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The Pentagon announced in its new National Defense Strategy that China remains the U.S.’s most “serious challenge” to security and noted that Beijing is increasing its “aggressive endeavor to refashion the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to suit its interests and authoritarian preferences.”
The report was released along with the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review and the Missile Defense Review. None of the reports sat well with China that sees Washington as a fading superpower grasping at its last chance for relevance.
Wang Wenbin, China’s foreign ministry’s spokesman, said the U.S. policy reflects Washington’s “logic of seeking absolute military superiority and will stoke a nuclear arms race.”
“The U.S. has strengthened the role of nuclear weapons in its national security policy and lowered the threshold for their use, which has increasingly become the source of the risk of nuclear conflict,” he said.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a former Raytheon board member, identified China as the only competitor that has both the intent and—increasingly—the power to reshape the international order. He said Russia presents more of an “acute threat.”
Seamus Daniels, the defense budget analysis fellow for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Breaking Defense that the Pentagon is training its focus on command and control, fortifying communications systems, long-range strike capacity, and space program.
China’s Global Times newspaper quoted Zhuo Hua, an international affairs expert at the School of International Relations and Diplomacy of Beijing Foreign Studies University, who told the paper the U.S. is trying to say that the concept of ‘integrated deterrence’ has entered the actual combat level, the essence of which is to build the war capability and operation mode of civil-military integration, nuclear and conventional weapons integration, and the integration of offense and defense by integrating resources at home and courting allies abroad.”
The Trends Journal reported earlier this month that the Biden administration continues to see China as its chief rival. (See “U.S. LAYS OUT ROADMAP TO MAINTAIN WORLD DOMINATION WITH ‘MODERNIZED’ MILITARY EQUIPPED FOR ‘STRATEGIC COMPETITION.”)
We noted that Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser who was an Obama administration carryover, said the world is at an “inflection point,” and in the early years of a decisive decade. (See “BIDEN PRESIDENCY= OBAMA 2021.”)
“The terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China will be set. The window of opportunity to deal with shared challenges like climate change will narrow drastically, even as the intensity of those challenges grows. So, we need to grasp our moment, just as Truman did his,” Sullivan said.
The report said China has been working to undermine alliances that the U.S. has in the Indo-Pacific region’s East China Sea, the South China Sea, and “along the Line of Actual Control” on the Chinese-Indian border.
The paper noted that China or PRC appeared 101 times in the 80-page security report, including a paragraph titled, “Threats to the U.S. Homeland.”
Another Chinese expert, told The Global Times that China has no interest in “stepping into the boxing ring with the U.S.”
“We will do things at our own pace,” Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the paper. “China will never occupy Alaska or deploy missiles close to the U.S. In China’s view, it’s meaningless for the U.S. to try to maintain military hegemony in the Asia-Pacific across the vast Pacific Ocean.”
TREND FORECAST: The Trends Journal reported in November 2021, in an article titled, “DUH! PENTAGON SURPRISED BY CHINA’S TEST OF HYPERSONIC MISSILE,” that China successfully launched one of the missiles. Reports leaked to the media shortly after the Pentagon’s former software chief told The Financial Times that Beijing has already won the artificial intelligence race with the U.S. and will likely further its lead in other technologies in the future.
“We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years,” Nicholas Chaillan told the paper. “Right now, it’s already a done deal; it’s already over in my opinion. Whether it takes war or not is kind of anecdotal.”
Gerald Celente, has said that the U.S.—despite having the largest and most expensive military in history—has not won a war since World War II and cannot even win against third-world nations, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc.
The U.S.’s disastrous withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan last year – which is long forgotten as America ramped up the Ukraine War – further negated America’s military’s reputation. By their deeds you shall know them, and considering the U.S. unbroken line of military defeats, Beijing sees the U.S. as a fading power.
TREND FORECAST: We maintain our forecast of “The Rise of China” as one of the Top Trends of 2021. We predicted that the 21st century will be the Chinese century because the business of China is business; the business of America since World War II has been war.
Both China’s manufacturing abilities and tech innovation were at third world levels before Bill Clinton and George W. Bush brought the communist nation into the World Trade Organization at the turn of the century.
It was U.S. and European companies that exported their manufacturing facilities and high technology to China so they could use its cheap labor to make their products… and sell them back to the citizens around the world at much higher prices so they could boost their profit margins.
Thus, with the U.S. workforce having slid into the service sector economy—working at Walmarts, janitorial jobs, hospitality sector, restaurant workers, packing and shipping for Amazon, stocking shelves and cashiers at Dollar General, Kroger’s etc.—what was once a nation of manufacturing innovation and creativity has descended into Slavelandia. (Read “SLAVELANDIA: RICH GET RICHER, POOR GET POORER,” 13 Oct 2020.)
As we have long forecast, the only way the United States—which is rich in natural and human resources—will halt its economic decline is to become a self-sustaining economy.
Therefore, in the absence of a Renaissance whereby the people raise their emotional, physical, moral and spiritual levels to their highest degrees, the country will continue its “end-of-empire” decline.