Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met his Chinese counterpart, Liang Guanglie, in Vietnam on Monday for the first time since the two militaries suspended talks with each other last winter, calling for the two countries to prevent “mistrust, miscalculations and mistakes.”
His message seemed directed mainly at officers like Lt. Cmdr. Tony Cao of the Chinese Navy.
Days before Mr. Gates arrived in Asia, Commander Cao was aboard a frigate in the Yellow Sea, conducting China’s first war games with the Australian Navy, exercises to which, he noted pointedly, the Americans were not invited.
Nor are they likely to be, he told Australian journalists in slightly bent English, until “the United States stops selling the weapons to Taiwan and stopping spying us with the air or the surface.”
Supposedly, back in "the good old days" relations between the U.S. and the Chinese military were all warm and furry:
The Pentagon is worried that its increasingly tense relationship with the Chinese military owes itself in part to the rising leaders of Commander Cao’s generation, who, much more than the country’s military elders, view the United States as the enemy. Older Chinese officers remember a time, before the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 set relations back, when American and Chinese forces made common cause against the Soviet Union.
There is a history that goes back even before common cause was made against the Soviet Union. Howard Zinn's groundbeaking book - Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, makes it clear that in 1967, China was the demonized enemy, without whose help, opposition to the U.S. backed puppet government in Saigon couldn't have continued.
Ironically, in George Crile's 2003 book Charlie Wilson's War, Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos are lend their considerable talents to aiding the Mujaheedan to combat the Russians in Afghanistan as payback to Russia for America's "losing" the war in Vietnam.
A nation that doesn't know who it is waging war upon or why, and that can't remember who it was waging war upon and why, is a nation hell bent on fighting endless wars, forever and ever. Amen.
And lest we forget, in Korea the "yellow hordes" rolled out of China and into Korea and sent the U.S. led NATO forces into retreat, leading U.S. military strategists to conclude that U.S. must never again wage a land war in Asia. By which they meant, that the NEXT time the U.S. fought an Asian army, it would use atomic weapons.
The younger officers have known only an anti-American ideology, which casts the United States as bent on thwarting China’s rise.
“All militaries need a straw man, a perceived enemy, for solidarity,” said Huang Jing, a scholar of China’s military and leadership at the National University of Singapore. “And as a young officer or soldier, you always take the strongest of straw men to maximize the effect. Chinese military men, from the soldiers and platoon captains all the way up to the army commanders, were always taught that America would be their enemy.”
"You always take the strongest of straw men?" Well, not here in the U.S. of A. We take Iran to be our straw man. And before Iran, Iraq.
That "Chinese military men, from the soldiers and platoon captains all the way up to the army commanders, were always taught that America would be their enemy."
That is a very rational teaching, and shows the wisdom and foresight of Chinese strategists. Of course, it never has to come to war, but, with the U.S., it always seems to. China's rise as an economic power is threatening to "the powers that be" here in the U.S.
The stakes have increased as China’s armed forces, once a fairly ragtag group, have become more capable and have taken on bigger tasks. The navy, the centerpiece of China’s military expansion, has added dozens of surface ships and submarines, and is widely reported to be building its first aircraft carrier. Last month’s Yellow Sea maneuvers with the Australian Navy are but the most recent in a series of Chinese military excursions to places as diverse as New Zealand, Britain and Spain.
These Chinese military maneuvers in diverse places point to agreement between the Chinese government and the governments of these diverse locals. Upon such agreement trust is forged.
Even improved Chinese forces do not have capacity or, analysts say, the intention, to fight a more able United States military. But their increasing range and ability, and the certainty that they will only become stronger, have prompted China to assert itself regionally and challenge American dominance in the Pacific.
The intentions are not to fight. The reality is, the U.S. may choose to. Certainly, in the economic sphere, the U.S. is attempting to dictate how China should evaluate its currency. Economic self-interest has always been one of the strongest motivations for making war.
From the Chinese military’s view, this year has offered ample evidence of American ill will.
The Chinese effectively suspended official military relations early this year after President Obama met with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, and approved a $6.7 billion arms sale to Taiwan, which China regards as its territory.
Since then, the Chinese military has bristled as the State Department has offered to mediate disputes between China and its neighbors over ownership of Pacific islands and valuable seabed mineral rights. And when the American Navy conducted war games with South Korea last month in the Yellow Sea, less than 400 miles from Beijing, younger Chinese officers detected an encroaching threat.
The United States “is engaging in an increasingly tight encirclement of China and constantly challenging China’s core interests,” Rear Adm. Yang Yi, former head of strategic studies at the Chinese Army’s National Defense University, wrote in August in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, the military newspaper. “Washington will inevitably pay a costly price for its muddled decision.”
Perhaps some diplomacy is in order?
