Will China’s Moment of Advantage Lead to War With America?

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Posted: Sep 14, 2022 12:01 AM

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In early 1993, at a conference in Virginia, the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment director, the great Andrew Marshall, presented his staff and consultants with a long-term thought experiment: How could the U.S. fight and win a war for national survival circa 2020 to 2025?Marshall didn’t name the adversary, but I’d heard him ask a version of the question in his office a couple of months earlier.So, I’d thought about potential adversaries three decades on…“You mean against China?” I blurted out. Silence among the conferees. The future admiral sitting to my right shot me a glance.Then Marshall nodded. Yes, China.Andrew Marshall very likely had the finest strategic mind of his era. He wanted everyone in the room to consider the political, technological, economic, military, social, bilateral, regional and global contexts for such a terrible war.A subset of politics is leadership.It’s now 2022 — we’re within Andy Marshall’s long-range time frame for a U.S.-China war of ultimate consequence.Burn the words in your brain: war for national survival.Ukraine is fighting one against another imperialist dictatorship, Russia. Vlad Putin’s Russia, like Xi Jinping’s China, justifies expansionary wars on questionable historical claims of lost territory and injustice that incite ethnic passions. Substit …