As a dictatorship, it can continue military development and expansion despite economic downturns. With big data and big decrees, Xi Jinping has severely tightened party control in expectation of inevitable variations of fortune. The hatches are battened for a trade war that would adversely effect China and the world should the U.S. not blink first or fail to reject false or delaying assurances.

China looks past this and all short-term maneuvering to see the U.S. ill-attending to its fundamental strengths, and marks us down as a declining country that cannot come to terms with necessities. It knows that in the 1970s and ’80s, when America led the world in computers, electronics, research, and capital, we failed to automate. Taking the easy way out by offshoring for the sake of cheaper wages, we allowed our manufacturing base to atrophy. And now China sees a weakling that, rather than venture competition, seeks safe spaces behind tariff walls.

Perhaps had the U.S. refrained from needlessly antagonizing every one of its important allies and instead assembled them in a coalition of common interests and grievances, China, thus isolated, would have made real accommodations. But given broken, uncoordinated, squabbling opposition, and the high level of Chinese-American economic interdependence, it need not do so. It will almost certainly delay, prevaricate, and work around its commitments in all too familiar fashion. And a country the leader of which in living memory sacrificed 40 million of his people to crackpot economic theory presents an entirely different kettle of fish than bullying Canada or outfoxing a real estate minimogul over lunch at the Four Seasons.

The only effective leverage on China, and by extension North Korea—which otherwise will retain nuclear weapons whether overtly or covertly but certainly—is to alter the correlation of military forces in the Western Pacific, and indeed in the world, so that it no longer moves rapidly and inevitably in China’s favor, which is what China cares about, the essence of its policy, its central proposition. Though with some effort the U.S. is perfectly capable of embarking upon this strategy, it has not. It seems we lack the awareness, political will, intelligence, probity, discipline, leadership, and habit of mind to do so.

First, it is astounding that China, the world’s third-ranking nuclear power, with 228 known nuclear missiles and a completely opaque nuclear-warfare establishment, unlike the U.S. and Russia is subject to no agreements, no inspection, no verification and no limits, while in this regard the U.S. remains deaf, dumb and blind. The U.S. should pressure China to enter a nuclear arms-control regime or explain to the world why it will not.

Second, keeping in mind that America’s inadequate military sea and air lift make wartime supply of forces in Europe a well known problem, the distance from San Francisco to Manila is twice that between New York and London, China has 55 attack submarines, and the U.S. Navy has long neglected antisubmarine warfare. This renders the diminished string of American bases on China’s periphery crucial for initial response and as portals for resupply. But they are vulnerable, and little has been done to make them less so.

Nothing can change the fact that whereas Chinese attacks on American bases in South Korea, Japan, and Guam would not strike the American homeland, response against bases in China would raise the specter of nuclear escalation. China understands that a knockout blow against our bases would banish the U.S. from its environs, condemning us to a long-distance campaign to which the U.S. Navy in its present state—overstretched, undertrained and half the size of the Reagan Navy—is inadequate. And if China spiked the Panama Canal, which we abandoned and it took on, and used its six nuclear attack submarines to block the southern capes and choke points east of Suez, it would have to contend only with roughly half of our already diminished fleets.

China has medium-range ballistic missiles, air-launched land-attack cruise missiles, air-refueled bombers and fighter bombers, sea-based missiles, and seaborne commandos. To protect our bases from all this we need long-range antiship missiles, adequately defended, on outpost islands; deep, reinforced aircraft shelters rather than surface revetments and flimsy hangars; multilayered missile and aircraft defenses in numbers sufficient to meet saturation attacks; deeply sheltered command and control, runway repair, munitions, and stores; and radically strengthened base defense against infantry, special forces, and sabotage. It would be expensive, but essential.

Above all, building up the Navy, Marines, and long-range air power to make the vastness of the Pacific correspondingly less an impediment is necessary in concert with base-hardening to remedy the diminution of those powers and balances that deter war and make for stable relations in the international system, in that they allow confident restraint and encourage productive negotiation. Failure will lead to the moment when our regional allies, finding less reason to adhere to us than to appease China, remove their increasingly important military components of the de facto Pacific alliance, thus catastrophically breaking it.

At present the U.S. is inexplicably blind to the fundamental power relations upon which China is intently focused. As long as we remain vulnerable while China increases its military powers and ours decline, Beijing need not do anything but pretend to compromise. This can change if we send the Chinese a message they cannot ignore. That is, if we take our eyes off the zero-sum game long enough to assure our strengths in depth. Frankly, if we do not, the Pacific Coast of the United States will eventually look out upon a Chinese lake.

Appeared in the March 4, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal

For many years Congress has been handing over power to the president and the agencies of the administrative state. Lawmakers are delighted to do this, because it relieves them of the difficult decisions involved in creating actual legislation.

Something similar is happening with complaints about Mr. Trump’s emergency declaration. In 1976 Congress enacted the National Emergencies Act. Although it was the aftermath of Watergate, a low ebb for presidential power, the act gives the president the unrestricted authority to declare national emergencies.

Since then, presidents have declared 57 emergencies, of which 31 are still in force. Nevertheless, now we hear congressional complaints that Mr. Trump has somehow managed to overstep his unrestricted authority. Even though they raised no similar objection when Bill Clinton declared a national emergency to prohibit transactions with Sudan (1997) or when George W. Bush used one to impose economic sanctions on Zimbabwe (2003), many in Congress claim to be sure that what is happening on the southern border is not an emergency. The absence of any outcry in the earlier cases is easy to explain: They did not have partisan political implications.

Congress can adopt a joint resolution denying the president the emergency authority he claims. But the act provides that the president can veto it, requiring two-thirds of both congressional chambers to override and making it almost certain that the president’s declaration will go into effect.

Under the emergencies act, the president must specify which appropriation authorities—granted under other statutes—he will invoke to fund his declaration. These other laws, 136 of them by one count, could provide some of the funding for what the president wants to do, and any court battle about the emergency will center on the language of those statutes. That substantially undercuts the claim that Mr. Trump’s declaration of an emergency provides a precedent for a future Democratic president to declare climate change or gun violence a national emergency. That future president would have to find other language among these statutes to support funding for an emergency action.

Despite all the claims about Mr. Trump’s overstepping, the emergency declaration itself will probably be upheld by the Supreme Court. Congress has provided no standard to judge whether an actual emergency exists, and it is all but inconceivable that the justices would assert the power to impose their own definition. Eventually, then, although particular funding sources will be fought over statute by statute, the president will likely be able to build his border wall. Some of the funding can come from sources that can be reprogrammed under existing appropriation rules without an emergency declaration.

That, too, underscores lawmakers’ hypocrisy. Many bemoan the loss of Congress’s constitutional “power of the purse.” It is certainly true that the Constitution requires that only Congress can appropriate the funds for running the government, and that this is one of the most important legislative checks on the executive.

But does Congress really treasure and protect this power? Not when politics or ideology are involved. When a Democratic Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, it provided that the agency would be funded entirely by the Federal Reserve, not through annual appropriations from Congress. The idea was to protect the agency from future lawmakers’ influence. So much for Congress’s respect for its own power of the purse.

In reality, Congress reserves for itself the ability to complain about the abuse of its constitutional authority while happily giving it away when that is politically or ideologically advantageous.

Appeared in the March 4, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal