Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and
this article by
him offers some interesting insights into China and its relationship with the USA. He starts off by talking about the US involvement with
Taiwan (we are bound by treaty to come to their aid if they are attacked).
From his LA Times article:
China's stealth war on the U.S.Interesting to think about in light of the attempted buy-out of Unocal. Also, little known is the fact that the Chinese essentially control the day-to-day operations of the Panama Canal (thanks Bill Clinton!) and that also thanks to President Bill, the Chinese Overseas Shipping Company (COSCO) was able to purchase the Long Beach Naval Air Station for use as a shipping port. Yeaahhh Riiighhht... I used to be happy that China was seeming to become more of a capitalist nation but I have not been seeing very much change at the top and their overall strategies have not been very good for the planet... Major polluter, they are buying up more petroleum than they use (stockpiling it), they have openly stated that the nation of Taiwan is a 'wayward state that needs to come home'. I don't know about you but there is a significant difference in quality between Chinese products and Taiwanese products and I want to be able to buy independent Taiwanese motherboards and machine tools. I use both and these guys seriously rock.
Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army caused quite a stir last week when he threatened to nuke "hundreds" of American cities if the U.S. dared to interfere with a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.
This saber-rattling comes while China is building a lot of sabers. Although its defense budget, estimated to be as much as $90 billion, remains a fraction of the United States', it is enough to make China the world's third-biggest weapons buyer (behind Russia) and the biggest in Asia. Moreover, China's spending has been increasing rapidly, and it is investing in the kind of systems --- especially missiles and submarines -- needed to challenge U.S. naval power in the Pacific.
The Pentagon on Tuesday released a study of Chinese military capabilities. In a preview, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Singapore audience last month that China's arms buildup was an "area of concern." It should be. But we shouldn't get overly fixated on such traditional indices of military power as ships and bombs -- not even atomic bombs. Chinese strategists, in the best tradition of Sun Tzu, are working on craftier schemes to topple the American hegemon.
In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.
"Unrestricted Warfare" recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."
Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).
