Is China's naval blockade in case of war realistic: opinions
The British Journal of Strategic Studies published an article by an American researcher Shona Mirsky (Sean Mirski) on the US capabilities to implement China’s naval blockade in the event of war. Mirski considers the blockade as the best, under certain scenarios of military conflict, a variant of hostilities against the PRC, which allows destroying Chinese economic potential and forcing the Chinese to admit defeat. The possibilities of the PRC to counteract such an American strategy are regarded by Mirsky as modest. China does not have the forces to break the American blockade away from its shores. Mirsky's work is important because it allows us to better understand Russia's colossal significance for the unfolding US-China confrontation. The transition of Russia to the camp of the allies of the United States will, in fact, mean that this confrontation will end with the defeat of China, and not having time to begin. At the same time, the firm support of China by Russia leads to a sharp narrowing of the US military and economic leverage over pressure on China. Accordingly, Russian-Chinese transport and energy projects should also be considered from the point of view of their strategic importance for the two countries, and not from narrow economic positions. The study of the use of nuclear submarines to damage the Chinese economy is also of great importance for Russia from the point of view of ensuring its security in the Far East. Not having, in principle, an opportunity to achieve parity with China in the field of land and ground forces in the Far East, Russia retains a powerful nuclear submarine fleet. Given the dependence of the PRC on maritime trade and the difficulties in providing reliable PLO in the seas adjacent to China, this fleet remains the only effective non-nuclear instrument of military deterrence of China available to Russia. In light of this, the decisions of the Russian leadership on the preservation and development of a nuclear submarine base in Kamchatka, significant investments in the nuclear submarine fleet and plans to deploy new types of submarines in the Far East should be considered absolutely correct and extremely important.
IA REX: How realistic is the concept of Sean Mirsky regarding the implementation of China’s naval blockade in the event of war?
Grigory Trofimchuk, Head of the Political Consulting Department of the Russian-Asian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs:
The creation of one of the three pairs, geopolitical arcs - RF-PRC, PRC-USA, USA-RF - is able to decide the fate of humanity for a century to come. But the big question is whether one of them will be chosen.
It seems that only one Washington, at least to some extent, is thinking about the issue of the geopolitical picture of the future world, and Moscow and Beijing are stupidly preparing for a possible war, and, not understanding who is with whom. Moscow and Beijing, with the announced strategic partnership between them, do not go further than the high declarations, preferring to remember how good it was before and how good it is now. And despite the fact that the West has already deprived them of a number of strategic bases - in North Africa, in the Middle East, already practically in South America (after the death of Chávez) and other places.
In the case of the fall of Iran, the Chinese energy menu, the most dense in the world, will change dramatically, towards the strictest diet. Perhaps only then will a more substantive dialogue between China and Russia begin. Not only by the level of prices for raw materials and payment schedules, but also by more momentous issues. Most likely, at this time it will be too late for both capitals to do something.
Perhaps something will change with the election of the new Chairman of the PRC Xi Jinpingwhich sounds clear and simple things. Such intelligibility and the presence of simple human emotions inspires optimism. Otherwise, Russia and China will continue to send joint protest papers to the UN over the destruction of the next country by the West, which was a partner for both Moscow and Beijing, each time more and more afraid to roll out a concrete, physical protest. It’s like a husband and wife: he didn’t put it on the spot right away, on the very first day of marriage, then suffer life until tragedy happens, until it hits you in a dream with a knife. Therefore, very soon, even a simple paper protest of the two countries against Washington will seem to them impermissible, inexcusable audacity.
Washington - unlike Moscow and Beijing - financially invested in Russian-Chinese issues, trying to push, dissolve and dismember Russians and Chinese as much as possible: through polls, through stirring mistrust of the population of the Far East to the Chinese invaders, "who bought everything here." To counteract these information processes, we need money, we need ideas, we need carriers of these ideas, but Moscow and Beijing seem to be ready to think about anything, but not about that. There is no money for this - and this is with the existing raw material and financial shaft, which continually flows over the Russian-Chinese border in both directions.
At the same time, Russia and China, it seems, cannot understand what is more frightening for them: to declare to the West that they remove their hands from Syria and Iran, or to openly announce their bilateral bloc.
The hypothetical Russia-China bloc will remove almost all the questions, but for this, Russia will have to give China preferential raw materials, introduce China into its strategic projects, such as the Arctic, move joint space. And in order to guarantee the removal of the threat to such a bloc from the side of the Pacific Ocean monopolized by America, it is necessary to take the brothers Vietnam and North Korea, then the entire west coast of Asia will be covered completely, up to a millimeter.
At the same time, not only Russia alone, but China will also be forced to seriously invest in these two “subsidiary” economies - the Vietnamese and North Korean. And this is still possible in principle, after all, both Vietnam and the DPRK are people's states. They have not yet disowned Russia, which, it seems, slightly avoids its friends with a socialist “flavor”, but almost openly scoffs at the DPRK, going completely in the United States.
If the United States reliably opposes China to Vietnam (and such plans exist) through real money, loans, investments, technology and, most importantly, through empty promises, then in this “red” Pacific coast (“red” is not because of communism, but simply beloved colors of these peoples) a hole will be punched that you can’t shut up with any money. No Russian and Chinese surface and underwater fleet.
Therefore, the creation of the “Red Coast” is a real, theoretically achievable project. And in this case, it is no longer the United States that will block China from the sea, but China will build (and at the same time, the entire pro-Russian Eurasia) the Great Wall-2, only this time not from the north, but from the west. And not land, and sea. Nobody will pester this block with such vulgar questions as belonging to the South Kuriles or Diaoyu. Without such a wall, Russia in the foreseeable future will be locked up in the Sea of Okhotsk, and China in the East and South China.
But we must start with the "small". For example, a fundamental change in the attitude of the Russian population to the Chinese. In practice, this is an even more difficult task than the construction of the Great Wall, as Russian organizations that are trying to intensify the dialogue with the Chinese are subject to noticeable obstruction in Russia: how is that? What do you want to sell us to the Chinese?
The main problem at the moment is that Russia and China are still in the project, while the United States has long been in working drawings and existing layouts. Washington knows what it wants, and no longer hides it. Obama's boycott of the APEC summit in Vladivostok; the White House conducting a conditional line in the East China and South China Seas, for which it does not intend to let the PRC; hints towards Moscow that its zone of responsibility in the vast Asia-Pacific region is, at best, China and the DPRK; the demonstrative non-appearance of the US delegation to the Asian Inter-Parliamentary Summit, where Matvienko I had to justify myself to those who had gathered about this — all these are points of the same program.
Splitting theses have already been entered into the information field of the world: 1) “if China wins the war between Russia and China, then Washington will side with China”; 2) “if Russia wins the war between the Russian Federation and the PRC, then Washington will side with Russia.” Therefore, it is already clear that nuclear submarines of Russia and China, with the unexpectedly military-political scenario initiated by the United States, will be absolutely useless, as all nuclear weapons turned out to be useless. weapon Moscow with the collapse of the USSR.
The layout for the future is very simple. If the United States undermines Russia, China will definitely not survive - all the more so without two such oil and gas barrels as Iran and the Russian Federation. If the United States undermines China, Russia, as they say, will not survive for three days, since they will immediately speak to it in a different way, in a different language, instantly throwing it out of the G8, returning to the usual G7 format. But today it seems that neither Moscow nor Beijing are noticing these disastrous sign trends, completely burying themselves in the economy, in their calculators, trying to earn as much as possible from each other.
Also, one of the main questions remains: will Russia decide to create a true Eurasia, from the White Sea to the Yellow Sea, which, by the way, China itself offers it unobtrusively.
Yuriy Yuryevpolitical constructor:
According to some sources, this is not only a theoretical study, because some Israelis invest in "islands" in Asia, suitable as jumping points aviation, and as naval bases and as bases of "rebels" or "pirates," according to the situation. Indeed, China can be blocked by sea, because it is by sea that the main energy resources come to it. And here - the role of Iran, Pakistan and Russia as suppliers and transit countries of resources for China really grows. And ideally, Russia can open the northern sea route from China to Europe, shorter than the existing southern routes.
But Russia is no less vulnerable than China. Radicals can cut the Trans-Siberian Railway, and cut the main lines of communication between Russia and its own east. As jointly, in the case of joint jihad, and "simple" terrorism. And the precedent of this was already when the railway communication of Russia with the ex-republics of the USSR, and now with the countries of the Caucasus, almost paralyzed Ichkeria, which increased their separatism and alienation from Russia. Perhaps for this reason, threats are reported in Russia itself, and the actual "Eurasianism", which is now politically engaged in Russia, is not really focusing on countries where there are many Russians, such as Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania. But Russia can be cut open by internal intrigues, for example, taking control of the leadership of Russian Railways and other means of communication to show Russia what happened at the time of Tsushima - poor passage of forces and reserves to the Far East theater. It is possible that there are already symptoms of “buying up lobbyists” in Russia itself, which will clouded and sabotage Russia's ability to supply not only China, but also itself, with increasing threats.
As for the clashes of Russia and China with their heads and the already long-term intriguing game of the United States to set off China and Russia, Zbigniew Brzezinski is not very successful at this game, and Sean Mirsky doesn’t work too well. They remember too well both in Russia and in China, at what cost wars, and especially civil ones. But in the USA they probably forgot that the “western” is born on its own, like an infection, and if someone fires out at rallies in the USA, then this can generate a chain reaction to the whole country, since there are a lot of weapons there. Al-Qaeda somehow missed the chance to shoot at the crowd of Yankee demonstrators, although such a threat is even worse than the blockade of the state. So, the Chinese, or the Russians or someone else, whom the US intends to block, may cause something worse in the US than a blockade from the outside. Therefore, it is better for the United States to continue to sell high-tech and not to block anyone, especially for high-tech producers, even if those who are generous with the mind of Mirsky offer the United States some benefit from violence.
Leonid Savin, political scientist, editor-in-chief of the information and analytical publication Geopolitics:
In addition to this study and others like it, for example, the concept of "war from the sea", which implies a military operation against China, there are also other versions where, on the contrary, China will inflict a hypothetical defeat on the United States and its allies in the region. Such analytics were conducted primarily in relation to Taiwan, and simulation games showed that the US and its ally would lose embarrassingly. There are other scenarios, such as China's invasion of the Far East. In this case, the United States is helping Russia fight the aggressor. But here, too, they (and us) will fail. So there are a lot of options for the future. In terms of energy supplies for China, the Strait of Malacca is primarily important, and the South China Sea is a kind of HartSea. The question of the expediency of submarines, as well as the development of the Russian Navy, of course, no one doubts. At the same time, it is necessary to think deeper - underwater Robots both offensive and deterrent should also be developed and put into service. And Mirsky's research can also be interpreted in light of the recent words of the head of the Pentagon that the European missile defense budget will be cut in order to strengthen the US Pacific flank. Officially, North Korea is named as the reason, but, most likely, China is meant, which frightens the States with the growth of its power.
Michael dorfman, writer (New York, USA):
The blockade of the coast of China, along with nuclear bombardments, was proposed by General MacArthur in the 1950s, thinking in this way to win the war in Korea. Then MacArthur was fired for professional unsuitability and lack of subordination. No one will lay off the mundane, because the neoconservative Tink tank, where he works, is designed to work out just such scenarios. The blockade of the PRC, first of all, means an economic catastrophe for the United States itself, whose economy today depends on Chinese exports, imports and Chinese loans. If we are talking about the Cold War, then where it is more realistic to simply cut off food supplies to China. The Chinese have nothing to replace the supply of grain and soybeans from the United States. The United States also has enough leverage to impose an embargo on the supply of grain and oil from Latin America. The USA has already played such games against Japan at the end of 1930, and is still living here with the mentality of victory in World War II.
Andrey Davydov, journalist:
Without going into the scenarios of possible hostilities, you can make for yourself the main conclusion. In the foreseeable future, China, with the sound mind of its leadership, does not carry a military threat to the territory of Russia. For it means war on two fronts. Not in the sense that the United States would suddenly become an ally of the Russian Federation, but the sense that, more than aspirations of starting a war with Russia, China would have set itself up under the American blow — at least under the same blockade. It may be objected that China could be in alliance with America ... Such an alliance for China is no better than a defeat in the war with America. Because regardless of the course of the war with Russia, China will put in a subordinate position. Hard subordinate.
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