US-Russia-China and new Cold War by Naveed Aman Khan
US-Russia-China and new Cold War by Naveed Aman Khan
HOW America would fight China and Russia in future? Joining hands of Russia and China recently have pushed America back in the blue water. The American contest with China and Russia will define the 21st Century. China will be more formidable adversary than Russia ever was. The wars of the future would be naval, with all of their abstract battle systems, even though dirty counterinsurgency fights were all the rage years ago. That future has arrived, and it is nothing less than a new cold war. The constant, interminable Chinese computer hacks of American warships’ maintenance records, Pentagon personnel records, and so forth constitute war by other means.
This situation will last decades and will only get worse, whatever this or that trade deal is struck between Chinese and American Presidents that sends financial markets momentarily skyward. The new cold war is permanent because of a host of factors that generals and strategists understand but that many, especially those in the business and financial community still prefer to deny. The US- China relationship is the world’s most crucial with many second and third order effects a cold war between the two is becoming the negative organizing principle of geopolitics. This is because the differences between the United States and China are stark and fundamental. They can barely be managed by negotiations and can never really be assuaged.
The Chinese and the Russians are committed to pushing US naval and air forces away from the Gulf, Western Pacific the South and East China seas, whereas the US military is determined to stay put. The Chinese and the Russian commitment make perfect sense from their point of view. They see the South China Sea the way American strategists saw the Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The principal blue water extension of their continental land mass, control of which enables them to thrust their navy and maritime fleet out into the wider Pacific and the Indian Ocean, as well as soften up Taiwan. It is similar to the way dominance over the Caribbean enabled the United States to strategically control the Western Hemisphere and thus affect the balance of forces in the Eastern Hemisphere in two world wars and a cold war. For the United States, world power all began with the Caribbean, and for China, it all begins with the South China Sea.
But the Americans will not budge from the Western Pacific. The US defence establishment, both uniformed and civilian, considers the United States a Pacific power for all time. Witness Commodore Matthew Perry’s opening of Japan to trade in 1853, America’s subjugation and occupation of the Philippines starting in 1899, the bloody Marine landings on a plethora of Pacific islands in World War II, the defeat and rebuilding of Japan following World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and, most important, American current treaty alliances stretching from Japan south to Australia. This is an emotional as well as a historical commitment. Something I have personally experienced as an embed on US military warships in the Gulf have encircled Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, China and Russia.
With the Xi-Putin shake hand Trump is shaken . The US is much more shaken by the China and Russia threat. It considers China, with its nimble ability as a rising technological power unencumbered by America’s own glacial bureaucratic oversight to catch up and perhaps surpass the United States. Russia and China are the pacing threats the US military now measures itself against. American economic and military tension with China and Russia will never significantly lessen, they will only inflame the military climate. When a Chinese or Russian vessel cut across the bow of an American destroyer, or China and Russia denied entry of a US amphibious assault ship to Gulf and Hong Kong. With the waning of the liberal world order, a more normal historical era of geopolitical rivalry has commenced, and trade tension is merely accompaniments to such rivalry. In order to understand what is going on, we have to stop artificially separating US- China trade tension and US-China-Russia military tension.
There is also the ideological aspect of this new cold war. For several decades, China’s breakneck development was seen positively in the United States, and the relatively enlightened authoritarianism of Deng Xiaoping and his successors was easily tolerated, especially by the American business community. But under Xi Jinping, China has evolved from a soft to a hard authoritarianism. Rather than a collegial group of uncharismatic technocrats constrained by retirement rules, there is now a president-for-life with a budding personality cult, overseeing thought control by digital means including facial recognition and following the internet searches of its citizens. It is becoming rather creepy, and American leaders of both parties are increasingly repelled by it. The philosophical divide between American and Chinese systems is becoming as great as gap between American democracy and Soviet communism. Regaining strength of Putin’s Russia and emergence of Xi’s China as now military and economic giants have pushed the US back.
