that America’s military policy must pass a “global test” before it can be implemented.  That’s a policy that’s alive and well in the present administration, as this exchange during last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing between Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) and Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, demonstrates (the exchange begins at about the 2:00 minute mark) [emphasis mine].

SESSIONS: Do you think you can act without Congress and initiate a no-fly zone in Syria without congressional approval?

PANETTA: …our goal would be to seek international permission, and we would come to the Congress and inform you and determine how best to approach this; whether or not we would want to get permission from the Congress, I think those are issues we would have to discuss as we decide what to do here.

SESSIONS: Well I am almost breathless about that because what I heard you say is, “we’re going to seek international approval and we will come and tell the Congress what we might do, and we might seek congressional approval” … Would you like to clarify that?

PANETTA: I have also served with Republican Presidents and Democratic Presidents who have always reserved the right to defend this country if necessary.

SESSIONS: But before you would do this, you would seek permission of the international authorities?

PANETTA: If we are working with an international coalition or NATO we would want to be able to get appropriate permissions in order to be able to do that.  All of these countries would want to have some kind of legal basis on which to act.

SESSIONS: What “legal basis” are you looking for?  What entity?

PANETTA: If NATO made the decision to go in, that would be one.  If we developed an international coalition beyond NATO then obviously some kind of UN security resolution would be the basis for that.

SESSIONS: So you are saying NATO would give you a “legal basis?”  And an ad hoc coalition of nations would provide a “legal basis?”

PANETTA: We would seek whatever legal basis we would need in order to make that justified. We can’t just pull them all together without getting the legal basis on which to act.

…

SESSIONS: I’m all for having international support, but I’m really baffled by the idea that somehow an international assembly provides a legal basis for the United States military to be deployed in combat.  I don’t think it’s close to being correct.  They provide no legal authority.  The only legal authority that’s required to deploy the U.S. military is the Congress and the president and the law in the Constitution.

PANETTA:  Let me, just for the record, be clear again.  When it comes to the national defense of this country, the President of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to act to defend this country, and we will.  If it comes to an operation where we’re trying to build a coalition of nations to work together to go in and operate as we did in Libya, or Bosnia, or for that matter, Afghanistan, we want to do it with permissions either by NATO or by the international community.

So, what do we have, then?  Panetta has gone even farther than Kerry, now insisting that “international permission,” rather than the Constitution (which includes authorization by Congress), is the “legal basis” for American use of our military capability in an international effort.  The administration seems to accept foreign control, foreign permissions, over whether we will use our military to conduct national defense activities in conjunction with foreign groups of countries; we have no authority of our own to employ our forces in that environment.  The President, intimates Panetta, executes his national defense obligations absent Congress’ involvement, although there is a willingness to discuss “whether or not we would want to get [Congressional] permission.”  Notice, also, that, even after Panetta’s “clarification,” neither the Constitution nor the Congress enter into it.  Ever.

It seems as though, given the entirety of Panetta’s responses, that he didn’t even understand the questions.

As Sessions said, international support is good.  But a sovereign nation needs no one else’s permission to use its military forces, either unilaterally or in concert with other nations.  Period.  That’s not the same as having an agreement with those others to engage in a joint action of some sort.  Those agreements, though, only outline the various responsibilities of the members of the coalition (ideally founded on the individual capabilities of those members); they do not constitute permission for employment.

At least General Martin Dempsey (those first two minutes of the video) understands for whom he works.

h/t Power Line

Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and Sanctions

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Our intel suggests that Iran can build a nuclear weapon in about a year.  The Obama administration that that’s time for economic sanctions to work and to convince Iran not to go ahead.  This week, President Obama implored Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to go through with a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear development facilities.  But is it true?  If Iran is within a year of building a nuclear weapon, can sanctions work at all anymore?

Consider: for sanctions to work, the Iranian government must agree that the costs of those sanctions are greater than the gains from possessing nuclear weapons.  Stipulate, arguendo, that the latest round of sanctions work insofar as oil sales are cut off, that Russia and China don’t continue to trade with Iran, simply bypassing the global financial network.  What are those costs?  Economic dislocation.  High prices.  Scarcity of goods.  But no one dies.  Everyone is safe.

Think about the sanctions that have been in place all these last several years: the Iranians don’t have any gasoline for their cars, for instance—and this one is largely self-inflicted.  They’re major oil exporters, but they’ve made a conscious decision not to do any refining domestically.  Food is expensive, the transportation network undermaintained and cumbersome to use.  Internet, cell phone, etc. contact with the outside world for the general population is hard to achieve.  Most goods beyond bare necessities are hard to come by, and their prices are very high.  Yet their nuclear weapons development program is proceeding apace and has been all along.  What are the gains?  I’ll come back to these below.

Consider: why does Iran want nuclear weapons?  It isn’t only for the status of being a nuclear power.  There are three primary purposes for nuclear weapons.  On the occasion of their first use, the reason was to hold down total casualties—both friendly and enemy—associated with invading a mountainous island nation.  Later, the weapons’ purpose was in their existence: to deter attack by others, whether those others also were nuclear powers  or not.  The third reason for having nuclear weapons is to use them, and/or to give/sell them to surrogates who will use them.

In a 2005 interview with an American journalist, the then leader of Hezbollah (an Iranian proxy terror organization), Hussein al-Moussawi, said

We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to destroy you.

Moreover, the Iranian government is on record, repeatedly, as saying that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.  They want to kill the Great Satan (i.e., us).  It’s clear that Iran wants nuclear weapons to use them and/or to pass them to others who will use them.

For sanctions to have the effect on the Iranian government we expect them to have, the Iranian government has to think like we do.  But they don’t think like us.  Moreover, their tolerance for pain is higher than ours.

What will Iran gain from obtaining nuclear weapons?  The destruction of Israel.  Weapons to pass to surrogates for use within the United States—and Europe—to kill as many of us and them as can be done—even to destroy us.

Will sanctions work on Iran?  Can Iran be dissuaded without military force, in this environment and with this mind set, from obtaining nuclear weapons?

Hypocrisy

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Fox News is reporting that the People’s Republic of China is claiming that

it was forced to veto a United Nations vote on Syria because it was called before differences in the proposal were bridged, but denied playing spoiler and said it wants to see an end to violence there.

Forced.  Poor babies.  The resolution that the PRC (and Russia) chose to veto would have been a move toward ending nearly a year of Bashar Assad’s killing—to the tune of 5,400—of his own people since last March.

The PRC justifies itself by insisting that the resolution, as written, unduly pressured…the Syrian government.  This is a strange, but strangely consistent, objection coming from a country with similar problems in Tibet, and in its Xinjiang province (which is populated with all those uppity Uighurs.  Oh, yeah, and that also is the PRC’s largest natural gas-producing region).  This also comes from a country that still maintains it has a right to conquer the Republic of China.

Liu Weimin, a spokesman for the PRC’s Foreign Ministry, insisted that that too-early Security Council vote was forced before suitable (Chinese diluting) amendments had been agreed.   This, though, ignores the fact that the PRC never would have accepted a resolution that had actual teeth for ending the Syrian government’s butcherybloodshed.  Just as it had consistently demanded watering down earlier versions of the resolution.

Liu also denied that the PRC was favoring Assad, in particular.  Yet this is exactly the outcome of the Chinese veto.

The People’s Daily  opined

The present situation in Syria is extremely complicated.  To naively back one side, while attacking the other side, might look like bringing about a favorable turn, but is actually just laying up trouble ahead.

No.  It’s not complicated at all.  Either the PRC supports Assad and his behavior, or it does not.  In the meantime, people are dying today.  But that’s no trouble at all.

We don’t need to keep taking the PRC seriously on the political stage; we can ignore and bypass them—and we should ignore and bypass them, so long as they continue to side with bloody despotism.

These Chinese are not just on the wrong side of history—they’re on the wrong side of morality.

Resetting with Russia and China

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Given Russia’s and the People’s Republic of China’s veto of an Arab League motion before the UN’s Security Council “aimed at ending the violence in Syria that called for Mr. Assad to hand over his powers to his vice president and allow creation of a unity government,” vetoes that came hours after Assad’s murderous artillery bombardment of the Syrian city of Homs with an estimated 200 civilian deaths )about which Russia and the PRC surely knew), it may be time to “reset” relations.

Plainly, these vetoes are motivated by either, or both, of two things.  Others have written of Putin’s reluctance to admit that a dysfunctional, even dishonest, much less a murderous government should be susceptible to abolishment by the people: for one thing, Syria is important to a Russian naval presence in the Med, for another, Putin doesn’t want to encourage the Russian people along the same lines, and so on.  Other Chinese motives also seem apparent: Iran is a convenient source of needed oil, and Syria is an important, if not critical, ally of the Iranians.

Another motive is much more stark.  A butcher in charge of Syria hurts the US.  American impotence in dealing with this butcher, especially after the benign (compared to the Syrian situation) affair of Gadhafi, hurts the US.  Vetoes of American-backed (if Arab-led in the present instance) public initiatives demonstrate that impotence.

Following these vetoes, we’re getting some unusually strongly couched statements from President Obama’s State Department.  UN Ambassador Susan Rice has said of the vetoes

The United States is disgusted that a couple of members of this Council continue to prevent us from fulfilling our sole purpose.

and

The people of Syria…have been slapped in the face by several members of the Security Council today.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said

What happened yesterday at the United Nations was a travesty.

and

Faced with a neutered Security Council, we have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations….

and

We will work to expose those who are still funding the regime and sending it weapons to be used against defenseless Syrians, including women and children….

The question becomes, then, is this a sign that resetting is beginning?  Or is it just more idle chit-chat and firm finger-shaking from the Obama administration?