Chinese and US flags and currency notes. File photo.
By Brian Berletic – Sep 7, 2024
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has recently claimed the US is not “looking for a crisis.” This is said, of course, with an important caveat—no crisis is sought as long as China subordinates itself to the United States.
Because China, like any other sovereign nation, based on international law, is obligated to resist foreign subordination, the US continues speeding toward inevitable war with China. Although China has formidable military capabilities, causing doubt among many that the US will actually ever trigger war with China, the US has spent decades attempting to create and exploit a potential weakness China’s current military might may be incapable of defending against.
Washington’s long-running policy of containing China
Far from a recent policy shift by the Biden Administration, US ambitions to encircle and contain China stretch back to the end of World War II. Even as far back as 1965 as the US waged war against Vietnam, US documents referred to a policy “to contain Communist China,” as “long-running,” and identified the fighting in Southeast Asia as necessary toward achieving this policy.
For decades the US has waged wars of aggression along China’s periphery, engaged in political interference to destabilize China’s partners as well as attempt to destabilize China itself, as well as pursued likewise long-running policies to undermine China’s economic growth and its trade with the rest of the world.
More recently, the US has begun reorganizing its entire military for inevitable war with China.
Cutting Chinese economic lines of communication
In addition to fighting Chinese forces in the Asia-Pacific region, the US also has long-running plans to cut off Chinese trade around the globe.
In 2006, the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) published String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asia Littoral, identifying China’s essential “sea lines of communication” (SLOC) from the Middle East to the Strait of Malacca as particularly vulnerable and subject to US primacy over Asia.
The paper argues that US primacy, and in particular, its military presence across the region, could be used as leverage for “drawing China into the community of nations as a responsible stakeholder,” a euphemism for subordinating China to US primacy. This, in turn, is in line with a wider global policy seeking to “deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”
Under a section titled, Leveraging US Military Power, the paper argues for and expanded US military presence across the entire region, including along China’s SLOC, augmenting its existing presence in East Asia (South Korea and Japan), but also extending it to Southeast Asia and South Asia, recruiting nations like Indonesia and Bangladesh to bolster US military power over the region and thus over China.
It notes Chinese efforts to secure its SLOC, including with a mutually beneficial port project in Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, part of the larger China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the construction of a port in Sittwe, Myanmar, part of the larger China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Both projects seek to create alternative economic lines of communication for China, circumventing the long and vulnerable sea route through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.
Both projects have since come under attack by US-backed militancy with regular attacks still taking place against Chinese engineers across Pakistan and a large-scale armed conflict backed by the US currently unfolding in Myanmar which regularly sees opposition forces target Chinese-built infrastructure.
Thus, US policy has sought and has since achieved the region-wide disruption of China’s SLOC as well as efforts to circumvent choke points (CPEC/CMEC). Other potential corridors, including through the heart of Southeast Asia, have also been targeted by US interference. The Thai section of China’s high-speed railway to connect Southeast Asia to China has been significantly delayed by the US-backed political opposition openly trying to cancel the project.
In many ways, the US has already created a crisis for China, albeit through proxies.
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Targeting Chinese maritime shipping
Under the guise of protecting “freedom of navigation,” the US Navy has positioned its warships and military aviation around the world’s most important maritime passages including the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East and the South China Sea—the east approach to the Strait of Malacca—along with plans to establish a significant naval presence on the Strait’s west approach.
The US realizes that Chinese military power is extensive enough to significantly complicate, if not outright defeat, US military aggression along Chinese coasts. The US instead imagines targeting China far beyond the reach of its warplanes and missile forces.
The US Naval Institute published, Prize Law Can Help the United States Win the War of 2026, the third place entry in the Future of Naval Warfare Essay Contest. It warns that a “close naval blockage” is infeasible due to China’s formidable anti-access area-denial (A2AD) capabilities.
It instead argues for:
…a distant blockade—“intercept[ing] Chinese merchant shipping at key maritime chokepoints” outside China’s A2/AD reach—would be generally sustainable; flexible in tempo and location; pose manageable risks of escalation; and impede China’s resource-hungry, import-dependent war effort.
Part of this “distant blockade” would be a campaign of targeting, seizing, and repurposing Chinese shipping vessels to augment the US’ lagging shipbuilding capabilities and the dearth of maritime resources it has created.
Far from a random essay representing a purely speculative strategy, the US has already taken steps to implement its “distant blockade.” The entire US Marine Corps has been tailored solely to wage war against Chinese shipping across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
The BBC in its 2023 article, “How US Marines are being reshaped for China threat,” would report: “The new plan sees the Marines as fighting dispersed operations across chains of islands. Units will be smaller, more spread out, but packing a much bigger punch through a variety of new weapons systems.”
The “new weapons systems” are primarily anti-shipping missiles. Operating on islands and in littoral regions, the US Marines have been transformed into a force almost solely for disrupting Chinese shipping.
Together with plans to seize Chinese vessels, the US has positioned itself not as a global protector of “freedom of navigation,” but the greatest threat to it. Considering China’s status as the largest trade partner of nations around the globe, US plans to target Chinese shipping isn’t a threat to only China, but to global economic prosperity as a whole.
US war with China is war with the world
The danger of Washington’s desire for war with China and implementing its “distant blockade” to strangle China’s economy into ruins is a danger for the entire world. While preventing the global economic damage this strategy will cause after it is put into motion may be impossible, targeting the various components the US is using to encircle and contain China ahead of this conflict is possible.
US political interference and the political as well as armed opposition it has created and is using to cut China’s various economic lines of communication, can be exposed and uprooted by national and regional security initiatives.
Securing national and regional information space is the simplest and most effective way to cut the US off from the populations it seeks to influence and turn against targeted nations to achieve the political and security crises it uses to threaten trade between China and its partners. Passing and enforcing laws targeting, exposing, and uprooting US interference, including the funding of opposition parties, organizations, and media platforms by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is also essential.
Recent moves by the US to target foreign media organizations and their alleged cooperation with American citizens has created a convenient pretext for other nations to cite when targeting and uprooting NED-funded activity.
While taking these steps will have their own consequences, including retaliation from the US itself, the alternative—allowing the US to prepare and eventually carry out its “distant blockade” against China and its global trade partners—will be even more consequential.
Only time will tell if the emerging multipolar world is capable of seeing and solving this future crisis the US has spent decades preparing to create, or if the political leadership in Southeast and South Asia will fear short-term consequences at the expense of allowing and thus suffering catastrophic consequences in the intermediate future.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
