08/18/16 – Peter Lee – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, guys, Scott Horton Show.
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Hey, introducing Peter Lee, the China hand.
That's his handle on Twitter.
And you can find his blog at chinamatters.blogspot.com, Chinamatters there.
And this one is also reprinted at unz.com, Nuclear Blackmail and America's Fantasy War with China.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Doing great, Scott.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Nice to put a face to the Franco-American Spaghetti-O character on your Twitter AVI there.
Yeah, I really look like that.
Well, good.
Now I'm used to that.
The association can never be broken.
All right.
So yeah, no, listen, I'm really glad to have you on the show here.
And I'm really glad that I finally figured out that, oh, Peter Lee and China hand, that's the same guy.
Okay.
I'm kind of an idiot.
So yeah, what that means, I finally looked at your Twitter page and followed the linkster.
And then I'm like, oh, yeah, no, I read this guy.
You know, I just didn't know that he was that.
Okay.
Yesterday you were the spotlight on antiwar.com for this one that you wrote about China.
And this is something that gets a lot of neglect on this show instead of the coverage it deserves.
The Asia pivot, it is on.
And here the Rand Corporation, which works for the Pentagon, but is out in California so that it's supposedly somehow independent of them.
They've come up with a plan thinking the unthinkable about, is it basically it's their advice to the Air Force in the Navy about how they might go about waging a war against China if one was to break out?
Is that it?
Well, I looked at that report as reassurance that a war with China could be fought on conventional terms and would not escalate to nuclear.
So so they're trying to encourage it almost.
Exactly.
Yes.
The the whole point of the pivot is a conventional military buildup, you know, putting arms in the region, also arming our allies.
And if the whole thing is going to go nuclear at the end, the premise of that effort seems to be flawed.
Yeah.
And but it goes without saying, or I guess it goes with some saying in the Rand report that, nah, don't worry, man, the Chi-Coms, they're not going to use their H-bombs.
They have a reason to be so reassured about that.
I looked at that a lot.
And I think that the main reason for providing that assurance is not because they necessarily believe that, but they're trying to, as we say, shape the info war battlefield in Washington as well.
And I sort of see President Obama's hand in this to a certain extent because he is actually of the non-nuclear persuasion, you know, he did get a Nobel Peace Prize for that.
And I think that he wants to develop a doctrine, no matter how unrealistic, that involves a non-nuclear confrontation with China.
But I think even more importantly, the war staying non-nuclear is key to the pivot and the United States' role as the, what they call now the net provider of security in Asia.
The bottom line is, if the war is going to go nuclear, everybody else in the region is going to want to have nuclear weapons.
Japan has been hinting that they could go nuclear since the 70s, I think it is.
Even today in South Korea, conservative parties in the parliament are demanding a nuclear deterrent against North Korea.
And Taiwan, I believe it was under Chiang Kai-shek, and his son, were also talking about developing a nuclear capability.
So if all those people go nuclear, then the United States does not have a very strong leadership role because these local countries will want to manage their nuclear deterrence and their diplomacy with China on a local, almost a bilateral basis.
And that detracts from what the United States is trying to do, which is saying, we provide the nuclear umbrella, you are under that umbrella, and therefore your security policies are subordinate to what the United States is trying to do.
Well now, so could there be a situation where the Americans back out of the region and recognize that no, the Pacific Ocean is not just an American lake, these countries all have coasts there too, etc., without the South Koreans and the Japanese and whoever else panicking and making nukes?
This is something I've talked with Andrew Bacevich about in the past, where he says, oh yeah, we definitely ought to get out of the Middle East, but Asia?
You know, I think, as crazy as it sounds, maybe we're a stabilizing force there, and if we were to really pull out there, then sort of like you're talking about, it might be more of a free-for-all and a much more dangerous situation all around.
Well, I'm the small minority of people who are not fans of the non-proliferation treaty.
It's sort of difficult to say this, but I think in one way the more people have nukes the better, because it forces them to manage their security policies more responsibly.
My personal view is that the United States trying to maintain a conventional superiority and preclude their allies from going nuclear is actually more destabilizing than Japan and South Korea simply saying, okay, I got nukes, stay away from me.
Well, no, I mean, that makes sense in a mutually assured destruction way, but then, hey, the Americans have used nukes before, we are just talking about politicians here, and doesn't that mean that it's overall just mathematically more likely if the South Koreans and the Japanese have their own nukes that, yeah, it might give them an incentive to mellow out a little bit, but if a miscalculation is made, it could mean that everybody in Shanghai and Tokyo die, right?
Yeah, I think, though, when I look at this situation, I consider these states, with the exception, I think, of North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons and has not used them, by the way, is that they're relatively high-functioning states.
Where I would worry about the world turning to vapor is in South Asia, where you have India and Pakistan basically with extremely limited interest in each other's coexistence, and they both have nukes, and they haven't used them yet.
Which that would involve China right away as well, wouldn't it?
Depends on what they're trying to do.
I think that the Chinese have deliberately maintained a very basic nuclear weapons arsenal.
They liked the old mutually assured destruction strategic deterrent, and they're not interested in shooting off nukes down there.
The Pakistanis are facing existential concerns that their state is going to collapse if the Indians get too aggressive about it, and I don't think the Chinese threatening to nuke Delhi is going to help with that situation.
Yeah.
Well, and as long as we're talking about that, am I right that there's this whole new push inside Pakistan for more usable tactical nukes right at the same time the Indians are building bigger and bigger H-bombs?
I'm not up on the Pakistan nuclear program, but I wouldn't be surprised.
One thing that, by the way, speaking of tactical nuclear weapons and the ostensible United States interest in nonproliferation, was one thing I mentioned in that piece about rolling out the new guided dialable yield tactical nuclear weapon, or actually what they call them now is nonstrategic nuclear weapons.
The United States now has one in its arsenal that would be delivered by a stealth fighter.
It's clearly one that's supposed to minimize collateral damage and allow them to take out targets, relatively small tactical targets.
The interesting thing was that the Chinese responded unofficially through the South China Morning Post a couple of days ago where they said, yes, we're developing tactical nuclear weapons as well.
The genie is pretty much out of the bottle when it comes to tactical nukes.
Everybody's going to want them, I think.
Which is just another name for much more usable nukes, because after all, Mr. President, these are little bitty ones.
Exactly.
They didn't do the neutron bomb, the property-protecting bomb, but the military has always been interested in that.
The context of this is really that in about 15 years, it's feared, of course there's different plans for everybody, but the likelihood is that if the United States tries to fight a war against China in Asia, China is going to have the conventional advantage.
That I think is the bottom line behind the Pentagon's strong interest in having tactical nuclear weapons as an equalizer.
We've already got the B61 bomb, and the next shoot-a-drop will be the long-range standoff cruise missile.
We're phasing out the old nuclear-tipped cruise missile, and what they call the plutonium pits, I think it is, the plutonium warheads will be available then to put on these new missiles which are designed to be launched at a standoff position, which means outside of probably China, maybe Russia's air defenses, and then they're stealthy and guidable and dial-able yield-y.
So, again, that's supposed to add, it's basically supplementing conventional war capabilities.
Amazingly, the Pentagon apparently has a nuclear-use phase in its planning now, which they define as not nuclear war.
It's just conventional war in which we happen to use some nukes, and with the conventional advantage eroding with China spending hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems to use locally in Asia, I think it's only a matter of time before American nuclear planning comes into play for China.
And the only question is how do you get nukes back in the picture without nuclearizing Asia and then the Japanese and the Koreans saying, well, if we're going to have nuclear exchanges, I want to have my own nukes, which I think is the strategic circle that they're trying to square right now.
Conventional war with nukes.
You know, it's not nuclear war.
I can just see a bunch of eggheads at the University of Chicago sitting around telling each other how smart they are for agreeing about this and writing up their little report and going to have lunch and meanwhile, you know, possibly plotting the end of mankind.
But hey, we all agree with our little consensus about how smart we are about how much sense this makes.
So don't worry about it.
Exactly.
And the key element of not calling a nuclear exchange is that way you can build in the assumption that the Chinese will not retaliate in a serious nuclear way.
That again, is part of that whole spectrum thing.
If we just say, well, the grand thing is about signaling to China, which is to say, if we fight a war with China, we're not going to, our intention is not to take it into the strategic exchange, nuclear exchange phase.
You should just be content with us raining down conventional munitions and perhaps even a few, you know, low dial tactical nukes to take out Chinese military facilities that are otherwise invulnerable, but you know, you're not going to, you're not going to retaliate.
You know, you're not going to start shooting off nuclear weapons to the United States or which is more realistic actually, is that the China would declare that U.S. facilities and allies in the region, particularly in Japan and South Korea would be targeted in the case of a conventional war and possibly targeted with nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
Well, now I don't know how many they've got, but it's just a few dozen, but it's certainly enough that they could, if it came down to it, erase San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver.
I don't know if they can reach Austin or not.
They can certainly erase the Western half of every population center in the Western half of the United States of America.
Well, they'd like you to think about that.
And also they're, they now have a strategic nuclear missile capable fleet of four submarines.
And once the, once they decide to allow these submarines to carry nuclear arm missile, they will begin what are known as deterrence patrols, which means they just sail around in the Pacific with the, with the threat that if there's a war that threatens the land-based deterrent, they can shoot off these ballistic missiles from underwater.
But I think that the real threat of nuclear exchange with, that the Chinese quite frankly rely on is the idea that they're going to take out, they're going to take out the targets in Japan with nuclear weapons and that is supposed to restrain the United States because well, it sounds like it's not working, right?
I mean, it sounds like the Americans are confident that since, since they won't use their nukes, we can go ahead and do whatever we want with them basically.
And there's not really a question as to whether, well, I don't know, I guess you were saying there is a question of whether we could win a conventional war.
I mean, I'm not picturing land invasion of China, of course, but when it comes to American air power and naval power on a conventional level, could they not beat the Chinese?
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The main scenario everybody talks about in this connection is that Taiwan declares independence and for the sake of credibility and national unity, the Communist Party decides that we got to invade.
And in that case, it's actually rather interesting.
It's basically a numbers game.
The Chinese have a lot of missiles down there.
The first thing they do is they start blanketing the region, the airfields in Japan and Taiwan, and our aircraft carriers with missiles.
And supposedly the idea is that even though our weapons systems and defenses are superior, we're not going to stop everything.
And so then there comes this embarrassing time where even if our jets have survived, they don't have places to land.
And so it's a relatively crude mathematical formula, but the more missiles, which are relatively inexpensive, conventional missiles that you put into East China facing Taiwan or facing Japan, the harder it comes to justify the confidence that even though we're fighting 5,000 miles, 6,000 miles from home with only a handful of military bases that we're going to be able to prevail, strictly on a nutrition basis, not on a technology basis.
Well, and I'm thinking of what the war nerd always said about how aircraft carriers have been obsolete since World War II.
And the only reason we have our Navy driving them around everywhere is because we're not in any fights with anyone who can hit back.
But try to get in a fight with the Chinese and you're going to lose every carrier within range anyway.
Yeah, well, the conventional war strategy, as I understand it, is not that the United States will be able to defend those carriers with missile defense.
It's that they're going to have to go in and massively degrade Chinese missile facilities on the mainland.
So as soon as this whole, the balloon goes up, it's not like we're sailing the Ronald Reagan down there and hoping it doesn't get sunk.
We're launching massive airstrikes against Chinese missile locations on the mainland and what is called crossing swords with a nuclear power.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, you lose an aircraft carrier or two, then nukes start going off anyway.
And by the way, if we're just in a conventional war over Taiwan or whatever it is, and it goes on for a few days, doesn't that mean that Dr. Strangelove is up there saying at some point, Mr. President, they have a field full of nuclear missile silos and we have to take it out because we just decided that we changed our mind and the Rand Corporation was wrong and that there is a real risk that they're going to panic and start lobbing H-bombs at us.
And so now that means we have to start using H-bombs on their nuclear, tactical nukes won't do it, right?
You got to hit their silos with the biggest, meanest thermonuke you've got to make sure to take out all their nukes before they can use them, don't you?
Yeah, I consider that to be pretty valid that, you know, if you're going to start a war with China, even though we're saying we're not going to, at least with Rand, if the Chinese are in their bunkers reading the Rand report, they're going to be saying, hey, they're not going to target our strategic nukes.
But my feeling is if you're actually fighting a war with China, you know, you might as well lay it all out on the first day instead of waiting for things to go south and, you know, basically fighting a 10-day war with the big American losses and, you know, Okinawa getting, you know, showered with missiles.
Why not just go for the whole enchilada on the first day?
And one of the interesting things that I did not know was that I was reading about President Obama's dreams of renouncing first use of nuclear weapons.
And a very influential thinker over at Brookings, Jonathan Pollock, and some other guy wrote something to say, we can't think about moving away from first use because in the event of a conventional North Korean attack against South Korea, we want the option of being able to first use nuclear weapons against North Korea.
And in my opinion, U.S. keeps, you know, I can go tinfoil hat and say the United States keeps North Korean business so that it has an excuse to put all these weapons systems and doctrines in place in Asia.
But I think that the United States uses Kim Jong-un and North Korea as a signaling mechanism to say what we might do.
And I think that the message that the Chinese are getting here is that the military wants to keep first use, and they also want to use it in case of a conventional attack in which the United States and its allies are at a disadvantage, which is, as I said, is probably going to be in the mix about 2030.
So President Obama now is a lame duck, you know, the renunciation of first use was openly opposed by the Secretary of the Air Force.
Shinzo Abe came out, he didn't like it.
NATO declared its opposition.
So obviously they're going to stall this until he leaves office and presumably Hillary Clinton is in charge.
And I think then that, you know, nuclear first use against China is going to stay on the table.
I'm not going to write a RAND report saying we're going to nail China with tactical nuclear weapons, but that's going to be the implication when we have an arsenal of dial-able stealth fighter-delivered nuclear bombs and also standoff nuclear cruise missiles.
Right.
Well, and at some point, the RAND reports don't matter, right?
Everybody has a plan until they're punched in the mouth, as Mike Tyson said it best.
War plans never last more than the first day.
And so you could see them having a no first use doctrine and then changing their mind.
Hell, we're in the middle of a war.
We think we need to use them.
They're going to use them.
But you know, I think it's probably pretty notable in it that we used to have a we will use nukes first against anyone we feel like, including Canada, I guess, policy, including the Brits.
It wasn't until Obama that he said, no, we now take that off the table, except for war with any other nuclear powers or Iran.
And which was a huge climb down from where America previously was on threatening to first strike against helpless little third world countries that don't even have an army.
Yeah, well, President Obama was, you know, he's a lawyer and he was always very legalistic about this.
His doctrine was that if you were in a I recall the doctrine was if you are in a member in good standing of the nonproliferation treaty.
That makes you exempt.
And he was pretending Iran was not at the time, even though they were.
So we knew what he meant by that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also North Korea legally withdrew from the treaty.
So I guess that makes them a target.
Well, and all this is, you know, when you talk about nuclear war against North Korea, Doug Bandow is always writing about how the South Koreans now because they're so dependent on the U.S., they now are building a blue water navy so that they can go and have adventures out away from their shores.
Well, meanwhile, America and our our soldiers and our H-bombs are left to protect them from invasion from the north, the the country that has a GDP that's whatever a tiny fraction of South Korea's, but has a larger land army just in terms of individual soldiers, whereas South Korea could afford to build 10 times the army that the north has.
But they don't because America's picking up their tab like they're Israel or something.
I guess there is a bit of moral hazard involved there.
You put troops there and people take advantage.
All right now.
So but wait a minute.
What about this is all China's fault, because everybody knows they're trying to steal all these islands and they're trying to shut off trade and passage through the South China Sea.
And they're trying to build a giant Chinese empire to rule the world.
And we have to resist their aggression.
Everybody knows that.
Right.
Well, I'm a you know, I'm one of the small cadre of people who don't think that I'd say that the the Chinese are interested in not conquering East Asia, but they're interested in Finlandizing it, if that's a verb they would like the they would like the local countries to see that their interests lie in lying with with China on economic and security matters and basically pushing out the United States.
And I think the Chinese, you know, they feel when they play the long game, if they can keep from screwing up their own country badly enough, you know, the United States position is not tenable.
At the end of World War Two, we had 50 percent of the world's GDP.
And I think by 2050, Asia will surpass the average share of world GDP of the United States will be down to like 20 percent and they'll have like 30 percent or something like that.
So, you know, from logic, the idea that, you know, a not a second rate power, but a distant and power with its relative advantage eroded will be able to dictate security policy in China's backyard.
The Chinese see that as as illogical and quite frankly, so do I.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as Dan McAdams pointed out in his piece about Jennifer Rubin and Iran recently, how trade and commerce help keep the peace.
And he went back and cited the downing of the American spy plane in 2001 when business interests in America and China let it be known to their political governments that you guys are going to work this out right now.
And they said, OK, let's work this out right now instead of having a fight, because we got so many billions of dollars invested in each other's economies and in trillions even in invested in our future as trading partners together.
And so many wide and varied and different interests in each country with this lattice work of interest together.
It helps prevent violence.
I mean, in this case, Dan McAdams was saying, you know, three cheers for trade with Iran for the very same reason.
Just read a thing yesterday about how Exxon Mobil is taking Trump's side and trying to lobby Congress against making sanctions against Russia permanent.
Three cheers for the Rockefellers for capitalism and trade.
If if, you know, those interests can outrank somehow the interests of Lockheed and Israel and, you know, whoever else is pushing for the more warlike policies in these countries.
Well, you know, it's an interesting thing when you think about it, because, you know, the three initials TPP, TPP is an attempt to decouple the Asian democracies in the United States economically from China and reduce China's economic leverage.
In fact, Ash Carter once said actually said it more than once.
It's one of his favorite lines.
China TPP is worth is like another aircraft carrier for me.
So the Chinese have been pivoting away from the Western financial system.
You know, they basically have a go west policy where they're going into Central Asia and moving on to Europe.
Their currency, you know, is becoming a international reserve currency.
The United States, I think, unsuccessfully is trying to build a sort of modern economic containment network keyed on TPP.
And so I'm not and I'm not sure anymore how strongly the U.S. business community is interested in in making nice with China.
There will be probably when Hillary Clinton takes office, there'll probably be another test.
The Chinese like to throw these out at the beginning of a new administration.
And and so if things get tense, I don't think you're going to find, you know, Boeing and General Motors, you know, tugging at Secretary or President Clinton's coats as much as they used to in the old days.
It's a different world now.
Yeah.
So what are we left with, Walmart?
Hey, we we need to import cheap plastic crap from them.
Don't bum.
Is that enough?
Without without the auto companies, without the oil companies, without the real, you know, the big banks, see the big banks.
So they got a lot of interest, right?
Just financing all the trade back and forth.
Couldn't hope.
But yeah, I see what you mean, though.
It's interesting in it how, you know, Trump is, you know, saying his whole thing is how China is ripping us off and screwing us in every way and this and that.
But he's the big opponent of the TPP, which he says is, you know, proof of Hillary being bribed by the Chinese to do things their way.
Yeah, well, I'm a fan of managed trade, but unfortunately, the horses what they say, the horses already left the barn.
You know, there was the under particularly under under Bush, who was preoccupied with financing the deficit, you know, he the Chinese one of the great successes in in in world economic history was the Chinese exploitation of its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, I guess it was, and the huge transfer of wealth that took place.
And now that's already happened.
And so, you know, I think that Trump is, to a certain extent, living in the past, you know, it's, you know, we're not going to start, you know, making furniture in North Carolina.
And the Chinese aren't either.
That furniture is going to be made in Vietnam and Indonesia and India.
You know, the economy has unfortunately changed from what was originally from what we originally conceived.
All right, well, listen, man, I got to run.
But thank you so much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it.
I really enjoyed it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Good deal.
All right, so that is Peter Lee.
He writes at China Matters.
That's China Matters dot blogspot dot com.
This one is at UNZ dot com.
A very important read.
I do hope that you guys will look at it, help make it viral.
Nuclear blackmail and America's fantasy war with China.
And that's running at UNZ dot com.
And you can find it in the more viewpoints page there at antiwar dot com.