The Seriousness of Unrestricted Warfare

Commentary

As former Rep. Mike Gallagher wrote on Oct. 7 in the Wall Street Journal, America must better understand our enemies. The United States cannot bribe them to be our friends. North Korea will starve and imprison its people while spending billions on nuclear arms. The Iranian mullahs will similarly murder and imprison their own people while maintaining a multibillion-dollar terror network. Détente provided the Soviets billions in liberalized trade benefits even while Moscow “doubled down” on global revolution in El Salvador, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Indochina.

Similarly, the United States and its allies gave market access to China thinking this would normalize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But all we have done is use American consumption to deliver trillions in intellectual property, technology, and capital to the CCP with which to make “unrestricted warfare” on us.

Now Gallagher concludes that deterrence may yet keep China at bay, but as the former head of the House committee examining the Chinese threat explains, China is preparing for war, across the board. The United States needs to take this threat seriously.

Critical to this threat is the buildup of Chinese nuclear arms. For decades, China watchers on the left reassured us that China’s economic growth was nothing more than a “peaceful rise” and its nuclear plans were benign. When three years ago the then-commander of the U.S. Strategic Command laid out the “breath taking” Chinese nuclear expansion, the critics claimed the admiral was exaggerating to justify building a more modern U.S. nuclear force.

Many on the right spend their day funding the Chinese expansion by raising trillions in investment capital from the United States and pocketing millions in fees.

But in return, the CCP facilitates the massive export of fentanyl and illicit drugs into the United States with its criminal triads in U.S. cities nationwide.

The CCP has what are termed “police stations” in the United States to muscle Chinese nationals, including tens of thousands of military age men who were admitted across our southern border with no vetting.

China has a near monopoly on both the mining and processing of multiple dozens of critical minerals the United States needs for its industry, grid, and military weapons, although just beneath our feet, the United States has in great abundance—$12 trillion—these same minerals which we have deliberately refused to develop or map or mine or process.

Now it is also true that China is losing millions of people as its birth rate has plummeted. Many of its towns and small cities are empty of people and dilapidated. Internally, it has tens of trillions of dollars of debt it cannot pay. It forcefully harvests organs from its Falun Gong prisoners to provide for its gerontocracy of big-shot party members. But without pause the nation is preparing for war as its modernized military stockpiles raw materials as its energy and food deficit remain its Achilles heel. These growing weaknesses may make China more, not less, reckless.

What purpose then do China’s nuclear weapons serve? “They cannot be used in warfare” is the refrain from many. But the number of Chinese nuclear weapons will reach at least 1,500 over the next few years, much faster than previously estimated. And such weaponry serves as a security umbrella under which China believes it can act with impunity. Similarly, it uses economic leverage on trade, rare earths, and other minerals to intimidate U.S. lawmakers and security leaders to stand down and restrain our policy options to deal with China. Its military might, especially nuclear weapons, serves to bully and coerce the United States into doing the bidding of the CCP, a point unanimously underscored by the conclusions of the Strategic Posture Commission report of October 2023.

A Ploughshares analysis some years ago ridiculed even the idea that China would add to its military might in order to wage war against the United States. After all, it was argued China wants to sell the United States cellphones, not drop bombs on its cities. That is true for now. But China is making war against the United States in other forms. The current $600 billion trade deficit and capital flows to China help build China’s military. In fact, the previous administration supported buying Chinese company stocks with U.S. Treasurys that in part funded the retirement of the U.S. military and civilian government workforce. Securities and Exchange Commission requirements that Wall Street reveal the particular Chinese companies held within mutual funds have been ignored. And while previous policy forced U.S. companies to make fossil energy scarce, expensive, and hard to produce in search of global climate change nirvana, at the same time, China’s consumption of coal will, according to former Secretary of State John Kerry, make it impossible to achieve any global carbon or greenhouse gas limits. And China owes the United States more than a trillion dollars in sovereign debt, a debt on which they have illegally reneged.

Unless deterred, China will on a day of its choosing attack Taiwan and U.S. interests in the Western Pacific. They will also use electromagnetic pulses and cyber to attack our electric grid. They will simply cut off our mineral raw materials supply. They will seek to crash the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. From our own farmland, they will unleash a biological attack on our agriculture. They will quietly get out of our equity markets. And they will commit surreptitious terror attacks against our 35 critical infrastructure nodes—railroad crossings, pipelines, and key bridges—previously identified by the Gilmore Commission, without which we cannot run our economy.

The United States needs across-the-board deterrence to fight unrestricted warfare. The United States cannot have Wall Street send trillions to China to build their “military rise” and expect it to be “peaceful.” The United States must either take the CCP threat seriously or suffer the consequences as we did in World War II and on 9/11.

From RealClearWire

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.