What to do about China as an existential threat to the US and other free nations?

China within a matter of years will pose an existential military threat to the United States. At 1.34 billion inhabitants, it is four times larger in population than the US with its 311 million. Once a nation industrializes, a greater population means greater wealth and power rather than just too many hungry mouths to feed. If China were a free republic like the nations of Europe, Japan, and the (former British) Commonwealth, this would not likely be a problem. But China is a totalitarian dictatorship which intends to dominate the world and is rapidly arming in pursuit of that goal.

Are we being unnecessarily alarmist? Not according to military analysts. Air superiority is a prerequisite for naval and land dominance, but US air superiority is eroding. The US is also burdened with defending allies who long since could have and should have assumed the burden of their own defense.

(Note the headline the New York Times gives to the same op-ed: “Adapting to Decline.” Decline has indeed been the Times‘ outlook for the US for some time now.)

What must the US do to preserve the existence it has enjoyed as a free constitutional republic since 1776-1789?

It must unhesitatingly build on its strengths, reduce its weaknesses, and take advantage of the Chinese dictatorship’s weaknesses.

Its strengths are its ability to innovate, its freedom of speech and religion, its diversity, and its reservoir of potential allies in the free world.

Its weaknesses are its excessive partisan divisions, its sub-optimal educational system, its remaining burdensome regulations, and its budget-busting entitlements.

China’s weaknesses partially mirror in reverse the US strengths. China has neither freedom of speech nor religion. The US should be doing everything in its power to get truthful news about China and the world into China, past its ruthless censorship. The US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) hasn’t always done this well, according to repeated exposes by BBG Watch. China is also aggressively atheist, but most of its allies — such as Cambodia, Myanmar, and Pakistan — are deeply religious. The US government’s broadcast media should be making much of this too in their broadcasts to China’s allies.

China is ethnically diverse but its non-Han populations are regarded as racial inferiors, and two of these, the Tibetans and Uighurs, are viciously suppressed. China’s ally, Pakistan, is under pressure to distance itself from China because many Pakistani men complain that their Uighur wives have been imprisoned by the Chinese.

China has many allies, but most of these it bullies and dominates. As a result. some of these would likely be foot-dragging allies in time of war unless occupied. If Tahiti is typical of how the Chinese go about this, they are not going to be widely welcomed.

The US should be encouraging its economically developed allies to form strong regional defense alliances and help discourage debt entrapment by the Chinese. The US just increased its allotment to the World Bank by $13 billion on the understanding that the Bank would provide a funding alternative for developing counries besides China.

Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet post (“US rejoining TPP to counter China is desirable but won’t be easy”)