Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

■"Inside Pentagon, A Scholar Shapes Views of China: Beijing, Mr. Pillsbury Says, Sees U.S. as Military Foe; An Optimist Turns Gloomy; His Direct Line to Top Aides," by Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Zoellick Details Discussions With China on Future of the Korean Peninsula," by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 8 September 2005, p. A22.

■"A Trial Run Finds Hong Kong Disneyland Much Too Popular for Its Modest Size," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 8 September 2005, p. C1.

■"A Chinese University Removes a Topic From the Closet," by Howard D. French, New York Times, 8 September 2005, p. A3.

The WSJ front-pager on Michael Pillsbury is long overdue. Outing this obscure but influential China hawk gets his connections out in the open. Pillsbury is a major stalking horse for Andy Marshall, head of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and he clearly has the ear of both Rummy and his trusted intell chief Steve Cambone.

Pillsbury is a free-lancer on nobody's payroll. Rich (guess how), he's spent decades perusing Chinese military writing, which he finds-gasp!-fixated on U.S. military power. Can you believe it? I would have picked Argentina myself, but I guess that goes with being the world's sole superpower.

Here's Pillsbury's great contribution to understanding China:

"Mike's core insight has been to plumb the subterranean anti-American feelings within China's military," says Daniel Blumenthal, a China specialist at the Defense Department …

Wow! Chinese military leaders are strongly anti-American! I am stunned. And they write about it. And they write about their dreams of future high-tech war against us. And we read those documents, and we take their statements of aspiration and treat it as gospel truth.

Guess where we did this before, swallowing propaganda lock, stock and barrel?

You guessed it! We swallowed it all from the Red Army for years, believing all their aspirational bullshit, trumping them up into 10-foot-monsters they never were, and overestimating their defense budgets and power projection capabilities consistently.

We are repeating, to the extent Pillsbury is taken seriously inside the Pentagon, this systematic analytic mistake all over again.

What do Mr. Pillsbury's critics say?

Mr. Pillsbury's numerous critics call him a charming but combative China hawk whose work has overblown the thoughts and writings of a small cadre of Chinese military officials.

But make no mistake, as best boy to both Marshall and Cambone, Pillsbury is a man to be reckoned with, even as his take on China is so absurdly limited to just reading military writings (God help anyone trying to figure out the United States or the world through American military writing).

Me, I think China's a bit more complex than that, spanning a lot of different time periods from our own past, like experiencing a sexual revolution right now, along with a burgeoning gay rights movement, that places them somewhere in our late 1960s/early 1970s.

I know, I know. Mr. Pillsbury wants us to know that the Chinese military simply think differently than our military does. My answer: complete bullshit. The Chinese mirror image us like you wouldn't believe (matched only by hard-liners on our side mirror-imaging them ("Look, they dream of high-tech wars against high-tech opponents---just like us!"). Spare me the "inscrutability" and the "ancient Chinese secrets." If their big scary plan is to lie low for 40 to 50 years and then somehow break out the can of whupass, then I'm less than impressed

Give then 40 or 50 years, and we'll see a China amazingly addicted to a middle-class lifestyle, with Disney vacations and all.

Rather than focus on scary bad cops in the Pentagon, which I remind you is not in charge of determining who our enemies are (that job belongs to the president and us, frankly), take a peek at how Robert Zoellick, Dep Sec of State is prepping the Chinese to consider life after Kim by emphasizing that the status quo is untenable. Then check this bit out:

Zoellick also suggested that the United States was interested in using the six-nation talks-which also include South Korea, Russia and Japan-as a springboard for creating a multilateral security framework for northern Asia that would mirror organizations in the southeastern part of the continent.

Zoellick said he urged the Chinese to consider scenarios for the Korean Peninsula that "would be benign to us and which would be benign to them."

I've said it before and I say it again: Zoellick is by far the smartest man in the Bush Administration. Honest to God, I'd name him president tomorrow. Pretty decent crew around both him and Rice as well.

I say keep an eye on this pair, Pillsbury and Zoellick. Much rides on which vision of China holds sway with Bush. I'm betting on the Rice conduit to Bush with Zoellick more than the Pillsbury via Cambone and Marshall through Rummy to Cheney.

You know, Dr. Rice may yet prove the historical difference in the second term.

From my lips to God's ears.