The U.S. and China are on a collision course. A war isn’t inevitable, but is increasingly likely.
The incidents depicted in the videos below aren’t accidental nor the actions of rogue crews. They’re deliberate, calculated, choreographed, practiced, and ordered from the top. Most likely there’s weeks or months of planning behind them.
You can be very certain the Chinese pilots and ship crews who carry out these aggressive maneuvers have been carefully trained, and given very specific parameters. In both these incidents, the goal was to get closer than the last time, and convey to the Americans they might get rammed the next time.
As the U.S. shrugs off these incidents, China gradually escalates its aggressiveness of these harassments. Their spokesmen blame us. They claim our planes and warships are in their “sovereign territory.” The U.S. and its allies reject those territorial claims.
China doesn’t want to fight us if they don’t have to. They strongly prefer we accede to their demands, which amount to surrendering Taiwan and the South China Sea without a fight.
We can’t do that. A huge part of world seaborne trade passes through the South China Sea, and surrendering that waterway to China would give Beijing a stranglehold on the world economy. This also would require us to deliver 24 million Taiwanese into communist dictatorship. If we did that nobody would ever trust us again. The fallout would be enormous; for starters, Japan and South Korea almost certainly would move immediately to acquire their own nuclear weapons.
There’s also an enormous strategic problem: Taiwan makes virtually all of the world’s most advanced microprocessors. If those fabrication plants fall into Beijing’s hands, our military and space programs will be paralyzed, and our civilian economy severely harmed. And China would acquire a technological ability they don’t have now with potential to neutralize our weapons. It would make China the world’s dominant military power, able to dictate terms to everyone else.
So far China has been deterred from attacking Taiwan, but deterrence is fading. They are spending enormous sums on rapidly upgrading their military. Taking over Taiwan is their top strategic priority. They prefer to do so peacefully, but are preparing to use force. Some Western analysts expect China to invade Taiwan within the next 5 years.
After these two recent incidents, what will happen next? I think we’ll probably see them repeated a few times, then China will escalate another notch. A plane might fire tracers, a ship may fire a shot over our bow. After those warnings, at some point they’ll ram a U.S. ship and/or shoot down an American plane, claiming we invaded their territory. It will be deliberate.
We can live with these buzzing incidents, which are merely annoying, and our policy goal at this time should be to dissuade the Chinese from escalating in that fashion. To do that, we need to make them understand there will be consequences. Sanctions should be on the table, along with further economic disengagement, with the threat of a military response lurking in the background.
But I really doubt anything is going to stop them. They’ve convinced themselves they own Taiwan and the South China Sea, and their entire thinking isn’t aligned toward reaching a modus vivendi with the U.S. and its allies, but directed toward figuring out how to push us out of the region. That means the best we can hope for is a continuing standoff until either something fundamentally changes internally in China, or they conclude we have the upper hand and they can’t defeat us.