China hawk extraordinaire Rep. Steve Chabot had a piece in the DC Examiner last week calling for a “fresh review of America’s interests in Asia.” For one thing, Rep. Chabot loudly protested China’s “enormous and ever-growing militarization program.”
For advocates of Taiwan independence like Rep. Chabot, the PRC’s military modernization program is no doubt worrisome. But the United States is in no position to protest any other country’s allegedly “enormous and ever-growing militarization program.”
US defense spending is more than $400 billion annually, not including the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US has the largest blue-water navy in the world, with 12 aircraft carriers. We can project naval (or other) power anywhere in the world in a matter of days.
Chinese defense spending is hard to pin down, precisely, but experts generally center around a median estimate in the neighborhood of $50 billion. China has 0 aircraft carriers, and thus is unable even to protect its precarious supply of energy that comes from the Middle East through the Strait of Malacca.
China looks at things pretty simply: The United States could militarily impose its will on issues that China perceives as life-or-death concerns: the future of Taiwan, the balance of power in East Asia, and the security of China’s supplies of energy. It would be like if China were the dominant military power in the Western hemisphere, and then started squawking about America’s attempt to build up its own military.
For Rep. Chabot (or Secretary Rumsfeld) to think that the United States has any position to protest anybody’s “enormous and ever-growing militarization program” is a bit ridiculous. At a time when we’re engaged in two wars halfway ’round the world, spending nearly as much on defense as the rest of the world combined, it’s a shaky line of reasoning that says that China’s attempt to bring a 1950s-era military into the 21st century is anything that we are in any position to protest.
As Martin Wolf noted in the FT last September (sub. req’d),
the Chinese can justifiably react by asking why the US needs to spend as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. With Canada and Mexico as its neighbours, why does it feel so threatened? To this the US would respond that it has special responsibilities as guarantor of world peace and, in any case, threatens no other nation. China, in its turn, could then ask who elected the US global policeman and why, given the public debate in the US about whether and how to curb its rise, it should trust its security to the US.
Just so.
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* For an explanation of the title, go here.
