Provoking China with THAAD in South Korea — a probably not so smart strategy

© 2016 Peter Free

 

17 August 2016

 

 

Caveat — what follows requires historical knowledge

 

I am addressing sound strategists. Especially those with Realpolitik bent.

 

My theme is that international provocation sends ripples into the future. If one does not want to face the predictable long term consequences of those waves, one should not initiate the provocation.

 

 

Proving again that American leadership nitwits do not learn — and don't care that don't

 

The US is deploying its missile-intercepting THAAD system to South Korea. The acronym stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense.

 

Supposedly we are doing this to strengthen South Korea's defenses against North Korea and its still toddling missiles and bombs.

 

China, predictably, is unhappy. An arms race will probably begin. Realpolitik-wise, armament competitions are pretty much always destabilizing. World Wars I and II partially illustrate some of the effects of geopolitically mistaken arms racing.

 

Economically, for instance, over the strategic long term, uncertainty and blood-letting usually do not work to the advantage of global business. Economic endeavors, the essence of modernity, need predictability in which to operate. Arms sales are an exception. But arms sales are, comparatively, a non-dominant fraction of the non-lethal economic transactions that Chinese and Americans are party to.

 

The picture gets grimmer.

 

The People's Republic of China may also start upping pressure against Taiwan's pseudo independence. As well as more forcefully extending Chinese influence in the East and South China Seas and beyond. Do the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands ring any bells?

 

Regional neighbors will feel threatened. Guess whom they are going to call to oppose China's predictable Great Power upset?

 

All this will have been set into motion because the United States is so consistently unable to see how strategy plays out over more than the next 5 or 10 minutes.

 

Apparently, we are too erectilely aroused to see that North Korea is already reasonably well deterred by nuke-possible retaliation. Even without upping the technological stakes with a THAAD deployment.

 

 

Increased tension, of course, will be profitably good for America's military industrial complex

 

Think of the profitable weapons sales, military expansion, and homeland security mongering that we can do.

 

At least until things get blood-letting serious, and China proves that messing with it in its sphere of influence is a step unprofitably too far. Hard to make money when somebody's punted you down the block. Bruises divert your attention.

 

Keep in mind that the upshot of the THAAD provocation is similar to how we would react, if China began messing with the United States from dangerously armed positions in Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean.

 

Remember the Soviets and the Cuban Missile Crisis?

 

Militarily speaking — looking into the future — the US is not going to win a war on China's periphery. Logistical and personnel constraints are too imposing. And from a political strategic perspective, one wonders whether the American public has the fortitude to cope with major commitment to the region.

 

Do we really want to send Americans to die on behalf of our allies' Lesser Power interests in the far Pacific?

 

It is not as if China is committing immensely noticeable aggression anywhere new. Unlike the United States, which cannot seem to keep its often imperialistic hands inside its own pockets.

 

 

The fact is that Great Powers do what they do

 

Balancing against excess is the key to Power management.

 

Provocation generally backfires, when it is unnecessarily inserted into tense situations. As we arguably already have here.

 

 

 

Has history seen similarly perennially abrasive behavior before?

 

The Roman historian, Tacitus, said of the Roman Empire:

 

 

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

 

 

Would Vietnamese, Iraqi, Afghani, Palestinian and Libyan perspectives agree with Tacitus' synopsis, as applied to us?

 

 

The moral? — Provocation's downstream effects may eventually bite our dangling parts off

 

Not only do I object to American foreign policy on traditionally expressed American ethical grounds, I object to it on strategic grounds.

 

Making powerful enemies by being consistently abrasive is not a good idea. THAAD missile placement in South Korea is foreseeably going to set China off.

 

This will probably disadvantage us over the long term. Especially so, while American scrotum-tugging continues against the Russian Federation. Russia is now forcefully countering our incessant sphere of influence scrunching against them.

 

So — with this geopolitical stage set — pretend that you are in charge.

 

Does anyone of reasonably sane mind think that the United States is powerful enough to challenge both Russia and China in simultaneously provoked engagements?

 

Here, I imagine General Võ Nguyên Giáp's strategic spirit. He chuckles at self-defeating American thinking, as his reincarnated mind migrates into modern Russian and Chinese peers.

 

And do you remember who influenced General Giap's strategic genius?

 

Yes, China's own spectacularly successful revolutionist, Mao Tse-tung — the Twentieth Century dynamo who almost single-handedly plucked the then Chinese backwater from obscurity. The same man who set the People's Republic of China directly on strategic course toward unseating American world dominance.

 

Which side, would you guess, is going to play the strategy game more intelligently?

 

 

Those who remember and implement lessons from Smart People's History?

 

Or those who refuse to recall anything substantive at all?