Gunboat Diplomacy in China and Cuba
Is China Next?
by Chalmers Johnson
Quietly and with minimal reportage in the American press, the U.S. Navy
announced that in mid-July through August it would hold "Operation Summer
Pulse 04" in waters off the China coast near Taiwan. It was the first time
in U.S. naval history that seven of our twelve carrier strike groups (CSGs)
were deployed in one place at the same time. It is hard to imagine what an
armada this was (or what it cost). At a minimum, a single CSG includes the
aircraft carrier itself (usually with nine to ten squadrons of about 70
aircraft), a guided-missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an
attack submarine, and a combination ammunition, oiler, and supply ship.
Normally the United States uses only one or at the most two CSG's to show
the flag in a troubled spot. In a combat situation it deploys three or four,
as it did for both the first and second wars with Iraq. But seven in one
place is unheard of. It's the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings.
Which only goes to show that our foreign policy is increasingly made by the
Pentagon. Of all the money the United States spends on foreign affairs, 93 %
is controlled by the Department of Defense and only 7 % by the State
Department. The various regional commanders, CENTCOM for the Middle East,
PACOM for the Pacific, SOUTHCOM for Latin America, and so forth, have
ambassadors reporting to them. Even the current secretary of state for only
the third time in our history is a military officer — former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell (his two predecessors were George C.
Marshall and Al Haig).
Taiwanese ships joined their American colleagues in this modern rerun of
nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy.
Instead of trying to intimidate China with our navy, we should be trying to
adjust to China's commitment to peaceful commerce. If left alone by American
militarists, China will almost surely, over time, become a democracy on the
same pattern as that of South Korea and Taiwan (both of which had
U.S.-sponsored military dictatorships until the late 1980s). Our military
fanatics and neo-conservative ideologues know this and appear to be trying
to precipitate a confrontation with China. If they are successful, the
results are all too predictable: we will halt China's march away from
communism and militarize its leadership, bankrupt ourselves, split Japan
over whether to renew aggression against China, and lose the war — just as
we lost our war against Vietnam and are in the process of losing the one in
Iraq. We will also earn the lasting enmity of the oldest and most populous
nation on earth.
Chalmers Johnson's latest book is The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004).
Back to Peace Talk Index, Autumn, 2004