MinnesotaSmith
Membership Revoked
A bit leftie, esp. for the Wall Street Journal, but some decent numerical info.
https://outline.com/6vTSWT
The U.S. Is Ceding the Pacific to China
MARK HELPRIN MARCH 03, 2019
"The way to deal with China, and thus North Korea, its naughty but wholly dependent vassal, is not by a failing and provocative attempt to weaken it, but by attending to America’s diminishing strengths. Unlike the short-focused U.S., China plays the long game, in which the chief objective is a favorable correlation of forces over time and the most important measure is military capacity.
As a dictatorship, it can continue military development and expansion despite economic downturns. With big data and big decrees, Xi Jinping has severely tightened party control in expectation of inevitable variations of fortune. The hatches are battened for a trade war that would adversely effect China and the world should the U.S. not blink first or fail to reject false or delaying assurances.
China looks past this and all short-term maneuvering to see the U.S. ill-attending to its fundamental strengths, and marks us down as a declining country that cannot come to terms with necessities. It knows that in the 1970s and ’80s, when America led the world in computers, electronics, research, and capital, we failed to automate. Taking the easy way out by offshoring for the sake of cheaper wages, we allowed our manufacturing base to atrophy. And now China sees a weakling that, rather than venture competition, seeks safe spaces behind tariff walls.
Perhaps had the U.S. refrained from needlessly antagonizing every one of its important allies and instead assembled them in a coalition of common interests and grievances, China, thus isolated, would have made real accommodations. But given broken, uncoordinated, squabbling opposition, and the high level of Chinese-American economic interdependence, it need not do so. It will almost certainly delay, prevaricate, and work around its commitments in all too familiar fashion. And a country the leader of which in living memory sacrificed 40 million of his people to crackpot economic theory presents an entirely different kettle of fish than bullying Canada or outfoxing a real estate minimogul over lunch at the Four Seasons.
The only effective leverage on China, and by extension North Korea—which otherwise will retain nuclear weapons whether overtly or covertly but certainly—is to alter the correlation of military forces in the Western Pacific, and indeed in the world, so that it no longer moves rapidly and inevitably in China’s favor, which is what China cares about, the essence of its policy, its central proposition. Though with some effort the U.S. is perfectly capable of embarking upon this strategy, it has not. It seems we lack the awareness, political will, intelligence, probity, discipline, leadership, and habit of mind to do so.
First, it is astounding that China, the world’s third-ranking nuclear power, with 228 known nuclear missiles and a completely opaque nuclear-warfare establishment, unlike the U.S. and Russia is subject to no agreements, no inspection, no verification and no limits, while in this regard the U.S. remains deaf, dumb and blind. The U.S. should pressure China to enter a nuclear arms-control regime or explain to the world why it will not.
Second, keeping in mind that America’s inadequate military sea and air lift make wartime supply of forces in Europe a well known problem, the distance from San Francisco to Manila is twice that between New York and London, China has 55 attack submarines, and the U.S. Navy has long neglected antisubmarine warfare. This renders the diminished string of American bases on China’s periphery crucial for initial response and as portals for resupply. But they are vulnerable, and little has been done to make them less so.
Nothing can change the fact that whereas Chinese attacks on American bases in South Korea, Japan, and Guam would not strike the American homeland, response against bases in China would raise the specter of nuclear escalation. China understands that a knockout blow against our bases would banish the U.S. from its environs, condemning us to a long-distance campaign to which the U.S. Navy in its present state—overstretched, undertrained and half the size of the Reagan Navy—is inadequate. And if China spiked the Panama Canal, which we abandoned and it took on, and used its six nuclear attack submarines to block the southern capes and choke points east of Suez, it would have to contend only with roughly half of our already diminished fleets.
China has medium-range ballistic missiles, air-launched land-attack cruise missiles, air-refueled bombers and fighter bombers, sea-based missiles, and seaborne commandos. To protect our bases from all this we need long-range antiship missiles, adequately defended, on outpost islands; deep, reinforced aircraft shelters rather than surface revetments and flimsy hangars; multilayered missile and aircraft defenses in numbers sufficient to meet saturation attacks; deeply sheltered command and control, runway repair, munitions, and stores; and radically strengthened base defense against infantry, special forces, and sabotage. It would be expensive, but essential.
Above all, building up the Navy, Marines, and long-range air power to make the vastness of the Pacific correspondingly less an impediment is necessary in concert with base-hardening to remedy the diminution of those powers and balances that deter war and make for stable relations in the international system, in that they allow confident restraint and encourage productive negotiation. Failure will lead to the moment when our regional allies, finding less reason to adhere to us than to appease China, remove their increasingly important military components of the de facto Pacific alliance, thus catastrophically breaking it.
At present the U.S. is inexplicably blind to the fundamental power relations upon which China is intently focused. As long as we remain vulnerable while China increases its military powers and ours decline, Beijing need not do anything but pretend to compromise. This can change if we send the Chinese a message they cannot ignore. That is, if we take our eyes off the zero-sum game long enough to assure our strengths in depth. Frankly, if we do not, the Pacific Coast of the United States will eventually look out upon a Chinese lake."
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, is author of “Paris in the Present Tense.”
https://outline.com/6vTSWT
The U.S. Is Ceding the Pacific to China
MARK HELPRIN MARCH 03, 2019
"The way to deal with China, and thus North Korea, its naughty but wholly dependent vassal, is not by a failing and provocative attempt to weaken it, but by attending to America’s diminishing strengths. Unlike the short-focused U.S., China plays the long game, in which the chief objective is a favorable correlation of forces over time and the most important measure is military capacity.
As a dictatorship, it can continue military development and expansion despite economic downturns. With big data and big decrees, Xi Jinping has severely tightened party control in expectation of inevitable variations of fortune. The hatches are battened for a trade war that would adversely effect China and the world should the U.S. not blink first or fail to reject false or delaying assurances.
China looks past this and all short-term maneuvering to see the U.S. ill-attending to its fundamental strengths, and marks us down as a declining country that cannot come to terms with necessities. It knows that in the 1970s and ’80s, when America led the world in computers, electronics, research, and capital, we failed to automate. Taking the easy way out by offshoring for the sake of cheaper wages, we allowed our manufacturing base to atrophy. And now China sees a weakling that, rather than venture competition, seeks safe spaces behind tariff walls.
Perhaps had the U.S. refrained from needlessly antagonizing every one of its important allies and instead assembled them in a coalition of common interests and grievances, China, thus isolated, would have made real accommodations. But given broken, uncoordinated, squabbling opposition, and the high level of Chinese-American economic interdependence, it need not do so. It will almost certainly delay, prevaricate, and work around its commitments in all too familiar fashion. And a country the leader of which in living memory sacrificed 40 million of his people to crackpot economic theory presents an entirely different kettle of fish than bullying Canada or outfoxing a real estate minimogul over lunch at the Four Seasons.
The only effective leverage on China, and by extension North Korea—which otherwise will retain nuclear weapons whether overtly or covertly but certainly—is to alter the correlation of military forces in the Western Pacific, and indeed in the world, so that it no longer moves rapidly and inevitably in China’s favor, which is what China cares about, the essence of its policy, its central proposition. Though with some effort the U.S. is perfectly capable of embarking upon this strategy, it has not. It seems we lack the awareness, political will, intelligence, probity, discipline, leadership, and habit of mind to do so.
First, it is astounding that China, the world’s third-ranking nuclear power, with 228 known nuclear missiles and a completely opaque nuclear-warfare establishment, unlike the U.S. and Russia is subject to no agreements, no inspection, no verification and no limits, while in this regard the U.S. remains deaf, dumb and blind. The U.S. should pressure China to enter a nuclear arms-control regime or explain to the world why it will not.
Second, keeping in mind that America’s inadequate military sea and air lift make wartime supply of forces in Europe a well known problem, the distance from San Francisco to Manila is twice that between New York and London, China has 55 attack submarines, and the U.S. Navy has long neglected antisubmarine warfare. This renders the diminished string of American bases on China’s periphery crucial for initial response and as portals for resupply. But they are vulnerable, and little has been done to make them less so.
Nothing can change the fact that whereas Chinese attacks on American bases in South Korea, Japan, and Guam would not strike the American homeland, response against bases in China would raise the specter of nuclear escalation. China understands that a knockout blow against our bases would banish the U.S. from its environs, condemning us to a long-distance campaign to which the U.S. Navy in its present state—overstretched, undertrained and half the size of the Reagan Navy—is inadequate. And if China spiked the Panama Canal, which we abandoned and it took on, and used its six nuclear attack submarines to block the southern capes and choke points east of Suez, it would have to contend only with roughly half of our already diminished fleets.
China has medium-range ballistic missiles, air-launched land-attack cruise missiles, air-refueled bombers and fighter bombers, sea-based missiles, and seaborne commandos. To protect our bases from all this we need long-range antiship missiles, adequately defended, on outpost islands; deep, reinforced aircraft shelters rather than surface revetments and flimsy hangars; multilayered missile and aircraft defenses in numbers sufficient to meet saturation attacks; deeply sheltered command and control, runway repair, munitions, and stores; and radically strengthened base defense against infantry, special forces, and sabotage. It would be expensive, but essential.
Above all, building up the Navy, Marines, and long-range air power to make the vastness of the Pacific correspondingly less an impediment is necessary in concert with base-hardening to remedy the diminution of those powers and balances that deter war and make for stable relations in the international system, in that they allow confident restraint and encourage productive negotiation. Failure will lead to the moment when our regional allies, finding less reason to adhere to us than to appease China, remove their increasingly important military components of the de facto Pacific alliance, thus catastrophically breaking it.
At present the U.S. is inexplicably blind to the fundamental power relations upon which China is intently focused. As long as we remain vulnerable while China increases its military powers and ours decline, Beijing need not do anything but pretend to compromise. This can change if we send the Chinese a message they cannot ignore. That is, if we take our eyes off the zero-sum game long enough to assure our strengths in depth. Frankly, if we do not, the Pacific Coast of the United States will eventually look out upon a Chinese lake."
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, is author of “Paris in the Present Tense.”
