The threat that blows from China.

China calls each new edition of its most potent intercontinental ballistic missile East Wind. This lovely and suggestive name begs an assessment of China's capabilities and intentions, because it appears to contradict what China tells us of itself and what is most reassuring for us to believe.

By geography, history, and tradition, China has been remarkably self- contained. It seems to have an artificial horizon that allows it to be content within its own sphere and to internalize its upheavals rather than export them. It rejects what it calls "power politics," and shuns alliances. Of the almost 2.5 million soldiers of the world's largest army, it has detailed only 32 for international peacekeeping duties, fewer than provided by Estonia. After going to war in Korea, India, and Vietnam, it simply withdrew, as if it found existence beyond its borders painful.

The historical pattern of Chinese stasis and Confucian self-restraint is repeatedly cited by China as evidence that its foreign policy is neither interventionist nor expansionary. But as China's thinly veiled nuclear threat against the United States shows-as do its wars or objectives in Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands, the Spratlys and Paracels, India, Laos, Burma, Kashmir, on the Amur, and in various Third World clients-even if this is mainly true, it is not entirely true. And even if it is mainly true, China may yet depart from its traditional course.

PATTERNS THROUGH TIME

Certainly historical precedent is not without examples for it to emulate. In the seventh and eighth centuries a.d., the Tang Dynasty expanded northward and westward almost to the Aral Sea, 1,000 miles beyond China's present borders. When the Mongols intermixed with and ruled the Chinese as the Yuan Dynasty, Peking was the seat of an empire that stretched from the Pacific to the Danube, from the Amur to the Euphrates, from Moscow to the Arabian Sea. This very same dynasty also controlled Korea and Vietnam, and sent two naval expeditions to conquer Japan. The borders against which China has in recent times pressed with unmistakable ardor, during a period of weakness, are the gateways to those regions over which, during a period of strength, the Yuan Dynasty once ruled.

The striking precedent of the Yuan Dynasty may be weakened by its Mongol origin and its remoteness in time, but it is a leading example of a nation in ascension. Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Mongols, Russians, British, and numerous others have possessed what the Arabic historian Ibn Khaldun called 'asabiya, a sense of group solidarity, unity of purpose, and esprit de corps: in short, the momentum of destiny, when a whole people comes alight with success. China is reaching for this.

And ours is the perfect era for it to abandon its predilection for looking inward, in that science, technology, and trade-the international currencies of power-will inevitably pull from isolation even those countries that are most deeply entrenched. China has modeled itself, either consciously or by extraordinary and meaningful coincidence, on Japan, another isolated, inward-looking Asian country that, shocked and humiliated by the West, programmatically set out to appropriate the skills of those who had bested it, and succeeded. British and American bombardment impelled the Japanese to tame their warlords, do away with feudalism, restore central power, and begin to study the ways of the West with a vengeance. China-not long ago just as feudal, divided, conquered, and backward-has done exactly this. After the restoration of the Meiji emperor in 1868, the Japanese sought national unity, industrialization, and military strength, recognizing that they would proceed in that order. Their slogan was fukoku kyohei, "rich country, strong arms." Predominantly agricultural Japan was able after only a third of a century to marshal warships, built in European yards, to defeat a second-class European power (Russia), and then after another third of a century to come close to defeating the world's leading naval power (this time with a battle fleet built in Japanese yards), because, to quote the cardinal sentence in G. B. Sansom's The Western World and Japan, "The greater part of her early industrial effort was put into production of goods of direct or indirect strategic importance." Japanese students, officials, and businessmen methodically collected information in the West or from Westerners in Japan, and, although the Japanese imitated every aspect of Western culture, their characteristically disciplined focus was on industry and the military. For China, the stress of occupation and war continued on during the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Cultural Revolution. Only in the Seventies did the sky clear enough for it to envision and begin military-industrial modernization, encouraged by its assessment that war was not imminent with either the Soviet Union or the United States, and that China would therefore be allowed a long strategic pause in which to prepare. In 1978, during the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress, Deng Xiaoping consolidated his authority and established what came to be known as the 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military." Like the Meiji fukoku kyohei, this represents a profound understanding of the relation of military to economic power.

In the United States, the direction of policy is determined by the continuous battle of two major parties, each further subdivided. Whereas the object of our politics is not unanimity, in China the measure of success is the extent to which a single voice is taken up by all. After Deng Xiaoping proffered the 16-Character Policy, every center of power amplified and elaborated upon its principles in what became an extremely reliable description of China's course, a description that has been verified over the last two decades by the precise conformity of action and declaration.

As described by General Zhao Nanqi, former president of the Academy of Military Science, "The essence of the change was to make full use of the period of relative peace without major wars and to pay close attention to making plans for our modernization drive." A review of the relevant literature, cross-checked with reference to expressed and executed military, economic, and social policy, makes clear that China understands that wars are won by preparing the entire culture, reforming it if necessary. China understands that the source of its modernization and empowerment will initially be the West, from which it must take what it needs. It understands and anticipates a lag time of 50 to 75 years, or more, and it is patient. It knows that the West is far ahead of it, but that as the West slows and China picks up its pace, the West can be caught. It is approaching this with the purposeful concentration of the Meiji and the angry resolve of Germany between the wars. Its task is to win the next war, whenever that may be, and its determination is not to be dismissed.

A NATION GEARS UP

These are China's aims, but what of its potential? With both political and analytical brilliance, Deng Xiaoping was able to redirect China's energies according to the single principle that its strategic power depends upon its per capita GNP. It may seem obvious that the wealthier a country is, the more it can devote to its military, but understanding the particulars of this proposition is necessary for making a decent guess about what China may be able to do and when. What follows in the next few paragraphs is expressed in the number-laden language for which, in more enlightened countries, various academics are justly condemned to death. It is, however, the heart of the argument, and if we do not master these numbers, they will master us. In a hypothetical country with a population of 100 million and a GNP of $10 billion, even one dollar for defense subtracted from each person's lot would mean four days in which he would not eat. But in the same country with a GNP of $100 billion, the government could extract, for example, $400 from each person (40 percent of GNP, as in the U.S. during WW II), who would still be living a full six times better than in his recent memory. The difference is vast, being that between a defense budget of $100 million and a discontented population, and a defense budget of $40 billion and a population richer than it ever imagined. This is impressive enough, but what is truly startling and cautionary in the example is that a tenfold increase in GNP has been transformed into a 400-fold increase in defense expenditure-because of a most extraordinary relation that escapes most observers as they keep in mind two variables rather than three, the third being per capita income, which defines the margin of extraction.

A very big country with a sudden and previously unexperienced margin of abundance would have many closed avenues opened to it. That Israel, with only a few million people, was able to prevail against enemies with, initially, many times its GNP, is attributable not least to the fact that Israel's per capita GNP quickly surpassed those of its competitors. Now it is 16 times Egypt's, or, in purchasing power parity (PPP), 4.5 times. (For countries with well developed domestic arms industries-China, Israel-PPP is more accurate than the absolute measure, because for these countries hard currency is not required for military acquisition.) In 1950, Egypt's GNP was 4.5 times Israel's. The subsequent reversal was due to Israel's rate of economic growth, which from Israel's founding to shortly before the Six Day War averaged 11 percent per annum, the highest in the world. Israel's spectacular victory over its combined opponents in June of 1967 was foreshadowed by this, but at the time only a few analysts fully understood the connection.

Although recently growth has slowed, for the past two decades China has had among the highest rates of economic growth and capital reinvestment in the world, which is all the more significant given China's size. In the twelve years from 1986 through 1998, China tripled its GNP and doubled its absolute per capita GNP. It doubled its PPP per capita GNP in just the six years prior to 1998. At first glance one might think that it has used this great increase in margin to advance defense outlays concomitantly, in that these have increased from $5.8 billion in 1986 to $37.5 billion in 1998. But it hasn't. Adjusting for population increase, China's 1998 GNP was more than its 1986 GNP by $400 billion, from which, in keeping with the exhortations of the 16- Character Policy, it might have been perfectly reasonable to extract a military bite not of $37.5 billion but of $100 billion or more. Why have military outlays increased by a factor of six rather than of 16? For three reasons. First, in the rush of getting to where it is, China has become somewhat less stable and finds it necessary to buy social peace with a larger civilian share of GNP than might otherwise have been desirable. Second, China's expressed time frame for catching the West is 50 to 75 years, and capital investment is a far more efficient use of resources than the immediate diversion of them. Third, China's military echelons and industries are in a period of reformation and development, able to make use only of what their current organization and methods of operation allow them to absorb.

The still tremendous increase in military spending has been devoted to both the replacement of outdated armaments and the more professional training of smaller forces. In a "military market basket" of ICBM-or- equivalent delivery vehicles, major surface combatants, submarines, tanks, and combat aircraft, China has seen during its period of extraordinary growth a reduction of 22 percent (excluding the nuclear component, which has grown by 560 percent). If it holds military outlays to between 5 percent and 6 percent of GNP and the GNP continues its strong growth, the reductions will slowly stabilize and reverse. This is undoubtedly the scenario from which Western governments develop their estimates. But for China merely to continue along such a line would be a departure from the carefully formulated, widely propagated plan that it has been following for almost a generation. After the cadres have been professionalized and their weapons improved at a comfortable pace, and when the military industries have been adequately primed, China will find itself at a new juncture, probably sometime between 2015 and 2030. If at that moment social stability need not be bought, or if the economy is strong enough for more butter and more guns, GNP will be diverted from civilian consumption and capital reinvestment to military expansion. Neither minor nor short lived, such a diversion will mean an immense surge in military spending and preparation, after which Western politicians will express their utter shock, and the press will declare enough times to convince itself absolutely that no reputable analyst could have foreseen or did foresee such a thing. Even then, it will not occur to the politicians or the press, as they pass helplessly from denial to hysteria, that during the previous years the Chinese mantra of stability so contemptuously derided in the West was not merely attributable to deep fear of the anarchy and dissolution that has so tried China during its long history, but was, rather, a grave effort to shield the 16-Character Policy in its early and vulnerable stages. This is undoubtedly for the Chinese leadership, as it moves through China's traditional perils, a matter of some drama and import, as it should be for us as well.

WHAT CHINA CAN DO

Assuming that China neither stagnates, disintegrates, nor sees its perspective altered by its achievements, it may soon be rich in options that we find worrisome. In PPP, its 1998 GNP was more than $4 trillion. Because it has independent military industries, apportioning 10 percent of GNP to defense (as did a dozen of the world's countries in 1998) would have resulted in a PPP-equivalent defense budget greater than that of the United States, at a cost only of reducing PPP per capita GNP (in addition to the current 5 percent already debited for defense) from $3,500 to $3,300. Even without adjustment for PPP, a 10 percent apportionment would have yielded a defense budget, taking into account differences in manpower costs, approaching half that of the United States. Note that these examples are based only on 1998 figures, while China, according to its own affirmations, intends to hold fire for a decade or two, when much higher numbers could be derived from a swollen national output.

But they are only numbers. Even were China to realize its capacities, what could it do with its newfound power? Attendant to the flawed notion that China is bound by history to non-expansion is the impression that it has nowhere to go, being confined by the Himalayan, Karakorum, and Pamir mountains to the west; Siberia, leading north to nothing; Southeast Asia, an inverted triangle disappearing into the sea; and, to the east, the Pacific. Upon closer inspection, however, China's confines appear less than absolute.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that world petroleum use will double by 2030, with Middle Eastern supply of world demand peaking at approximately 55 percent between 2012 and 2020 (coincident with the Chinese surge that I project). Thus it is significant that, whereas the naval port of Zhanjiang is 4,800 miles from Abu Dhabi, Norfolk is 8,200 miles via Suez and, in view of Chinese relations with states along the Red Sea, 11,600 miles via the Cape of Good Hope. (The oil embargo that began in 1973 was successful not because of sudden Arab resolution but due to the effect of shuttling Persian Gulf tankers that great distance around the blocked Suez Canal.) Given the possibility that an advance upon contiguous Central Asian energy reserves might be for China not that much more daunting than its inhalation of Tibet, much opportunity exists here for what the Chinese call power politics, especially were China, like most developing nations, to shift from coal to oil.

Without using neutron bombs on swarms of short-range missiles, both of which it possesses and is augmenting, China has neither the amphibious capacity nor the air power to take Taiwan. But with a capitulationist, disengaged, or weakened United States, this would require only assiduous planning, moderate sacrifice, and medium economic growth. Beyond that, and possibly in the flush of unification, the domination of Japan cannot be ruled out as a future Chinese aim born not of ambition but of the cascade of events. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would almost certainly stimulate Japanese rearmament, which would require of China the "active defense" that would (in the formulation of the Chinese Air Force) "teach a lesson and severely punish anyone who is threatening China's peace and security." China often proclaims peaceful intentions but simultaneously declares an extremely low threshold of preemption. Action against Japan before it has rearmed and while circumstances favor China, though perhaps unlikely, is the kind of unexpected tragedy that litters history.

With comparatively little effort, China can seal its obvious advantages in regard to a war on the Asian mainland. Its first steps are more or less accomplished, the consequence of its mass, its position, and the social transformation of the West. What American president in our time would go to full-scale non-nuclear war on the mainland of Asia, and what for? Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson opted out when the U.S. possessed absolute nuclear superiority and different civilian and military cultures. Domination of the East Asian landmass is for China more or less assured.

Why then does it pour so much capital and energy into a full-blown nuclear-weapons program with the object of deploying MIRVed ICBMs on mobile launchers rolling around its great interior deserts, or in nuclear submarines cruising within protected maritime bastions? Clearly, its aim is to neutralize American nuclear superiority, or-as Maj. Gen. Yang Huan, formerly of the Strategic Rocket Forces, elegantly expresses it-to "smash nuclear blackmail." MacArthur advocated and, later, Eisenhower considered the use of nuclear weapons against China, but nothing followed. Vietnam was a decade-long illustration of American nuclear restraint. China knows both that tactical nuclear weapons, having been all but banished from American doctrine, are not the easy route to escalation they once were, and that North Korean chemical and biological warfare programs make the tactical use of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula unlikely. But China sees the urgency of neutralizing American nuclear power (which, with an invulnerable counterforce, it can). Why? To remove the nuclear dimension of localized warfare, freeing conventional means (in which China can more easily secure an on-scene advantage) to work without inhibition. As it becomes a great power, China envisions what has always been natural for a great power: the unchallenged dominance of its region of the world. Were China, as current American policy baselessly assumes, to lack such ambitions, it would be the first great power in history, including the United States, to do so.

CLINTON: THE FACE OF APPEASEMENT AND SELF-DELUSION

At first blush the China policy of the Clinton administration might appear to be part of the second ideological childhood of so many of its putative foreign-policy experts: that is, a recapitulation of their conduct during the Cold War and of the idea that national security is a rightist will-o'-the-wisp for pumping up the arms business and holding on to power; that, quite apart from the fact that American interests are indefensible, the belief that they can be endangered is simply the paranoia engendered by inexplicable hostility to Socialism. Accordingly, the institutions of national security are important only in that they cry out to be miniaturized. This uncultivated view is the ideal complement to the American people's fatigue with the wars of the 20th century, its desire for a millennial transformation of history, the lingering shock of twice coming up roughly against China (in Korea and Vietnam), and the accurate feeling that to face the new China would be costly and dangerous. Thus, the administration "pushes" for a peanut-sized strategic defense, starves and demoralizes the armed forces, abandons export controls, and at every turn shows China the face of appeasement and self-delusion.

But here ideology is just a cover, for the real nature of American- Chinese relations is transactional. The famous description of the White House as a turnstile only serves the Clinton defense that access (which is what you get when you pass through a turnstile) is by its nature innocuous. Turnstiles are, after all, part and parcel of American politics. A more precise analogy would be to a store. In a store you pay money for something you can take home. That is the essence of the Clinton China policy.

Like his Meiji counterparts, Deng Xiaoping understood that the tools he wanted would have to be bought, borrowed, or stolen. Even before the 16-Character Policy, the father of China's ballistic-missile program- Lt. Gen. Qian Xuesen, M.A., M.I.T.; Ph.D., Cal Tech; Col., U.S. Army Air Force-left the U.S. in 1955 with four of his associates on the Titan Missile design team. This was the hors d'uvre. Now the expropriations were to be accomplished in earnest, according to the principles of "people's war," in which, just as guerrilla warfare can complement or supplant conventional military operations, massive numbers of intelligence gatherers from all segments of society work alongside but usually independently of professionals. Three thousand Chinese-government front corporations now operate in the United States, among them, according to the Cox Committee, "corporations set up outside the PRC by organs of the PRC government to funnel money to key U.S. leaders," and many others with links to the army and arms ministries. In 1996 alone, 80,000 Chinese citizens in 23,000 delegations visited the U.S. Despite case after case of theft and espionage, their access to defense contractors and the national laboratories is uncontrolled. Money men like Charlie Trie and James Riady provide serendipitous access, in their case to an ambitious southern governor whose obscure early contacts began to clarify once he moved into the White House. Though the net of go-betweens, bagmen, monks, nuns, and mules was exceedingly complex, it did not successfully cover the fact that the president and his party solicited and received millions of dollars in political contributions and other moneys (such as witness payoffs) from sources allied to, controlled, or funded by the Chinese government. For example, Col. Liu Chaoying (daughter of the vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission) and Ji Shengde, head of Chinese military intelligence, met with Johnny Chung in Hong Kong in the summer of 1996, giving him $300,000 that led to a meeting of Col. Liu and the president. Wang Jun (son of the late President Wang Zhen), an arms dealer, contributed $600,000 via Charlie Trie, and met with the president in the White House. One Mr. Wu, closely connected with the People's Liberation Army and Macao organized crime, funneled at least a quarter of a million dollars to the DNC through Charlie Trie, the president's friend from Little Rock. There were literally dozens of others with ties to China, its military, North Korea, and Chinese ministries and industries with interests in American technology. Each had money to contribute, and the thorough and energetic Mr. Clinton seems to have met every single one. They were armed not only with well laundered bank accounts but also, reportedly, with suitcases full of cash. Because of this, and because more than a hundred witnesses took the Fifth or fled, and because the White House and Justice Department have won the Olympic gold medal in omerta, what is known is obviously only the detritus that has floated up from a much greater, submerged enterprise that with complete impunity has corrupted the President of the United States and his closest associates.

While benefiting from these illicit contributions, the president himself took the initiative to end export controls under COCOM; to move the remaining authority over exports (despite protests from State and Defense) to the Department of Commerce, which in 1997 and 1998 allowed 6,539 out of 6,565 classification requests to pass without referring them to the expert agencies; to lift sanctions on China so as to allow the launch of American satellites even after it became clear that the work of Hughes and Loral aided China in the development of new missile types; to liberalize controls on supercomputers so that China, which had no such thing in 1996, had 600 by 1998; and to appoint John Huang, a money shepherd and operative of the Riadys (who themselves are partners of China Resources, an "agent of espionage, economic, military, and political," according to reliable sources) to be principal deputy assistant secretary of commerce for international economic policy. While he was reviewing intelligence documents and placed in a key position bearing on the release of military technology, John Huang met secretly with Chinese officials in Washington nine times, six times in the Chinese embassy. China has walked away with a great deal of what it needs to implement the 16-Character Policy: guidance, MIRV, busing, fairing, and failure-analysis technology for missile design and testing; highly classified antisubmarine warfare techniques; night-vision technology; machine tools necessary for military production beyond the ken of Chinese manufacture; plans for every nuclear warhead in the U.S. inventory; nuclear legacy codes; and high-capacity computers. China is a signatory of the nuclear test ban treaty, and would be hindered in its pursuit of the miniaturized warheads it needs to neutralize American nuclear predominance if it were not able to simulate testing with supercomputers. With the legacy codes, warhead plans, and computers of 10,000 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second), it can carry out its programs. The faster the computers, the faster it can work to customize what it needs. In 1998, two 10,000 MTOPS computers were released to China by special waiver. In February of 2000, the president proposed to end licensing requirements in sales to China for "civilian" use of computers up to 20,000 MTOPS: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military." China now has 40 ICBMs and is developing at least two more classes. Given that deployed ICBMs have increased by 560 percent since 1987, it seems reasonable to estimate that, with additional silo-based ICBMs and the new mobile and SLBM classes, China may possess 200 or more a decade from now. It now has the information and computer power needed to replicate the kind of American warhead that can ride 14 to a missile. Ten years on, when the U.S. may have reduced the number of its warheads to between two and three thousand, China may well have MIRVed its ICBMs and have achieved nuclear parity numerically, if not by other measures as well. That is indeed a lot to walk away with, but it is not as important as the singular fact that by its intervention in American politics China has twice helped to secure the election of an administration opposed to ballistic-missile defense and committed to reduce the U.S. military to what are in many respects subcritical levels. Is it not astounding that all of this has gone unchecked, that the press, the Congress, and the people have failed to restore to proper order the most elementary matters of law, precedence, and national self-preservation? Every decision regarding China, the president and his supporters will affirm, was made solely in the best interests of the United States. This is not the most brazen lie in American history. William Marcy Tweed's county courthouse cost twice what the United States paid for Alaska, including $41,190.95, in 1869, for what Tweed and his supporters affirmed were, "Brooms, etc."

WHAT TO DO

The Clinton presidency is coming to an end, leaving in place of a China policy only years of advertisement that Americans think small, are afraid, and can be bought. Presumably China has extensive knowledge of certain lapses, which might constrain a President Gore from adopting a new China policy even if he wanted to. That is what happens when the monkey puts his hand in the coconut and closes his fist. But, no matter: Despite delay, it is never too late for a sound U.S. policy, especially when it fills a vacuum.

That policy must be founded on the historical truth that empires in ascension share the common characteristic that they will expand only into a relatively empty and demoralized space. In the late 19th century, the British were masters of a quarter of the earth's surface. In this great area almost 400 million people were subject to British rule, and yet the entire expanse was garrisoned by only 125,000 British troops. Following the pattern of Cortez, who conquered Mexico with 600 Spaniards, and Pizarro, who subdued the Inca Empire with 183, light- occupation forces held down whole continents-but only until they met determined opposition, and then they were gone. Empires are not inevitable. They will not arise if they are resisted, and resistance is a matter of timing: The earlier it begins, the earlier and more easily imperial momentum is broken.

The effectiveness of resistance is shaped more by its character than by its mass, and fundamental to its character is its justification. The United States must counter Chinese domination of Asia to keep the balance of geostrategic power and for the sake of our economic relations and free access to the famously interdependent world economy. But we have a far more important duty. The world is full of unnecessary suffering and death. Other than God's, no compassion is deep enough to allay it. If, however, something existed that could allay it, it would be worth fighting for. Such a thing does exist. It is a weapon against human misery far more powerful than compassion or revolution. Proven and validated as it moves through history, it is the chief and outstanding principle to which the Founders were devoted and for which we have fought, justly, in war after war. The theme of American history, of Western Civilization, it has become a universal standard. It is, simply, that government shall derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. Our longstanding allies on China's seaward rim have come hard to this principle, and to abandon them other than by duress would be to abandon the principle itself. The hope of the world is that as China advances it will move peacefully toward this standard. Until then, standing firm in the Western Pacific is fully consistent with the underpinnings and traditions of this civilization. And if it is the principle of self-government that becomes once again the point of contention between East and West, so be it. We would not be imposing this principle on China, but, rather, protecting the free and viable democracies that have chosen to live by it. China's claim to Taiwan, for example, where only 14 percent of the inhabitants are mainland Chinese, is no more legitimate than would have been an American claim to Canada in 1825 because American Tories had fled there in the years after our independence. We may have accepted the idea of one China, but we have never agreed to unification by force.

Whatever China's power and prospects, affording protection to those in its shadow is entirely feasible for the United States if it exploits its strengths. With a population one-fifth the size of China's and ten times the GNP, the U.S. can outpace China discouragingly at any rate it chooses, just as it did the Soviet Union. It is one thing for China to race an opponent that is slowing, but it would be another to compete with one that does not flag, and quite another to race against a United States that effortlessly pulls away. This the U.S. can effect at little cost. Were it not trumpeted by Richard Gephardt as the rape of the Sabine women, raising the percentage of GNP allocated to defense from 3.2 to 4.2, one point short of the 30-year average, would go unnoticed in this country but leave China behind with each passing year by two full years of its current outlays. A painless step worth far more than a point of GNP would be to shut down the major sources of China's defense research simply by instituting reasonable security and counterespionage practices and placing commonsensical controls on exports. And must we continue to serve China's strategic interests by transforming the United States Army into a faddishly light gendarmerie? What might China, not to mention North Korea, think about the careless assumption of our somnolent planners less than a decade after the Gulf War, perhaps the largest single battle in history, that the combat of massive formations will never again occur? Another military reform that would discourage China and others would be to remove our mothers, wives, and daughters from combat. Traditional cultures are not only appalled by this kind of experimentation, they see it as one of the signs that we are undergoing a crisis of will, and they are right.

And then there is Russia. America's triumphalist, dismissive, and careless approach to Moscow is that much more foolish in light of Russia's potential combination with China, the prevention of which should be a major objective of our diplomacy. Russia will arm China only according to its own interests, but how it calculates or miscalculates those interests may change the face of history. Nonetheless, in all respects, Korea, where we face the possibility of large-scale combat on the ground, is the most vulnerable point. For the long term, the best course is to await unification and, when it is achieved, withdraw. Until that time, we may be capable of defending the South even from a Chinese onslaught, if we reconstitute our forces, and as long as we recognize that we may once again be compelled to run up and down the peninsula. If China wants to shock and dislocate the United States, it will attack in Korea, but, then again, if it does it will wake the real giant, which is us.

We want and can have good relations with China, including (upon the satisfaction of certain conditions) a robust nonstrategic trade, but China has been most aggressive in mounting an espionage offensive against us and in its interference in our domestic politics. This requires a response. Apart from merely putting it on notice not to take the Clinton years as gospel, we should firmly set about doing the two things China finds most frustrating-building a strategic defense and increasing military cooperation with Taiwan. (We have already embarked upon the latter, although President Clinton, not surprisingly, promises to veto the legislation that establishes it.) Neither of these is a violation of any agreement we have with China, and both will clarify and check its unwarranted initiatives. One cannot be afraid to provoke where required, but one must also be reluctant to do so while uncertain of a rival's plan or if it may be transformed, lest a cycle of provocation and reaction lead to a war no one wants.

Here fate has been generous to the democracies, for Japan, Taiwan, and Australasia are islands. This incontrovertible fact is to us what the gift of the English Channel was to Britain in the world wars. Navies can exist, radiant in force across the seas, and yet remain neither threatening nor overbearing. Two-thirds of the earth's surface, the sea is the supreme theater of geostrategic maneuver, as the British Empire and the world wars attest. It comes naturally to Americans to dominate the sea, deploying the world's most complex machines in an austere, spatially abstract arena of lots of distance and little nuance. If China is to be the great challenge of the 21st century, the United States must at least double the strength of its navy. Taiwan could be protected for a decade with no more than the number of attack submarines President Clinton will have scrapped in his two terms. These, and fresh squadrons of surface combatants, with half a dozen new carrier battle groups, and coordinated augmentations of the ground- based fighter inventory, the army, and the military establishment in train, would obviate Japanese rearmament, and are the best chance for discouraging China from a course in which military development is paramount. Naturally, the president and his limpets would recoil at the very mention of this, but that is because, as their conduct shows, they do not understand that to refuse to maintain the balance of power in Asia is to beg for war.

What of that conduct? It has been capitulationist by action and by default. It has been cowardly, craven, and venal. The presidency of the United States was put up for sale and the presidency of the United States was bought. This in conjunction with the rise of what China metaphorically calls the east wind. Things can change, however, if America is roused, as has happened many times before. It is true that the east wind may rise, but the wind can also rise in the west.