By Eric Vandenbroeck
10 Sept. 2019
As Greg Myre
national security correspondent with a focus on the intelligence community
pointed out yesterday on NPR: The growing friction between the U.S. and China,
combined with the rapid rise of China's economy and its military, has stirred a
debate about whether the U.S. and China are headed toward a Cold War.
"The Chinese
military has undergone a substantial program of modernization to the point now
where they are a near-peer military in a number of military domains," Neil
Wiley, the director of analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in
an interview with NPR.
Wiley has a top-floor
office in Washington, D.C., that's suited for deep reflection on big questions.
He looks out over the Potomac River, at the planes coming and going at Reagan
National Airport, and toward the top brass over at the Pentagon.
This year, for the
first time, the DIA has put out an unclassified
report on China's military, similar to the ones it issued on the Soviet Union
during the Cold War.
The report catalogos China's rise: a military budget second only to
the U.S., an aggressive approach to disputed islands in the South China Sea,
joint military exercises with Russia, its first foreign military base in
Djibouti.
"Chinese leaders
characterize China's long-term military modernization program as essential to
achieving great power status," Army Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr., the
director of the DIA, writes in the report. China is "on the verge of
fielding some of the most modern weapon systems in the world. In some areas, it
already leads the world."
The DIA report
doesn't use the term "Cold War," and other U.S. government agencies
and officials avoid the term as well. But outside government circles, it's a
hot topic. From books
to foreign
policy journals to national
security conferences, there's a robust discussion on the similarities and
differences between the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the increasingly tense U.S.-China
relations.
This week also, the
U.S. Navy conducted
drills with ships from Southeast Asian countries in the Gulf of Thailand
and the South China Sea, an apparent sign of Washington’s renewed interest in
the region and in challenging China.
Close U.S. partners
such as Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong have warned
of growing tensions between the two superpowers and urged restraint by both
sides. Washington has been deepening security and diplomatic relations in the
region, even with former adversaries such as Vietnam, which has been locked in
a tense maritime
standoff with China since July.
In recent years, the
notion of an emerging second Cold War, this time between the United States and
China, has gained credence. As early as 1995, China scholar David Shambaugh warned of deteriorating relations in an
article titled, “The United States and China: A New Cold War?” Last year,
Cold War analyst Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon professor of government at
the Harvard Kennedy School, warned
of a “new cold war,” and articles published in the Economist,
Foreign
Policy, the Washington
Post, and across the mainstream media have built
on this narrative. But the Cold War paradigm is not the best way to
understand today’s strategic landscape.
Having looked at this
matter in-depth, on 18 Jan. 2018 I already concluded that
China wants to displace rather than replace the United States yet is not
comparable to a cold war situation and that the rhetoric coming from China can
best be understood in light of China's new nationalism with which president Xi counters Trump’s America first narrative by expanding
its business empire.
The security
environment is far more benign than that of the Cold War, and middle
powers—countries with more moderate power and influence, have far more agency
to shape great-power competition to suit their interests. Southeast Asia is a
prime case in point. The region was at the heart of the Cold War era’s
so-called hot wars, calamitous U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Laos that have shaped the outlooks of a generation of counterinsurgency and
strategic analysts in Washington. Today, it sits at the geographic nexus of
Chinese and U.S. influence and is the site of emerging military friction. But
the dynamics are very different.
Characterizing
U.S.-China competition in Cold War terms risks embedding a limited framework
into U.S. strategic thinking. Worse still, Washington runs the repeated danger
of coming to view Southeast Asian nations as dominoes that will fall to one
side or the other, rather than as autonomous partners with their own divergent
interests.
Today’s international
security environment is far more tranquil than that of the Cold War. Unlike the
devastation of the wars in Syria and Yemen, along with the humanitarian crisis
associated with massive displacement, U.S.-China competition has so far been
nonviolent, occurring predominantly along economic and technological axes.
Compare this to the Cold War, when the United States waged a proxy war against
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and U.S. troops fought and died in Korea and
Vietnam.
Stephen Wertheim, a
scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia
University, warned
in a recent New York Times op-ed that the emerging “cold war [with China] could
plunge the United States back into gruesome proxy wars around the world and
risk a still deadlier war among the great powers.” However, that outcome is far
less likely now than it was during the Cold War. For one, the Vietnam War was
born from a hard-fought struggle for independence from colonial occupation.
Today, even the weakest powers in Southeast Asia display more ability
to hedge between competing great powers.
U.S. and Chinese
interference in other countries’ internal affairs is far subtler and less
destructive than U.S. and Soviet methods once were, in part because of
international law and the transparency born of new digital technology and
expanded internet access. That is not to say that the motives of contemporary
great powers are altruistic: The Trump administration vocally advocated
for a quasi-coup in Venezuela and has steadfastly
supported the repressive monarchy of Saudi Arabia, while Beijing doles out
hefty financial
support to friendly dictators who support Chinese interests, such as Hun
Sen in Cambodia. The Chinese Communist Party has also overtly
pressured small countries such as the Solomon Islands to abandon diplomatic
ties with Taiwan in exchange for investment and infrastructure loans.
Decades ago, middle
powers such as India and Pakistan could play the United States and Soviet Union
off of one another to their advantage, to an extent. Under Prince Norodom
Sihanouk, Cambodia successfully balanced the United States, Soviet Union, and
China, preserving his country’s neutrality throughout the 1960s until Gen. Lon Nol launched a coup overthrowing Sihanouk in 1970.
Today, such countries
have more options. Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage compares
them to “knights” on a chessboard, as opposed to “pawns.” For example,
since a military coup in 2014, Thailand has been grappling with a domestic
political crisis and civil-military tensions. The Obama administration limited
contact with the junta led by Gen. Prayuth Chan-Ocha
and suspended security
assistance. Meanwhile, Bangkok has cultivated
warmer ties with Beijing, for instance by purchasing three Chinese
submarines and granting Chinese telecommunications company Huawei’s bid to roll
out 5G internet technology in the country. In response, the Trump
administration has hosted Prayuth on a White
House visit in 2017 and in 2018 agreed
to deepen trade ties. The United States and Royal Thai Navy coordinated
closely during this week’s naval exercises in Southeast Asia.
Also what the
potential "trade cold war" concerns the current situation is that
China has
offered to buy American products in exchange for a delay in a series of US
tariffs and easing of a supply ban against telecoms giant Huawei.
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