Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

COLUMN: In the Ring, By Bill Gertz, Washington Times, June 1, 2007

The problem with the anti-mil-mil cooperation argument is that adherents lack credible scenarios for U.S.-on-China war and vice versa.

I've seen all the scenarios and not one holds up to any rational scrutiny. They are fantastic relics of the past, as are those who cling to them.

Spin me out the plausible strategy where China gets away with sinking a U.S. carrier. You can't. You simply can't answer the "and then what?" questions.

There is no Chinese economy without profound and continuous access to U.S. markets. It simply comes to a stop, as does communist rule.

If China were to attack and sink a U.S. carrier, we'd sink their entire navy and decimate their air force to boot. We'd crush the crap out of them in a completely unfair fight. We'd do it out of both anger and the simple desire to signal to them and anybody else: do this and we'll kill you en masse.

Do I think we can push events in such a way as to get this type of lunatic response from the Chinese? Sure.

Do I think history would judge us as complete fools for doing so? Absolutely.

Are they some leaders in China dumb enough to entertain such ideas? Sure, but there are more here, and they worry me more because our advantages over China remain huge militarily.

You jettison the nonsensical Taiwan scenario--wet dream of platform builders across America--and the China hawks don't have a leg to stand on. There are no rational scenarios extended into the Middle East: all of the ones you can name have China facing more dependency and vulnerability than we do (they need that energy, we do not), so the spoiler role--so much more easily achieved--falls into our lap, not China's.

But Geertz is unredeemable--a total pawn of the Big War crowd and the mil-industrial complex, who feed him like the pet he is. People like him need to be escorted off the stage pronto. They hold up our much-needed and much-delayed adjustment to the war we have because they insist on holding on to the war--and the enemy image--they prefer.

Let me be perfectly clear here in a way Keating could never hope to be until he takes off his uniform:

This thinking kills our SOF every day.

This thinking kills our Marines every day.

This thinking kills our Army soldiers every day.

This thinking kills our Reservists every day.

This thinking kills our National Guard every day.

This thinking kills our contractors every day.

This painfully out-of-date non-strategic mindset kills Americans every single day by continuing this inexcusable idiocy of overfeeding the Leviathan and starving the SysAdmin.

And at some point it must be described as implicit collusion with al Qaeda and the radical Salafist movement, because no one can possibly be both that stupid and that cynical.

When you purposefully argue against the necessary adjustment to this Long War--year after year--how do you not eventually equate this position with aiding and abetting the enemies of this country?

When you so consistently argue against the strategic adjustment necessary to tapping the allies required for our victory, how can you pretend you stand with America and its security?

Or does Taiwan and the greed of the military-industrial complex come first?

I won't bother asking Geertz if he has no shame. He's that condition's poster child.

But what can you expect from the Wash Times and its master?

There is nothing particularly hard about maintaining a hedge against China--anymore than there is against the UK. By mentoring their rise as a naval power, we gain access and intelligence. What they get is some catch-up info that hardly turns their navy into ours. Anyone who tells you otherwise just plain doesn't have a clue about our capabilities, nor the complexity of doing what only our military can do.

As I have said many times before, this is not about trusting the Chinese to be anything but Chinese. But it's also not about steering through our rear-view mirror strategically.

To hold onto China as the big rising threat is a fundamental misreading of global economics and globalization's evolution--and willfully so.

China will seek to steal from us. China will confound us where it can and confront us when it has no choice, but it will so asymmetrically because symmetrical challenges would be suicidal. The reason why no carrier's been sunk since WWII is because WWII ended with the invention of nuclear weapons, and nukes kill great power war in all its kinetics. That's why terrorism rises to the top of the heap--duh!

That threat is a function of globalization's spread, just like China's rising income. Pretending you can isolate military threats from that larger economic reality is just plain goofy.

But that ignorance is what keeps America so stupid when it comes to its grand strategy: we rely on columnists and journalists for this vision, and they're feed by military experts with virtually no understanding of economics (witness how slowly we learn in Iraq).

There is no grand strategy that so willfully excludes economic rationality. It's just nonsense and crap.

And doing so in the name of respecting the "irrationality" of conflict is equally bogus. Because it's only in the absence of economic success that such irrationality emerges, so focusing on the yang while denying the yin's power is simply contemplating war solely within the context of war, like contemplating disease without any reference to good health.

Keating's a smart guy who's been around the block. If he sees strategic opportunity in creating dialogue and cooperation with China on their reach for power projection, then maybe--just maybe--he knows more about what he's doing that Geertz back in DC being fed the garbage he so routinely peddles on behalf of his "sources."

I believe in confronting America's threats, both external and internal. Our greatest internal threat are those dinosaurs who want the post-9/11 threat definition to be additive--as in, all the new PLUS all the old.

That--quite simply--is a recipe for exhaustion and defeat. Those who persist in that argument must have their motives questioned, because--deep down--behind all the half-baked rationales, you will find greed--pure and simple.

I forgive the stupidity, but not the greed.