{"id":29299,"date":"2013-11-14T16:09:38","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T16:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=29299"},"modified":"2013-11-14T18:26:39","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T18:26:39","slug":"zen-at-war-on-the-rocks-on-china-and-avoiding-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=29299","title":{"rendered":"Zen at War on the Rocks on China and Avoiding War"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Chinese<\/a>

Chinese Navy<\/p><\/div>\n

[by Mark Safranski<\/strong>, a.k. a. “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

The editors of the excellent War of the Rocks<\/strong> invited me to post a short rebuttal to the op-ed \u201cHow Not to Go to War With China<\/a><\/strong>\u201d, by Scott Cheney-Peters<\/strong>, which appears in their “Hasty Ambush” section:<\/p>\n

UNDERSTANDING CHINA: THE REAL KEY TO AVOIDING WAR<\/a><\/h2>\n

….A place to begin our efforts in avoiding war with China might be avoiding engagement in some of the same incorrect mirror-imaging assumptions we once made about the Soviet Union, not least of which was MAD.\u00a0 As a doctrine, Soviet leaders never accepted MAD and the Red Army general staff ignored it in drafting war plans to fight and prevail in any nuclear war. While the Soviets had no choice but to tackle the logic of deterrence as we did, the operative Soviet assumptions were predicated on a different strategic calculus, a different force structure and above all, different policy goals from their American counterparts.\u00a0 A dangerous gap between American assumptions of Soviet intentions and the reality of these intentions came to light when in 1983 the Reagan administrationdiscovered to their alarm<\/a>\u00a0that Soviet leaders had interpreted the NATO exercise\u00a0Abel Archer 83<\/a>\u00a0as preparations for a real, imminent nuclear first strike on the USSR and\u00a0ordered Soviet nuclear forces<\/a>\u00a0on high alert.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The military-to-military confidence-building initiatives outlined by Cheney-Peters intended to construct \u201chabits of cooperation<\/a>\u201d are not entirely useless. There is some value in ensuring that high-ranking American military officers have personal and limited operational familiarity with their Chinese counterparts in the People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA), but as potential game-changers, they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Such a policy misses the essential strategic and political centers of gravity in the Sino-American relationship. \u00a0Namely that for the first time in 600 years, China is building a blue water Navy that will foster power projection as far away as the Indian ocean and Australia.\u00a0 Secondly, this naval expansion, coupled with a new Chinese foreign policy, aggressively\u00a0presses grandiose territorial demands<\/a>\u00a0on nearly all of its neighbors, including India and Japan.\u00a0 These are fundamental conflicts with American interests that cannot be explained away or papered over by banquet toasts with visiting delegations of Chinese admirals. […]<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Also read another WotR \u00a0China piece “99 Red Balloons: How War with China would Start”<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0by Matthew Hipple<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski, a.k. a. “zen“] The editors of the excellent War of the Rocks invited me to post a short rebuttal to the op-ed \u201cHow Not to Go to War With China\u201d, by Scott Cheney-Peters, which appears in their “Hasty Ambush” section: UNDERSTANDING CHINA: THE REAL KEY TO AVOIDING WAR ….A place to begin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[361,144,651,304,102,87,178,78,336,39,270,374,530,18,217],"tags":[1276],"class_list":["post-29299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-china","category-debate","category-defense","category-diplomacy","category-foreign-policy","category-geopolitics","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-military","category-national-security","category-navy","category-strategy-and-war","category-war","category-warriors","tag-war-on-the-rocks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29299"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29317,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29299\/revisions\/29317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}