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On both sides, the talk only grows grimmer. Just the other day, speaking about China, Admiral John Aquilino, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned that "I'm responsible [for finding a way] to prevent this conflict today and -- if deterrence were to fail -- to be able to fight and win." Fight and win indeed! And if that doesn't seem clear enough to you, he's talking about a future war between the planet's two nuclear-armed great powers. His comments were mild compared to those of General Mike Minihan, head of the Air Mobility Command, who recently predicted war with China within -- yes! -- two years! ("My gut tells me [we] will fight in 2025.") And don't think it's just the admirals and generals either. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, while not exactly predicting such a conflict, Minihan-style, did recently say of China, "We obviously have to prepare, to be prepared to fight and win that war."
That war! Meanwhile, after a -- yes, this is not a misprint -- congressional war game simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the head of the new House committee on China, Mike Gallagher (R-WI), insisted that Washington needed to arm that island "to the teeth." At the same time, the U.S. military is upgrading its forces in the region, its military positions in the Pacific, and its training exercises for just such a future conflict. At the same time, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has turned a cold shoulder to the Biden administration's attempts to restart high-level talks of any sort while, as the New York Times reported recently, his country has begun a significant buildup of its nuclear arsenal.
With all of that grimly in mind, why not take a step back from this increasingly overheated world of ours and let TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, explore what lies behind such tensions: the rise and fall of great powers on a distinctly disturbed planet. Tom
The Rise of China (and the Fall of the U.S.?)
Tectonic Eruptions in Eurasia Erode America's Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe. During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, America's wartime commanders -- George Marshall in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe, and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific -- knew that their main strategic objective was to gain control over the vast Eurasian landmass. Whether you're talking about desert warfare in North Africa, the D-Day landing at Normandy, bloody battles on the Burma-India border, or the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, the Allied strategy in World War II involved constricting the reach of the Axis powers globally and then wresting that very continent from their grasp.
That past, though seemingly distant, is still shaping the world we live in. Those legendary generals and admirals are, of course, long gone, but the geopolitics they practiced at such a cost still has profound implications. For just as Washington encircled Eurasia to win a great war and global hegemony, so Beijing is now involved in a far less militarized reprise of that reach for global power.
And to be blunt, these days, China's gain is America's loss. Every step Beijing takes to consolidate its control over Eurasia simultaneously weakens Washington's presence on that strategic continent and so erodes its once formidable global power.
A Cold War Strategy
After four embattled years imbibing lessons about geopolitics with their morning coffee and bourbon nightcaps, America's wartime generation of generals and admirals understood, intuitively, how to respond to the future alliance of the two great communist powers in Moscow and Beijing.
In 1948, following his move from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-torn Western Europe, laying the economic foundations for the formation of the NATO alliance just a year later. After a similar move from the wartime Allied headquarters in London to the White House in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped complete a chain of military bastions along Eurasia's Pacific littoral by signing a series of mutual-security pacts -- with South Korea in 1953, Taiwan in 1954, and Japan in 1960. For the next 70 years, that island chain would serve as the strategic hinge on Washington's global power, critical for both the defense of North America and dominance over Eurasia.
After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, America's postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains. For more than 40 years, their unrelenting efforts to dominate Eurasia assured Washington of an upper hand and, in the end, victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the U.S. ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas -- the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.
Thanks to diplomat George Kennan, that strategy gained the name "containment" and, with it, Washington could, in effect, sit back and wait while the Sino-Soviet bloc imploded through diplomatic blunder and military misadventure. After the Beijing-Moscow split of 1962 and China's subsequent collapse into the chaos of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to break out of its geopolitical isolation -- in the Congo, Cuba, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan. In the last and most disastrous of those interventions, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to term "the bleeding wound," the Red Army deployed 110,000 soldiers for nine years of brutal Afghan combat, hemorrhaging money and manpower in ways that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In that heady moment of seeming victory as the sole superpower left on planet Earth, a younger generation of Washington foreign-policy leaders, trained not on battlefields but in think tanks, took little more than a decade to let that unprecedented global power start to slip away. Toward the close of the Cold War era in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an academic working in the State Department's policy planning unit, won instant fame among Washington insiders with his seductive phrase "the end of history." He argued that America's liberal world order would soon sweep up all of humanity on an endless tide of capitalist democracy. As he put it in a much-cited essay: "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident" in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism" seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture."
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