China Fill-in
Pentagon fears growth in China’s arms market (2019). This article simply says that China is selling more and more weapons to the Middle East.
China fill-in bad
Made in China: Beijing Shows off 100s of New Weapons (2019)
China arms exports increasing (2019). Beijing continues to build its stature as a global arms exporter, according to the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on the military and security developments of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Per Department of Defense research, China completed over $25 billion worth of arms sales between 2013 and 2017, thereby rising to the level of world’s fourth-largest arms supplier. A particularly successful niche for China has been the area of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). The latest SIPRI report noted that China is today the world’s leading exporter of armed drones, with sales of 153 to 13 countries since 2014.
Rising China sells more weapons (2019). rms transfers also are a component of China’s foreign policy, used in conjunction with other types of military, economic aid, and development assistance to support broader foreign policy goals,” the Pentagon report said. “These include securing access to natural resources and export markets, promoting political influence among host country elites, and building support in international forums.”
How dominant is China in the global arms trade? (2018)/ This article provides details on China’s growing arms exports.
How China weaponizes overseas arms trade (2019). As such, arms exports will also increasingly figure in the growing strategic competition with the United States. The arms competition between these two countries – both in East Asia and increasingly globally as well – is synonymous with their emerging great-power rivalry. In this regard, China has a growing capability to shape the direction and character of this arms competition – not only through its military-technological development and diffusion of arms exports, but more importantly, through its strategic choices that influence the contours of alliances and military advantage in different geographic areas.
China-Latin American sales antagonizing the US? (2018).This analysis outlined the current trends and factors leading to China’s increased arms sales to Latin America. As the data shows, China’s arms sales saw an increase parallel to its increased political and economic relations to the region. As the U.S.-China Security and Economic Commission notes, “China has sought to improve its diplomatic presence through an increasing number of high-level visits, military cooperation and exchanges, and involvement in several regional organizations.”39 Arms sales directly complement Chinese diplomatic relations and provide additional relationship building opportunities. They promote broader embassy coordination while creating familiarity between China’s military and its counterparts. Moreover, as China continues to cement its economic and military relations with the region, it is possible that Latin American leaders may become more open to purchasing Chinese defense equipment, especially if China continues to improve the quality of its defense products.
China is flooding the Middle East with cheap drones (2019).While the Pentagon continues to this day to deliver armed Reaper drones only to the UK, France, and Italy, purchasers of Chinese combat drones, according to Chinese manufacturers, include Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, the UAE, and Zambia. So far, the three largest buyers of Chinese drones are Pakistan (with a share of 25 percent) as well as Egypt and Myanmar (with 23 and 13 percent, respectively). Several of Beijing’s buyers are close strategic U.S. allies who have requested the sale of armed drones from Washington to no avail and have thus fallen back on Chinese products.
China boosts arms sales by 74% (2017). This article focuses on a growing arms race in Asia driven by increases in China’s military spending and exports.
China Threat Bibliography is here.
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US arms sales needed to deter China’s aggression
Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for the National Interest, AUgusst 9, 2018, The Trump Administration Has a Plan to Compete with Russia and China over Weapon Sales, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/trump-administration-has-plan-compete-russia-and-china-over-weapon-sales-28327
The administration is hoping to boost the export prospects for American weapons systems to allied countries by modifying policies and streamlining the bureaucratic process. Under the new policy, the United States hopes to make its export bureaucracy more proactive and cut red tape in the process. “These steps are among the first in what we hope will be a series of efforts to streamline the arms transfer process,” Kaidanow said. Report Advertisement “I can assure you that my colleagues and I at the State Department, but also again more broadly in the USG, will continue exploring ways to cut red tape and give U.S. industry every advantage in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, while continuing to ensure the responsible export of arms.” The United States is making these policy changes with great power competition with China and Russia in mind. Report Advertisement “We’re trying to improve our ability to compete with our adversaries by providing our partners with viable alternatives to foreign products in order to maintain influence in key regions throughout the world,” Laura Cressey, Deputy Director for Regional Security and Arms Transfers at U.S. Department of State, said. “We’re going to be working with our partners and allies to identify critical capability requirements that they have and then trying to expedite transfers to support these essential foreign policy and national security objectives.” However, writing the policy guidance is the easy part. Implementing the policy will be far more challenging. “The release of the new policy was only the first step in a series of what we believe will be very practical results-focused initiatives to transform the way that the U.S. government works to support and grow our defense industrial base,” Kaidanow said. “Through that memorandum, the president also directed the secretary of state, in coordination with the secretaries of defense, commerce, and energy, to submit an implementation plan within 60 days.” As part of the effort, the United States is looking at reforming export hurdles such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which has been a vexing problem for the defense industry for decades. Report Advertisement “We’ll look at streamlining the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, and also continuing to revise the U.S. Munitions List and the Commerce Control List,” Cressey said. Additionally, the State Department and Defense Department will try to speed up the bureaucratic processes involved in weapons exports. ADVERTISING inRead invented by Teads Report Advertisement “We will also be looking at the day-to-day processes to ensure that we are as efficient, as streamlined, and as effective as possible,” Cressey said. “So some of the things that we’re looking at, and that folks in industry and associations have asked us to look at, is: establishing milestones and timelines for the foreign military sales process; improving and speeding up our contracting process – processes within the Defense Department; trying to increase the competitiveness of U.S. defense items and systems by building in exportability to the design and development; and also by expanding support for what we call non-program-of-record systems. We’re looking into potential financing options that could make our systems more attainable for our foreign partners. And we’re also examining existing polices to ensure that they don’t unnecessarily detract from our ability to compete in international – in the international marketplace.” Without the changes, the United States is increasingly in danger of losing its market share as China, in particular, increasing develops and produces evermore-capable weapons for the export market. One example is the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) market, which the United States dominates, but which is also threatened by Chinese competition and by Washington’s tight export regulations. “By removing some of the previous administration’s artificial barriers to the transfer of arms to critical partners, the UAS export policy being one example, this administration is both strengthening our hand in the ongoing strategic competition while also stimulating economic growth at home, as well as job creation,” Alex Gray, Special Assistant to the President for the Defense Industrial Base, said. Recommended: Forget the F-35: The Tempest Could Be the Future Recommended: Why No Commander Wants to Take On a Spike Missile Recommended: What Will the Sixth-Generation Jet Fighter Look Like? “It should be noted that the U.S. aerospace and defense industries contribute almost $1 trillion annually to the U.S. economy and they support about 2.5 million American jobs. Just as one point, the international – UAS export market alone is estimated to be worth more than $50 billion a year within the next decade. Those are the stakes we’re competing for.” Those nations that are unable to purchase American weapons could find that China or Russia are more than willing to supply them with comparable systems. “We are witnessing China – as an example, not alone – but China filling voids the U.S. left with a denial to a friend or ally,” Keith Webster, president of the Defense and Aerospace Export Council at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said. “The consequence of a denial filled by China or others is as follows: The U.S. loses market share that is not easily recaptured, and in some cases will never be recaptured. The U.S. loses control of the capability. The U.S. loses the opportunity to train, influence, and maintain a military relationship with foreign forces, who now are introducing into their inventory a Chinese – Korean, Israeli, et cetera – capability.” There are some immediate examples that Webster said he could point to. “We never answered India’s request for ballistic missile defense capability.” “That ask of the U.S. went unanswered for a number of years. And now, India has been forced to consider and has – may potentially go buy, potentially, the Russian S-400 system. Similar to what Turkey’s buying—or said they were going to buy. Now we are rushing to put together a proposal for BMD for India to counter that situation.”
US needs to maintain deterrence against China. Failure of the US to deter it collapses the global order
Michael Mandlebaum, March/April, 2019, MICHAEL MANDELBAUM is Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2019), from which this essay is adapted, The New Containment, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-02-12/new-containment
The quarter century following the Cold War was the most peaceful in modern history. The world’s strongest powers did not fight one another or even think much about doing so. They did not, on the whole, prepare for war, anticipate war, or conduct negotiations and political maneuvers with the prospect of war looming in the background. As U.S. global military hegemony persisted, the possibility of developed nations fighting one another seemed ever more remote. Then history began to change course. In the last several years, three powers have launched active efforts to revise security arrangements in their respective regions. Russia has invaded Crimea and other parts of Ukraine and has tried covertly to destabilize European democracies. China has built artificial island fortresses in international waters, claimed vast swaths of the western Pacific, and moved to organize Eurasia economically in ways favorable to Beijing. And the Islamic Republic of Iran has expanded its influence over much of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen and is pursuing nuclear weapons. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. SIGN UP This new world requires a new American foreign policy. Fortunately, the country’s own not-so-distant past can offer guidance. During the Cold War, the United States chose to contain the Soviet Union, successfully deterring its military aggression and limiting its political influence for decades. The United States should apply containment once again, now to Russia, China, and Iran. The contemporary world is similar enough to its mid-twentieth-century predecessor to make that old strategy relevant but different enough that it needs to be modified and updated. While success is not guaranteed, a new containment policy offers the best chance to defend American interests in the twenty-first century. Now as before, the possibility of armed conflict exerts a major influence on the foreign policies of the United States and countries throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The Cold War divided the world into rival camps, with regions and even countries split in two. Today, similar cleavages are developing, with each revisionist power seeking its own sphere of influence separate from the larger U.S.-backed global order. Now as before, the revisionist powers are dictatorships that challenge American values as well as American interests. They seek to overturn political, military, and economic arrangements the United States helped establish long ago and has supported ever since. Should Vladimir Putin’s Russia succeed in reasserting control over parts of the former Soviet Union, Xi Jinping’s China gain control over maritime commerce in the western Pacific, or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran dominate the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf, the United States, its allies, and the global order they uphold would suffer a major blow. The China-occupied Subi Reef in the disputed South China Sea, April 2017 POOL / REUTERS The China-occupied Subi Reef in the disputed South China Sea, April 2017 But today’s circumstances differ from those of the past in several important ways. During most of the Cold War, Washington confronted a single powerful opponent, the Soviet Union—the leader of the international communist movement. Now it must cope with three separate adversaries, each largely independent of the other two. Russia and China cooperate, but they also compete with each other. And while both have good relations with Iran, both also have large and potentially restive Muslim populations, giving them reason to worry about the growth of Iranian power and influence. Cold War containment was a single global undertaking, implemented regionally. Contemporary containment will involve three separate regional initiatives, implemented in coordination. The Soviet Union, moreover, presented a strong ideological challenge, devoted as it was to advancing not just Moscow’s geopolitical interests but also its communist principles. Neither Russia nor China has such a crusading ideology today. Russia has abandoned communism completely, and China has done so partially, retaining the notion of party supremacy but shedding most of the economics and the messianic zeal. And although the Islamic Republic represents a cause and not just a stretch of territory, the potential appeal of its ideology is largely limited to the Muslim world and, primarily, its Shiite minority.
US led global order key to solve every impact
Robert Kagan 17, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Strategy, Brookings Institution, “The twilight of the liberal world order,” 1/24/17, https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-twilight-of-the-liberal-world-order/
However, it is the two great powers, China and Russia, that pose the greatest challenge to the relatively peaceful and prosperous international order created and sustained by the United States. If they were to accomplish their aims of establishing hegemony in their desired spheres of influence, the world would return to the condition it was in at the end of the 19th century, with competing great powers clashing over inevitably intersecting and overlapping spheres of interest. These were the unsettled, disordered conditions that produced the fertile ground for the two destructive world wars of the first half of the 20th century. The collapse of the British-dominated world order on the oceans, the disruption of the uneasy balance of power on the European continent due to the rise of a powerful unified Germany, combined with the rise of Japanese power in East Asia all contributed to a highly competitive international environment in which dissatisfied great powers took the opportunity to pursue their ambitions in the absence of any power or group of powers to unite in checking them. The result was an unprecedented global calamity. It has been the great accomplishment of the U.S.-led world order in the 70 years since the end of the Second World War that this kind of competition has been held in check and great power conflicts have been avoided. The role of the United States, however, has been critical. Until recently, the dissatisfied great and medium-size powers have faced considerable and indeed almost insuperable obstacles to achieving their objectives. The chief obstacle has been the power and coherence of the order itself and of its principal promoter and defender. The American-led system of political and military alliances, especially in the two critical regions of Europe and East Asia, has presented China and Russia with what Dean Acheson once referred to as “situations of strength” in their regions that have required them to pursue their ambitions cautiously and in most respects to defer serious efforts to disrupt the international system. The system has served as a check on their ambitions in both positive and negative ways. They have been participants in and for the most part beneficiaries of the open international economic system the United States created and helped sustain and, so long as that system was functioning, have had more to gain by playing in it than by challenging and overturning it. The same cannot be said of the political and strategic aspects of the order, both of which have worked to their detriment. The growth and vibrancy of democratic government in the two decades following the collapse of Soviet communism have posed a continual threat to the ability of rulers in Beijing and Moscow to maintain control, and since the end of the Cold War they have regarded every advance of democratic institutions, including especially the geographical advance close to their borders, as an existential threat—and with reason. The continual threat to the basis of their rule posed by the U.S.-supported order has made them hostile both to the order and to the United States. However, it has also been a source of weakness and vulnerability. Chinese rulers in particular have had to worry about what an unsuccessful confrontation with the United States might do to their sources of legitimacy at home. And although Vladimir Putin has to some extent used a calculated foreign adventurism to maintain his hold on domestic power, he has taken a more cautious approach when met with determined U.S. and European opposition, as in the case of Ukraine, and pushed forward, as in Syria, only when invited to do so by U.S. and Western passivity. Autocratic rulers in a liberal democratic world have had to be careful. The greatest check on Chinese and Russian ambitions, however, has come from the combined military power of the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. China, although increasingly powerful itself, has had to contemplate facing the combined military strength of the world’s superpower and some very formidable regional powers linked by alliance or common strategic interest, including Japan, India, and South Korea, as well as smaller but still potent nations like Vietnam and Australia. Russia has had to face the United States and its NATO allies. When united, these military powers present a daunting challenge to a revisionist power that can call on no allies of its own for assistance. Even were the Chinese to score an early victory in a conflict, they would have to contend over time with the combined industrial productive capacities of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations. A weaker Russia would face an even greater challenge. Faced with these obstacles, the two great powers, as well as the lesser dissatisfied powers, have had to hope for or if possible engineer a weakening of the U.S.-supported world order from within. This could come about either by separating the United States from its allies, raising doubts about the U.S. commitment to defend its allies militarily in the event of a conflict, or by various means wooing American allies out from within the liberal world order’s strategic structure. For most of the past decade, the reaction of American allies to greater aggressiveness on the part of China and Russia in their respective regions, and to Iran in the Middle East, has been to seek more reassurance from the United States. Russian actions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria; Chinese actions in the East and South China seas; Iranian actions in Syria, Iraq, and along the littoral of the Persian Gulf—all have led to calls by American allies and partners for a greater commitment. In this respect, the system has worked as it was supposed to. What the political scientist William Wohlforth once described as the inherent stability of the unipolar order reflected this dynamic—as dissatisfied regional powers sought to challenge the status quo, their alarmed neighbors turned to the distant American superpower to contain their ambitions. The system has depended, however, on will, capacity, and coherence at the heart of the liberal world order. The United States had to be willing and able to play its part as the principal guarantor of the order, especially in the military and strategic realm. The order’s ideological and economic core—the democracies of Europe and East Asia and the Pacific—had to remain relatively healthy and relatively confident. In such circumstances, the combined political, economic, and military power of the liberal world would be too great to be seriously challenged by the great powers, much less by the smaller dissatisfied powers.
China Threat Bibliography is here.
Russia and China fill-in bad
US paying countries not to buy weapons from Russia (2019). This article says that right now the US is giving aid to countries that stop buying weapons from Russia and replace their weapons with US weapons.
Russia Makes Some of the Deadliest Weapons on Earth (But There Is a Problem) (2019). This article argues that Russia’s economy isn’t strong enough to sustain its defense industry and that Russian arms sales are needed to sustain the industry. It also argues that the Russian defense industry is in decline now and that that it needs to grow in order order to sustain Russian military power projection.
The case against arms embargoes, even against Saudi Arabia (2019). The article argues that if countries can’t get arms from the US that they will purchase arms from Russia.
Russia and China targeting Middle East sales (2019). The article generally describes how the US and Russia (and China) compete in the Middle East for arms sales.
Russia does not set extra political, economic conditions for arms sales (2019). This article says that Russia does not add any extra conditions to its arms sales, making the arms easy to purchase.
Russia v. China: The race to dominant the arms defense market (2017)