September 7, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has recently claimed the US is not “looking for a crisis.” This is said, of course, with an important caveat – no crisis is sought as long as China subordinates itself to the United States.
Because China, like any other sovereign nation, based on international law, is obligated to resist foreign subordination, the US continues speeding toward inevitable war with China. Although China has formidable military capabilities, causing doubt among many that the US will actually ever trigger war with China, the US has spent decades attempting to create and exploit a potential weakness China’s current military might may be incapable of defending against.
Washington’s Long-Running Policy of Containing China
Far from a recent policy shift by the Biden Administration, US ambitions to encircle and contain China stretch back to the end of World War 2. Even as far back as 1965 as the US waged war against Vietnam, US documents referred to a policy “to contain Communist China,” as “long-running,” and identified the fighting in Southeast Asia as necessary toward achieving this policy.
For decades the US has waged wars of aggression along China’s periphery, engaged in political interference to destabilize China’s partners as well as attempt to destabilize China itself, as well as pursued likewise long-running policies to undermine China’s economic growth and its trade with the rest of the world.
More recently, the US has begun reorganizing its entire military for inevitable war with China.
Cutting Chinese Economic Lines of Communication
In addition to fighting Chinese forces in the Asia-Pacific region, the US also has long-running plans to cut off Chinese trade around the globe.
In 2006, the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) published “String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asia Littoral,” identifying China’s essential “sea lines of communication” (SLOC) from the Middle East to the Strait of Malacca as particularly vulnerable and subject to US primacy over Asia.
The paper argues that US primacy, and in particular, its military presence across the region, could be used as leverage for “drawing China into the community of nations as a responsible stakeholder,” a euphemism for subordinating China to US primacy. This, in turn, is in line with a wider global policy seeking to “deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”
Under a section titled, “Leveraging U.S. Military Power,” the paper argues for and expanded US military presence across the entire region, including along China’s SLOC, augmenting its existing presence in East Asia (South Korea and Japan), but also extending it to Southeast Asia and South Asia, recruiting nations like Indonesia and Bangladesh to bolster US military power over the region and thus over China.
It notes Chinese efforts to secure its SLOC, including with a mutually beneficial port project in Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, part of the larger China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the construction of a port in Sittwe, Myanmar, part of the larger China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Both projects seek to create alternative economic lines of communication for China, circumventing the long and vulnerable sea route through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.