The New War between the Pentagon and China

On Sept. 7, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden published an article with his signature regarding his recent visit to China in several newspapers. Entitled, “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise,” the vice president dismissed concerns of his people about the extraordinary development of China, and set out the reasons for thinking differently and committing to normal relations.

However, Stephen Glain, famed American journalist and writer with 25 years of experience as a correspondent for several U.S. media companies in Asia and the Middle East appreciates that with “the reduction of commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, with its objectives declared in Asia, Washington is not so much seeking to withdraw from the Persian Gulf as it is preparing for a perspective war against China.”

In an article published in mid-August with the title, “The Pentagon’s New China War Plan,” Glain sites sources specializing in defense issues that declare that the Pentagon seeks to adapt the concept of “Air-Sea Battle” towards a confrontation with China.

The publication “Inside the Pentagon” was released before a small group of U.S. Navy officers known as the “China Integration Team,” while they were adapting tactics of Air-Sea Battle in preparation for a potential conflict with China.

Air-Sea Battle, developed in the 1990s and codified in a memorandum classified in 2009, is a formula for American military power to adapt to the demands of a potential response to “threats in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf” (a formula encoded to refer to China and Iran). It complements the 1992 Guidelines for Defense Planning, a kind of white book from the government called to prevent the emergence of any “peer competitor” that might challenge U.S. global dominance.

This guide is a commandment from the Pentagon for controlling what defense planners call the “global commons,” a euphemism which identifies the arteries of international trade: sea lanes, bridges on land and air corridors.

For Washington, if a foreign power disputes the mastery over these three “global commons,” it is as if war is declared, and, at the discretion of the Pentagon, that is exactly what China is doing in the South China Sea.

In this spirit, Gen. Jim Amos, commanding general of the Marine Corps since October 2010, said in late May that the wars in the Persian Gulf were denying Washington the necessary resources for confronting an increasingly aggressive China. This statement transformed Gen. Amos into the first U.S. military leader that publicly referred to their service plans for after the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

U.S. mobilization in Asia that responds to a study conducted in the spring of 2001 by the Pentagon under the name “Asia 2015” identifies China as a persistent competitor to the U.S., inclined to military adventurism abroad.

Three years after this study, the U.S. released a plan to create a string of bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, a containment move clearly aimed at Beijing, as similarly done with the cooperation agreement of nuclear energy in India signed in 2008.

It is known that several years ago the Pentagon developed plans to convert Guam as its main center in the Pacific. This was an initiative so vast that John Pike, a leading expert on Western defense policy, space and intelligence, and director of the organization Global Security which he founded in 2000, has speculated that Washington intends to “lead the world from Guam and Diego Garcia beginning in 2015.”

Unlike U.S. allies in Asia and Europe, Glain says China isn’t likely to share national security obligations with a foreign power, and is even more unlikely in the South China Sea, where Beijing does not identify Washington as a strategic partner, but rather as a direct threat.

Glain sites tense situations in bilateral relations in which the United States, far from peaceful diplomacy for a solution on the matter, adopts extreme positions.

One hopes that Washington has enough sense to realize that their biggest creditor, China, is not a third world country like so many that the U.S. and NATO have bombed and occupied almost with impunity since the end of the Cold War.