Does China want to fight a war with the U.S.?
Gordon Chang thinks the Chinese military is suicidal:
Why be concerned with WikiLeaks when the secretary of defense is rushing to give sensitive information to the only great power preparing to kill Americans? The justification for doing so is that the Chinese will reciprocate. Yet they have in fact not responded in kind after years of essentially one-way transfers of information and know-how from the United States to China, and Gates on this trip will not see any military facility not previously opened to U.S. officials....The Chinese interpret Gatesâ??s offers of cooperation as signs of weakness. He is, in their view, the representative of a power in terminal decline, a country that will soon be so weak it will not be able to resist Chinese advances in the region. Comments early last year to the effect that Beijing can use its holding of American debt to punish the United States reveal the mentality of senior PLA officers.
Chinaâ??s generals and admirals are wrong in every respect, but the important point is that we are oblivious to what they are thinking. Gates needs to recognize that Beijing is configuring its military to fight the United States, that its senior officers do not fear war, and that they think they can win one. To not recognize facts is recklessâ??and something that has led to every great tragedy involving Americans.
You have to assume that China's generals also think about the enormous stockpile of American nuclear weapons, long range bombers, submarines and inter-continental ballistic missiles - weapons that, collectively, could obliterate large swathes of their country.
No one should ever discount the possibility that nations can embrace a suicidal irrationality from time to time, but nothing in China's recent behavior suggests that the country wants to fight a war with the United States.
(AP Photo)
