OPINION:
Foreign policy elites are fretting about a cold war with China, but we should be thankful if that’s all we get.
China boasts the largest navy in the world and weapons like hypersonic and carrier-killing missiles that could quickly disable U.S. assets in the South China Sea and western Pacific.
Along with bases on the militarized Paracel and Spratly islands, those make precarious the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan and could force the United States to accept Chinese dominance through critical lanes of commerce in the South China Sea.
All this would threaten the sovereignty and, at the very least, the independent discretion of island nations from the Philippines to Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia.
As leaders preparing for war are inclined, Chinese President Xi Jinping is consolidating his domestic political and economic control.
He is streamlining government agencies, and the Chinese Communist Party is asserting greater control over the bureaucracy and private businesses.
After cracking down on China’s financial and high-tech leaders, the CCP is placing party representatives on corporate boards and in key management positions. Beijing has taken “golden shares” in ownership that permit the CCP to guide and veto strategic business decisions.
Like Russia before it invaded Ukraine, Mr. Xi is pushing for greater self-reliance.
In addition to a fully integrated, state-of-the-art semiconductor supply chain and weapons manufacturing capabilities, Mr. Xi is aiming for self-sufficiency in agricultural commodities.
Much of this is a logical response to U.S. policy.
Even a peaceful China content to compete with the West solely in economic spheres and for influence in developing nations, and disinclined to support Russian aggression in Europe, would likely feel threatened by a continued U.S. naval dominance of the South China Sea and western Pacific.
The former carries about one-third of global seaborne trade and provides essential passage for China’s imports of oil and other critical commodities and exports.
Taiwan’s democracy and economic success present a direct threat to the CCP’s bargain with China’s masses — authoritarian rule in exchange for rising prosperity — and a superior U.S. military presence would make reunification virtually impossible.
China’s market socialist economy is incompatible with the Western system of market capitalism. The World Trade Organization has proved inadequate in settling disputes, and President Biden’s industrial policies for semiconductors, electric vehicles and batteries, and green energy pose a direct challenge.
Despite having accomplished leadership or at least parity in manufacturing process technologies, supercomputers, artificial intelligence, solar panels, EVs and batteries, China is still scaling up industrial espionage and weaponizing its patent courts to directly appropriate the technology of Western companies.
The United States — together with the Netherlands and Japan — is severely curtailing exports to China of machinery used to make leading-edge semiconductors, and the United States is seeking to orchestrate other export sanctions. The Biden administration is tightening limits on U.S. investment in China.
In sum, China and the United States are withdrawing into a technological competition that is both self-justifying and destabilizing. In varying measures across industries, two separate research and development and supply chains will emerge for computer hardware, critical components and software, artificial intelligence, green industries and critical raw materials. And those will find expression in the Chinese and U.S. conventional arms competition.
The United States is handicapped in several dimensions.
By early in the next decade, China will have a larger economy as measured by gross domestic product and is capable of increasing its military spending 7% each year against 1% domestic inflation. The U.S. military budget is not keeping pace with inflation.
The Ukrainian conflict will not be favorably resolved without NATO providing Kyiv with jet fighters and weapons to strike supply lines in Russia and inflict corresponding damage on Russian infrastructure.
Mr. Biden is naturally reluctant to take such aggressive steps for fear that a desperate President Vladimir Putin could unleash nuclear weapons or NATO forces could be drawn into direct conflict with the Russian military. But the emerging stalemate drains U.S. resources that could be used to build American forces more rapidly in Asia and the Arctic, where China, with access to Russian ports and icebreakers, is asserting a presence.
U.S. military planners are proving as inept as Russian ground forces with slow and failed weapons development projects. Taiwan must be defended due to its strategic value in the production of semiconductors and their geostrategic importance to Japan and the Philippines. Still, China could tumble the world into war elsewhere.
Its military has been harassing Philippine naval vessels and challenging American aircraft in the South China Sea. One of those incidents could easily escalate into a Chinese effort to regulate commercial passage and face down an out-resourced U.S. Navy. Then the dominoes would fall.
Global conflicts are like global financial meltdowns. They often emerge as small sparks in distant places beyond the immediate attention of policymakers, but that have devastating consequences.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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