Ambassador Chas Freeman on Our Cold War Against China, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

 Read full text: https://www.unz.com/runz/ambassador-chas-freeman-on-our-cold-war-against-china/#comment-6895392

....In 1986 Freeman was appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and played a key role in negotiating the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola along with the independence of Namibia. Appointed U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1989, he held that post for the next three years, including during the very crucial period of America’s Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and then served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs from 1993 to 1994. His professional stature led him to be selected as the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica‘s entry on “Diplomacy,” and he accumulated a long list of impressive awards and honors during his decades of government service:

In his thirty-year diplomatic career, Freeman received two Distinguished Public Service Awards, three Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, two Distinguished Honor Awards, the CIA Medallion, a Defense Meritorious Service Award, and four Superior Honor Awards.[10] He speaks fluent Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic and has a working knowledge of several other languages.[4].........

...... A long 2020 discussion of the same subject was so detailed and thoughtful that large sections of it are worth quoting:

Washington has declared war on China. The administration and its allies hope that the war will be “cold,” but have no strategy for keeping it so. I find it noteworthy that the most belligerently anti-Chinese members of the current U.S. Senate are also its youngest. They came to adulthood after the end of the post-World War II “Cold War” and have no experience of its anxieties. They appear to take its sudden end as predestined – something that was so inevitably right ideologically that it can and should be taken for granted. Their military experience, if any, has been in the contemporary equivalent of the 19th century’s Indian Wars – combat with gun-toting farmers with no air forces, air defenses, navies, guided missiles, or nuclear weapons with which to answer U.S. hostility…

The Cold War was radically different from this. It was a global struggle between two competing ideological blocs and nuclear-armed power centers capable of destroying not just each other but all life on the planet except maybe the cockroaches. It began as a series of squabbles over the spoils of a worldwide war. Each side strove to consolidate spheres of politico-military and economic influence and deny the other access to them. But each learned to avoid confrontations that might lead to armed combat directly with the other. Each limited itself to proxy wars aimed at sustaining or imposing its ideology somewhere not in the grip of the other. Each sought to minimize and contain interaction with the other. That was not difficult, given the utter lack of interdependence between the two and the blocs of nations they formally and informally commanded.

The struggle we Americans have now initiated with China has none of these characteristics. To analogize it to the Cold War of 1947 – 1991 is intellectually lazy. More important, it is profoundly misleading and delusional. The Sino-American split is not the sequel to a bloody world war. However politically convenient it may be for Americans to cast antagonism to China in all-encompassing Manichean terms, this is a contest born of contending national self-images and ambitions, not ideologies. The struggle with China on which Americans have embarked is a bilateral contest in which others may or may not choose to take sides, not one between two committed blocs of nations. China is both a much less inherently hostile and far more robust rival than the Soviet Union was.

Emulating China’s autocracy by closing America to foreign goods, services, people, and ideas, as the United States is now doing, is self-defeating. Modeling China policy on Ronald Reagan’s treatment of the USSR before he met Mikhail Gorbachev, as Secretary of State Pompeo has done, is the path to receipt of a national “Darwin award.” The U.S. contention with a resurgent China cannot be conducted in the same manner as the Cold War. It will not end, as the Cold War did, with the voluntary resignation of an ideologically disillusioned and exhausted adversary…

China is armed with nuclear weapons, but it has sized and configured its arsenal for a retaliatory response to an attack on it by other nuclear powers, not for a first strike, which it has abjured and is not equipped to conduct. China is a threat to American global primacy, but mostly in economic and technological rather than political or military terms, in which it remains decidedly inferior. China is once again the immovable economic and cultural center of its native region – where the United States has for seventy-five years been the resident overlord – but China seeks no “allies” and has no political satrapies or military dependencies.

He went on to provide a very thorough list of the crucial differences between China and the USSR that we had previously faced, with all boldface provided in the original:

Crucially, China is not the Soviet Union:

• China has no messianic ideology to export. Its appeal derives from its performance, not its ideas. It is happy to be emulated, but justly charged with callous indifference to how foreign societies govern themselves.
• China is not engaged in regime change operations to create an ideological sphere of influence. It seeks to prevent the overthrow of its own authoritarian system of governance but does not oppose democracy or promote authoritarianism abroad. Where tested, as in Korea, it often has a better relationship with democracies than with their undemocratic opponents.
• China’s relationships with foreign nations are transactional rather than sentimental. It has no “satellites,” “allies,” or entente partners to divert its attention from its own defense. Beijing has no ideological soul mates, committed followers, or dedicated sycophants abroad.
• China’s economy dwarfs that of the USSR. It accounts for 30 percent of global manufacturing and continues to grow. China has an economy that is almost one-third larger than that of the United States in purchasing power terms and that is rapidly approaching parity at nominal exchange rates.
• China is now the largest consumer market on the planet and the biggest trading partner of three-fourths of the world’s other economies. It is fully integrated into the global capitalist system and cannot be walled off from it.
• China already possesses one-fourth of the world’s scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematics workforce. It is steadily increasing its ascendancy.
• China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is an order-setting geoeconomic strategy with no Soviet parallel that dwarfs the nearest American equivalent – the Marshall Plan.
• China spends two percent or less of GDP on its military vs. the estimated 9 – 15 percent of the USSR and the current 7.9 percent spent by the United States.[2] Unlike the USSR, if pushed to do so, China has the capacity to more than match any U.S. military spending increases.
• Despite much wishful thinking on the part of its detractors, premising a policy on China’s collapse from systemic defects, as George Kennan shrewdly did in the case of the USSR in 1947, is – on the evidence – delusional.
• China has not built a nuclear arsenal to match that of either the United States or Russia. It has instead adopted a “no first use” policy for nuclear weapons backed by a modest force de frappe that can conduct a limited but devastating retaliatory counterstrike to any foreign nuclear attack on it.
• There are no U.S. arms control agreements, exchanges of information, understandings on mutual restraint, or escalation control mechanisms between the U.S. and Chinese armed forces as there were with the USSR
• American military intervention in the Russian civil war lasted only two years (1918-1920). Overt U.S. intervention in China’s ongoing civil war, sparked by the Korean War, began in 1950. Seventy years later, U.S. support for the heirs to Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Chinese regime not only continues but is escalating.
• The United States backs challenges to China’s sovereignty over Taiwan and islets in its near seas. By contrast, despite rhetorical opposition to its incorporation of the three Baltic states, America never actively contested the USSR’s territorial integrity.
• The armed forces of the United States aggressively patrol China’s shorelines and test its defenses, as they did those of the Soviet Union. But, so far, unlike the USSR, China has not reciprocated.

Meanwhile, the differences between our own country during that past, ultimately successful global conflict and our current situation were just as significant:

Equally important, the United States of the 2020s is not the America of the early Cold War.

• As the Cold War began, the United States produced one-half or more of the world’s manufactures. It now makes about one-sixth.
• For the first time in American history, foreigners do not envy American freedoms. Once almost-universal admiration for the United States has been overwritten by repeated displays of racism, gun violence, political venality, xenophobia, and – most recently – executive incompetence and legislative default in the face of national challenges. No one abroad now seeks to emulate the U.S. political system or believes that the United States illustrates the possibilities of democracy.
• During the Cold War, the United States was the uncontested leader of a bloc of dependent nations that it called “the free world.” That bloc is now in an advanced state of decay. America’s international followership is greatly diminished and its capacity to organize coalitions that integrate lesser powers in support of common objectives has atrophied.
• Legacy U.S. alliances formed to contain the USSR have little relevance to American contention with China:
  • US-European alliances like NATO are withering. Though cautious about China, Europeans do not and will not support an effort to “contain” it.
  • No Asian security partner of the United States wants to choose between America and China.[3] U.S. “alliances” in Asia embody U.S. undertakings to protect partners rather than commitments by them to come to America’s aid. Such dependent relationships cannot be repurposed to form a coalition to counter China.
• The United States is isolated on a widening list of issues of importance to other countries. It has withdrawn or excluded itself from a growing number of multilateral instruments of global and regional governance and is no longer able to lead the international community as it once did.
• Americans have repeatedly declined to recapitalize or cooperate in reforming international financial institutions to meet new global and regional investment requirements. This has led China, India, and other rising powers to create supplementary lenders like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank. The United States has chosen to have no voice in these and continues inadvertently to stimulate the creation of still more institutions that can act without reference to American interests or views.
• Since 1950, the Taiwan issue has been a casus belli between the United States and China. But U.S. allies or security partners see it as a fight among Chinese to be managed rather than joined. If the U.S. mismanages the Taiwan issue, as it now appears to be doing, it will have no overt allies in the resulting war.
• No claimant against China in the South China Sea is prepared to join the U.S. in naval conflict with China.
• U.S. foreign policy is now as partisan as domestic policy. It is often driven by special rather than national interests and is unrealistic, strategically incoherent, divisive, and fickle.
• Partisan oligopolies have swallowed independent media in the United States and reduced the thousands of U.S. correspondents once reporting on international affairs to mere dozens. U.S. corporate media now treat the news as an entertainment-based cost center and consumer product rather than as a necessary public service or civic duty. These developments and the politicization of the U.S. intelligence community diminish and distort American situational awareness, helping spurious narratives to overwrite facts.

Therefore, he concluded:

In short, this time is different. Sino-American relations have a history and dynamic that do not conform to those of the US-Soviet contest. If you have seen one “communist,” you have not seen them all. And the United States is much less well equipped to inspire and lead opposition to China than it was to the USSR.

The US-China contention is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China, unlike the determinedly autarkic USSR, is part of the same global society as the United States. The battlefields include global governance, geoeconomics, trade, investment, finance, currency usage, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration, in addition to the geopolitical and military domains in which the Cold War played out. Short of nuclear war, the struggle the United States has begun with China may not be existential, as the Cold War was, but it cannot avoid being hugely consequential.......

...... Freeman had served in government for nearly half a century, sometimes at a very high level, so his assessment of the nature and behavior of the Trump Administration should be taken very seriously:

There is no longer an orderly policy process in Washington to coordinate, moderate, or control policy formulation or implementation. Instead, a populist president has effectively declared open season on China. This permits everyone in his administration to go after China as they wish. Every internationally engaged department and agency – the U.S. Special Trade Representative, the Departments of State, Treasury, Justice, Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security – is doing its own thing about China. The president has unleashed an undisciplined onslaught. Evidently, he calculates that this will increase pressure on China to capitulate to his protectionist and mercantilist demands. That would give him something to boast about as he seeks reelection in 2020.

That characterization of the Trump Administration was made at Stanford University in early May 2019, but unbeknownst to both Freeman and his entire audience, our government at that point was already half-way through a secret, large-scale defensive exercise that lasted from January to August. Crimson Contagion was intended to prepare our federal and state officials for the hypothetical possible appearance of a dangerous respiratory virus in China. Then around late October 2019, just a few weeks after the conclusion of that exercise, exactly such a mysterious virus suddenly appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

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Freeman described a Trump Administration that was completely undisciplined and lacked any proper controls but that had strongly encouraged anti-China actions across all its different departments. These factors may have been very germane to the global Covid outbreak.

Beginning in April 2020, I began publishing a long series of articles that repeatedly emphasized exactly that sort of connection, and I’ve stood almost alone on the Internet in being willing to publicly advocate that controversial hypothesis.

Some of my most dramatic conclusions can be summarized in just a few paragraphs:

For example, in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year in 2018 a mysterious viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and in 2019, another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry…