Washington is shocked to learn Beijing knows the U.S. wants to contain China’s influence. It didn’t take a balloon to figure it out.
(Originally published March 9 in “What in the World“) U.S. intelligence, lending ever more irony to that term, has determined that China is increasingly convinced the U.S. won’t tolerate challenges to American hegemony in Asia.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday that Beijing has thus concluded that any increase in its own influence will have to come at the expense of America’s. Maintaining ties with Russia, the U.S. intelligence community’s annual “threat assessment” deduces, is one way Beijing believes it can do that. Maintaining alliances with the enemy of one’s enemy is one of those underhanded, experimental forms of diplomacy completely alien to the U.S.—except maybe in 1972 when Nixon went to Beijing to meet Mao and make Brezhnev jealous.
This shocking discovery—that the Chinese have figured out what was plain to anyone watching U.S. responses (or the lack thereof) to China’s economic, military, and diplomatic advances over the past 20 years—will doubtless serve to justify further U.S. demonization of China and the militarization of Asia.
After the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, America became an absentee hegemon in Asia, retreating diplomatically and economically to an extent that became a source of frequent discussion and concern in the region. At the same time, China has since its admission to the World Trade Organization two months after the 9/11 attacks expanded its economic, diplomatic, and military influence in Asia to an extent consistent with its status as the world’s most populous nation and second-largest economy, but that “dramatic” can’t begin to describe. With U.S. foreign policy in Asia left largely in the hands of the U.S. Navy, as one former U.S. Ambassador in the region explained to me in 2012, confrontation was inevitable.
One excellent, recent example of U.S. neglect in Asia is the Solomon Islands, where China last year shocked Washington and its allies in Australia and New Zealand by sealing a deal to provide security to the island nation in return for a possible naval base. Gaining a base in the Solomons would give China a way to puncture U.S. archipelagic defenses that stretch from Japan (buying hundreds of U.S. cruise missiles) to Australia (now buying U.S. nuclear submarines) and thus strengthen China’s ability to pressure Taiwan and harry its neighbors in the South China Sea. In response to this apparent diplomatic coup, Washington last month rushed officials to Honiara—where there is a permanent memorial to U.S. soldiers killed liberating it in 1943 from the Japanese in the Battle of Guadalcanal—to re-open an embassy that it kept shuttered for 30 years. Oh yeah, those Solomon Islands!
Washington’s surprise is all the more, well, surprising given that it began describing China’s rise as a threat within six months of China’s admission to the WTO and after then-President Barack Obama ten years ago announced a “pivot to Asia” that pledged cooperation with China, but which was in large measure a plan to counter it.
In its article on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment, The New York Times repeats allegations by the Administration of U.S. President Joe Biden that China has been considering providing military aid to Russia for use in Ukraine. The White House still hasn’t produced any evidence to support this insight into Beijing’s policy considerations. Instead, it’s employed a gaslighting tactic described last month in this space.
The Times helpfully adds some new embroidery of its own: that China was trying to find a way to secretly funnel ammunition to Russia. But the only evidence it provides is a link to a conversation between its own reporters in a podcast that also provides no evidence. Instead, the conversation speculates that the Administration’s allegations appear to be working because, hey, there’s still no evidence China has started supplying ammunition to Russia. And China appears instead to be sticking to the very same policies it’s had since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. Only now we have muscular U.S. diplomacy to thank for China’s restraint.