China/Encirclement

China/Encirclement (Politics,  War/Preparation,  mid-level deep event)
Interest of	• Brian Berletic • German Marshall Fund/Young Strategists • Peter Navarro • Jonathan Ward
USA and allies encirclement of China.

China is geographically encircled by allies of the United States. This is part of a long-term plan, and a continuation of such concepts as Mackinder's Heartland theory and Cold War containment, which led to the encirclement of Russia before.

War against China

John Pilger's documentary The Coming War on China

A 2016 RAND Corporation document titled, “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable", (along with comments by US officials to the effect ) indicates that the United States has plans ready to go to war with China within a "window of opportunity" that would close between 2025 and 2030.

For that the US Marines have done away with all their main battle tanks and other weapons systems to focus on Navy-centric warfighting. The war would focus on challenging the Chinese Navy in the South China sea, to cause enough disturbance and through that bring about economic hardship.

Maritime Choke Points

China is dependent on it's access to sea lanes for trade and import of resources. In a military scenario, the US could simply decide to not engage China's Navy directly as a first step, but close the sea lanes to Chinese ports. China, unlike other countries, does have a number of these choke points to consider.

History

The renewed focus officially started in 2012, with President Barack Obama's Pivot to Asia, a large scale redeployment of US military resources to East Asia, followed by diplomatic, economic and propaganda offensives. President Donald Trump focused on the economic aspects of the strategy, and made a major contribution to making a large proportion of the US population accepting the notion of China as an enemy.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
2021	“In a blunt opening statement before the talks in private, Mr Anthony Blinken said the US would "discuss our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion of our allies". "Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability," he said. In response, Mr Yang Jiechi accused Washington of using its military might and financial supremacy to suppress other countries. "It abuses so-called notions of national security to obstruct normal trade exchanges, and incite some countries to attack China," he added. Mr Yang said human rights in the US were at a low point, with black Americans being "slaughtered".”	China US	March 2021
2023	“Dozens of versions of the above war-game scenario have been enacted over the last few years, most recently in April by the House Select Committee on competition with China. And while the ultimate outcome in these exercises is not always clear — the U.S. does better in some than others — the cost is. In every exercise the U.S. uses up all its long-range air-to-surface missiles in a few days, with a substantial portion of its planes destroyed on the ground. In every exercise the U.S. is not engaged in an abstract push-button war from 30,000 feet up like the ones Americans have come to expect since the end of the Cold War, but a horrifically bloody one. Soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army hold up shotguns. And that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear.”	Michael Hirsh	September 2023
AUKUS	“For $360 billion, we're going to get eight submarines. It must be the worst deal in all history”	Paul Keating	15 March 2023
Kim Beazley	“In the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen.””	Kim Beazley	2006
Yossef Bodansky	“According to Yossef Bodansky, then Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in "yet another anti-Russian jihad, seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces." Bodansky revealed the entire CIA Caucasus strategy in detail in his report, stating that US Government officials participated in "a formal meeting in Azerbaijan in December 1999 in which specific programs for the training and equipping of Mujahideen from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon, culminating in Washington's tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US "private security companies'. . . to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad for a long time…Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism".”	William Engdahl Yossef Bodansky	2015
Peter Dutton	““It would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action...maybe there are circumstances where we wouldn’t take up that option, (but) I can’t conceive of those circumstances.””	Peter Dutton	13 November 2021
Jens Stoltenberg	“We also have to understand that this is not about NATO moving into Asia, but instead about the fact that China is coming close to us.”	Jens Stoltenberg	January 2024

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