By Leon V. Sigal
Global Beat Syndicate, 24 February 2006
NEW YORK, February 23, 2000—A decision to deploy missile defense systems will do little to protect the United States against potential threats but it is sure to stir Chinese antagonism. And it could also alienate America's allies and destabilize relations in Northeast Asia.
Ostensibly, the defense systems are intended to counter an emerging missile threat from North Korea. But Beijing believes Washington has exaggerated that threat while at the same time refusing to deal with Pyongyang.
China knows that North Korea has conducted just two ballistic missile tests in the past decade -- both of them failures. It also knows of North Korea's interest in a deal to end missile exports and stated willingness to negotiate an end to development of missiles in talks with the United States—a willingness North Korean negotiators underscored last September in Berlin by agreeing to a moratorium on missile tests.
Until recently, however, Washington has been reluctant to deal. It did not open missile talks until April 1996 and has held just two rounds of talks since, without making anything like an acceptable offer for an end to North Korea's missile exports and development. In 1993, the United States pressured Israel to break off negotiations with North Korea designed to end its missile exports to the Middle East and Persian Gulf in return for hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and technical assistance and the start of diplomatic relations.
Beijing concluded that American missile defenses were aimed at it, not North Korea, and sent a subtle warning to Washington not to proceed. As the Cox Commission report on the transfer of U.S. missile technology to China pointed out last year, a Chinese national "under the direction of PRC intelligence" turned over a document in 1995 containing stolen information on the W-88 warhead. The Cox report speculates whether the information enabled China to develop W-88s of its own to arm missiles with multiple warheads. That is one way to counter U.S. missile defenses.
But the Cox report neglects to pose the most important question: why did China let the U.S. know it had acquired the technology to develop multiple warheads? The year 1995 was a watershed in the politics of missile defense. In 1994, the Republicans adopted missile defense as a major plank in its Contract with America and captured both houses of Congress. To protect itself against Republican attack, the Clinton administration stepped up spending on such a system. By its disclosure, the Chinese were saying, "Don't deploy defenses because we can defeat them."
China has better ways than the W-88 warhead to defeat defenses. The most obvious one is to build more missiles. To date, China has deployed just 18 missiles capable of reaching the United States. It has not even put nuclear warheads on the missiles, but stored them separately. China has long had the capability to build more missiles and put them on higher alert. Why hasn't it?
One reason is its long-stated policy of renouncing the first use of nuclear arms. But the deeper explanation is that China's military leaders prefer to modernize their conventional forces, which are equipped largely with relics of the 1940s and 1950s. That is why China has begun buying 1970s aircraft, tanks, ships, and submarines on sale in Russia and elsewhere.
China's defense budget is about one-ninth that of the United States. It fell throughout the 1980s and resumed growing steadily only six years ago. Competing claims constrain military spending. China's regions want to invest more in infrastructure to fuel growth and absorb new entrants into the labor force who would otherwise migrate to rapidly growing cities. With tax evasion rampant, the central government's revenue base is too small to satisfy all the demands.
If the United States deploys a missile defense system, then the Chinese military will deploy more missiles. But the Chinese leadership will demand a hike in defense spending to pay for the missiles rather than cut back on conventional arming. A reallocation of resources from domestic needs to defense will prompt an intense struggle in which the United States will be cast as China's antagonist. That will make Sino-American cooperation all but impossible.
It will also put America's allies, Japan and Taiwan, in an untenable position. While they are reluctant to offend a Congress that makes defenses a litmus test of alliance, they also want to avoid arousing China's hostility. It is for that reason that Japan has put much more money behind negotiating a missile deal with North Korea than it is willing to spend on missile defense. It is also for that reason that well-placed politicians in Taiwan's ruling party and opposition quietly favor a negotiated solution to missile threats in Northeast Asia. The United States should follow their lead before it turns China into an outright foe.
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Citation: Leon V. Sigal. "Awakening the Dragon: Needlessly Antagonizing China," Global Beat Syndicate, 24 February 2006.
Original URL: http://147.71.210.21/adamag/Feb00/Dragon.htm
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