5/15/2021

Chas Freeman - Playing War Games with China

Below is the introductory paragraphs of an article by Chas Freeman. The full article can be viewed at Playing at War Games with China    – Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (chasfreeman.net)

Playing at War Games with China   
Remarks to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
By video link, Washington, D.C.  11 February 2021

Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon decided to ignore Napoleon’s advice to “let [China] sleep, for when it wakes it will astonish the world.”[1]  I was there when China opened its eyes.  And I have watched it transform the various orders of the world and become an American obsession.

Every generation of Americans feels obliged to reinvent the China policies it inherits from its predecessor.  We can be sure our country will eventually get its policies right – after we’ve exhausted all the alternatives.  But we have not yet done so.  And, for many reasons, our latest policies toward China are almost certain to prove self-defeating.

We have just exited the most bizarre presidency in our history.  One of its distinguishing characteristics was the substitution in our foreign relations of unrestricted economic warfare for diplomacy.  Bluster and bullying replaced dialogue and reason aimed at convincing the recalcitrant to see that it could be in their interest as well as ours for them to do things our way.

In the last half of the last century, we Americans made the rules.  Others got into the habit of following us.  To some extent, that habit – though fading – has outlasted our adherence to the principles we once stood for.  So military posturing, economic intimidation, diatribe, and attempted regime change are becoming the norm in international relations.  China is a case in point.  Sino-American relations now exemplify Freeman’s third law of strategic dynamics: for every hostile act there can be an even more hostile reaction.

Americans have an inbuilt missionary impulse.  We enjoy protecting, tutoring, lecturing, and hectoring other peoples on how to correct their character to approximate our idealized image of ourselves.  We are offended when others insist on independence from us and on preserving their own political culture.  China has never wavered in its determination to do both, wishful thinking by American politicians and pundits notwithstanding.

In America’s pas de deux with China, we have consistently been the initiator of the dance and taken the lead.  We developed some well-founded complaints about Chinese economic behavior, so we launched a trade war with it.  We were alarmed about China’s potential to outcompete us internationally, so we decided to try to cripple it with an escalating campaign of “maximum pressure.”  We saw China as a threat to our continued military primacy, so we sought to contain and encircle it.  Cumulatively, we have:

  • declared China to be an adversary and called for regime change in Beijing;
  • launched an invective-filled global propaganda campaign against China, its ruling Communist Party, and its fumbled initial response to COVID-19;
  • sanctioned allies and partners for failing to curtail their own dealings with China;
  • replaced market-driven trade with China with government management of economic exchanges based on tariffs, quotas, sanctions, and export bans;
  • abandoned or attempted to sabotage international organizations in which we deemed Chinese influence to be greater than ours;
  • kneecapped the WTO, trashing the rule-bound order for international economic relations we had taken seven decades to elaborate;
  • attempted to block Chinese investment and lending in third countries;
  • blacklisted Chinese companies and delisted them on our stock markets;
  • curtailed visas, criminalized scientific exchanges, and banned technology exports to China;
  • closed a Chinese consulate (losing one of our own as a result) and initiated tit-for-tat reductions in reporting by journalists;
  • sought to terminate Chinese sponsorship of language teaching in our country, and discouraged in-country study by potential federal employees;
  • reidentified the United States with Beijing’s civil war adversary in Taipei and violated the Taiwan-related terms of U.S. normalization with Beijing;
  • stepped up provocative air and sea patrols along China’s borders; and
  • begun to reconfigure both our conventional and nuclear forces to fight a war with China in its near seas or on its claimed and established territory.

These actions have gotten China’s attention, much as they got Japan’s when we applied a range of considerably less hostile measures to it in 1941.  Japan reacted by attacking Pearl Harbor.  China has not yet lost its cool.... 

3 comments:

  1. "sanctioned allies and partners for failing to curtail their own dealings with China" - the reason why Singapore to date dare not approve China vaccine Sinovac ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good article.

    It laid out all the factual misdeeds and mischieves of the Hegemonic US Empire that thinks and behaves like it is the World Emperor of the Post-WW2 Era. It is no more.

    Its time is up!

    The US's own infrastructure at home is so backward and in urgent need of repairs.

    Its human rights record at home is so atrocious that killing and murdering coloured people by the White-dominated police force goes unchecked on a daily basis like nobody's business.

    Its democracy is in such a big mess that both the Democrats and Republicans are run by sub-standard get-rich-quick politicians, who are more dictatorial than Hitler of Germany and Emperor Hiroshito of Japan.

    Its foreign policies are so self-centred with defeatist attitude and mentality that they are all self-defeating, instead of gaining the upper-hand over China, the Awaken Dragon, on her way to make this world a better place in business, trade, livelihood, prosperity, peace and glory.

    How can a mere 230 years old un-united, unlawful, warlike, newly and loosely formed country like USA be able to challenge a 6,000 years old Living Civilisation?

    Wishful thinking at best.

    March on! Go forth, the Good Dragon! Make this world a better place to live in for Everyone!

    ReplyDelete
  3. ‘Britain’s deployment is not to be provocative,’ says defence sec as UK sends aircraft carrier and other warships towards China.

    Fucking white brutes think Chinese are stupid. Sending aircraft carriers to China's doorstep like gunboats in the 19th Century and said it is not meant to be provocative.

    China must sink these antique warships when they arrived in the South China Sea then said the sinking was a mistake because soldiers fired wrongly.

    ReplyDelete