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The China Syndrome

by PRESIDENTIAL POLICY: DOES IT MAKE THE GRADE?, JAMES JAY CARAFANO, PHD January 11, 2011
Last week, the White House suffered a full blown case of its own China syndrome—low balling Beijing’s military ambitions. As worrying reports of new initiatives by the regime piled, the administration said and did—virtually nothing.
 
It started when Heritage China military expert Dean Cheng noted that a number of items concerning the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were in the news of late. “The most high profile,” he pointed out was the comment by Admiral Robert Willard, chief of U.S. Pacific Command, that China’s anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) system had reached initial operational capability (IOC). This means that the Chinese DF-21D, which is believed to have been developed specifically to target U.S. carrier strike groups (CSGs), has now been distributed to at least some PLA units for actual operational use in the event of conflict.” As if the news that now Chinese ballistic missiles can take out U.S. carrier strike groups is not bad enough, there is also fresh evidence of a new Chinese stealth fighter aircraft.
 
Then Cheng mused that something else must be up as well. He wrote, “As the world rang in 2011, one of the lesser noticed events is the absence of a Chinese defense white paper for 2010. The biennial public explanation of Chinese military capabilities and intentions was due out by the end of December. Yet as of Tuesday morning, no report has been released. This is a striking omission, as the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been assiduous in producing these reports in a timely manner.”
 
Cheng thought maybe the Chinese had something to hide. There are a couple of high-level U.S.–Chinese meetings on the calendar: a visit of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates next week, followed by President Hu Jintao’s coming to America. So Cheng wondered that “there may be something to the report or its context that the Chinese are hesitant to highlight.”
 
Well, the very next day a Japanese news network seemed hot on the trail of what that might be, reporting that the “Chinese military will consider launching a preemptive nuclear strike if the country finds itself faced with a critical situation in a war with another nuclear state, internal documents showed Wednesday.”
 
The news that Beijing is more than willing to pull the nuclear trigger is a sobering story indeed.
 
Surely, it will come as a major embarrassment to President Obama, who was leading the high-fives after the Senate ratified the New START nuclear agreement, hailing how this was the first step on the “road to zero”—a world without nuclear weapons. The fact that the Chinese proclaim they have no interest in getting rid of nuclear weapons—except perhaps in an exchange of mushroom clouds—makes the White House look pretty foolish.
 
This headline comes on top of news out of the Russian Duma last week that it intended to declare that the New START agreement does indeed limit U.S. missile defense—which the White House assured the Senate in the debate over ratification that it did not. William Chedsey reports for Newsmax.com that “Russia’s legislature says the New START nuclear arms treaty ratified last month by the U.S. Senate restricts the U.S. from building and operating missile defenses against nuclear attacks.”
 
So here the Administration plans to “engage” with China having cut U.S. missile defense programs by 15 percent its first year in office, axing its only stealth fighter in production (the F-22), and signed a treaty with Russia that ensures that the U.S. will become a lesser nuclear power.
 
The White House response to rising military challenges was to say nothing other than stand by while Secretary Gates announced another round of cuts to the defense budget and slashing active duty forces. Given all that is going on Heritage defense scholar Mackenzie Eaglen rightly asks if any of this makes sense. “Cutting the defense budget without any change in U.S. foreign policy commitments would cause direct harm to those in uniform,” she writes. “Instead of asking, ‘How we can cut defense?’ lawmakers should be asking, ‘What is required to protect the nation?’ and developing a robust defense budget from there. America’s military power should match the commitments that America’s military is expected to keep, which in turn are dictated by how America’s political leaders, over time, define the nation’s interests and responsibilities.”
 
Gates and the White House would like us to believe they are simply getting rid of waste or cutting government bureaucracy. Everyone is for making the Pentagon more efficient, but no one wants to hurt the troops. Yet that is exactly what is going to happen. The defense cut mantra ignores the reality that the Pentagon has already been significantly cut over the past two years. Over 50 major programs for modern, upgraded systems were canceled in last year’s defense budget because of cost constraints.
 
So it is hard to give the president any grade for the week in foreign policy and national security anything other than a big fat “F” for failing to keep with the demands of protecting the nation.
 
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is a leading expert in defense affairs, intelligence, military operations and strategy, and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation.

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