December 01, 2007 ... Why would we fight China?

In a recent Atlantic article ‘How We Would Fight China by Robert D. Kaplan’ the rise of China is considered a threat more deadly than Russia will be or the USSR ever was. To confront this threat, a whole new defence system based on naval and amphibious capabilities will have to be developed and deployed in consort with our southeast Asian partners-cum-allies, so that a protracted conflict can be pursued in and around the Pacific for decades to come. In other words: another cold-war or series of cold-war-like events.

This is predominantly predicated upon that which is presently understood to be the administration of China, a comparative analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century imperialist expansion by former European empires, and the increasing Chinese influence in south American and African states.

More importantly however, it is predominantly predicated on an America which has abandoned its founding principles of being an ally to none, yet a friend to those who wish to freely trade, with innovation and entrepreneurship being the advantage that America has over its competitors.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s China was considered to be an awesome market in which to sell goods, the only barrier to trade being the hardline Communist regime of the times. But the real impediment to trade was that China had almost zero productive capability, its economy was based on a self-subsistence peasant culture and thus had no means to enter in arrangements of exchange to any degree of value beyond cigarettes. A China of 1.2-billion penniless peasants is not a market.

China has many problems of its own making. One such being the effects of the one-child-per family policy, which has created the problem of only one child to look after elderly parents, get a university education and hold down a well-paying job with which to fund past, present and future generations.

America has many problems, too, and the best way to confront and surmount them is for America to quit wasting hundreds of billions of dollars worth of capital on armed forces it doesn’t need to develop or maintain for its own defence, and to get back to matters which are in in its self-interest. There are those who would argue that a return to founding principles is synonymous to isolationism, but such arguments are only valid within the context of the big-government allied to foreign policies America was never intended to have. Big-government always undermines the will of the individual, and removes too many of the incentives for the individual to look after themselves in the manner they would choose.The foreign policies of the type currently in practice are a distraction, at best.

Under such conditions, a prosperous China with the means to engage in trade of value, is America’s friend. But without fundamental change at home, China may become the enemy it does not to need to become beyond 2008.