The Threat from China and the Threat from Inaction: Which Is Worse?

Guest Column  |  By Editors of FamilySecurityMatters.org  |  March 4, 2008

Note to our feckless Congress: one would be right to ask how much less expensive and risky would have been a serious and capable U.S. intelligence, counterintelligence and security program focused on the threat, capabilities and intentions of the PRC regime (or of radical Islam and its leading groups and sponsors).

While there is justifiably much concern among enlightened politicians and citizens about global Jihad, our national security is threatened by forces that could be far more formidable, and yet seem to be virtually ignored.

China arguably is the number one strategic threat to the United States. As Richard Fisher, Senior Fellow, Asian Military Affairs, at the International Assessment and Strategy Center states:

"The Asian region, of critical importance to the United States, is currently being pulled in two contradictory directions, one encouraging, the other deeply worrying. Encouragement comes from the spread of democracy and freedom: in the 1980s South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan all moved from autocratic regimes to genuine democracy, joining India and Japan. But the same period saw North Korea acquire weapons of mass destruction while China, crushing internal calls for democratization, embarked on an arms buildup the full dimensions and implications of which are only now beginning to be grasped ".

A non-exhaustive outline:

Additional to having the largest army and the fastest growing Navy in the world, specifically its submarine fleet, it is not merely looking for nukes - as some say our Islamist enemy does each day - it is already nuclear armed.

It is the single largest and most consistent source of WMD proliferation to rogue and Muslim states -- Libya, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - as well as a provider of leading conventional armaments and training to Sudan, Venezuela and Bolivia.  Two of the foregoing are US-designated State Sponsors of Terrorism; five are radical Muslim states.

China is broadly acknowledged to be the leading espionage threat to the United States.  They have already stolen EVERY U.S. nuclear weapons design, and have acquired U.S. MIRVing and other launch and targeting technologies.  Further, as if this isn't enough, they also have acquired the supercomputers needed to design and test the next generation of weapons, as well as to enable low-cost modeling of nuclear weapons, thus saving the PRC many years of effort, billions of dollars and ensuring that they are a greater threat sooner than they otherwise would have been.

China is the leading cyber threat to the U.S. - already successfully targeting and compromising our military, commercial and intelligence assets (and those of our allies).

As a result, the U.S. government is now launching a broad cybersecurity initiative which is reported to cost in the tens of billions of dollars. This effort is necessary to recover from, and to block further losses to, China's decades-long, pervasive espionage and theft operations aimed at eroding what is arguably our leading technology advantage. This catch-up program may well end up costing considerably more than the billions envisioned, just in order to stay ahead.  Considering the percentages of both our security and of our economy that are reliant on satellites and on cyber space, we have little choice.

Directly related to this cyber offensive is the Chinese march to space, its great leaps in pico and nano satellite technology as part of its asymmetric warfare approach, and its obsession with being able to blind, confuse and paralyze the U.S. preemptively, as needed.

Note to our feckless Congress: one would be right to ask how much less expensive and risky would have been a serious and capable U.S. intelligence, counterintelligence and security program focused on the threat, capabilities and intentions of the PRC regime (or of radical Islam and its leading groups and sponsors).

Geopolitically, China is pursuing a successful access-denial strategy in the Western Pacific/Asian region designed to first neutralize and then force the U.S. out of the region as a security and commercial guarantor. China, driven in part by its quest for energy resources, is aggressively pursuing an influence and flag presence (one might call it "soft basing") in Central Asia, Sudan and Latin America. China also is working with Iran and other Gulf States, and with Russia, to frustrate U.S. strategic objectives on multiple levels. This includes not only competition for oil and gas and sea access, but also issues such as stopping the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs.

Then of course there is the issue of the already-evident Asian regional arms buildup, a direct result of the PRC's increasing militarization. The costs of this incipient instability to the region's new democracies, and the increased risk of miscalculation and war -- both in the region and along its vast, largely unstable periphery --  are at once hard to calculate and too high to ignore.

Finally, there is just the actuarial matter of the PRC being the world's last and most murderous Communist dictatorship, comprising roughly 1/4 of the world's population and slated soon to be the world's largest economy. Again this leaves aside some key issues such as currency convertibility, slave labor, intellectual property theft, tainted drugs, food and other exported products.  Also left out of this brief outline of issues are other areas in which the PRC is far from a "responsible actor" such as: democracy, human rights, greenhouse gas emissions, propping up Myanamar's (the former Burma's) drug lord junta, and the regime in Khartoum waging a genocidal war in Darfur.

One wonders what our political "leaders" -- especially the conservative ones who should have more sense about this subject -- imagine constitutes a national security threat, either immediate or ongoing and long-term; or, what they think they are doing about it.

What is clear is the abject failure to take seriously the China threat and its manifestations, and indeed to take truly seriously the Islamist threat -- or a Russia resurgent, and the tangled wreck that is our intelligence apparatus.

Conservative leaders, from Churchill to Reagan, traditionally were defined by both their vision and their clarity about the root and meaning of such threats. They never shrank from their duty as leaders to educate the American public about the dangers inherent in inaction. The present situation suggests that more has been lost in the conservative movement than the William F. Buckley we honored last week, and the Ronald Reagan invoked daily by candidates and columnists.

The original article can be found at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/