Forward Observer: A New Arms Race

Europe's plan to resume selling arms to China already has generated the beginning of a backlash in Congress. The backlash is bound to get stronger in coming months if President Bush or lawmakers cannot persuade European nations to keep the Chinese arms embargo in place.

The near-term consequence of such an impasse could well be a China-Taiwan arms race. The long-term worst case scenario is a Pacific war in which European and former Soviet bloc countries support China while the United States arms Taiwan.

Despite such high stakes, the 109th Congress so far has been all bark and no bite in warning European nations against lifting the arms embargo imposed on China in 1989 in retaliation for China's bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square. The United States at that time not only ended arms sales but also military-to-military contacts with China, a freeze that began to thaw under President Clinton in 1993 as he pursued a one-China policy. Bush, in contrast, has been leaning away from China and toward Taiwan.

Both the House and Senate, as part of their bark, have come up with resolutions in this new session urging the European Union to keep the China arms embargo in force. Lifting it, states S. Res. 59, "would increase the risk that U.S. troops could face military equipment and technology of Western, even U.S., origin in a cross-strait military conflict" between China and Taiwan.

Another part of the lengthy resolution says that several Chinese defense firms sold forbidden technology to Iran. If Europe does lift the arms embargo for China, the resolution calls for a U.S. "re-evaluation" of selling American arms to members of the European Union who then, in turn, might sell them to China, despite European promises to export only defensive equipment to the newest superpower.

When he introduced the resolution, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., said the Europeans are out to strengthen China's military so it "would serve as a more effective counterweight to American power, theoretically strengthening the European Union's hand in international political and strategic decisions. Additionally, European defense industries stand to gain billions of euros in Chinese contracts which, for E.U. leaders, seems too good to resist."

Whether Congress escalates from bark to bite in the coming weeks will depend on whether European nations swing off their present collision course -- unlikely given the polite but cool reception Bush received last week when he exhorted them to stick with the embargo. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., have warned that European countries will jeopardize their carefully crafted agreements with the United States to jointly develop, buy and use each other's weaponry if they go ahead with plans to help modernize the Chinese military. Such threats have not yet been distilled into legislation, however.

During this pregnant pause, U.S. defense company executives told CongressDaily they have little choice but to watch the fight from the sideline. To lobby overtly for a piece of the China market right now, they said, would amount to biting the biggest hand that feeds them -- Uncle Sam's. But the billions of dollars and thousands of jobs at stake assure a big dustup within the U.S. military-industrial complex if the European Union or some of its member countries do, indeed, move ahead with arms sales to China.

A few statistics from the CIA's World Factbook illustrate why no president, no Pentagon, no Congress can safely ignore China, especially not its military: population: China 1.3 billion people, United States, 293 million; labor force: China, 778 million, United States, 142 million; potential soldiers (male) aged 15 to 49: China 379 million, United States, 74 million; industrial production rate of growth: China, 30.4 percent in 2003; United States, minus 1 percent.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was among the administration witnesses who encountered new congressional fears about a "China gap" as he made the rounds of Armed Services committees this month. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, for example, who champions her home-state shipyard in Bath, asked him about projections "the Chinese naval fleet overall will actually surpass the size of the American fleet by the year 2015. That's only a decade from now. The decreasing number of [U.S.] ships being procured, particularly in light of the Chinese buildup, really concerns me."

Rumsfeld said her concern was well-founded, adding that China has not only built a bigger navy but expanded its area of operation.

For more than two years now Iraq has been the center of attention for both Congress and the media. But the hot breath of China is forcing both institutions to swing more of their focus to the hovering giant. During the nuclear standoff between the United States and Soviet Union, the oft-stated objective was to keep the two scorpions in the bottle from striking each other. That same analogy now applies to China and Taiwan in the short term and the United States and China in the long term. The Chinese embargo question is pushing these new realities front and center.