International speculation about U.S.-China relations came to an end after the Feb. 10 call between Biden and Xi Jinping; meanwhile, the U.S. military has had a series of recent high-profile activities, all focused on the Chinese military threat. From three related reports publicly released by the U.S. Navy, to a special report by the Congressional Research Service, to a new task force on defense strategy toward China at the U.S. Department of Defense, all signs indicate that while the U.S. has been speaking polite language to the Chinese Communist Party recently, the alarm bells are ringing on national defense.
How does the United States view the Chinese military threat at this moment? A recent article by Admiral Charles A. Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, gives a clear picture. In his article “Forging 21st-Century Strategic Deterrence,” published in the February issue of Proceedings, a leading naval publication, he points out that there is now a real possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and China and Russia due to the escalating military threat the United States faces from China and Russia. The possibility of a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia is now a real possibility.
According to Admiral Richard, after the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the U.S. Department of Defense stopped focusing on the threat of foreign nuclear weapons and instead focused on preventing terrorist forces in the Middle East. Recently, however, China and Russia have begun to threaten the United States and the international order in ways not seen since the height of the Cold War, so the U.S. military must shift its original military strategy from one in which the enemy is “unlikely to drop nuclear weapons” to one in which “dropping nuclear weapons is a very real possibility The U.S. military must therefore change its military strategy from one in which the enemy is “unlikely to drop nuclear weapons” to one in which “dropping nuclear weapons is a very real possibility” and must act to address and prevent this reality. He emphasized that the United States must act immediately to prepare for the future in the face of the growing threat from Russia and China and their actions in gray areas.
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party is more difficult for the United States to deal with than the Soviet Union.
While the United States faced a military threat from the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union shared with the United States the idea that nuclear weapons should not be used, and thus the two sides signed a treaty to prevent nuclear weapons control. On Jan. 29 of this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law extending this nuclear control treaty for another five years. In other words, the United States has a degree of confidence in Russia’s nuclear weapons use because Russia takes international rules and commitments more seriously.
The Chinese Communist Party, on the other hand, not only refuses to sign the nuclear weapons control treaty, but also flouts other international rules or international law, and its occupation of international waters in the South China Sea for military purposes is a clear violation of international maritime law. In January, China passed the Marine Police Law, which it claims applies to the waters it claims to control (including the international waters of the South China Sea) and allows its marine police to fire on foreign vessels in those waters. In response, the Philippine Department of Defense made its concerns clear, and its defense secretary spoke by phone with the U.S. defense secretary on Feb. 10 to confirm their military alliance and U.S. protection of the Philippines, as well as the importance of the 2016 International Tribunal in The Hague arbitration ruling on the South China Sea. The tribunal ruled at the Time that China’s claimed ownership of the South China Sea violated international maritime law, but China refused to accept the ruling, and the Hague International Court of Justice does not have enforcement capabilities in international law.
Worried that China’s nuclear weapons use pledge cannot be relied upon
The United States now realizes that the Chinese Communist Party’s international commitments (such as “no first use of nuclear weapons”) are unreliable and can be overturned at any time, as well as in the case of nuclear weapons use. As a result, the U.S. is now taking precautions against the Chinese military threat, not just in public publications, but in action, with a Feb. 10 Defense Department release announcing a visit by Biden to the Pentagon and the creation of a strategic study group on China to develop a U.S. defense strategy to address China’s “incremental threat.
With the U.S. military on high alert, will the Chinese Communist Party relent? It does not appear so. The article “China is a challenge to the U.S. that is hard to hide,” published by the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign propaganda mouthpiece, Dovetail News, on Feb. 12, states, “In fact, it is hard for Beijing to hide from the fact that ‘China is a challenge to the United States. …… China has become the ‘elephant in the room’, and it is difficult to hide its sharp edges”.
The current international situation can no longer be tasted simply from the political and economic news or diplomatic rhetoric, the storm clouds are changing, and it can be seen from the dynamics of the military community on both sides.
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