War: What is it good for? (60 page)

Fort Irwin, a chunk of the Mojave Desert as big as the state of Rhode Island, is the last place American troops go before deploying overseas. For
more than thirty years, it has been a barometer of American thinking about coming engagements. Had I shown up in 1980, when the center opened, I would have seen long-range shoot-outs between hundreds of tanks, skies full of fighters, and entire infantry battalions storming drab replicas of central European towns. But that all changed in 2005, when concerns about counterinsurgency took over. All the fake apartment blocks were torn down, except for one ersatz town, saved for old times' sake. In their place, the imitation minarets and madrassas that I saw rose from the sand.

If I get a chance to make another visit anytime soon, the scenery in the Mojave Desert will have changed yet again. Counterinsurgency was the face of battle while the globocop was strong enough to deter all rivals from trying anything else, but how much longer, the army is now asking, will that hold true? Hoping for the best but planning for the worst, the center is bringing back the tanks. Middle Eastern mock-ups are making way for a range of scenarios, from blitzkrieg breakthroughs to gunfights with gangsters. The new settings could represent almost any place from Syria to South Korea, but major wars are definitely back on the army's agenda.

Despite the globocop's travails in southwest Asia, it is increasingly looking as if the region where it is failing most seriously at preventing the rise of strategic rivals is actually East Asia. Along the continent's outer rim—the chain of islands from Japan to Jakarta (
Figure 7.6
)—the struggle has generally gone well. In some ways, in fact, developments in outer-rim East Asia have been very like those in western Europe. Japan, like West Germany,
was demilitarized and occupied in 1945 and then partially remilitarized and admitted to world markets under American supervision. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore all followed suit, turning into economic giants, but even in the 1980s, when Japan was booming even faster than West Germany and its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds had reached enormous heights, American anxiety about having created a Japanese rival remained muted.

East Asia's inner rim, however, has been a different story. The People's Republic of China controls not only thousands of miles of inner-rim
coastline but also a great swath of the Eurasian heartland, putting it in much the same position that Germany would have been in had it won either of the world wars. For two millennia, this setting made China one of the world's biggest economies, but since the Industrial Revolution it has left the nation dependent on importing natural resources and exporting finished products through the outer rim. Every year, $5 trillion in goods passes through the South China Sea, investing not just the Strait of Malacca but also tiny specks of rock such as the Spratly and Paracel Islands (called the Nansha and Xisha Islands in Chinese) with huge strategic significance.

By the time Mao Zedong seized power in 1949, it looked as if the successive outer-rim globocops had encircled China with island chains that could strangle its economy. Mao's initial response was to seek drastic remedies. In his first five years, he tried to loosen the globocop's grip by sending millions of men to fight in Korea and threatening to invade Taiwan, but in both cases American nuclear blackmail persuaded him to back down. Next, he decided to ignore geopolitics and to jump-start a Chinese industrial revolution by sheer willpower. However, when he commanded peasants to switch from farming to backyard ironworking, twenty million starved. Undeterred, Mao proclaimed a cultural revolution, urging younger communists to tear down everything old (including the economy) before building a utopia fueled by nothing more solid than Mao Zedong Thought. Once again, disaster ensued.

Things got so bad by 1972 that Mao felt compelled to signal his openness to change in the grandest possible way. For some time, Richard Nixon had been angling to bring China and the United States closer together to oppose the Soviet Union; now, to general astonishment, Mao invited America's former red-baiter in chief to Beijing. “This was the week that changed the world,” Nixon grandiloquently announced, but in fact it was only after Mao was safely dead that saner counsels really prevailed in China. By that point, in the late 1970s, China's economy needed to grow by 8 percent every year for decades to avoid famines even worse than the ones it had already endured. Recognizing this, Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world economy. Since China could not break the island chains by force (it had virtually no navy, and the vast People's Liberation Army, old-fashioned at the best of times, had come close to collapse during the Cultural Revolution), this meant making nice with the globocop.

Deng's policies unleashed environmental devastation and rampant corruption, but they also delivered the goods. During the 1990s, a staggering
150 million farmers fled the impoverished interior for factories near the coast, effectively creating a new Chicago every year. Moving to a city typically raised a worker's income by 50 percent, and because the new urbanites still needed to eat, those who stayed on the farm and sold food to the cities also saw wages rise by 6 percent per year. By 2006, China's economy was nine times bigger than it had been when Mao died thirty years earlier.

But this was just the beginning. Fourteen thousand new cars were hitting China's roads every day in 2006, and nearly fifty-three thousand miles of new roads were being built for them to drive on. By 2030, officials estimated, these cars and roads would bring another 400 million peasants into the cities, and to accommodate them, China would erect more than half of all the homes being built on the planet. Between 1976 and 2006, China's share of the world's economic output more than tripled, from 4.5 to 15.4 percent. Across the same years the American share declined, and although the United States was still ahead, producing 19.5 percent of the world's GDP, there was no denying that the globocop now had a rival.

The United States let China become such a rival for the same reason that the United Kingdom let Germany and the United States itself become rivals in the late nineteenth century: it made the globocop richer too. In fact, China's rise was an extraordinarily good financial deal for America. Because Chinese imports were so inexpensive, most American workers saw their living standards improve, even though their wages were stagnant; and because China lent much of its profits back to the United States by buying a trillion dollars' worth of Treasury bonds, Americans never ran out of money to keep buying Chinese imports. As a final touch, cheap Chinese goods exerted deflationary pressures that prevented cheap Chinese credit from setting off rampant inflation. Everybody won.

So mutually rewarding was the relationship between the globocop and its Asian friend that the historian Niall Ferguson and the economist Moritz Schularick christened it “Chimerica”—a marriage of China and America. What made the name so apt, though, was that Chimerica was also a chimera, a dream from which the world would eventually wake up. In economics as in strategy, every action has a culminating point, beyond which, Clausewitz observed, “the scale turns and the reaction follows.”

The scale was already turning by 2004, when
BusinessWeek
magazine announced that “the China Price” had become “the three scariest words in U.S. industry,” and the turn was complete by 2008, when economic logic reasserted itself and Western asset bubbles burst. In April 2009, with the
bottom of the abyss still not in sight, the leaders of the world's twenty biggest economies met in London to craft a response. Their best hope, one of their British hosts suggested, was that a joke doing the rounds of the meeting would turn out to be true: “After [the Tiananmen Square crisis in] 1989 capitalism saved China. After 2009 China saved capitalism.”

Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes. China's part in helping to save capitalism made “the China Price” into the scariest three words for American diplomats as well as industrialists. China has become a massive body in the financial firmament, and its economic gravity is pulling the western Pacific into a Sinocentric orbit. Before 2009 was over, South Korea, Japan, and even Taiwan had all made very public overtures to Beijing. Vital links in the island chain around China were close to snapping.

The big question was what this would mean for the globocop. Not much, said Beijing, which, since 2004, had been describing China's growing influence as a “Peaceful Rise.” China, it insisted, was joining—not challenging—the American world-system and would accept its rules. And just in case “Peaceful Rise” still sounded alarming, Beijing softened its image still further in 2008 by changing the label to “Peaceful Development.” This, spokesmen explained, was part of an ancient Chinese strategic culture, rooted in Confucianism. Rather than using force to resolve disputes, China had always relied on virtue, showing by its humane example that cooperation would make everyone better-off.

Americans have often made similar claims about their own policies. As long ago as 1821, John Quincy Adams argued that the United States made its mark on the world through the “benignant sympathy of her example.” But despite these fine words, the United States has regularly resorted to force, and throughout history, in fact, geopolitical shifts on the scale of China's takeoff have always been accompanied by massive violence. Europe's rise between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries had involved a Five Hundred Years' War, and the shift in the economic center of gravity from Europe to North America between 1914 and 1945 set off a storm of steel. Perhaps this time will be different, but if drawing the western Pacific into a Sinocentric orbit also means drawing the region out of the American orbit, the consequences for the globocop could be fatal—very like, perhaps, those Britain would have suffered if Germany had defeated France in 1914 and shut it out of a western European customs union.

China's leaders are neither uniquely virtuous (as the Confucian argument implies) nor uniquely vicious (as their shriller critics sometimes suggest). They are just like leaders throughout the world and throughout
history—but that is precisely what makes the situation alarming. China, like everyone else, has to play the game of death. Since the 1980s it has mostly played the game well, which means (as it always means) being dovish when that works and hawkish when it does not. Far from substituting Confucius for Mackinder, China is (in the words of the journalist Robert Kaplan) an “über-realist power.”

Recognizing its military weakness, diplomatic isolation, and strategic vulnerability, for a generation after Mao's death China avoided confrontations while pouring money into military modernization. Between 1989 and 2011, spending grew almost sevenfold, while the American defense budget—despite vast outlays on the Global War on Terror—grew by just one-quarter.
⁴

“The inevitable analogy,” says the strategist Edward Luttwak, is between China today and Germany in the 1890s. But while both countries spent massively to turn industrial might into military might, China's spending has been smarter than Germany's. Kaiser Wilhelm challenged the United Kingdom directly by building a battleship fleet, but China is challenging the United States asymmetrically.

Chinese investment has gone mostly into submarines, mines, and short-range ballistic missiles. These cannot contest American dominance of the oceans, but they can make the waters right around China too dangerous for the United States to operate in. According to one senior Chinese adviser, Beijing “is looking for more strategic space in the western part of the Pacific, so that American strategic weapons will not be able to pass through the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea.” Success may be close: war games played by the RAND Corporation in 2009 suggested that already by 2013 China would be able to win an air war over Taiwan. Its thousands of missiles would quickly suppress land-based Taiwanese fighters, and with American planes forced to operate from carriers deployed out of missile range (“over the horizon,” in military-speak) or from distant Guam, a mainland invasion of Taiwan would stand a good chance of success.

None of this would matter if China could rely on economic gravity to resolve all disputes in its favor, but strategy being what it is, that is not happening. By 2010, China's growing power had so alarmed its neighbors that some were banding together to stand up to the giant. Predictably, as
dovish behavior stopped yielding results, China turned more hawkish. A series of standoffs with Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even India followed. Around one uninhabited atoll after another, aircraft buzzed each other, frigates were blasted with fire hoses, and fishermen were arrested. “China Ready for Worst-Case Diaoyu
⁵
Scenario,” the
Global Times
(more or less an organ of the Chinese Communist Party) warned.