Ambassador Chas Freeman on Our Cold War Against China, by Ron Unz

Although his public service career stretches back for nearly sixty years and he probably ranks as one of our most distinguished professional diplomats, until the last year or so I was only dimly aware of Charles W. “Chas” Freeman, Jr.

I had occasionally read some of his opinion columns and perhaps one or two of his articles, and those always seemed to provide good and sensible points about the foreign policy issues that he addressed. Every now and then I’d seen him quoted in news stories, usually regarding either the Middle East or China, and his brief remarks were cogent ones. Articles on the latter topic sometimes mentioned the striking detail that very early in his long career he had served as the personal interpreter for President Richard Nixon during the latter’s historic 1972 trip to China and his meetings with Mao. But aside from that, my awareness of Freeman’s history or his activities was fairly low.

There was one notable exception to this. At the beginning of the first Obama Administration in February 2009, Freeman had been selected to serve as chair of our National Intelligence Council, tasked with assessing and assimilating reports from our 17 different intelligence agencies, then presenting the unified conclusions to the Director of National Intelligence and through him to the president. But although Freeman was eminently suited for that crucial American position, many members of the Israel Lobby regarded him as insufficiently loyal to the foreign country that they themselves served. So they mounted a fierce and very vocal lobbying campaign that successfully blocked his appointment, and I remembered reading about that unfolding controversy in my newspapers at the time.

One fatal black mark against Freeman had been that in 1997 he had succeeded former Sen. George McGovern as president of the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC). Although that organization possessed barely a sliver of AIPAC’s power and influence, Freeman declared that MEPC “strives to ensure that a full range of U.S. interests and views are considered by policy makers,” a goal that the Israel Lobby obviously viewed with extreme disfavor.

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In 2006, Profs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt released their original working-paper version of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, and MEPC became the first American outlet to publish it. Freeman endorsed its conclusions, saying that “No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article, given the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it.” Such penalties were demonstrated a couple of years later when Freeman’s own top-level appointment was blocked.

These events had all taken place many years ago, so I refreshed my memory of the details by reading Freeman’s 6,000 word Wikipedia entry, which contained a large section devoted to that controversy. But everything in that coverage and the rest of the article was far more laudatory than I ever would have expected, suggesting that the former ambassador’s record was so exemplary that all efforts by agitated pro-Israel activists to blacken his name had completely failed. Indeed, upon the defeat of Freeman’s 2009 nomination, David Broder, the dean of DC correspondents, published a Washington Post column entitled “The Country’s Loss,” bemoaning the success of the Israel lobbyists in forcing the former ambassador’s withdrawal.

That same Wikipedia entry also described Freeman’s long and varied government career, noting that his legal research became “the intellectual basis for the Taiwan Relations Act” that has officially governed our policy with that island nation for the last half-century.

In 1986 Freeman was appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and played a key role in negotiating the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola along with the independence of Namibia. Appointed U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1989, he held that post for the next three years, including during the very crucial period of America’s Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and then served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs from 1993 to 1994. His professional stature led him to be selected as the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica‘s entry on “Diplomacy,” and he accumulated a long list of impressive awards and honors during his decades of government service:

In his thirty-year diplomatic career, Freeman received two Distinguished Public Service Awards, three Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, two Distinguished Honor Awards, the CIA Medallion, a Defense Meritorious Service Award, and four Superior Honor Awards.[10] He speaks fluent Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic and has a working knowledge of several other languages.[4]

Despite Freeman’s long and distinguished career, he only came to my direct attention during the last year after I began watching some of his interviews on a couple of the YouTube channels that I follow. These included his half-hour segments on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s channel and especially his hour-long appearances on Dialogue Works.

The various video platforms and social media distribution systems have now allowed the Internet to almost completely replace cable news shows and other electronic broadcast media for much of the public, including myself, and this helps explain the collapsing ratings of those traditional media outlets.

So whereas in the past, I would only see Freeman’s name in a news quote or on an op-ed once every year or so, I could now watch him thoughtfully expressing his views on major matters every week for thirty minutes or a full hour, doing so almost completely free of the traditional media gatekeepers who might have heavily filtered his message or even banned him entirely.

Matters had been very different during the early 2000s. Back then, top credentialed critics of our Iraq War were blacklisted from the media and therefore completely disappeared from the public debate. This befell my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, and after his passing a few years later, I described his plight.

By contrast these days the views of a figure such as Freeman are easily available to anyone interesting in hearing them, and his interviews often demonstrated the sort of candor and courage that would never be allowed to appear on CNN or MSNBC, let alone on FoxNews.

Freeman’s statements were always provided in the subdued, careful tones of a lifelong professional diplomat now in his early 80s and the depth and breadth of his knowledge greatly impressed me. For example, in his latest interview just a few days ago, he carefully reviewed developments in East Asia—China, South Korea, and Japan—then easily shifted to Syria, Lebanon, and the rest of the Middle East, finally closing with a discussion of Russia’s ongoing Ukraine war, always seeming to possess total command of the local details in each of those different regions.

Among other interesting points, he mentioned that Japan had spent many years quietly building military systems that could very quickly be transformed into a powerful independent deterrent capability. So if our country got itself into a hot war with the Chinese, Japan might well use that opportunity to suddenly disengage from its postwar American alliance and become fully independent once again.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat sad but completely matter-of-fact tone, Freeman suggested that the government and soldiers of Israel these days shared many characteristics with the fanatic and bloodthirsty terrorists of ISIS, and were just as unwilling to comply with international law or respect any agreements they had made. Such statements would be totally unimaginable on traditional electronic media.

Video Link

Freeman’s previous interview a couple of weeks earlier was also very interesting. He began by discussing the ICC arrest warrant issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the latter’s vehement public denunciation in response, which Freeman described as “the most monumental list of lies,” declaring that our total support for Israel put us at war with international law, resulting in our isolation from the world. He also reviewed the European situation and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, with the entire segment being well worth watching.

Video Link

In listening to many of Freeman’s long interviews and reading the texts of his public speeches, I never came across the slightest example of any non-mainstream or conspiratorial beliefs, and all of his ideas seemed firmly situated within our official narratives. Thus, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda militants were entirely responsible for the 9/11 Attacks and the Jewish Holocaust of World War II was one of history’s most horrific atrocities. From his personal perspective, racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia were some of the world’s worst moral evils, and one of our greatest international challenges was coping with the terrible threat of Climate Change.

Given Freeman’s extreme courage on other matters, I’m sure he was entirely sincere and candid in expressing those positions, which have probably been almost universal among all of his professional colleagues and members of his personal circle. As someone born in 1943, his entire life has been lived within our conventional narrative framework, and he had already reached his 60s before the Internet became a significant source of alternate information, so he certainly cannot be faulted for never questioning any of this.

Freeman seems a perfect example of an important development in our ideological landscape. Over the last couple of decades and especially the last several years, control of American foreign policy has been seized by extremist forces once dismissed as fringe elements. As Col. Larry Wilkerson explained in one of his own interviews, during his first term of service as chief of staff to Colin Powell in the George H.W. Bush Administration, the Neocons had routinely been called “the crazies” by the national security and foreign policy establishments. But when he returned to government service a decade later in the George W. Bush Administration, those same Neocons soon successfully seized control of those establishments.

As a direct result of this process, many fully mainstream individuals, whether academic scholars such as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, and Ted Postol, or military and intelligence experts such as Col. Wilkerson, Col. Douglas Macgregor, and Ray McGovern, have been pushed into alternative circles. None of these figures changed their views, but the political spectrum underwent such a radical shift that merely by staying in place they became relegated to its margins.

I recently discovered that Freeman has a small personal website, providing his biographical background and links to his past appearances in the traditional media. But it also includes the transcripts of the many dozens of public speeches he had given over the last couple of decades.

These latter all seem based upon very carefully prepared written texts, so they amounted to long and thoughtful opinion pieces on China, the Middle East, or other crucial world flashpoints, and I greatly benefited from reading quite a number of them. Although few if any of his statements surprised me, they were all informed by Freeman’s deep expertise and his historical insight.

For example, earlier this year he made some crucial points regarding the nature of our ongoing proxy war against Russia in Ukraine:

Our country invented the modern sphere of influence. In the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary to it, we asserted a right to limit the freedom of maneuver of the countries of the Western Hemisphere and to demand their deference to our political and economic interests. After World War II, Americans expanded our sphere of influence to include Western Europe and Northeast Asia. In the post-Cold War period, Washington adapted the hegemonic principles of the Monroe Doctrine to the unipolar moment and extended our sphere of influence to the entire world beyond the borders of Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. In the end, the only countries bordering Russia other than those of Central Asia not in our sphere of influence were Georgia and Ukraine. American neoconservatives saw these neighbors of Russia as vacuums to be filled by U.S. military power.

Early last year, he had emphasized the dangerously self-destructive nature of the global conflict we had provoked with China, and he argued that our situation was entirely different from what we had faced during our long Cold War against the USSR. Indeed, our own country now found itself closer to the situation of that latter vanquished adversary:

In international affairs, as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Our actions have stimulated China to mirror, meet, and match our military hostility to it. We are now in an arms race with China, and it is far from clear that we are holding our own. Our apparent determination to hang onto Taiwan as part of an American sphere of influence in East Asia and our aggressive patrolling of China’s borders with naval and air forces have provided Beijing with the justification for its rapid reconfiguration and comprehensive modernization of the PLA.

The PLA Navy (PLAN) is now the world’s largest. Some PLAN ships are reportedly equipped with railguns, a technology we have been unable to develop and deploy. The land-based PLA Rocket Force fields ballistic missiles capable of striking moving aircraft carriers 1,000 miles from China. China fields hypersonic missiles against which we have no defense. The PLA Air Force now possesses the world’s largest bomber force as well as fighters equipped with air-to-air missiles that outrange ours. Beijing is beefing up its nuclear capabilities to deter renewed U.S. intervention in its unfinished civil war with the political heirs of Chiang Kai-shek, who lost his war with the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland but, with U.S. backing, reestablished his regime in Taipei.

Despite China’s remarkable military buildup, Beijing has so far kept defense spending well below two percent of GDP. Meanwhile, cost control continues to elude the Pentagon. DoD has never passed an audit and is infamous for the waste, fraud, and mismanagement that result from its reliance on cost-plus procurement from the U.S. equivalent of profit-driven state-owned enterprises – military-industrial corporate bureaucracies whose revenues (and profits) come entirely from the government. The U.S. defense budget is out of control in terms of our ability to pay for it.

Four decades ago, the United States bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing it to devote ever more of its economy to defense while neglecting the welfare of its citizens. Now we Americans are diverting ever more borrowed and taxpayer dollars to our military even as our human and physical infrastructure decays. In some ways, in relation to China, we are now in the position of the USSR in the Cold War. Our fiscal trajectory is injurious to the general welfare of Americans. That, along with our liberties, is, however, what our armed forces are meant to defend.

A long 2020 discussion of the same subject was so detailed and thoughtful that large sections of it are worth quoting:

Washington has declared war on China. The administration and its allies hope that the war will be “cold,” but have no strategy for keeping it so. I find it noteworthy that the most belligerently anti-Chinese members of the current U.S. Senate are also its youngest. They came to adulthood after the end of the post-World War II “Cold War” and have no experience of its anxieties. They appear to take its sudden end as predestined – something that was so inevitably right ideologically that it can and should be taken for granted. Their military experience, if any, has been in the contemporary equivalent of the 19^th century’s Indian Wars – combat with gun-toting farmers with no air forces, air defenses, navies, guided missiles, or nuclear weapons with which to answer U.S. hostility…

The Cold War was radically different from this. It was a global struggle between two competing ideological blocs and nuclear-armed power centers capable of destroying not just each other but all life on the planet except maybe the cockroaches. It began as a series of squabbles over the spoils of a worldwide war. Each side strove to consolidate spheres of politico-military and economic influence and deny the other access to them. But each learned to avoid confrontations that might lead to armed combat directly with the other. Each limited itself to proxy wars aimed at sustaining or imposing its ideology somewhere not in the grip of the other. Each sought to minimize and contain interaction with the other. That was not difficult, given the utter lack of interdependence between the two and the blocs of nations they formally and informally commanded.

The struggle we Americans have now initiated with China has none of these characteristics. To analogize it to the Cold War of 1947 – 1991 is intellectually lazy. More important, it is profoundly misleading and delusional. The Sino-American split is not the sequel to a bloody world war. However politically convenient it may be for Americans to cast antagonism to China in all-encompassing Manichean terms, this is a contest born of contending national self-images and ambitions, not ideologies. The struggle with China on which Americans have embarked is a bilateral contest in which others may or may not choose to take sides, not one between two committed blocs of nations. China is both a much less inherently hostile and far more robust rival than the Soviet Union was.

Emulating China’s autocracy by closing America to foreign goods, services, people, and ideas, as the United States is now doing, is self-defeating. Modeling China policy on Ronald Reagan’s treatment of the USSR before he met Mikhail Gorbachev, as Secretary of State Pompeo has done, is the path to receipt of a national “Darwin award.” The U.S. contention with a resurgent China cannot be conducted in the same manner as the Cold War. It will not end, as the Cold War did, with the voluntary resignation of an ideologically disillusioned and exhausted adversary…

China is armed with nuclear weapons, but it has sized and configured its arsenal for a retaliatory response to an attack on it by other nuclear powers, not for a first strike, which it has abjured and is not equipped to conduct. China is a threat to American global primacy, but mostly in economic and technological rather than political or military terms, in which it remains decidedly inferior. China is once again the immovable economic and cultural center of its native region – where the United States has for seventy-five years been the resident overlord – but China seeks no “allies” and has no political satrapies or military dependencies.

He went on to provide a very thorough list of the crucial differences between China and the USSR that we had previously faced, with all boldface provided in the original:

Crucially, China is not the Soviet Union:

China has no messianic ideology to export. Its appeal derives from its performance, not its ideas. It is happy to be emulated, but justly charged with callous indifference to how foreign societies govern themselves.

China is not engaged in regime change operations to create an ideological sphere of influence. It seeks to prevent the overthrow of its own authoritarian system of governance but does not oppose democracy or promote authoritarianism abroad. Where tested, as in Korea, it often has a better relationship with democracies than with their undemocratic opponents.

China’s relationships with foreign nations are transactional rather than sentimental. It has no “satellites,” “allies,” or entente partners to divert its attention from its own defense. Beijing has no ideological soul mates, committed followers, or dedicated sycophants abroad.

China’s economy dwarfs that of the USSR. It accounts for 30 percent of global manufacturing and continues to grow. China has an economy that is almost one-third larger than that of the United States in purchasing power terms and that is rapidly approaching parity at nominal exchange rates.

China is now the largest consumer market on the planet and the biggest trading partner of three-fourths of the world’s other economies. It is fully integrated into the global capitalist system and cannot be walled off from it.

China already possesses one-fourth of the world’s scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematics workforce. It is steadily increasing its ascendancy.

China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is an order-setting geoeconomic strategy with no Soviet parallel that dwarfs the nearest American equivalent – the Marshall Plan.

China spends two percent or less of GDP on its military vs. the estimated 9 – 15 percent of the USSR and the current 7.9 percent spent by the United States.[2] Unlike the USSR, if pushed to do so, China has the capacity to more than match any U.S. military spending increases.

Despite much wishful thinking on the part of its detractors, premising a policy on China’s collapse from systemic defects, as George Kennan shrewdly did in the case of the USSR in 1947, is – on the evidence – delusional.

China has not built a nuclear arsenal to match that of either the United States or Russia. It has instead adopted a “no first use” policy for nuclear weapons backed by a modest force de frappe that can conduct a limited but devastating retaliatory counterstrike to any foreign nuclear attack on it.

There are no U.S. arms control agreements, exchanges of information, understandings on mutual restraint, or escalation control mechanisms between the U.S. and Chinese armed forces as there were with the USSR

American military intervention in the Russian civil war lasted only two years (1918-1920). Overt U.S. intervention in China’s ongoing civil war, sparked by the Korean War, began in 1950. Seventy years later, U.S. support for the heirs to Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Chinese regime not only continues but is escalating.

The United States backs challenges to China’s sovereignty over Taiwan and islets in its near seas. By contrast, despite rhetorical opposition to its incorporation of the three Baltic states, America never actively contested the USSR’s territorial integrity.

The armed forces of the United States aggressively patrol China’s shorelines and test its defenses, as they did those of the Soviet Union. But, so far, unlike the USSR, China has not reciprocated.

Meanwhile, the differences between our own country during that past, ultimately successful global conflict and our current situation were just as significant:

Equally important, the United States of the 2020s is not the America of the early Cold War.

As the Cold War began, the United States produced one-half or more of the world’s manufactures. It now makes about one-sixth.

For the first time in American history, foreigners do not envy American freedoms. Once almost-universal admiration for the United States has been overwritten by repeated displays of racism, gun violence, political venality, xenophobia, and – most recently – executive incompetence and legislative default in the face of national challenges. No one abroad now seeks to emulate the U.S. political system or believes that the United States illustrates the possibilities of democracy.

During the Cold War, the United States was the uncontested leader of a bloc of dependent nations that it called “the free world.” That bloc is now in an advanced state of decay. America’s international followership is greatly diminished and its capacity to organize coalitions that integrate lesser powers in support of common objectives has atrophied.

Legacy U.S. alliances formed to contain the USSR have little relevance to American contention with China:

US-European alliances like NATO are withering. Though cautious about China, Europeans do not and will not support an effort to “contain” it.

No Asian security partner of the United States wants to choose between America and China.[3] U.S. “alliances” in Asia embody U.S. undertakings to protect partners rather than commitments by them to come to America’s aid. Such dependent relationships cannot be repurposed to form a coalition to counter China.

The United States is isolated on a widening list of issues of importance to other countries. It has withdrawn or excluded itself from a growing number of multilateral instruments of global and regional governance and is no longer able to lead the international community as it once did.

Americans have repeatedly declined to recapitalize or cooperate in reforming international financial institutions to meet new global and regional investment requirements. This has led China, India, and other rising powers to create supplementary lenders like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank. The United States has chosen to have no voice in these and continues inadvertently to stimulate the creation of still more institutions that can act without reference to American interests or views.

Since 1950, the Taiwan issue has been a casus belli between the United States and China. But U.S. allies or security partners see it as a fight among Chinese to be managed rather than joined. If the U.S. mismanages the Taiwan issue, as it now appears to be doing, it will have no overt allies in the resulting war.

No claimant against China in the South China Sea is prepared to join the U.S. in naval conflict with China.

U.S. foreign policy is now as partisan as domestic policy. It is often driven by special rather than national interests and is unrealistic, strategically incoherent, divisive, and fickle.

Partisan oligopolies have swallowed independent media in the United States and reduced the thousands of U.S. correspondents once reporting on international affairs to mere dozens. U.S. corporate media now treat the news as an entertainment-based cost center and consumer product rather than as a necessary public service or civic duty. These developments and the politicization of the U.S. intelligence community diminish and distort American situational awareness, helping spurious narratives to overwrite facts.

Therefore, he concluded:

In short, this time is different. Sino-American relations have a history and dynamic that do not conform to those of the US-Soviet contest. If you have seen one “communist,” you have not seen them all. And the United States is much less well equipped to inspire and lead opposition to China than it was to the USSR.

The US-China contention is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China, unlike the determinedly autarkic USSR, is part of the same global society as the United States. The battlefields include global governance, geoeconomics, trade, investment, finance, currency usage, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration, in addition to the geopolitical and military domains in which the Cold War played out. Short of nuclear war, the struggle the United States has begun with China may not be existential, as the Cold War was, but it cannot avoid being hugely consequential.

Under different political circumstances, Freeman would have spent the last dozen or more years serving near the very top of America’s national security apparatus, providing these same sorts of candid memos and evaluations to our president and other leading decision-makers, perhaps with enormous consequences for American foreign policy.

The previous year, Freeman had given an even longer 2019 presentation at Stanford University, describing the early stages of President Donald Trump’s broad-brush attacks against China and their roots in domestic American politics:

President Trump’s trade war with China has quickly metastasized into every other domain of Sino-American relations. Washington is now trying to dismantle China’s interdependence with the American economy, curb its role in global governance, counter its foreign investments, cripple its companies, block its technological advance, punish its many deviations from liberal ideology, contest its borders, map its defenses, and sustain the ability to penetrate those defenses at will…

Trump’s presidency has been built on lower middle-class fears of displacement by immigrants and outsourcing of jobs to foreigners. His campaign found a footing in the anger of ordinary Americans – especially religious Americans – at the apparent contempt for them and indifference to their welfare of the country’s managerial and political elites. For many, the trade imbalance with China and Chinese rip-offs of U.S. technology became the explanations of choice for increasingly unfair income distribution, declining equality of opportunity, the deindustrialization of the job market, and the erosion of optimism in the United States.

In their views of China, many Americans now appear subconsciously to have combined images of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Japan’s unnerving 1980s challenge to U.S. industrial and financial primacy, and a sense of existential threat analogous to the Sinophobia that inspired the Anti-Coolie and Chinese Exclusion Acts.

Meanwhile, the ineptitude of the American elite revealed by the 2008 financial crisis, the regular eruptions of racial violence and gun massacres in the United States, the persistence of paralyzing political constipation in Washington, and the arrogant unilateralism of “America First” have greatly diminished the appeal of America to the Chinese elite.

Freeman was quite even-handed and admitted that some economic criticism leveled against China was warranted:

Some of the complaints against China from the squirming mass of Sinophobes who have attached themselves to President Trump are entirely justified. The Chinese have been slow to accept the capitalist idea that knowledge is property that can be owned on an exclusive basis. This is, after all, contrary to a millennial Chinese tradition that regards copying as flattery, not a violation of genius. Chinese businessfolk have engaged in the theft of intellectual property rights not just from each other but from foreigners. Others may have done the same in the past, but they were nowhere near as big as China. China’s mere size makes its offenses intolerable. Neither the market economy in China nor China’s international trade and investment relationships can realize their potential until its disrespect for private property is corrected. The United States and the European Union (EU) are right to insist that the Chinese government fix this problem.

Many Chinese agree. Not a few quietly welcome foreign pressure to strengthen the enforcement of patents and trademarks, of which they are now large creators, in the Chinese domestic market. Even more hope the trade war will force their government to reinvigorate “reform and opening.” Fairer treatment of foreign-invested Chinese companies is not just a reasonable demand but one that serves the interests of the economically dominant but politically disadvantaged private sector in China. Chinese protectionism is an unlatched door against which the United States and others should continue to push.

However, many of our public accusations were entirely baseless, and indeed far more applicable to our own country’s behavior than to that of the Chinese:

There is a lot of this sort of manipulative reasoning at play in the deteriorating U.S. security relationship with the Chinese. Social and niche media, which make everything plausible and leave no truth unrefuted, facilitate this. In the Internet miasma of conspiracy theories, false narratives, fabricated reports, fictive “facts,” and outright lies, baseless hypotheses about China rapidly become firm convictions and long-discredited myths and rumors find easy resurrection.

Consider the speed with which a snappy phrase invented by an Indian polemicist – “debt-trap diplomacy” – has become universally accepted as encapsulating an alleged Chinese policy of international politico-economic predation. Yet the only instance of a so-called a “debt trap” ever cited is the port of Hambantota, commissioned by the since-ousted autocratic president of Sri Lanka to glorify his hometown. His successor correctly judged that the port was a white elephant and decided to offload it on the Chinese company that had built it by demanding that the company exchange the debt to it for equity. To recover any portion of its investment, the Chinese company now has to build some sort of economic hinterland for the port. Hambantota is less an example of a “debt trap” than of a stranded asset.

Then too, China is now routinely accused of iniquities that better describe the present-day United States than the People’s Middle Kingdom. Among the most ironic of such accusations is the charge that it is China, not a sociopathic “America First” assault on the international status quo, that is undermining both U.S. global leadership and the multilateral order remarkably wise American statesmen put in place some seven decades ago. But it is the United States, not China, that is ignoring the U.N. Charter, withdrawing from treaties and agreements, attempting to paralyze the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution mechanisms, and substituting bilateral protectionist schemes for multilateral facilitation of international trade based on comparative advantage.

The WTO was intended as an antidote to mercantilism, also known as “government-managed trade.” China has come strongly to support globalization and free trade. These are the primary sources of its rise to prosperity. It is hardly surprising that China has become a strong defender of the trade and investment regime Americans designed and put in place.

By contrast, the Trump administration is all about mercantilism – boosting national power by minimizing imports and maximizing exports as part of a government effort to manage trade with unilateral tariffs and quotas, while exempting the United States from the rules it insists that others obey.

Under Trump, America demonstrated to both China and the rest of the world that it was totally unreliable in keeping agreements that it had signed, with these wanton acts likely to have very negative long-term political consequences:

The supply chains now tying the two economies together were forged by market-regulated comparative advantage. The U.S. attempt to impose government-dictated targets for Chinese purchases of agricultural commodities, semiconductors, and the like represents a political preemption of market forces. By simultaneously walking away from the Paris climate accords, TPP, the Iran nuclear deal, and other treaties and agreements, Washington has shown that it can no longer be trusted to respect the sanctity of contracts. The U.S. government has also demonstrated that it can ignore the economic interests of its farmers and manufacturers and impose politically motivated embargoes on them. The basic lesson Chinese have taken from recent U.S. diplomacy is that no one should rely on either America’s word or its industrial and agricultural exports.

For these reasons, the impending trade “deal” between China and the United States – if there is one – will be at most a truce that invites further struggle. It will be a short-term expedient, not a long-term reinvigoration of the Sino-American trade and investment relationship to American advantage. No future Chinese government will allow China to become substantially dependent on imports or supply chains involving a country as fickle and hostile as Trump’s America has proven to be. China will instead develop non-American sources of foodstuffs, natural resources, and manufactures, while pursuing a greater degree of self-reliance. More limited access to the China market for U.S. factories and farmers will depress U.S. growth rates. By trying to reduce U.S. interdependence with China, the Trump administration has inadvertently made the United States the supplier of last resort to what is fast becoming the world’s largest consumer market.

And our extremely aggressive military behavior was likely to eventually produce a reciprocal response:

The U.S. Navy and Air Force patrol China’s coasts and test its defenses on a daily basis. U.S. strategy in the event of war with China – for example, over Taiwan – depends on overcoming those defenses so as to be able to strike deep into the Chinese homeland. The United States has just withdrawn from the treaty on intermediate nuclear forces in part to be able to deploy nuclear weapons to the Chinese periphery. In the short term, there is increasing danger of a war by accident, triggered by a mishap in the South China Sea, the Senkaku Archipelago, or by efforts by Taiwanese politicians to push the envelope of mainland tolerance of their island’s unsettled political status quo. These threats are driving growth in China’s defense budget and its development of capabilities to deny the United States continued military primacy in its adjacent seas.

In the long term, U.S. efforts to dominate China’s periphery invite a Chinese military response on America’s periphery like that formerly mounted by the Soviet Union. Moscow actively patrolled both U.S. coasts, stationed missile-launching submarines just off them, supported anti-American regimes in the Western Hemisphere, and relied on its ability to devastate the American homeland with nuclear weapons to deter war with the United States. On what basis does Washington imagine that Beijing cannot and will not eventually reciprocate the threat the U.S. forces surrounding China appear to pose to it?

On Hostile Coexistence with China
Remarks to the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies China Program, Stanford University
Chas W. Freeman Jr. • May 3, 2019 • 5,000 Words

I fully concurred with his warnings about the extremely reckless and counter-productive actions that our government was taking against China. But one of the early paragraphs in his long speech might have held certain very important implications, although I doubt that he himself recognized their significance either at the time or even long afterward.

Freeman had served in government for nearly half a century, sometimes at a very high level, so his assessment of the nature and behavior of the Trump Administration should be taken very seriously:

There is no longer an orderly policy process in Washington to coordinate, moderate, or control policy formulation or implementation. Instead, a populist president has effectively declared open season on China. This permits everyone in his administration to go after China as they wish. Every internationally engaged department and agency – the U.S. Special Trade Representative, the Departments of State, Treasury, Justice, Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security – is doing its own thing about China. The president has unleashed an undisciplined onslaught. Evidently, he calculates that this will increase pressure on China to capitulate to his protectionist and mercantilist demands. That would give him something to boast about as he seeks reelection in 2020.

That characterization of the Trump Administration was made at Stanford University in early May 2019, but unbeknownst to both Freeman and his entire audience, our government at that point was already half-way through a secret, large-scale defensive exercise that lasted from January to August. Crimson Contagion was intended to prepare our federal and state officials for the hypothetical possible appearance of a dangerous respiratory virus in China. Then around late October 2019, just a few weeks after the conclusion of that exercise, exactly such a mysterious virus suddenly appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

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Freeman described a Trump Administration that was completely undisciplined and lacked any proper controls but that had strongly encouraged anti-China actions across all its different departments. These factors may have been very germane to the global Covid outbreak.

Beginning in April 2020, I began publishing a long series of articles that repeatedly emphasized exactly that sort of connection, and I’ve stood almost alone on the Internet in being willing to publicly advocate that controversial hypothesis.

Some of my most dramatic conclusions can be summarized in just a few paragraphs:

For example, in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year in 2018 a mysterious viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and in 2019, another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry…

From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec’s department ran the “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America’s foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.

With leading Trump officials greatly enamored of biowarfare, fiercely hostile to China, and running large-scale 2019 simulations on the consequences of a mysterious viral outbreak in that country, it seems entirely unreasonable to completely disregard the possibility that such extremely reckless plans may have been privately discussed and eventually implemented, though probably without presidential authorization.

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

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According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious symptoms. The implications are rather obvious. Furthermore:

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

The Iranians themselves were well aware of these facts, and their top political and military leaders publicly accused America of an illegal biowarfare attack against their own country and China, with their former president even filing an official protest with the United Nations. But although these explosive charges were widely reported in the Iranian press, they were completely ignored by the American media so that almost no Americans ever became aware of them.