Rumors Of U.S. - China War

Why Do Some American Sinophobes Seem To Want a US-China War, And Are Doing Their Damndest To Set One Up?

 Tom Fowdy 

If you don’t want a military conflict with China, then don’t encircle it, provoke it and wilfully misunderstand its motives. Beijing is not seeking world domination, but the continuing rejuvenation of its nation.

Two hawkish American academics, Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, have been relentless in their anti-China op-eds over the past few weeks. In a number of publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and now The Atlantic, as well as spin-offs on Bloomberg, their pieces all strike a very similar pessimistic tone, that the prospect of a US war with China is becoming more likely as the so-called “strategic window” which Beijing has to establish itself as a global power is closing.

The latest piece argues that in lieu of these goals and a changing geopolitical context, China is a “revisionist state” that is preparing to resort to war in order to seal its territorial claims, dominate East Asia and then move onwards to the world.

Is war really inevitable? Will China be compelled to respond by force in the end? This is a frequent question tossed about in mainstream commentary, and developments such as the AUKUS military alliance are not helping it. However, it should be noted that Beckley and Brands are notorious China pessimists, whose recent works give Gordon Chang, author of the 2001 tome The Coming Collapse of China a run for his money. All three believe that the game is up for the Communist party when it comes to the country’s economy and prospects for productive diplomacy.

But what has changed recently? The answer is that, unlike in past decades, the US has pursued an increasing military encirclement of China’s periphery and has forced Beijing to respond in tandem; Xi Jinping’s moves have not emerged out of thin air. Unless China’s rise was completely on terms the US has sought to impose, opposition to it from Washington was always inevitable no matter what it did. It is one thing to claim “China wants to seize the East China sea!”, but another to overlook the fact that Japan deliberately sought to provoke China in the early 2010s by incorporating the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands as a prefecture, which then-US President Obama announced was covered by the US-Japan defense treaty.

These kinds of provocations are part of a broader effort of China containment, which spawn tensions and inevitable responses from Beijing, which is then accused of being aggressive and expansionist. This all creates a vicious circle of militarization from both sides as China strives to defend its “national sovereignty” against perceived foreign intrusion. Consequently, the narrative of a “more assertive and coercive” China takes Beijing’s actions out of context, and fails to see that a regional competition with the United States becomes a need to attain security, as opposed to a global ‘good vs evil’ battle for hegemony and a lust for power. Brands and Beckley talk about the aspect of encirclement in China’s strategic point of view, yet fail to understand and appreciate what it actually means.

In conclusion, if you don’t want a war with China, stop trying to encircle it militarily. These types of articles that argue that Beijing has a “closing strategic window” to get what it wants and that it “must resort to war” are extremely dangerous because they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think that your enemy has no other choice but to pursue war against you, what does that make you do? It makes you prepare for one in response and miscalculate that there is no other option. This is precisely what happened in 1914, when Imperial Germany decided to pre-emptively attack France through Belgium because it believed war was inevitable and that the allies would attack them first if they didn’t act.

Wars arise from miscalculations and the principle of the “security dilemma,” where mutual insecurity becomes a self-affirming spiral of mutual distrust and militarization. The US fears China’s rise, which leads to them trying to contain it, which Beijing responds to, setting in motion a tit-for-tat series of responses. These authors are advocating not a solution to the problem but making it worse through framing China as being in peril, with no hope other than to soon make war while it still has the chance.