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2019-02-27 China-Japan-Koreas
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VDH: The Establishment Goes Trump on China
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[NationalReview] Read recent essays on China. Visit think-tank public symposia. Hear out military analysts. Talk with academics and media pundits. Listen to Silicon Valley grandees. Watch Senate speeches and politicians interview on television.
The resulting new groupspeak is surreal. If one excises the word "Trump," what follows is a seemingly revolutionary recalibration of attitudes toward China that more or less echo Trump’s voice in the wilderness and often crude and shrill warnings dating back from the campaign trail of 2015.
Trump’s second secretary of state, the skillful Mike Pompeo, has been institutionalizing the president’s pessimistic view of China. Insightful but heretofore underappreciated assessments from China scholars such as Miles Yu and Gordon Chang are now being taking seriously. Both have been warning us for years that the Chinese seek domination, not accommodation, and are replacing their erstwhile feigned respect for our strength with an emboldened contempt for our perceived growing weakness, whether real or psychological. Both have warned also that once China achieves military, economic, and cultural parity with the United States, the global order will be quite different from that of the last 75 years.
From the military, one hears more frequently now that we were at a tipping point by late 2016: The Obama Asian pivot had failed ‐ publicly provocative, but in reality without substance, giving the lethal impression of real weakness masked by empty rhetoric. The Chinese militarization of the Spratley Islands was conceded as the inevitable future of the South China Sea. Chinese military and weapons doctrine was aimed at destroying the offensive capability of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific as a way of breaking off allies from America, and then Finlanding them.
From 2009 to 2016, our defense readiness was eroding, China’s increasing. Psychologically, the American military could not reassure the global order that China would not one day soon unleash North Korea, absorb Taiwan, emasculate South Korea and Japan, or isolate the Philippines and Australia. Huge and mercantile Chinese trade surpluses with all its Western trading partners were accepted as normal.
The cash-short Pentagon seemed to shrug that America was the victim of cosmic and historic forces that inevitably would dethrone the United States, analogous to the declinism of the 1930s, when a powerful U.S. 7th Fleet was not able to deter a modern rising Japanese navy from carving out what would become the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere based on perceptions of American impotence and weariness and spent European colonialism.
In Silicon Valley, the good old news of making trillions of dollars over the last 30 years in outsourcing assemblage to China, opening up a huge new Chinese consumer market, and entering joint partnerships has insidiously been eclipsed by the growing reality that our techie masters of the universe were instead deluded Dr. Frankensteins who had helped to birth an unstoppable monster.
...The idea seemed to be that if a few thousand multimillionaires got even far more fabulously rich by acquiescing to Chinese mercantilism, they could not do real harm to the vast and powerful U.S. Or perhaps, given inevitable American decline, the idea was that they should get their profits in now, before the American golden goose was put out of its misery.
In all these areas and more, a new consensus, among left and right, is now settling in that we are at a crossroads with China. Any more appeasement and acquiescence will lose the West its Asian allies, who will be forced to go with the ascendant superpower, not the declining one.
Either the U.S. military recalibrates or it will return to its 1930s stature of a powerful but vastly overextended Pacific navy and air force. We have reached a cultural nexus at which any more acquiescence would institutionalize the idea that to object to Chinese piracy is to indulge in hurtful stereotypes and therefore should be replaced with appeasement, and that giving away American technology or allowing its expropriation with a wink and nod is not treasonous but simply good business.
The establishment would like to fool itself that it came to its growing about-face on China thanks to a natural exhaustion of patience, or new data, or brilliant new exegeses. And that evolution may be in part true.
But far more likely, Trump’s early and relentless hammering on Chinese mercantilism, systematic cheating, and illiberality finally made the old status quo unsustainable in the face of mounting evidence.
The establishment is adopting Trump’s once-renegade stance toward China, and yet trying to immunize it from him all the same. So the end result seems something like the following: “That idiot Trump somehow now agrees with us on confronting China.” 
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2019-02-27 00:00||
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Posted by Raj 2019-02-27 06:52||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2019-02-27 11:30||
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