October 3, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has emerged as the most formidable economic and military power since World War II. Most troubling, some of their top supporters are citizens of the United States who have been investing in China’s rise for years – Wall Street and Big Tech. This has fueled Chinese ambition to the point that they want and fell they can become the World’s only superpower. Our response to their ambition has been complicity.
Conservative talk show host Mark Levin warns that China is preparing for war, building the biggest navy the world has ever seen, creating military islands in the South China Sea, creating 27 bases in our hemisphere, and rapidly advancing and commercializing new military technologies. Further they are building a strong alliance group with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Levin contends that the U.S. is totally unprepared for war – economically as a nation, psychologically as a citizenry, without competency in our leadership. Marco Rubio advocates for the development of a strong alliance among Japan, South Korea, Australia and the U.S. to defend the South China Sea.
Direct military comparisons between the United States and China shows that on balance they are at a fairly comparable state, but a trend line favoring China. In particular, China has a superior Navy that the U.S. is unlikely to match. The CCP’s view is that if there is conflict much of it would be maritime, which would favor their naval superiority.
This segment completes the analysis of the United State’s status on the eight reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. Ray Dalio’s model, that was introduced in Segments 2 & 3, concluded that the United States is in decline. The last nine segments confirms that conclusion.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has emerged as the most formidable economic and military power since World War II. Most troubling, some of their top supporters are citizens of the United States who have been investing in China’s rise for years – Wall Street and Big Tech. This has fueled Chinese ambition to the point that they want and fell they can become the World’s only superpower. Our response to their ambition has been complicity.
Conservative talk show host Mark Levin warns that China is preparing for war, building the biggest navy the world has ever seen, creating military islands in the South China Sea, creating 27 bases in our hemisphere, and rapidly advancing and commercializing new military technologies. Further they are building a strong alliance group with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Levin contends that the U.S. is totally unprepared for war – economically as a nation, psychologically as a citizenry, without competency in our leadership. Marco Rubio advocates for the development of a strong alliance among Japan, South Korea, Australia and the U.S. to defend the South China Sea.
Direct military comparisons between the United States and China shows that on balance they are at a fairly comparable state, but a trend line favoring China. In particular, China has a superior Navy that the U.S. is unlikely to match. The CCP’s view is that if there is conflict much of it would be maritime, which would favor their naval superiority.
This segment completes the analysis of the United State’s status on the eight reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. Ray Dalio’s model, that was introduced in Segments 2 & 3, concluded that the United States is in decline. The last nine segments confirms that conclusion.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 13
ROMAN DECLINE #8: INVASION OF FOREIGNERS – EXCERPTS
Under the leadership of General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the most formidable economic and military opponent that the United States has seen since World War II. And unlike the U.S., China’s ambition is fueled not by a desire for global freedom and prosperity but by a desire for complete and total global supremacy. In the eyes of China’s Communist leaders, China’s history is one of thousands of years of glory the have only recently been interrupted by Western meddling.
Most troubling, some of the top supporters of the Chinese Communist Party are citizens of the United States who have been investing in China’s rise for years, waiting for the inevitable rise of this one-backward economy. Many of these people currently work on Wall Street, where billions of dollars of American capital are pushed into Chinese investments every day. Others are founders and current leaders of tech companies in Silicon Valley who see China as an ally in manufacturing and an enormous market for their products. Too often, these people are former government officials who made the policies that pushed the U.S. into the arms of China in the first place.
Clearly, the party is no longer hiding its plans for global supremacy. China was not “a historical inevitability,” but the result of a series of extremely bad decisions, almost all of which were made by the elite political class in the United States. As China rose, officials from the U.S. government helped them at every step of the way, failing all the while to see the threat that was right before their eyes.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023).
WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY ALLOWED TO HAPPEN: Chinese influence and control extends far beyond its own neighborhood. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet are only the crisis points within China’s immediate sphere of influence, and countries like North Korea are little more than territorial extension of the Chinese state. The majority of Chinese economic and political influence is being extended much farther afield, to the copper mines of Africa and Latin America, the land routes of Central Asia, and the energy fields of the Persian Gulf. Vladimir Putin’s ruinous war in Ukraine, and the resulting sanctions on Russia’s economic system, have virtually ensured that the entire Russian Federation – the largest sovereign landmass in the world – will become a Chinese economic dependency.
It is concerning enough that so much of the Earth’s surface and its population will be under the influence of a state dedicated to the overthrow of American power – what’s more concerning still is the shape that new power will take. The spread of Chinese power across the world means the spread of environmental damage and exploitation, abusive labor conditions, ruinous debt accumulation, poor infrastructure and sex trafficking. There is no doubt that, on net, the rise of Chinese hegemony represents a negative and threatening prospect for nearly every country in the world.
It is therefore incumbent on the world’s only superpower, the United States of America, to stop it. Unfortunately, in recent years America has become compromised. In 2020 alone, a year in which much of global trade was disrupted, the U.S. still managed to be the largest importer of Chinese goods in the world, sending the CCP a whopping $452 billion. The Chinese, moreover, have infiltrated American business and finance at nearly all levels, acquitting American companies, become the largest shareholders in many American industries, buying up American real estate, forcing the transfer to China of American technology, and luring away the vast majority of American manufacturing. In Chicago, where I live, the epidemic of high-rise luxury real estate construction – contributing to a city-wide housing shortage, price hikes, and a housing affordability crisis – has been driven in large part by Chinese investment.
Big Tech, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the universities are all dependent on Chinese money and markets to keep their profits trending upward. Their behavior in that last two decades closely parallels Russia in the 1990s, when under Boris Yeltsin and a handful of oligarchs looted and sold off the country’s resources to enrich themselves while ordinary Russian people were plunged into chaos and poverty. The consequences of this were most visible during COVID-19, when nearly all U.S. corporations, universities, and media rushed to defend the actions and decision-making of the Chinese government, helping the CCP cover up the origins of the virus by deeming anyone who disagreed with the Official Beijing line as a “racist” of “crackpot” or “conspiracy theorist.” It also became painfully clear that U.S. industry had outsourced the most basic capabilities: America, the most technologically advanced industrial country in history, could not even make its own masks or ventilators.
The only hope for countering the spread of Chinese influence is the United States, but American elites are busy dismantling the sources of American economic and military power to the benefit of the Chinese in order to enrich themselves. If this process continues, there will simply be no hope for preventing a Chinese-dominated future for the world. Having come from North Korea, it is difficult to convey how depressing this all is. Chinese hegemony promises only to spread the North Korean experience to more people around the world.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
The Communist Party of China has shown itself to be a great force for evil. The PRC’s strategy is to thwart the aspirations and the basic human rights of anyone, for anyone who yearns to be free is perceived, by means of its distorted prism, as being the enemy of the powers of a state intent on unbridled power and domination. Joe Biden, has, over his career, and most particularly during the presidency of Barack Obama, proven himself to be the coauthor of America’s submission to China’s patently undemocratic objective. China knows that with a sop or bribe of millions, it buys billions more. The corrupted, know the corrupt.
Source: America’s #1 Adversary by John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and Richard Levine (2020)
CHINA’S NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY: China’s leaders see China as a country that is “moving closer to center stage” to achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” This ambition permeated China’s national security strategy and the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) role in supporting the party. Since the early 1980s, when China initiated its Reform and Opening policy, China’s economy has grown rapidly. The CCP remained focused primarily on economic growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and in the early 2000s, it identified the initial decades of the 21st century as a “period of strategic opportunity” in the international environment that would allow China to focus on building “comprehensive national power.” The CCP’s contemporary strategic objectives are to:
Source: China Military Power 2019, A Defense Intelligence Agency Report. (2019)
OUR RESPONSE: The first U.S.-China summit of the Biden administration in 2021 started as most do. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan welcomed their counterparts and laid out their view of the state of the relationship. Then came the Chinese’s response. The CCP’s foreign affairs chief, Yang Jiechi, looked across the table and began reciting China’s achievements, how far it had come and how strong it was and stronger still it would soon be. He then turned his sights to America. America must accept decline. Yang declared. Stop promoting democratic values. Stop thinking of itself as the global leader. The dialogue grew heated. After a response from Secretary Blinken, Minister Yang shot back: “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” If it wasn’t already clear, this message crystallized China’s view: the sun is setting on America.
Washington has been much too slow to adapt to emerging technologies that will define power in the digital age. China has clear plans to shape how technologies are developed and used around the world, plans that give the state access to user information and reject notions of privacy and liberty. The U.S. has pushed back selectively, as in the effort to block Huawei’s 5G systems from U.S. and allied markets. Otherwise, Washington has failed to muster an alternative vision for a free and innovative digital world.
China has also usurped much of our leadership of the major organs of global governance. The sins of the World Health Organization (WHO) at the outbreak of COVID-19 revealed the rot. Those tasked with protecting global health covered up bad news out of China by categorizing it as a developing country, which makes it – one of the richest countries in the world – eligible for favorable loans. We have not held these institutions accountable for undermining U.S. interests, and now authoritarianism is on the march.
Finally, though the beacon of freedom still shines, U.S. diplomatic influence in both big global institutions and foreign capitals is fading. The humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and our failure to deter Vladimir Putin’s aggression signaled to many that America was in retreat. Moreover, China has sought to dominate the next generation of diplomacy: forging new relationships and shaping the rules of the road for emerging technologies. It need not be this way. These outcomes are the result of choices, and it is past time to make different choices that renew America.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023)
OUR CURRENT STATUS: “We have a Marxist revolution that is destroying us from within, while the enemy gathers abroad, conservative talk show host Mark Levin told Sean Hannity’s Fox News audience on Monday night, April 10. Levin warned that the United States “needs to prepare for war with China,” and he said it twice. “There is an axis of powers against us right now. It’s China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This is no joke,” Levin said: “China hasn’t built the biggest Navy, on the face of the Earth, military islands in the South China Sea, over 27 bases of different kinds in our hemisphere, a deep-water naval base in Somalia … You have a China with a base on the western coast of Africa facing us, killer satellites, nuclear missiles.”
“You think they’re building all that to defeat Taiwan? They’re building all that to defeat us. They’re not going to be satisfied with Taiwan. They’re in battles now with the Philippines, Japan, even Viet Nam, Australia’s being threatened. Levin called it “a big damn deal,” and he delivered a message that Americans may not want to hear.
“We need to prepare for war against China. I don’t mean to go to war. I don’t mean to initiate war. But they are preparing for war. We are completely unprepared as a nation, psychologically. We are completely unprepared economically and immigration-wise, in securing our border. Our military is not prepared in the sense that they’re pushing this woke ideology. Our military budgets do not reflect the threats that we are facing in the world around us.
Levin continues, “they’ve only communicated it in 10,000 different ways, whether it’s violating our air space, navigable waters, threatening our ships, threatening our country, threatening our people. What else can they do, short of attacking? They’re not going to be satisfied with Taiwan. This is a big damn deal. And we don’t have the military brass at the Pentagon to deal with this, nor is the secretary of defense or the secretary of state. We’ve never been so weak. That’s what Xi sees. He sees what I see. He sees what the rest of the damn world sees…”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla), appearing on Fox News said, “We should stop pretending that we’re not headed towards something there. We are,” Rubio said. “And … if they were to take Taiwan – it’s not just about the small island off the coast of China. That gives them effective control over all of the eastern Pacific or East Asia, 70% of global commerce. I mean they could literally shut us down. They could clamp down and close down our economy, like COVID times 50. That would be a strategic major moment in world history – not a good one for America.”
Rubio said the U.S. isn’t alone in wanting to contain China. He said the U.S. should be “focused on building alliances with Japan, with South Korea, with all these countries that want to be helpful and have capacity. “The Japanese are actually very capable. The Australians as well, it doesn’t have to be us alone. All these countries have an interest there.”
“But we need to take that seriously. You know, look, I’m concerned about Joe Biden. If I were the Chinese and Joe Biden is the president, they’re probably trying to figure out, we need to do this while that guy’s in office.”
Source: CNS news: Mark Levin: “We Must Prepare for War Against China … Because They Want War by Susan Jones (4/11/2023)
WHAT WE FACE: The world revolution in military affairs is proceeding to a new stage. Long-range, precise, smart, stealthy, and unmanned weapons and equipment are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Outer space and cyberspace have become new commanding heights in strategic competition among all parties. The form of war is accelerating its evolution to informatization. The aforementioned revolutionary changes in military technologies and the form of war have not only has a significant impact on the international political and military landscapes but also posed new and severe challenges to China’s military security.
China’s approach to funding security requirements has been deliberate and substantial. China’s military spending increased by an average of 10% (inflation adjusted) per year from 2000 to 2016 and has gradually slowed to 5 to 7% during the past two years. The official defense budget has remained at 1.2 to 1.4% of GDP, allowing for steady, sustainable expenditure and qualitative improvements throughout the PLA. China has also benefited from “latecomer advantage.” In other words, China has not had to invest in costly R&D of new technologies to the same degree as the United States. Rather, China has routinely adopted the best and most effective platforms found in foreign militaries through direct purchase, retrofits, or theft of intellectual property. By doing so, China has been able to focus on expediting its military modernization at a small fraction or the original cost.
The PLA often uses the term “informatization” to describe the transformation process of becoming a modern military that can operate in the digital age. The PLA uses the term “informatized warfare” to describe the process of acquiring, transmitting, processing, and using information to conduct joint military operations across the domains of land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum during a conflict. PLA writings highlight the benefit of near-real-time shared awareness of the battlefield in enabling quick, unified effort to seize tactical opportunities.
The Chinese military strategy documents also emphasize the growing importance of offensive air operation, long-distance mobility operation, and space and cyber operations. In other words, China expects that its future wars mostly will be fought outside its borders and will involve conflict in the maritime domain. China promulgated this through its most recent update to its “military strategic guidelines.” A key driver of ongoing military reforms is Beijing’s desire to increase the PLA’s ability to carry out joint operations on a modern, high-tech battlefield.
New technologies which are being introduced into the PLA enable sharing of information – intelligence, battlefield, logistical and weather reports – on robust redundant communication networks to improve commanders’ situational awareness. In particular, the transmission of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data in near-real time to commanders in the field could facilitate the commanders’ decision-making process and make operations more efficient.
The PLA uses military deception to reduce the effectiveness of adversaries’ reconnaissance and to deceive adversaries about the PLA’s warfighting intentions, actions, or major targets. PLA tradition emphasized deception and psychological manipulation to create asymmetric advantages and enable surprise The PLA has a longstanding doctrine for deception, and claims that it regularly practices deception during training. PLA sources describe military deception as a form of combat support. Skillfully deployed deception can paralyze an enemy force and achieve decisive results.
Source: China Military Power 2019: Modernizing a Force to Fight and Win by U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (2019)
MILITARY COMPARISONS: Comparison of China and United States Military Strengths (2023):
An Interactive Look at the U.S.-China Military Scoreboard (2018): Over the past two decades China’s People’s Liberation Army has transformed itself from a large but antiquated force into a capable, modern military. Although China continues to lag the United States in terms of aggregate military hardware and operational skills, it has improved its relative capabilities in many critical areas. To advance the public debate RAND used open, unclassified sources to compile this report.
Each scorecard assesses the relative advantage or disadvantage of U.S. and Chinese forces in diverse types of conflicts, at varying distances from the Chinese mainland, at different points in time from 1996 to 2017. Advantage means that one side is able to achieve its primary objectives in an operationally relevant time period while the other side would have trouble in doing so.
Closer to Mainland China
Operational Areas 1996 2017
Chinese air base attack Major Advantage U.S. Major Advantage China
U.S. vs. Chinese air superiority Major Advantage U.S. Approximate Parity
U.S. airspace penetration Advantage U.S. Approximate Parity
U.S. air base attack Approximate Parity Advantage U.S.
Chinese anti-surface warfare Major Advantage U.S. Advantage China
U.S. counterspace (satellites, etc.) Advantage China Approximate Parity
Chinese counterspace Major Advantage U.S. Approximate Parity
U.S. vs. China cyberwar Major Advantage U.S. Advantage U.S.
Nuclear Stability High Confidence U.S. High Confidence U.S
Low Confidence China Medium Confidence China
Source: Rand Corporation: An Interactive Look at the U.S. – China Military Scoreboard (2018)
[Note: The most important aspect of the above charts is to note the trend between 1996 and 2017. I would guess a similar trend in absolute terms would have occurred between 2017 & 2023
Expert’s Warning of US Navy on China: Bigger Fleet Almost Always Wins: As China continues to grow what is already the world’s largest navy, a professor at the US Naval War college has a warning for American military planners: In naval warfare, the bigger fleet almost always wins.
Pentagon leaders have identified China as the US military’s “pacing threat.” But fleet size numbers show that the US military can’t keep pace with China’s naval growth. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surpassed the US Navy in fleet size something around 2020 and now has around 340 warships, according to the Pentagon. China’s fleet is expected to grow to 400 ships in the next two years. Meanwhile, the US fleet sits under 300 ships, and the Pentagon’s goal is to have 350 manned ships, still well behind China, by 2045, according to the US Navy’s Navigation Plan 2022.
There is worry US industry cannot keep up with the demand of providing weapons assistance to Ukraine to fight Russia’s invasion while keeping US weapons arms inventories at adequate levels. Adm. Daryl Caudie, commander of the US Fleet Forces Command, last week called on the nation’s defense industries to step up their game, saying “you’re not delivering the ordnance we need.” “It’s so essential to winning. And I can’t do that without the ordnance.”
Caudle’s boss, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said, “The United States Navy is not going to be able to match the PLAN missile for missile.” And if the US Navy can’t match China’s missile for missile, or ship for ship, where can it find an edge?
Source: CNN World: Expert’s warning to US Navy on China: Bigger fleet almost always wins by Brad Lendon (1/17/2023)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
ROMAN DECLINE #8: INVASION OF FOREIGNERS – EXCERPTS
Under the leadership of General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the most formidable economic and military opponent that the United States has seen since World War II. And unlike the U.S., China’s ambition is fueled not by a desire for global freedom and prosperity but by a desire for complete and total global supremacy. In the eyes of China’s Communist leaders, China’s history is one of thousands of years of glory the have only recently been interrupted by Western meddling.
Most troubling, some of the top supporters of the Chinese Communist Party are citizens of the United States who have been investing in China’s rise for years, waiting for the inevitable rise of this one-backward economy. Many of these people currently work on Wall Street, where billions of dollars of American capital are pushed into Chinese investments every day. Others are founders and current leaders of tech companies in Silicon Valley who see China as an ally in manufacturing and an enormous market for their products. Too often, these people are former government officials who made the policies that pushed the U.S. into the arms of China in the first place.
Clearly, the party is no longer hiding its plans for global supremacy. China was not “a historical inevitability,” but the result of a series of extremely bad decisions, almost all of which were made by the elite political class in the United States. As China rose, officials from the U.S. government helped them at every step of the way, failing all the while to see the threat that was right before their eyes.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023).
WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY ALLOWED TO HAPPEN: Chinese influence and control extends far beyond its own neighborhood. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet are only the crisis points within China’s immediate sphere of influence, and countries like North Korea are little more than territorial extension of the Chinese state. The majority of Chinese economic and political influence is being extended much farther afield, to the copper mines of Africa and Latin America, the land routes of Central Asia, and the energy fields of the Persian Gulf. Vladimir Putin’s ruinous war in Ukraine, and the resulting sanctions on Russia’s economic system, have virtually ensured that the entire Russian Federation – the largest sovereign landmass in the world – will become a Chinese economic dependency.
It is concerning enough that so much of the Earth’s surface and its population will be under the influence of a state dedicated to the overthrow of American power – what’s more concerning still is the shape that new power will take. The spread of Chinese power across the world means the spread of environmental damage and exploitation, abusive labor conditions, ruinous debt accumulation, poor infrastructure and sex trafficking. There is no doubt that, on net, the rise of Chinese hegemony represents a negative and threatening prospect for nearly every country in the world.
It is therefore incumbent on the world’s only superpower, the United States of America, to stop it. Unfortunately, in recent years America has become compromised. In 2020 alone, a year in which much of global trade was disrupted, the U.S. still managed to be the largest importer of Chinese goods in the world, sending the CCP a whopping $452 billion. The Chinese, moreover, have infiltrated American business and finance at nearly all levels, acquitting American companies, become the largest shareholders in many American industries, buying up American real estate, forcing the transfer to China of American technology, and luring away the vast majority of American manufacturing. In Chicago, where I live, the epidemic of high-rise luxury real estate construction – contributing to a city-wide housing shortage, price hikes, and a housing affordability crisis – has been driven in large part by Chinese investment.
Big Tech, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the universities are all dependent on Chinese money and markets to keep their profits trending upward. Their behavior in that last two decades closely parallels Russia in the 1990s, when under Boris Yeltsin and a handful of oligarchs looted and sold off the country’s resources to enrich themselves while ordinary Russian people were plunged into chaos and poverty. The consequences of this were most visible during COVID-19, when nearly all U.S. corporations, universities, and media rushed to defend the actions and decision-making of the Chinese government, helping the CCP cover up the origins of the virus by deeming anyone who disagreed with the Official Beijing line as a “racist” of “crackpot” or “conspiracy theorist.” It also became painfully clear that U.S. industry had outsourced the most basic capabilities: America, the most technologically advanced industrial country in history, could not even make its own masks or ventilators.
The only hope for countering the spread of Chinese influence is the United States, but American elites are busy dismantling the sources of American economic and military power to the benefit of the Chinese in order to enrich themselves. If this process continues, there will simply be no hope for preventing a Chinese-dominated future for the world. Having come from North Korea, it is difficult to convey how depressing this all is. Chinese hegemony promises only to spread the North Korean experience to more people around the world.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
The Communist Party of China has shown itself to be a great force for evil. The PRC’s strategy is to thwart the aspirations and the basic human rights of anyone, for anyone who yearns to be free is perceived, by means of its distorted prism, as being the enemy of the powers of a state intent on unbridled power and domination. Joe Biden, has, over his career, and most particularly during the presidency of Barack Obama, proven himself to be the coauthor of America’s submission to China’s patently undemocratic objective. China knows that with a sop or bribe of millions, it buys billions more. The corrupted, know the corrupt.
Source: America’s #1 Adversary by John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and Richard Levine (2020)
CHINA’S NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY: China’s leaders see China as a country that is “moving closer to center stage” to achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” This ambition permeated China’s national security strategy and the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) role in supporting the party. Since the early 1980s, when China initiated its Reform and Opening policy, China’s economy has grown rapidly. The CCP remained focused primarily on economic growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and in the early 2000s, it identified the initial decades of the 21st century as a “period of strategic opportunity” in the international environment that would allow China to focus on building “comprehensive national power.” The CCP’s contemporary strategic objectives are to:
- Perpetuate CCP rule.
- Maintain domestic stability.
- Sustain economic growth and development.
- Defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
- Secure China’s status as a great power.
- Become the World’s superpower.
Source: China Military Power 2019, A Defense Intelligence Agency Report. (2019)
OUR RESPONSE: The first U.S.-China summit of the Biden administration in 2021 started as most do. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan welcomed their counterparts and laid out their view of the state of the relationship. Then came the Chinese’s response. The CCP’s foreign affairs chief, Yang Jiechi, looked across the table and began reciting China’s achievements, how far it had come and how strong it was and stronger still it would soon be. He then turned his sights to America. America must accept decline. Yang declared. Stop promoting democratic values. Stop thinking of itself as the global leader. The dialogue grew heated. After a response from Secretary Blinken, Minister Yang shot back: “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” If it wasn’t already clear, this message crystallized China’s view: the sun is setting on America.
Washington has been much too slow to adapt to emerging technologies that will define power in the digital age. China has clear plans to shape how technologies are developed and used around the world, plans that give the state access to user information and reject notions of privacy and liberty. The U.S. has pushed back selectively, as in the effort to block Huawei’s 5G systems from U.S. and allied markets. Otherwise, Washington has failed to muster an alternative vision for a free and innovative digital world.
China has also usurped much of our leadership of the major organs of global governance. The sins of the World Health Organization (WHO) at the outbreak of COVID-19 revealed the rot. Those tasked with protecting global health covered up bad news out of China by categorizing it as a developing country, which makes it – one of the richest countries in the world – eligible for favorable loans. We have not held these institutions accountable for undermining U.S. interests, and now authoritarianism is on the march.
Finally, though the beacon of freedom still shines, U.S. diplomatic influence in both big global institutions and foreign capitals is fading. The humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and our failure to deter Vladimir Putin’s aggression signaled to many that America was in retreat. Moreover, China has sought to dominate the next generation of diplomacy: forging new relationships and shaping the rules of the road for emerging technologies. It need not be this way. These outcomes are the result of choices, and it is past time to make different choices that renew America.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023)
OUR CURRENT STATUS: “We have a Marxist revolution that is destroying us from within, while the enemy gathers abroad, conservative talk show host Mark Levin told Sean Hannity’s Fox News audience on Monday night, April 10. Levin warned that the United States “needs to prepare for war with China,” and he said it twice. “There is an axis of powers against us right now. It’s China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This is no joke,” Levin said: “China hasn’t built the biggest Navy, on the face of the Earth, military islands in the South China Sea, over 27 bases of different kinds in our hemisphere, a deep-water naval base in Somalia … You have a China with a base on the western coast of Africa facing us, killer satellites, nuclear missiles.”
“You think they’re building all that to defeat Taiwan? They’re building all that to defeat us. They’re not going to be satisfied with Taiwan. They’re in battles now with the Philippines, Japan, even Viet Nam, Australia’s being threatened. Levin called it “a big damn deal,” and he delivered a message that Americans may not want to hear.
“We need to prepare for war against China. I don’t mean to go to war. I don’t mean to initiate war. But they are preparing for war. We are completely unprepared as a nation, psychologically. We are completely unprepared economically and immigration-wise, in securing our border. Our military is not prepared in the sense that they’re pushing this woke ideology. Our military budgets do not reflect the threats that we are facing in the world around us.
Levin continues, “they’ve only communicated it in 10,000 different ways, whether it’s violating our air space, navigable waters, threatening our ships, threatening our country, threatening our people. What else can they do, short of attacking? They’re not going to be satisfied with Taiwan. This is a big damn deal. And we don’t have the military brass at the Pentagon to deal with this, nor is the secretary of defense or the secretary of state. We’ve never been so weak. That’s what Xi sees. He sees what I see. He sees what the rest of the damn world sees…”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla), appearing on Fox News said, “We should stop pretending that we’re not headed towards something there. We are,” Rubio said. “And … if they were to take Taiwan – it’s not just about the small island off the coast of China. That gives them effective control over all of the eastern Pacific or East Asia, 70% of global commerce. I mean they could literally shut us down. They could clamp down and close down our economy, like COVID times 50. That would be a strategic major moment in world history – not a good one for America.”
Rubio said the U.S. isn’t alone in wanting to contain China. He said the U.S. should be “focused on building alliances with Japan, with South Korea, with all these countries that want to be helpful and have capacity. “The Japanese are actually very capable. The Australians as well, it doesn’t have to be us alone. All these countries have an interest there.”
“But we need to take that seriously. You know, look, I’m concerned about Joe Biden. If I were the Chinese and Joe Biden is the president, they’re probably trying to figure out, we need to do this while that guy’s in office.”
Source: CNS news: Mark Levin: “We Must Prepare for War Against China … Because They Want War by Susan Jones (4/11/2023)
WHAT WE FACE: The world revolution in military affairs is proceeding to a new stage. Long-range, precise, smart, stealthy, and unmanned weapons and equipment are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Outer space and cyberspace have become new commanding heights in strategic competition among all parties. The form of war is accelerating its evolution to informatization. The aforementioned revolutionary changes in military technologies and the form of war have not only has a significant impact on the international political and military landscapes but also posed new and severe challenges to China’s military security.
China’s approach to funding security requirements has been deliberate and substantial. China’s military spending increased by an average of 10% (inflation adjusted) per year from 2000 to 2016 and has gradually slowed to 5 to 7% during the past two years. The official defense budget has remained at 1.2 to 1.4% of GDP, allowing for steady, sustainable expenditure and qualitative improvements throughout the PLA. China has also benefited from “latecomer advantage.” In other words, China has not had to invest in costly R&D of new technologies to the same degree as the United States. Rather, China has routinely adopted the best and most effective platforms found in foreign militaries through direct purchase, retrofits, or theft of intellectual property. By doing so, China has been able to focus on expediting its military modernization at a small fraction or the original cost.
The PLA often uses the term “informatization” to describe the transformation process of becoming a modern military that can operate in the digital age. The PLA uses the term “informatized warfare” to describe the process of acquiring, transmitting, processing, and using information to conduct joint military operations across the domains of land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum during a conflict. PLA writings highlight the benefit of near-real-time shared awareness of the battlefield in enabling quick, unified effort to seize tactical opportunities.
The Chinese military strategy documents also emphasize the growing importance of offensive air operation, long-distance mobility operation, and space and cyber operations. In other words, China expects that its future wars mostly will be fought outside its borders and will involve conflict in the maritime domain. China promulgated this through its most recent update to its “military strategic guidelines.” A key driver of ongoing military reforms is Beijing’s desire to increase the PLA’s ability to carry out joint operations on a modern, high-tech battlefield.
New technologies which are being introduced into the PLA enable sharing of information – intelligence, battlefield, logistical and weather reports – on robust redundant communication networks to improve commanders’ situational awareness. In particular, the transmission of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data in near-real time to commanders in the field could facilitate the commanders’ decision-making process and make operations more efficient.
The PLA uses military deception to reduce the effectiveness of adversaries’ reconnaissance and to deceive adversaries about the PLA’s warfighting intentions, actions, or major targets. PLA tradition emphasized deception and psychological manipulation to create asymmetric advantages and enable surprise The PLA has a longstanding doctrine for deception, and claims that it regularly practices deception during training. PLA sources describe military deception as a form of combat support. Skillfully deployed deception can paralyze an enemy force and achieve decisive results.
Source: China Military Power 2019: Modernizing a Force to Fight and Win by U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (2019)
MILITARY COMPARISONS: Comparison of China and United States Military Strengths (2023):
- Manpower – China has the edge.
- Airpower – United States has the edge.
- Land Power – China has the edge.
- Naval Power – China has the edge.
- Natural Resources – United States has the edge.
- Financials – China has the edge.
- Logistics – United States has the edge.
- Geography – United States has the edge.
An Interactive Look at the U.S.-China Military Scoreboard (2018): Over the past two decades China’s People’s Liberation Army has transformed itself from a large but antiquated force into a capable, modern military. Although China continues to lag the United States in terms of aggregate military hardware and operational skills, it has improved its relative capabilities in many critical areas. To advance the public debate RAND used open, unclassified sources to compile this report.
Each scorecard assesses the relative advantage or disadvantage of U.S. and Chinese forces in diverse types of conflicts, at varying distances from the Chinese mainland, at different points in time from 1996 to 2017. Advantage means that one side is able to achieve its primary objectives in an operationally relevant time period while the other side would have trouble in doing so.
Closer to Mainland China
Operational Areas 1996 2017
Chinese air base attack Major Advantage U.S. Major Advantage China
U.S. vs. Chinese air superiority Major Advantage U.S. Approximate Parity
U.S. airspace penetration Advantage U.S. Approximate Parity
U.S. air base attack Approximate Parity Advantage U.S.
Chinese anti-surface warfare Major Advantage U.S. Advantage China
U.S. counterspace (satellites, etc.) Advantage China Approximate Parity
Chinese counterspace Major Advantage U.S. Approximate Parity
U.S. vs. China cyberwar Major Advantage U.S. Advantage U.S.
Nuclear Stability High Confidence U.S. High Confidence U.S
Low Confidence China Medium Confidence China
Source: Rand Corporation: An Interactive Look at the U.S. – China Military Scoreboard (2018)
[Note: The most important aspect of the above charts is to note the trend between 1996 and 2017. I would guess a similar trend in absolute terms would have occurred between 2017 & 2023
Expert’s Warning of US Navy on China: Bigger Fleet Almost Always Wins: As China continues to grow what is already the world’s largest navy, a professor at the US Naval War college has a warning for American military planners: In naval warfare, the bigger fleet almost always wins.
Pentagon leaders have identified China as the US military’s “pacing threat.” But fleet size numbers show that the US military can’t keep pace with China’s naval growth. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surpassed the US Navy in fleet size something around 2020 and now has around 340 warships, according to the Pentagon. China’s fleet is expected to grow to 400 ships in the next two years. Meanwhile, the US fleet sits under 300 ships, and the Pentagon’s goal is to have 350 manned ships, still well behind China, by 2045, according to the US Navy’s Navigation Plan 2022.
There is worry US industry cannot keep up with the demand of providing weapons assistance to Ukraine to fight Russia’s invasion while keeping US weapons arms inventories at adequate levels. Adm. Daryl Caudie, commander of the US Fleet Forces Command, last week called on the nation’s defense industries to step up their game, saying “you’re not delivering the ordnance we need.” “It’s so essential to winning. And I can’t do that without the ordnance.”
Caudle’s boss, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said, “The United States Navy is not going to be able to match the PLAN missile for missile.” And if the US Navy can’t match China’s missile for missile, or ship for ship, where can it find an edge?
Source: CNN World: Expert’s warning to US Navy on China: Bigger fleet almost always wins by Brad Lendon (1/17/2023)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| america_13l_invasion_of_foreigners_--_segment_13.pdf |