Most reach a similar conclusion: China attacks not when it feels confident about the future but when it worries its enemies are closing in. N umerous scholars have analyzed when and why Beijing uses force. And once the shooting starts, the pressures for escalation are likely to be severe. Today, Beijing might be tempted to engage in this sort of aggression in multiple areas. It is willing to pick even a very costly fight with a single enemy to teach it, and others observing from the sidelines, a lesson. In conflicts including the Korean War and clashes with Vietnam in 1979, China has often viewed the use of force as an educational exercise. The historical record since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 is clear: When confronted by a mounting threat to its geopolitical interests, Beijing does not wait to be attacked it shoots first to gain the advantage of surprise. It is also increasingly encircled, and faces growing resistance on many fronts-just the sort of scenario that has led it to lash out in the past. The right question, instead, is whether America can deter China from initiating a hot one.īeijing is a remarkably ambitious revanchist power, one determined to make China whole again by “reuniting” Taiwan with the mainland, turning the East and South China Seas into Chinese lakes, and grabbing regional primacy as a stepping-stone to global power. A cold war with Beijing is already under way. President Joe Biden has said that America “is not seeking a new cold war.” But that is the wrong way to look at U.S.-China relations. Top Pentagon officials have warned that China could start a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait or other geopolitical hot spots sometime this decade.Īnalysts and officials in Washington are fretting over worsening tensions between the United States and China and the risks to the world of two superpowers once again clashing rather than cooperating.
P resident Xi Jinping declared in July that those who get in the way of China’s ascent will have their “heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel.” The People’s Liberation Army Navy is churning out ships at a rate not seen since World War II, as Beijing issues threats against Taiwan and other neighbors.
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