Tales of Two Republics
May 27th, 2006I’ve very much been a critic of China and Russia on these pages, criticizing these two nations for their refusal to respect human rights and Democracy, as well as for their increasing militarism. While I do consider them a threat to us, I’ve always thought of the threat as more political than anything else. Russia and China have votes on the Security Council and can sabotage just about any multilateral attempt the United States makes at accomplishing something. I have never, however, discounted the possibility of armed confrontation with these two nations. Indeed, I’ve always been a proponent of defending Taiwan against invasion, but I’ve never bought the hype that China is going to replace the United States as the world’s superpower.
Why? There is no way it can sustain the Economic growth it has sustained for a decade, and, being completely honest, I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised if the Chinese had a civil war in future years, as that has been a recurring scene in Chinese history. As far as war with America goes, it is very well possible, but I can’t see the Chinese deciding to destroy their own country.
I came across this Fred Kaplan piece about China, and he’s gone through all the reasons that the Chinese threat is overhyped by Conservatives. He dissects the annual Pentagon report on China to do this, and after he’s done, he concludes that the Chinese merely serve as a boogeyman for Conservatives to use when they want to build a million different weapon systems. To make his point, he recounts a story involving Defense Secretary McNamara:
It’s an old, recurring story, this business of latching on to China as a rationale for big weapons or budgets that would otherwise be baseless. Back in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, to build some kind of anti-ballistic-missile system. McNamara was opposed to an ABM system. He’d recently ordered a study that concluded an ABM would be futile because the Soviets could counter our defensive missiles by just slightly increasing the number of their offensive missiles. But an order was an order, so McNamara gave a speech in which he outlined all the reasons an ABM was a bad idea—then concluded that we needed to build one anyway to defend against an attack by Red China.
Paul Warnke, at the time an assistant secretary of defense, walked into McNamara’s office later that day and asked, “China bomb, Bob?” Warnke told me, many years later, that McNamara looked down at his desk, shuffled some papers, and muttered, “What else am I going to blame it on?”
I think Kaplan is about right, although I wouldn’t be as dismissive of Chinese ambitions as him. The People’s Republic is worth keeping an eye on, to be sure.
Off of the People’s Republic, I’d like to discuss The New Republic; specifically, this article on “a New Conservatism,” Night Conservatism. It’s quite the chronicle of Conservatism’s many iterations, and it correctly points out that the mood amongst Conservatives, that their rhetoric — that it’s all changing.
I’m not sure if I completely buy its premise, as there is far more to Conservatism than what it suggests, and there are many more periods of Thought in their history that go unmentioned. But, all things considered, it’s a good piece to read. Very informative.