May 1, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Are We Still on an Imperial Planet?
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece on what it felt like to be inside an imperial power in decline, “
Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark.”
Consider today’s post a stand-alone follow-up to that. Finally,
special thanks go to TD copyeditor Christopher Holmes, who is always
“number one,” and to Erica Hellerstein, TD’s intern, for a job
consistently well done. Tom.]
China as Number One?
Don’t Bet Your Bottom Dollar
By
Tom Engelhardt
Tired of Afghanistan and all those messy, oil-ish wars in the Greater
Middle East that just don’t seem to pan out? Count on one thing: part
of the U.S. military feels just the way you do, especially a largely
sidelined Navy -- and that’s undoubtedly one of the reasons why, a few
months back, the specter of China as this country’s future enemy once
again reared its ugly head.
Back before 9/11, China was, of course, the
favored future uber-enemy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and all those neocons who
signed onto
the Project for the New American Century and later staffed George W.
Bush’s administration. After all, if you wanted to build a military
beyond compare to enforce a long-term Pax Americana on the
planet, you needed a nightmare enemy large enough to justify all the
advanced weapons systems in which you planned to invest.
As late as June 2005, neocon journalist Robert Kaplan was still writing in the Atlantic about “
How We Would Fight China,”
an article with this provocative subhead: “The Middle East is just a
blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will
define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable
adversary than Russia ever was.” As everyone knows, however, that
“blip” proved far too much for the Bush administration.
Finding itself hopelessly bogged down in two ground wars with rag-tag
insurgency movements on either end of the Greater Middle Eastern
“mainland,” it let China-as-Monster-Enemy slip beneath the waves. In
the process, the Navy and, to some extent, the Air Force became adjunct
services to the Army (and the Marines). In Iraq and Afghanistan, for
instance, U.S. Navy personnel far from any body of water found
themselves
driving trucks and staffing prisons.
It was the worst of times for the admirals, and probably not so great
for the flyboys either, particularly after Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates
began pushing pilotless drones as the true force of the future. Naturally, a
no-dogfight world
in which the U.S. military eternally engages enemies without
significant air forces is a problematic basis for proposing future Air
Force budgets.
There’s no reason to be surprised then that, as the war in Iraq began to wind down in
2009-2010, the “Chinese naval threat”
began to
quietly reemerge. China was, after all, immensely economically
successful and beginning to flex its muscles in local territorial
waters. The alarms
sounded by military types or pundits associated with them grew stronger in the early months of 2011 (as did
news of
weapons systems being developed to deal with future Chinese air and sea
power). “Beware America, time is running out!” warned retired Air
Force lieutenant general and Fox News contributor Thomas G. McInerney
while describing China’s first experimental stealth jet fighter.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
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