An ancient Chinese adage states: “When the winds of change blow, some build walls, others build windmills”. But President Xi Jinping also knows that whoever wants to build well must lay good foundations and reach the roof. Not the other way around. After having opened the polar Silk Road, perhaps taking possession of the roof of the world across the North Pacific, Xi Jinping will have to build the foundations of the "Middle Earth" in the South Pacific Ocean up to the borders of Australia. To do this, Xi Jinping has asked to quickly and significantly increase the production and installation of medium-range conventional and nuclear missiles that can destroy all US strongholds in the South Pacific Ocean in just a few minutes. In fact, last October 17, President Xi inspected a unit of the PLAN Missile Force, the DF-26, and during the speech asked the PLA Rocket Force to "improve strategic deterrence and effective combat capabilities".
Realistically, what is America's purpose in the Indo-Pacific region today?
That of continuing to manage it as one of the pillars of power necessary to preserve Washington's global control hypothesized after WWII when China appeared on the maps at most?
After Japan's defeat, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual defense pacts in the Pacific region, with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, thereby acquiring military bases along the Pacific coast that would ensure its extremity eastern Eurasia. And, to bind the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington has encircled the southern edge of the continent with “chains of steel,” including three naval fleets, hundreds of fighter planes and, most recently, a series of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the island of Guam. However, after the end of the Cold War, while the United States was engaged in the war against Islamic terrorism, China spent those same decades building industries that would make it the workshop of the world. Beijing and Moscow have become increasingly closer, also through energy joint ventures, military maneuvers and periodic summits; Putin and Xi revived the Stalin-Mao alliance, signed a “Pact of Steel” revealing it to the world during the Beijing Olympics and created a strategic partnership in the heart of Eurasia. Beijing's grand strategy to break Washington's geopolitical grip on Eurasia includes the plan to reconquer the disputed waters between the Chinese coast and the Pacific coast, which the Chinese call "the first island chain". By building dozens of island bases in the South China Sea since 2014, flying over Taiwan and the East China Sea in repeated incursions, and staging joint maneuvers with the Russian Navy, Beijing has waged a relentless campaign to try to begin “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along that Pacific coast. But, the United States, for the umpteenth time, is alone in facing a gigantic deadly enemy and the southern edge of the Asian continent is still controlled with "steel chains", but they are rusty and fragile.
Let's find out why….
by Nicola e Gabriele Iuvinale
Speaking at the April 2022 meeting of the Freeman Spogli Council of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, US political scientist Larry Diamond, speaking of the current dangers to democracy and the need to take decisive, global action, said that “on the 24th February 2022 we have entered a new historical era. Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the broader wave of authoritarian power projection definitively represent the return of great power competition.
It is not simply a 'resurrected Russia' that stands in the way of the global cause of freedom, as the greatest threat comes from the Chinese Communist Party.
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 he announced to the world that their time had come: “we [Chinese] are a global community with a shared destiny for humanity.”
Since then, China's main objective has been global hegemony: making Beijing the world's leading trade and military power.
To make states more dependent and willing to its new world order, Beijing uses every weapon at its disposal to project strong power, which seeks to penetrate the soft tissues of democracies and obtain their acquiescence through covert, coercive and corruptive means. It is this combination, of China's internal repression and its external ambition, that makes its growing global power so worrying.
In recent years, US Navy ships have intensified navigation in the South China Sea against Beijing's illicit claims and, adds historian Alfred McCoy, in 2022 "north, into the icy Arctic oceans, thanks to radical warming of the planet and the retreat of sea ice, a fleet of Chinese and Russian icebreakers maneuvered to open a polar Silk Road, perhaps taking possession of the roof of the world.”
Meanwhile, China spent those same decades building industries that would make it the workshop of the world. For Mckoy, “in a grave strategic miscalculation, Washington admitted Beijing to the World Trade Organization in 2001, strangely confident that a compliant China, home to nearly 20 percent of humanity and historically the world's most powerful nation, it would somehow join the global economy without changing the balance of power.”
During the 15 years after joining the WTO, Beijing's exports to the United States grew nearly fivefold, to $462 billion; and in 2014 its foreign exchange reserves increased from just $200 billion to $4 trillion.960 A vast treasure that Beijing and Xi Jinping have used to launch their Belt and Road Initiative; with this process - claims Mckoy - Beijing began the systematic demolition of the three pillars of Brzezinski's geopolitical power.
China has achieved its most surprising success yet in Europe, long a key bastion of American global power. As part of a chain of 40 commercial ports it is building or rebuilding around Eurasia and Africa, Beijing has purchased major port facilities in Europe.
After Japan's defeat, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual defense pacts in the Pacific region, with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, thereby acquiring military bases along the Pacific coast that would ensure its extremity eastern Eurasia. And, to bind the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington has encircled the southern edge of the continent with “chains of steel,” including three naval fleets, hundreds of fighter planes and, most recently, a series of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the island of Guam.
In the late 1990s, at the height of US global hegemony, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, issued a stark warning about the three pillars of power needed to preserve Washington's global control. 955 The first, Europe: the perch of Eurasia. The second, Central Asia: there they should have blocked the rise of "a single assertive entity", in the enormous "space between". And finally the third pillar, the Pacific coast: it was supposed to prevent "the expulsion of America from its offshore bases" on that ocean. Zbigniew Brzezinski was a devotee of the geopolitical concept of the English geographer Halford Mackinder.
After the end of the Cold War, while the United States was engaged in the war against Islamic terrorism, China spent those same decades building industries that would make it the workshop of the world. In a grave strategic miscalculation, Washington admitted Beijing to the World Trade Organization in 2001, strangely confident that a compliant China, home to nearly 20 percent of humanity and historically the world's most powerful nation, would join, somehow, to the global economy without changing the balance of power.
During the 15 years after joining the WTO, Beijing's exports to the United States grew nearly fivefold, to $462 billion; and in 2014 its foreign exchange reserves increased from just $200 billion to $4 trillion.960 A vast treasure that Beijing and Xi Jinping have used to launch their Belt and Road Initiative; with this process Beijing began the systematic demolition of the three pillars of Brzezinski's geopolitical power.
China has achieved its most surprising success yet in Europe, long a key bastion of American global power. As part of a chain of 40 commercial ports it is building or rebuilding around Eurasia and Africa, Beijing has purchased major port facilities in Europe.
Beijing and Moscow have become increasingly closer, also through energy joint ventures, military maneuvers and periodic summits; Putin and Xi revived the Stalin-Mao alliance, signed a “Pact of Steel” revealing it to the world during the Beijing Olympics and created a strategic partnership in the heart of Eurasia. In Beijing's grand strategy to break Washington's geopolitical grip on Eurasia there is the plan to reconquer the disputed waters between the Chinese coast and the
of the Pacific, which the Chinese call "the first island chain". By building dozens of island bases in the South China Sea since 2014, flying over Taiwan and the East China Sea in repeated incursions, and staging joint maneuvers with the Russian Navy, Beijing has waged a relentless campaign to try to initiate “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along that Pacific coast, attempting to topple Brzezinski's last pillar.
For Mckoy, the end of Washington's decades-long rule over that vast expanse of ocean may be just over the horizon.
The Chinese Navy is now the largest maritime force in the world, with a total of 355 ships according to a recent US Department of Defense report; number expected to grow to 460 by 2030. The report details how the Chinese Navy is improving its ability to carry out long-range precision strikes against land targets and anti-submarine warfare.
In addition to the world's largest navy and largest standing army, Beijing also has the third largest air force. This is in addition to the country's known nuclear capabilities. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “We are participating in one of the greatest shifts in global geostrategic power the world has witnessed. There is a country (China) that is becoming extraordinarily powerful, which wants to review the international order to its advantage. It will be a real challenge in the next 10, 20 years."
Today, thanks to its military power, China has already overcome the first and second island chains and the "steel chain hypothesized by Brzezinski to President Carter" no longer exists.
To date, US military deterrence has failed to achieve this goal.
Chinese ships sail daily in the North Pacific, dominate the Arctic Route with Russia, and Chinese aircraft carriers are stationed in the territorial waters of the disputed islands of Japan and the Philippines; soon, those skies will also be crossed by PLAN jets taking off from those aircraft carriers.
In fact, the People's Liberation Army has definitively surpassed the first and second island chains, projecting its military capacity throughout the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
The closing of the canal Suez with the war in Israel and the control of of the Arctic route by China and Russia they will put the entire West in serious trouble, because we do not have a navy capable of controlling the Arctic routes that act as beams for controlling the roof of the world; just one figure: 50 Russian icebreakers versus 2 Americans.
China, with its shipbuilding capacity (every 4/5 years builds as many military ships as the entire French fleet possesses), will support Russia and monopolize both economically and militarily the Arctic route up to the coast of Alaska.
At dinner he dominated Africa too , while the United States, under the administration of President Biden they definitively abandoned that very rich continent after receiving letters from the coup leaders of First and Niger who ordered them to abandon the countries and make way for the Russians and Chinese.
Realistically, what is America's purpose in the Indo-Pacific region?
To continue to manage it as one of its pillars of power necessary to preserve Washington's global control?
The times of Brzezinski are gone and those conditions realistically no longer exist.
Today, almost 50% of global production sails in the Indo-Pacific area and the South China Sea.
All global value chains are connected with and in that area; except for very high technology industries, the decoupling of the West vs. China has not reduced the risks of a possible maritime blockade in the area and the consequent fatal damage to the global economy.
Realistically today no country can afford a flare-up in the Indo-Pacific, a war between China and the West.
Contrary to some of the propaganda narrative, China is by no means a "dead man walking", either economically or militarily.
But Xi Jinping's China continues to accumulate military power and will be unstoppable in its growth, barring an imaginary, yet unreal, Chinese default.
The war in Ukraine demonstrated that modern conventional wars are fought with self-destructive drones: if a country does not have a real industrial base for their large-scale production it cannot face a war and cannot pursue a convincing policy of military deterrence.
Not only that: the absence of a solid real economy "with growing GDP" and low levels of growth are strongly negative in modern democracies also in another way:
they prevent valid military expenditure from being made and, on a "political logic" level, it is an impediment because citizens are not willing to cut welfare spending: everyone in the evening when they return home wants a hot dish and turns their faces away part.
Europe finds itself precisely in these conditions; not China!
The United States, for the umpteenth time, is alone in facing a gigantic mortal enemy.
Washington still maintains historic mutual defense pacts in the Pacific region, with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, and still has the same military bases along the Pacific coast as far as Guam; the southern edge of the continent is still controlled with “steel chains,” but they are rusted and brittle.
Japan's rearmament has yet to happen and will take years; Today, Taiwan would fall into the hands of China in a few days and the same fate would befall the Philippines.
To somewhat mitigate the serious military situation and military deterrence, the United States is supplying medium-range missiles to South Korea, Japan and historical allies in the area; but it won't be enough.
Furthermore, missile deterrence is also weakened by the reduced "political" support of America's historic allies in the area: Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand (and the same could be said of the European allies) because it is undermined by a globalization that has created an economic-financial entanglement that is not only extremely difficult to unravel but which exposes all countries to Beijing's economic retaliations, weakening America's "geopolitical grip" even on his historical allies.
To make states more dependent and willing to its new world order, Beijing uses every weapon at its disposal to project strong power, which seeks to penetrate the soft tissues of democracies and obtain their acquiescence through hidden, coercive and corruptive means. It is this combination, of China's internal repression and its external ambition, that makes its growing global power so worrying.
Drawing from the millenary culture of the art of deception also developed in the field of war, China has been carrying out its Liminal Warfare for years where the spectrum of competition and confrontation with the West is so broad that the battlefield is everywhere and the war is total; the control of technological means, 5G systems, strategic real estate purchases, the construction or management of bridges, highways and ports around the world, and much more, are considered "trans military" and "non-military" war operations.
They are combination strategies that mix lethal and non-lethal, military and non-military means, bringing into play a whole variety of competitions, combining them in a seamless architecture.
The Chinese way of waging war is therefore about “conceptual envelopment,” expanding the concept of war to the point of being able to maneuver in a space that is outside our definition of conflict.
This war consists of riding the edge of observability, of not exceeding the threshold of detectability.
Beijing's "Liminal Warfare" involves the integration of economic, legal, military, intelligence and cyber policies into a single, seamless mix of activities and maneuvers, focused on defining operations with the adversary before launch of a real military operation: if necessary.
And, to achieve this objective, Beijing also exploits the Belt and Road, including the maritime one, and economic-political coercion against all "its enemy" countries.
This objective is also a driving force for the implementation and development of the Chinese "dual circulation" macroeconomic plan wanted by Xi: increasing internal consumption through increasing local production and increasing exports from the BRI and BRICS countries. The geopolitical aim is to guarantee Beijing independence from the West in Chinese imports and exports. It is a fundamental element of Maoist politics that originates from the experience of the century of Chinese humiliation. In 2021, during a major speech on the topic, Xi Jinping said:
“The rice bowl of the Chinese people must be held firmly in their hands at all times and must contain mainly Chinese rice.”
Pillars of Chinese Deterrence in the South Pacific: The “Middle-earth” Foundation for Ocean Possession.
But, an ancient Cinse adage states: “When the winds of change blow, some build walls, others build windmills”. But Xi also knows that whoever wants to build well must lay good foundations and reach the roof. Not the other way around. After having opened the polar Silk Road, perhaps taking possession of the roof of the world through the "control" of the North Pacific with its ally Russia, Xi Jinping will have to build, in the south of the ocean up to Australia, the foundations of the " Casa China”, that of the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the nation. A global community with a shared destiny for humanity.”
To do this, Xi Jinping has asked to quickly and significantly increase the production and installation of medium-range conventional and nuclear missiles that can destroy all US strongholds in the South Pacific Ocean in just a few minutes.
In fact, last October 17, President Xi inspected a unit of the PLAN Missile Force and during his speech asked the PLA Rocket Force to “improve strategic deterrence and effective combat capabilities”.
In general, "strategic deterrence" refers to actions that force the other side to surrender by showing determination to act to achieve a certain strategic objective. Regarding "strategic force", this refers to the force that plays a fundamental role in the overall strategic situation. If we analyze it in the specific context of the PLA's Rocket Force, there is no doubt that Xi is referring to the Rocket Force's strategic nuclear force.
The red leader's message would seem casual, but in reality it contains a lot of mystery.
The meaning of strategic deterrence
The "strategic deterrence" invoked undoubtedly refers to the DF-26 ballistic missile, which is a medium-range ballistic missile that can be equipped with nuclear warheads.
To undertake the mission of nuclear deterrence as the strategic hub of East Asia (the foundation of the China House) against both the major cities of some East Asian countries and those of some major Northern European countries, China has built the new generation of medium and long range solid fuel ballistic missiles represented by the DF-26. This is an important factor why the DF-26 has first-place nuclear strike performance.
Guam is located in the center of the U.S. military's Western Pacific layout, but is within range of the DF-26.
The second is to develop new tactical attack capabilities. After all, attacking an enemy's important strategic support points in the Western Pacific is not limited to the implementation of strategic nuclear strikes. There are still a large number of tactical-level targets requiring precise strikes in China's anti-access area
As the combat denial system gradually improves, the need to suppress such targets becomes more and more urgent.
Due to China's current weak aircraft carrier strength, it is obviously unrealistic for tactical aircraft to extend thousands of kilometers to attack these targets. However, the use of subsonic cruise missile attack methods to hit these tactical targets obviously has weak effectiveness and the penetration capability is very poor.
Therefore, this requires China to develop new attack assets represented by medium-range ballistic missiles and rely on their precise capabilities to attack these tactical-level targets thousands of kilometers away.
The meaning of effective combat capability
Secondly, the leader mentioned the "effective combat capabilities" of the DF-26 brigade, which is even more interesting. The DF-26 is a ballistic missile with both nuclear and conventional capabilities, so this "real combat capability" naturally has a double meaning. Is it a combat of a “deterrent nature” or a real conventional combat?
If it is a nuclear war, China's strategy is actually a deterrent strategy. Beijing's declarations are that "nuclear war cannot be fought and cannot be won." The value of nuclear weapons lies in their strategic deterrent capabilities, which reside in the force of the launcher rather than being launched.
However, now that Xi Jinping has mentioned the "effective combat capability" of this type of ballistic missile, this means that China's nuclear strategy must be adjusted accordingly, from the original nuclear deterrence strategy to a verification warfare strategy in a certain situation?
After all, compared to strategic ICBMs, medium-range strategic missiles like the DF-26 have shorter reaction times and higher attack speeds.
And if it were actual conventional combat, the DF-26 will be used as a new-grade conventional combat force to carry out precision strikes on tactical targets in the second island chain.
Thus, the DF-26 ballistic missile will have both a nuclear and conventional configuration.
All rights reserved. Copyright Nicola and Gabriele Iuvinale
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