12/13/2004 07:07:33 AM|||Nathan Moore|||

My recurrent point, eloquently written by Mark Helprin at OpinionJournal.com.

China's mercantilist colonialism has just begun. Expansion, as Helprin notes near the end of the article, is necessitated not on the spread of a communist ideology, but instead is based on the needs of economic expansion. As the world order has changed significantly, from the fall of communision to the advent of terrorism, the Chinese have substituted one ideology, Maoist communism, for another, export based economics. The end-result of this transformation in focus is a form of mercantilism. This requires colonial possessions for the purpose of raw material acquisition. Unfortunately, this does not require the spread of freedom and the opening of consumer markets. They are not bent on following the U.S. model of commercial imperialism.

As Halperin notes, the growth in China's economy is being used to expand its military, in all aspects, to include, most alarmingly, space. In short, it's not a military-industrial complex, but an industrial-military one. Our advantage is our technology advantage over every other military in the world. We are currently fighting our battles at a 100 year advantage to our adversaries. China's desire to acquire electromagnetic pulse (EMP)weaponary is particularly alarming. An EMP blast would fry our circuits, literally, sending the nation into the technological dark ages. The Chinese have shown a peculiar interest in lasers and other anti-satellite weapsons (ASAT), giving them the ability to knock out our satellite network, making any confrontation with China a numbers game, a game which results in Chinese-American parity, if not Chinese superiority.

Our desire to confront and defeat terrorism is resulting in an unfortunate, and potentially costly, transformation of our military from a heavy but powerful Cold War fighting machine to a lighter "strike force" modus operandi. Against a heavy assets enemy like China, this could be disasterous. In fact, it would be disasterous.

I'm not attempting to sounding Pollyanna-esque. What I am trying to do is look more than five years down the proverbial historical pike. By remaining strong militarily and economically, and staying engaged in Asia, we can create a geopolitical paradigm making Chinese aggression too costly for the Chinese government. I don't see the political will to do that, yet. But someone needs to step up and make it so.

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