Parliament of the seas

June 20, 2024

MANILA – The best general, to paraphrase Sun Tzu anachronistically, is the one who wins without having to fire a shot. In 1995-1996, what is now called the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis took place, which was a turning point in Chinese and American defense strategies. As I wrote elsewhere some years back, for China, what it did was embark on a crash course, with unlimited funding, to build up its missile, submarine, and aircraft capabilities, the idea being that any American technological superiority could be swarmed to death with a barrage of land, sea, and air-launched missiles, and eventually with a carrier battle group (or two, or three) of its own by Beijing. In the two decades since, we’ve seen this come to pass, including Chinese construction on sandbars and atolls to create the Chinese version of what the Americans once did in Manila Bay: turning islands into, essentially, concrete battleships—or today, concrete aircraft carriers or missile launcher bases—in the South China Sea (SCS) to swarm any hostile American fleet.

China could do this because it was modernizing its economy and with the resources this made available, building up its national capacities on many fronts, not just militarily. This was already quite noticeable in 2005 when I wrote in the Arab News newspaper about the inroads China was making on multiple fronts, down to challenging American influence in Latin America.

What was America doing in the same period? A Russian American named Dmitri Alperovitch in a recent interview in ChinaTalk summed it up this way: “I write about this last supper that took place during the Clinton administration, where they brought all the defense contractor primes together and said, ‘You better start