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 Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
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The target of my column two weeks ago was the “Newsweek” article of May 5, 2005, “Does the Future Belong to China?” The author did not contemplate a war with China. Good heavens, no! But the article was, including its title, full of thunderbolts, as compared with the previous silence of the years when the mainstream had been pretending that China did not exist except for pleasures like Beijing duck that Americans who were lucky enough to be tourists in China could relish.
However, the message of the “Newsweek” article was typical for May 5, 2005: whether or not the future belongs to China, the latter would continue to be peaceful.
Now, an article in the June 2005 “Atlantic Monthly” is entitled “How We Would Fight China.” Whether there will be a Sino-American war is no longer a question. The question is, as of June 2005, how we will fight China.
When the study “Interpreting China's Grand Strategy: Past, Present and Future” was published in 2000, no one publicly visible or audible noticed it. In June 2005, this 308-page paperback, published in 2000, is on sale again for a stiff price: $40. Indeed, on May 25, “Financial Times.com” had reported from Washington that in contrast to its previous “soft” annual reports on China, the annual report the Pentagon was preparing this year was “hard.” Thus, “one source” said that “the Pentagon was simply responding to congressional pressure.”
You see? Just as the Newsweek was fashionable for May 2005, the Atlantic Monthly is such for June 2005! The author of its article, Robert Kaplan, is an Atlantic Monthly correspondent who spent three months among U.S. sailors in the Pacific and thus understood the strategy of China, for who could know it better as of June 2005 than American sailors in the Pacific? The strategy of China is the conquest of the Pacific.
Not that this is an evil plan of aggression, hatched secretly by the dictators of China to expand their dictatorship! We read on p. 50:
It is not clear from Kaplan's long article (eight large-forma magazine pages!) who will win this war and how. It may last for decades. But he is as cheerful as were the U.S. sailors in the Pacific in his description.
As of June 2005, it is obvious to Kaplan that the U.S. troops have scored a brilliant victory in Iraq, and if they have scored it against a backward Third-World country (the Sunni population: 9 million) who can doubt that they will score it against China (in alliance with Putin's Russia) in the Pacific? The U.S. brilliant victory will bring benefits, apart from the Pacific, such as greater naval nimbleness and a better ability to deal with tsunamis:
The last paragraph of the article is a hymn of infinite optimism:
Down with the wars against Iraq and other Persian Gulf countries and long live the war against China in the Pacific, since the Pacific is a pond, and the Persian Gulf a salty little mud puddle!
I must confess that when I came with my family to New York in 1972 I brought the news that the Soviet dictators were developing post-nuclear superweapons (which Yeltsin demonstrated in 1992) not because I had stolen the relevant key document from the most secret Kremlin safe, but owing to common sense.
Look! The Soviet nuclear power matched its U.S. counterpart. Mutual Assured Destruction WAS assured. Later Soviet submarines, with cruise missiles that could not be intercepted by any U.S. Star Wars (which do not yet exist even today), were submerged off the U.S. coasts, to surface if necessary and destroy the United States, should it nuke Soviet Russia. Why on earth did the Soviet dictators need post-nuclear superweapons? Common sense: To be able to destroy the Western means of retaliation, that is, to circumvent Mutual Assured Destruction and make the West surrender unconditionally.
What for? Gorbachev's dictatorship collapsed in 1991. The very existence of democracy in the democratic West had subverted it. This would never have happened if Gorbachev had become the sovereign of the world. But no decisive superweapon had been developed by 1991.
The dictators of China had a similar problem (recall the Tiananmen!) and they founded in 1986 Project 863 for the development of post-nuclear superweapons in seven fields.
Only those who know nothing about China have never heard of “assassin's mace,” the key image of China's geostrategy. The Chinese phrase is “shashou jian.” The word “shashou,” translated into English as “assassin,” means “surprise deadly attacker” and goes back to China's “period of warring states” in the second half of the first millennium.
Western chivalry prescribed an elaborate ritual for a fight. A knight challenged his opponent. Hence “the declaration of war.” Even Hitler declared war on the United States, and earlier, AFTER his surprise attack, on Russia. The two Western knights fought (fenced) by strict rules until one of them killed the other and was hailed as a noble skillful knight.
During their period of warring states, the Chinese found a different solution. Here was a Chinese warrior waiting for his opponent to challenge him and begin fencing. Instead, a stranger suddenly killed or incapacitated him with a mace (jian), that is, a spiked heavy club.
The moral? Never fight. Strike the enemy dead in a deadly surprise attack.
True, Hitler's war against Russia was a surprise attack. But it was not deadly. If Hitler had concentrated in 1939 on the development of nuclear weapons, his attacks would have been so deadly that the United States, Britain, and Russia would have surrendered unconditionally.
When firearms appeared, a deadly surprise attack became possible on anyone who didn't yet have firearms. He was preparing to fence, but an owner of firearms simply shot him.
Japan had been waging a conventional war of territorial expansion for decades, but in 1945 the United States struck Japan with nuclear weapons (the mace), and that was the end of Japan's fight of many decades.
Yes, in 1939, Hitler faced the choice between the development of the mace (nuclear weapons) and fight. He fought for five years — and lost. If he had, instead, developed the mace, he would have won without any fight.
As I have said above, in 1986, the dictators of China began to develop seven maces — post-nuclear weapons in seven fields. On the day they have THE decisive mace, they will hit the United States with it, or the United States will surrender unconditionally, as did Japan in 1945. No fight.
According to Kaplan's fantasy, China will choose the Pacific to fight for decades. Hitler made a stupid and fatal choice: to fight, and he lost the fight, instead of defeating all enemies with a mace without any fight. Kaplan assumes that 60 years after the fatal end of Hitler's fight, the “rulers of China” will repeat his mistake on a stupendous scale and far more absurdly. At least Hitler had a strategic plan: to use the natural resources of Russia to create armed forces capable of defeating the English-speaking countries. But how will the “rulers of China” defeat the West even if they win the Pacific after decades of FIGHT?
With articles like Kaplan's, the question is: which is better — the silence about “China's threat” before 2005, or fantasies in 2005 about a war with China, written by those who know nothing about China or about war and who are mentally infinitely below the dictators of China and their military advisers like Col. Qiao Liang and Col. Wang Xiangsui, the brilliant authors of “Unrestricted Warfare”?
Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.
He said Duncan Hunter, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and China hawks on the Senate Armed Services Committee were concerned that previous reports had been too soft in assessing China's future strategies.
This is wholly [!] legitimate. China's rulers may not be democratic in the literal sense [!], but they are seeking a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people — and doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy resources from the Middle East and elsewhere.
But the United States will not give away the Pacific to “China's rulers,” democratic as they are (though perhaps not “in the literal sense”) and democratic (in the literal sense?) as their goal to acquire the Pacific is. Hence the Sino-American war for the Pacific!I even picked up a feeling, especially among the senior chief petty officers (the iron grunts of the Navy, who provide the truth unvarnished), that they might be tested in the western Pacific to the same degree that the Marines have been in Iraq.
Preparing to meet all the possible threats the Pacific has to offer will force the Navy to become more nimble, and will make it better able to deal with unconventional emergencies, such as tsunamis, when they arise.
Welcome to the next few decades. As one senior chief put it to me, referring first to the Persian Gulf and then to the Pacific, “The Navy needs to spend less time in that salty little mud puddle and more time in the pond.”