Following September’s declaration of a military partnership between Australia, the UK and US (Aukus), in which it was agreed to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, tensions between the US and China have increased. US President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a virtual meeting on 15 November, ostensibly to bring a degree of control to US-China relations, but actions and statements from the two states indicate preparations for conflict. Trevor Rayne reports.
After Barack Obama’s pivot of US military forces to Asia, announced in 2011, came the Trump administration’s trade war measures against China, kept in place by Biden. The Biden administration has reinvigorated the so called ‘Quad’ military alliance of the US, Japan, India and Australia to confront China. Japan’s former Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, breaking with diplomatic precedent, said that a conflict over Taiwan would threaten Japan, which would be required to act with the US to ‘defend Taiwan together’. This breaches the protocols of the ‘one China’ policy established by the US in 1979. In November 2021, Taiwan’s naval staff confirmed that, for the first time since 1979, US troops were stationed on the island. Taiwan looks the most likely flash point for a US-China military conflict.
On 21 October, Biden was publicly asked if the US would come to Taiwan’s defence if it was attacked. Biden replied, ‘Yes, we have a commitment to do that.’ The US administration subsequently tried to downplay the statement by saying that there was no policy change: ‘[We] will continue to support Taiwan’s self-defence and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo.’ During the virtual meeting with Xi Jinping, Biden spoke of ‘common sense guardrails’ to ‘ensure that the competition between our countries does not veer into conflict, whether intended or unintended’. Xi Jinping warned that anyone who supported advocates of Taiwanese independence was ‘playing with fire’ and would ‘burn themselves’. Biden said he backed the ‘one China’ policy. The two leaders agreed to hold talks on nuclear strategic stability.
Hypersonic warfare
When China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon on 3 January 2019 this was the first time any country had attempted such a landing. The feat sent shock waves through the US military establishment. On 27 July 2021, China became the first country to fly a hypersonic glide vehicle around the world. This is effectively a manoeuvrable nuclear-capable miss-ile that flies at over five times the speed of sound. It could evade US early warning systems by flying over the South Pole, putting it out of reach of Alaska-based US interceptor missiles.
In September 2021 Nicolas Chaillan, the US Department of Defence (the Pentagon) Chief Technology Officer, resigned, saying that China had won the artificial intelligence battle with the US. He said that China was set to dominate the future of the world, controlling everything from media narratives to geopolitics. US and NATO statements about China express alarm – and are threatening. The US ruling class fears its global hegemony is being challenged and it is mobilising its assets and partners to defend it.
On 7 October, CIA Director Bill Burns announced a new spying agency saying ‘[The China mission centre] will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.’
The Chair of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley likened the Chinese missile flight to a ‘Sputnik moment’, recalling the Soviet launch of a satellite into space in 1957, which started the space race and intensified the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. Milley said, ‘We are witnessing one of the largest shifts in geostrategic power that the world has ever experienced. This shift is occurring alongside a fundamental change in the character of war. We need to act with urgency to develop capabilities across all domains – land, sea, air, cyber and our strategic nuclear forces – to address this evolving landscape. We have to act now. Otherwise, we risk condemning our future generations to failure.’ (Financial Times 16 November 2021). Milley’s Vice Chair, General John Hyten, was explicit, ‘All the hypersonic weapons they’re building, all the nuclear weapons they’re building, are not meant for their own population. It’s meant for the US …We have to assume that, and we have to plan for that.’
On 2 November 2021, the US Pentagon released its China Military Power Report; it includes menacing and often unproven speculations. Among these are that China intends to quadruple its arsenal of nuclear weapons to 1,000 by 2030. It states that China ‘tested 250 ballistic missiles in 2020 – more than the rest of the world combined’. The report repeats that China ‘has numerically the largest navy in the world’, when many of the vessels are small coastal craft. The report conjectures that China recognises ‘that its armed forces should take a more active role in advancing its foreign policy, highlighting the increasingly global character Beijing ascribes to its military power.’ This view of an expansionist threat was backed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg: ‘China is coming closer to us, for instance in Africa. We see them in the Arctic. We see them in cyberspace. We see them investing heavily in critical infrastructure in our countries …’
Whatever the number of nuclear weapons China intends to build, the US currently has about 5,550 nuclear warheads, Russia 6,255, Britain 225 and China 250. The US has at least 750 overseas military bases in over 80 countries; China has one, a naval base in Djibouti.
The US officially broke diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1979. However, its position in relation to the island has been described as one of ‘strategic ambiguity’, making it unclear to what extent the US will act to keep the People’s Republic of China from reuniting with its province. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act commits the US to maintaining ‘the capacity of the US to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardise the security, or the social or economic system, of the people of Taiwan’. During the Korean War (1950-53) General Douglas MacArthur described Taiwan as ‘an unsinkable aircraft carrier’, from which the mainland coast could be threatened. Given its geographical position, Taiwan, along with Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines, is important to the US in controlling China’s access to the Western Pacific. The retired head of the US Indo-Pacific Command reckoned China could act against Taiwan in six years. In recent months China has flown a record number of sorties into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone. Speaking on the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China on 1 July 2021, Xi Jingping called for ‘China’s complete reunification … We must take resolute action to utterly defeat any attempt toward “Taiwan independence”’. Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party looks to the US as it moves towards independence. China’s government will not back down. The US state and its allies are preparing to meet the challenge from China.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 285, December 2021/January 2022
