Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

POST: Gary Hart, Lynne Cheney, and War with China

No offense to Fallows, but I have reported and described the neocons' obvious intention to target rising China prior to 9/11 several dozen times in posts and print.

Here's what I wrote in PNM:

[p. 281-283] The Bush Administration came into power committed to defense transformation, which it defined primarily in terms of technology, as in, "We need to 'skip a generation' of technology and move toward the military we know we really can build in this information age." Their preferred rationale for that transformation was a near-peer competitor, or the "rising" China security threat. Were they largely cynical in this? I believe so, but no more than anyone else talking up a "revolution in military affairs," or "network-centric warfare." Simply put, all these transformation advocates saw a future military there for the taking, and worried that if America did not grab that future first, someone else would. In reality, no country out there is making any serious effort at that "transformational military"--not the Chinese, not the Europeans, no one. Our lead on the rest of the world is getting bigger, not smaller, and so the stories the transformation gurus resorted to telling were getting all the more fantastic with time. They needed an enemy worth fighting and did not have one, so they made one up.

Did the Bush Administration come into power with a chip on its shoulder about Iraq? You bet. Were they on a line toward making something happen? Not really. Their commitment to transformation kept their focus firmly on China--witness the P-3 spy place brouhaha with Beijing in the spring of 2001. This Administration had no stomach for nation building, no interest whatsoever in the Gap, and particularly no desire to start building peace in the Middle East. They said all these things quite openly; they were going to focus on security issues across the Core: targeting China, Russia and India for their undesirable behavior and whipping NATO and the Europeans into shape. Absent 9/11, this Administration would have done nothing for Africa, nothing for the Middle East, nothing for the Gap as a whole. They simply did not care. Their future worth creating was limited to the Core; they were virtual know-nothings about the Gap. Plus they really wanted to pull back from overseas military commitments in order to finance the fabulous technological transformation of the military there wanted more than anything else. This group has absolutely no interest in "empire"--just the opposite. If they had had their druthers, America would have let the Gap burn unceasingly while they plotted brilliant future wars with China. That "plot" was not facilitated by 9/11, it was destroyed by 9/11. Nonetheless, conspiracy theories about that the U.S. Government actually stages the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The terrorist attacks spared us a pointless and dangerous pathway of confrontation with the Chinese, and to a lesser extent with Russia and India.

No, I didn't check with Lynne Cheney or Gary Hart on the subject. Didn't need to.

Thanks to New Yorker in DC for sending this.