not a negative force’ (Elliott 2006). This thinly-veiled warning followed on the heels of
Bush’s historic visit to India, during which the two countries struck a controversial
nuclear deal, which many commentators say is designed at least in part to counter the
rise of China (Richter 2006). And one month later, prodded by the United States, NATO
was reportedly to be in a process of seeking formal partnerships with Japan, South
Korea, Australia, and New Zealand (Goodenough 2006). Despite NATO’s reassurance,
this latest development, based on ‘revised neo-con fantasies’ (Kolko 2006), would do
little to help reduce China’s growing suspicion of a U.S.-led strategic encirclement.
This ‘encirclement’ strategy will become even more apparent if we take into account
earlier U.S. negotiations with Indonesia to open a naval base on Sulawesi Island, and its
steps to strengthen military ties with Thailand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia as well
as several central Asian countries. In this way, as Robert Kaplan (2005: 50) approvingly
notes, the U.S. has quietly assembled ‘a Pacific military alliance of sorts’ at PACOM
headquarters in Honolulu, well on track to complete what Walter Russell Mead of the
Council on Foreign Relations calls a ‘strategic net’ to ‘persuade China to keep its
ambitions within reason’ (cited in Tisdall 2005b).
Preparing for conflict with China
According to Max Boot (2005b), alliances against China ‘are highly desirable’, but ‘to
be credible they need to be backed up by force’, meaning that military preparedness
must be an integral ingredient of the neocon China policy triad. Casting Beijing as ‘a
maturing fascist regime’, Ledeen (2002) reasoned that fascism was destroyed not by
‘internal crisis’ but by ‘superior force of arms’.
Consequently, for some neocons at least,
a war aimed at destroying the Chinese regime should be part of U.S. China strategy.
‘Getting into a war with China is easy’, says Michael Vickers at the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. ‘But the dilemma is, How do you end a war
with China?’ His answer: ‘effecting some form of regime change, because we don’t
want to leave some wounded, angry regime in place’ (Kaplan 2005: 54).
Significantly, the neocon-dominated Pentagon and national security establishment have
already embarked on a series of strategic reviews and redeployments with China in
mind. For instance, aimed at the so-called ‘arc of instability’ in East Asia, including the
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