Guest Article: The China Threat

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Martin van Creveld

William S. Lind*

The December 4 Wall Street Journal’s op ed page headlined a piece by John Ratcliffe, U.S. Director of National Intelligence, titled “China is National Security Threat No. 1”. Mr. Ratcliffe concluded his op ed by writing,

This is a once-in-a-generation challenge. Americans have always risen to the moment, from defeating the scourge of fascism to bringing down the Iron Curtain. This generation will be judged by its response to China’s effort to reshape the world in its own image and replace America as the dominant superpower. The intelligence is clear. Our response must be as well.

As is usually the case with op eds signed by prominent federal officeholders, the purpose of this piece is budget justification: intelligence agencies recently received a big budget boost for spying on China. And Mr. Ratcliffe is right with respect to some aspects of our relationship with China. It is an economic competitor, one that has pitted the enriching economics of mercantilism against the impoverishing economics of free trade. More the fools us for allowing it to do so.

But on the whole, Mr. Ratcliffe and the rest of the dragon puffers are wrong. They are wrong not because of bad intelligence about China, but because they miss the fact that for all Great Power rivalries, the context has changed. Contests between Great Powers are no longer the primary force shaping the world. Rather, what now shapes the world is the growing weakness of most states as the state itself faces a crisis of legitimacy. Great Power contests now take place within this context, which means such contests are themselves counter-productive to all involved because they further weaken states, certainly the loser and often the winner too. In effect, victories in state vs. state contests will henceforth almost always be Pyrrhic.

Just as Washington does not get this change in strategic context, neither does Beijing. For China, which is, as Mr. Ratcliffe writes, attempting to become the top Great Power, the new context has at least three major implications:

First, as it penetrates other parts of the globe through initiatives such as its “Belt and Road” project, it will find its presence there undermined and its goals blocked by increasing disorder. As states weaken, Fourth Generation war spreads, and Chinese efforts in the face of constant attacks by non-state elements will simply become unprofitable. This mirrors the European colonial experience but will occur much faster. In fact, it is occurring now, as China’s penetration into much of sub-Saharan Africa finds its efforts swallowed by spreading disorder. Where states are weak or merely fictions, one gang among many, efforts by outside powers will produce only a bottomless investment pit. The cost/benefit calculation will be as red as the east.
Second, where states are struggling to hold on to at least some shreds of legitimacy, an increasingly obvious Chinese role will threaten that legitimacy. This, again, is already happening, especially in Africa. Because one of the main factors driving Chinese expansionism is the need to provide jobs for Chinese people, Chinese projects hire little local labor. That, plus a general resentment against outsiders, will also bog down, then reverse Chinese penetration. The ugly Chinaman will get booted out, just as were the ugly American and ugly European.
Third, because the legitimacy of rule by the Chinese Communist Party depends on rapid economic growth in China, China too may suffer a crisis of legitimacy of the state. Like most authoritarian regimes, China’s Communist government is strong but rigid. It will seem impervious to disorder right up to the point where it collapses. China seems to think it has tamed the business cycle, but neither it nor anyone else has done so. History’s rule seems to be that if a government can prevent frequent, fairly small economic downturns, it gets less frequent but larger ones instead. Anyone looking at the house of cards that is China’s public and private debt can see what is coming. And China has a long history of internal fractioning. No Chinese state can assume it will always hold together. Were the Chinese state to fracture, that would not only be a disaster for China but for the rest of the world as well, including the United States. Once again, the new context touches and changes everything.

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China appears to be repeating the mistake Japan made in the 1930s. Japan attempted to build an empire just as European states had done, by conquest, but that era had passed. China now seeks in similar fashion to become the top Great Power when that position has lost much of its meaning and will soon lose the rest. Spreading state failure endangers the state system itself, and a successful defense of that system requires an alliance of all states, an alliance that must begin with the three current Great Powers, the United States, China, and Russia. Russia acts as if it may have at least some understanding this is the case, while Washington and Beijing show none. Nor does Mr. Ratcliffe, the Director of U.S. National Intelligence. Is there in fact any intelligence in U.S. National Intelligence?

*William (”Bill”) S. Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4^th Generation Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 25.1.2021.

Guest article: The View From Olympus: A Disastrous Decision–Or Is It?

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Martin van Creveld

Bill Lind*

On the surface, President Trump’s decision to abandon the nuclear accord with Iran is a disaster. If Iran considers the accord null and void without U.S. participation and resumes uranium enrichment on a large scale – Tehran for now says it will stick with the deal – we would be on the road to yet another unnecessary war in the Middle East. President Trump was elected to get us out of the wars we are in, not start new ones.

Meanwhile, revived and new U.S. economic sanctions on Iran may put us on a collision course with Europe. Will Europe allow Washington to dictate to European companies and banks whom they can do business with? If not, American sanctions on European businesses may be met with European sanctions on U.S. firms. Europe, China, and Russia have already said they will continue to honor the accord, which leaves the U.S. diplomatically isolated. Couple diplomatic with economic isolation and we will have a problem.

Some supporters of President Trump’s action hope the damage it will bring to Iran’s economy may inspire the Iranian people to revolt and overthrow the clerical regime. That is a possibility, although most peoples rally around the flag in response to outside pressure. But it is possible that, in the face of a widespread revolt, the Iranian state could collapse altogether. That would be a disastrous outcome for all concerned, because it would be a great victory for the Fourth Generation war entities that would fill the vacuum created by yet another American-facilitated state collapse. If Washington had any understanding of 4GW – which it doesn’t – it would realize a collapse of the Iranian state is far a greater danger than that state can ever pose.

But there is another way to read President Trump’s action. Both on North Korea and on some trade issues he has gotten good results by using a standard business technique: going in with maximalist demands, threats, etc., then backing off as part of a deal. In diplomacy, this is known as brinksmanship. You push a situation to the brink of disaster, then pull a rabbit out of the hat in the form of an agreement that leaves everyone satisfied and the situation more stable than it was before.
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If that is the game here – I have no way of knowing – then the President’s action was not a disaster. But it is still a high risk. The whole performance may have been coordinated with the Europeans in advance, in which case everyone is just following a script. Again, that could lead to a renewed and improved accord with Iran. But if not and our diplomatic isolation is real, the risks go up. And if Iran responds by tearing up the whole deal and going for the bomb, again, we face another unnecessary war. In that war, all the American troops in Syria and Iraq and perhaps those in Afghanistan as well will become Iranian hostages. What then, Mr. President?

President Trump’s brinksmanship with North Korea appears to have worked well, so far at least. If he comes out of his summit with Kim Jong-Un with an agreement that denuclearizes North Korea, ends the Korean war with a formal peace treaty, allows and helps North Korea to join the world economy and gets U.S. troops out of South Korea, he will indeed deserve, with Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon, the Nobel Peace Prize. Should he be able to build on that by making a similar deal with Tehran, one allowing Iran to improve its economy while reducing its considerable regional military and diplomatic overreach, he would at least be a candidate for sainthood. Has the President or anyone around him thought all this through?

God only knows. And I’m not sure He is paying attention.

* William S. (”Bill”) Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4^th Generation Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 22.5.2018.

“We Shall Win This War, and Then We Shall Get Out.”

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Martin van Creveld

No, this is not Vladimir Putin speaking. This is Winston Churchill, not long after returning to power in 1951. The context? The conflict in Malaysia, which at the time had been ongoing for three years with no end in sight. The immediate outcome? The war came to an end and the Brits left. The ultimate outcome? To this day, whenever anyone suggests that brushfire war, alias guerrilla, alias people’s war, alias low intensity war, alias nontrinitarian war, alias fourth-generation war (currently, thanks to my friend Bill Lind, the most popular term of all) is beyond the ability of modern state-owned armed forces to handle, someone else is bound to ask: but how about the British in Malaysia?

In response, let me suggest that, had Israel agreed to get out of the territories (I wish!) it could have “won” the struggle against Palestinian terrorism in twenty-four hours. But this is not what it pleases me to discuss today. It is, rather the situation in Putin’s own stamping ground, i.e. Syria.

The following is the story of the war, as far as I can make it out. It all started in May 2011 when terrorism against Assad dictatorial regime got under way. At first it was local, sporadic and uncoordinated. Later the opposition coalesced and assumed a more organized character; even so, by last count there are, or have been at one time or another, about ninety different groups fighting the regime. And even this mind-boggling number includes neither Hezbollah, nor Daesh, nor the various Kurdish militias, nor the so-called Baby Al Qaedas.

As in many similar wars (the one in the former Yugoslavia is a good example), some of the militias form coalitions, whereas others spend most of their time and energy combating each other. Some see the whole of Syria as their battlefield, others are local gangs out to keep certain regions or cities in their own power. Some are quite large (though none seems to have more than a few thousand fighters), others very small. Some are secular, others religiously-motivated.

What keeps the militias going are Saudi and Qatari money and weapons. Both the money and the weapons reach them mainly by way of Iraq a country which thanks to the U.S has ceased to be a country at all and is unable to control much of its territory. Earlier in the conflict Jordan too acted as a conduit. Later, though, the Jordanian Government, determined to look after itself first and stay out of the conflict as much as it could, all but closed this route. Bravo, King Abdullah. Well done.

In this war, as in so many other nontrinitarian ones, the largest formation on either side seems to be the reinforced brigade. Most, however, are much smaller. There is some use of tanks and much of artillery; however, on both sides most of the damage is done by lighter weapons. Including light quick-firing artillery (the kind that fires 20-30 millimeter rounds), mortars, machine guns of all calibers, antitank rockets and missiles, grenade launchers, assault rifles, and car bombs.

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In his famous work on “Protracted War” (not, as Western translations often call it, “guerrilla war”) Mao Zedong, writing from the point of view of the insurgents, divides this kind of struggle into three stages. First comes what we would call terrorism, individual attacks whose main purpose is to destabilize the government and show that it is not in control. Of necessity, such warfare does without any firm territorial base; it is at this stage, above all, that the guerrillas must be like fish swimming in the sea. The second stage is to consolidate some kind of base, usually in remote, difficult terrain that the government forces find it hard to penetrate, where the guerrillas can find refuge, train, and in general consolidate their power. The third stage is the switch to full-scale conventional war, waged against a demoralized opponents and at least partly with the aid of captured weapons and supplies.

In all this, the really critical step is finding the right moment to make the shift from the second stage to the third. Wait too long, and watch your forces becoming demoralized and perhaps disintegrating. Move too early, and you put everything you have achieved at risk. This, for example, was the error General Giap committed back in 1972. Switching from guerrilla to conventional warfare, twice he tried to launch a massive invasion of the south. On both occasions doing so left his forces exposed to US airpower which pulverized them.

Back to Syria. Until the spring of 2015 the various militias did very well. Encouraged by their success, they got to the point where they made the transition, assuming control over much of Syria in the process. By doing so, however, they changed their character and became more and more like their regular opponents. Becoming like their regular opponents, they exposed themselves to those opponents’ firepower, now directed at them not only from the ground (by the Syrian Army) but also from the air (by the Russians). Subjected to a combined conventional offensive, as at Aleppo, the various militias fought but, in the end, lost.

The recent ill-observed cease fire notwithstanding, that does not mean the struggle is over. Too many different parties are involved, of which many have not yet achieved their objectives and remain full of fight. With Assad’s forces on the upswing at the moment, fhe most likely outcome is a regression from Mao’s stage 3 back to stage 2, perhaps even stage 1. Precisely the kind of war which, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, gave the Americans as much trouble as it did.

And Putin? He seems be following Churchill, first proclaiming victory and then getting out. In other words, he knows where to stop. Isn’t that more than the Americans can say?