The China Axis, Nuclear War, and Global Peace

Commentary

The regime in China is rapidly expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities and related alliance activity.

On Aug. 21, Naval News reported that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had launched its most sophisticated non-nuclear submarine to date. Since at least March, the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) has had hypersonic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to targets in the United States. The PLARF is building and arming massive silo fields with nuclear missiles in China’s northwest provinces.

Beijing complicates U.S. and allied defenses by proliferating such weapons technologies among not only U.S. adversaries—such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea—but at least one key U.S. ally: Saudi Arabia. Beijing would welcome the co-optation of multiple U.S. allies into its own orbits of economic and military alliance structures.

These People’s Republic of China (PRC) international organizations, alliances, and memorandums of understanding (MOUs) led or determined by the CCP—including numerous bilateral agreements, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—might jointly be called the “China Axis.”

While attempting to co-opt countries around the world into its axis, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demands that Washington degrade U.S. nuclear doctrine by removing its “nuclear umbrella” over allies, acquiesce to a “no first use” policy, and end military technology sharing with allies like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom. If accepted, these concessions would erode U.S. deterrence against Beijing and Moscow, not only allowing their belligerence against Taiwan and Ukraine but against all of Europe and Asia.

The core of the China Axis—which includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea—is ramping up their nuclear saber rattling, conventional military operations, and the taking of hostages. The result is a rapidly deteriorating Pax Americana, in which Beijing makes outrageous demands and supports ongoing Axis violence against Ukraine and Israel. This has led Washington analysts to stop seeking nuclear arms control and instead proceed toward another nuclear arms race by supporting both greater quantities and qualities of nuclear weapons. That shift is entirely reasonable given the Axis’s nuclear threat to America and the free world.

As the leader of the China Axis, the CCP is rightly becoming the focus of U.S. nuclear deterrence. In March, President Joe Biden reoriented U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy to focus on China. The new U.S. strategy also deters an increasing threat of coordinated attacks by multiple nuclear-armed adversaries simultaneously, including not only China but also Russia and North Korea.

Former President Donald Trump has also addressed the risk, including by promotion of a U.S. iron dome missile defense system similar to the one operated successfully by Israel to defend against Iran and its proxies. Since July, a U.S. iron dome has been part of the official Republican platform. Under former President Ronald Reagan, a similar program called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was arguably not only a defensive shield but also a shield that allowed for a first strike against Soviet nuclear weapons because it defended against a Soviet second strike. The threat of such an offensive use of SDI helped bring Moscow to the bargaining table and break up the former Soviet Union. The CCP has vowed not to let the same thing happen to China.

Biden’s new nuclear strategy to focus on China and Trump’s iron dome could both deter some of the new synergistic risks of war with multiple Axis countries simultaneously and compel Beijing and Moscow to abandon their more aggressive inclinations that are sending the world into a spiral of nuclear proliferation.

For example, there is a risk that these two senior members of the China Axis could use North Korea, or Iran for that matter, if it increases its nuclear weapons capabilities, to conduct multiple nuclear strikes on major U.S. cities. In July, North Korea tested a single nuclear missile that would carry multiple nuclear warheads. China and Russia could provide North Korea with air defenses from any U.S. nuclear retaliation if it used such a missile against U.S. cities.

In this scenario, a U.S. economic depression could result in degrading the U.S. tax base while simultaneously absorbing our government expenditures in an attempt to rebuild. Inflation would increase as the power of the U.S. dollar waned and the ability of the U.S. government to borrow on international capital markets imploded. The United States could then be fiscally forced to withdraw our military forces from forward-deployed positions in Europe and Asia. Without the United States as an “offshore balancer,” Moscow and Beijing could claim and begin to rule entire continents as their spheres of influence.

The risk of nuclear war from the China Axis also entails severe environmental risks. Trump said in an interview with Elon Musk on Aug. 12: “China is much less than us right now [on nuclear weapons], but they’re going to catch us sooner than people think.”

Trump said he was particularly concerned about “nuclear warming,” which he has repeatedly spoken of in the context of proliferation. He is likely referring to the adverse environmental consequences of a large-scale nuclear exchange. In the 1980s, there was similar concern over a “nuclear winter” that scientists believed could cause human and other extinctions from massive quantities of smoke and nuclear fallout, blocking the sun and causing radiation sickness.

Beijing and Moscow likely believe that the reasonable fear held by the public in democracies of all of the above could lead us to blink first in the event of nuclear brinkmanship. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are already engaging in not-so-subtle forms of brinkmanship by ignoring nuclear arms control, flying nuclear-capable bombers near Alaska, and linking cooperation with Washington to U.S. concessions on any number of life-and-death matters for us and our allies.

In exchange for more security against nuclear proliferation, for example, the CCP wants the United States to end its military sales to Taiwan and relinquish the nuclear glue of our alliance system. Beijing is pressuring the Biden administration to draw back from its new nuclear strategy to deter the China Axis. In July, China suspended its participation in nuclear arms control talks with the United States, which one arms control expert called “inexcusable.” The suspension is over U.S. arming of Taiwan and is tantamount to a nuclear threat against the United States.

As the centrifugal forces of the China Axis begin to rip apart the global Pax Americana that survived with no nuclear weapons use since the end of World War II, the United States is rightly making moves to strengthen our nuclear deterrent and defend the peace. Stronger economies and conventional forces are just as important to defending our and allied territory as can be observed today in Ukraine. Both U.S. political parties and many of our allies have good ideas about better securing the peace in these ways, which is great as we need all hands on deck in the greatest American goals over the last century.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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