Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Two stories sent to me by readers. First is an AP story on base closings (basically the Andy Hoehn study in OSD that I talk about in PNM--years in the works). The second is a Washington Times story on Chinese peacekeeping in Haiti! (On my!)

Here's the key bit on the first story, from the AP, dated 23 September 2004:

Over the next decade, the military will abandon 35 percent of the Cold War-era bases and buildings it uses abroad, even as it seeks to expand a network of bare-bones sites in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe to help fight terrorism.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was outlining the plan Thursday to the
Senate Armed Services Committee.

In a report to Congress, the Pentagon offered details of the "global defense posture." The planned changes, once completed, will result in "the most profound reordering" of U.S. military forces overseas since the current global arrangements were set 50 years ago, according to the report.

The most widely noted aspect of the plan, which was announced in broad terms
last month by President Bush, is the withdrawal of 70,000 U.S. troops and 100,000 of their family members from bases in Germany and South Korea. That has gained attention in part because it means fewer U.S. bases probably will be shuttered in the 2005 round of base closings than if there were no withdrawal.

Pentagon seeks maximum flexibility

Less well understood is that even while troops will return to the United States from Germany and South Korea, the Pentagon will be building up its network of "forward operating sites," sometimes called "lily pad" bases. These are more austere than the large, fully developed bases - dubbed "Little Americas" - where U.S. forces stood guard during the Cold War.

"During the Cold War we had a strong sense that we knew where the major risks and fights were going to be, so we could deploy people right there," Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said in an Associated Press interview Wednesday.

"We're operating now in a completely different concept," said Feith, chief architect of the global realignment plan.

"We need to be able to do that whole range of military operations (from combat to peacekeeping) anywhere in the world pretty quickly."

The Pentagon is seeking maximum flexibility in the decades ahead in responding to terrorism and other potential threats, including those to oil supplies. So the military wants a range of basing and access agreements with as many countries as possible and in as many regions as it can.

Sound like a new rule set to you? People in the Pentagon will try to sell you that this was all in the works prior to 9/11, but that's nonsense. The fiddling they had in mind prior to that day was minimal compared to this. This is the Bush Administration embracing the new strategic environment revealed by 9/11 and embracing it big time. Yes, it was long in the works (and I describe it in PNM), and yes it will be long to unfold, but have no doubt about it, it will be big.

So big, in fact, that it will change the way all other great powers think about and employ military power in the world. China, recently, took the step of pitching in with peacekeeping troops in Haiti, of all places. Now, some in the U.S. security community will get all hot and bothered about this, citing the "very bad precedent," but this is silly in the extreme. We're floating proposals out of the White House for a global peacekeeping force and China's the most populous nation in the world. Does it make any sense for them to sit on the sidelines? Of course not.

Here's the Washington Times story on China (excerpted), which I received from reader Terry Collier):

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published September 6, 2004
_____

China's Public Security Ministry is set to dispatch a 130-man "special police" unit to Haiti this month in the first deployment of Chinese forces to the Western Hemisphere, Bush administration officials say.

The first advance unit of the police troops, who are specially trained for riot and crowd control, will over the next two weeks join the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, the multinational force known as Minustah dispatched to the war-torn Caribbean island.

The main body of the force will arrive a short time later and will deploy to the port of Gonaives, say officials who insist on anonymity.

Administration officials are concerned that the Chinese government will use the troop deployment as a way to put political pressure on the Haitian government, one of the few nations retaining diplomatic relations with China's rival Taiwan.

"It's been a big year for China," says one official opposed to the deployment. "They put a man in space, won gold medals at the Olympics, and now they are going to put troops in the Western Hemisphere for the first time."

The official says China's first military presence near U.S. shores would
boost Beijing's long-term strategy to "supplant U.S. influence" in the region. "China is pursuing a maritime strategy in the Caribbean to gain access and control over port facilities, free trade zone infrastructure, fisheries, oil and minerals, and off-shore banking platforms" . . .

Administration officials say the decision to permit the Chinese to join the U.N. force in Haiti was made quietly, without a full debate among defense, foreign policy and national security agencies.

"This was done by the people in charge of peacekeeping," one official says. China has sent small numbers of observers to previous U.N. peacekeeping missions but has declined earlier requests to send active units . . .

Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang, head of the Communist Party's political police and security organ, says the dispatch of the troops is an important diplomatic move and reflects China's "devotion to world peace and stability."

Gertz's breathless reporting here is a bit much. He goes on to make it sound the beginnings of a 21st Century Cuban missile crisis when all we're talking about here is 125 riot cops. Ooooh weeeee!

Gertz later cites some secret SouthCom report about China trying to use its economic interests in the region to supplant U.S. military power. He cites intell support to Venezuela's Chavez and arms sales to Cuba. All of this stuff if piddling in the extreme, compared to our broadband mil-to-mil interactions throughout Asia. Putting China's current efforts in the Western Hemisphere in the same light is a bit much. Where China is really vulnerable is in the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. just so happens to have the bulk of its overseas forces right now engaged in an occupation of the world's second largest source of oil. If you think that somehow China "controlling" the Panama Canal (which has become so irrelevant thanks to new ships that are beyond "Panamax"--or too big to go through the canal, that officials there are talking about widenind it) compares to our military domination of the Straits of Hormuz when it comes to the global economy and how it works, then you're sorry misinformed.

America is going to need a lot of help in shrinking the Gap. China will need to be a significant player. We cannot even dream of pursuing such a strategy while maintaining a fear-based, competitive relationship with China. Either we choose to do something about the Gap in order to win this global war on terrorism, or we choose to plan on China as the near-peer and start locking down America from terrorist attacks. You tell me which speaks to a better world and richer, more developed America.