CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT VIEW — Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations. Before retiring, he served as CIA's Deputy Director for Counterintelligence. He is the Senior Vice President for National Security Solution at DynCorp International; and is Board Chair of Spookstock, a charity that benefits the CIA Memorial Foundation and the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.
In the wake of yet another bloody defeat at the hands of R.E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia - this one at Fredericksburg in December 1862– Abraham Lincoln observed to his secretary that there was an ‘awful arithmetic’ to the conflict. The President calculated that if numerically superior Union forces would fight the Rebels continuously for a week, they could wipe the Southerners out simply because the North could afford to incur more casualties than their opponents.
"No general yet found’” the President lamented, “can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered."[1]
There has been much use of the language of war in discussion of our struggle against the corona virus. But our enemy is not the virus. The disease, remorseless in its ubiquity, is neutral. Our fight against it is the most public and deadly battle in what has already been a long, and heretofore largely unnoticed or unrecognized, conflict with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leadership. While its onset in Wuhan – be it from a lab or ‘wet market’ - looks to have been accidental, COVID-19’s spread beyond the borders of China can only have been intentional. It appears that at some point after he learned that the virus was abroad, Xi Jinping did some ‘awful arithmetic’ of his own. In so doing, he demonstrated a ruthless willingness to forfeit ‘the lives of others’ – those of foreigners and his own countrymen alike – by treating them as necessary sacrifices in an effort to preserve and then expand the power of the Chinese Communist regime.
Consequently, the Chinese dictator moved to prevent the spread of the virus within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He then apparently took a decision not to alert the rest of the world in a timely manner to the contagion emanating from his country aboard international flights from Hubei province, while domestic flights from Hubei were largely grounded. The CCP regime also suppressed information on COVID-19’s human-to-human transmission. That action was abetted by the World Health Organization, which ignored warnings from both Taiwan and courageous Chinese doctors. Xi’s callous calculus ensured - and was likely meant to ensure – the human and economic cost of the virus would not be borne by China alone.
Mark Kelton, Former CIA Deputy Director for Counterintelligence
Subsequent PRC attempts to obfuscate responsibility for the virus, to include the sale or provision of often non-functional testing gear to COVID-beleaguered nations, have fortunately been seen by many the for propaganda messaging they embody. But we can expect such overtures, as well as covert PRC efforts to steal information on vaccines and other COVID treatments, to continue for as long as the virus persists.
If Xi did consciously decide to allow COVID to take its course on the rest of the world, an action that resulted in more than 100,00 American dead and grave damage to our economic well-being, it was a de facto act of war. Proving intent in any circumstance involving a totalitarian state that goes to extreme lengths to protect state secrets, has taken great pains to expunge all evidence of the virus’s origin, and has moved to silence all who might speak to that point may well prove impossible in the near term. I say in the near term because, as the collapse of the Soviet monster made clear, even the darkest, most closely guarded secrets of the ruling elite may well find their way into the light when CCP rule is someday overthrown. For now, however, Xi has given us a clear understanding of both his own cynical, calculating nature and that of the regime he rules.
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Quoting Sun Tzu in any discussion of Chinese strategy seems almost obligatory. In Xi’s case, however, citing the man after whom he fashions himself – Mao Tse-tung – is more apropos. “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos”, Mao reputedly said, “The situation is excellent.” Whoever inspired him, Xi is using the distraction of the virus to steal a march on the rest of the world beginning with - in a tip of the hat to the Corleones with whom the CCP has much in common - the long overdue settling of some old Party business. The current chaos on America’s streets will only further encourage a belief that he can act while his main adversary is otherwise occupied.
Mark Kelton, Former CIA Deputy Director, Counterintelligence
The policy of politically and commercially engaging Communist China to incentivize change has long since been exposed as folly. We largely averted out eyes from internal repression not because it was not horrific.
The millions killed by Mao, the plight of the Tibetan people, the suppression of democratic aspiration on Tiananmen Square and a million ethnic Uyghurs in concentration camps attest to those horrors. We could afford to look away, we reasoned, because such issues were internal matters (though the Tibetans and many supporters in the West might disagree) and because of the allure of the Chinese market. Over time, as PRC power grew so did the CCP’s ability to exert influence beyond its borders albeit initially in a manner that, for the most part, limited the possibility of direct confrontation with the US. Xi has changed all that. In speech and act, the dictator has made no secret of his expansive aspirations and aggressive intent. His agenda - that being to use all means at his disposal to unseat the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power - has long been apparent to those who have cared to look.
Under Xi, the silent storm that characterized PRC diplomacy, intelligence and military activities has long since grown to a raging tempest. The Belt and Road Initiative has less to do with economics than with the lengthening of the PRC’s strategic reach. The ongoing expansion of Chinese military power has been fueled by the massive espionage theft of foreign, particularly American, industrial and trade secrets. The whole-of-society clandestine war waged on us has also featured covert activities designed to influence US public opinion and elections, actions orchestrated by PRC intelligence services and the United Front Work Department. Beijing undoubtedly watched the effectiveness of the 2016 Russian active measures campaign against the US with interest and envy and we can expect to see an enhanced PRC effort to influence our upcoming Presidential election. The Thousand Talents Plan has been used at once to advance Chinese technical and scientific knowledge by suborning US research and academic institutions. Made in China 2025 strives for PRC strategic supremacy in the technological domain. Its most well-known manifestation – Huawei – aims at domination of the telecommunications market and the extension of the Chinese surveillance state worldwide. All of these programs are the actions of an implacable adversary.
While the struggle of the people of Hong Kong to defend their democratic values against the CCP’s depredations has won the admiration of freedom-loving people around the world, their courageous actions have prompted hatred and fear in Beijing. Xi knows that it is not COVID but rather the bacillus of democracy that is the most dangerous threat to CCP rule. Purported treaty obligations notwithstanding, in choosing between the value to his Party of Hong Kong’s dynamic economy and the threat posed by its democratic values, Xi is fully prepared to forgo the former to expunge the latter. In truth, CCP commitment to One Country, Two Systems was always a chimera meant to placate the West until an opportune moment came to bring it to an end. That moment - which smacks of the Rhineland in 1936 - is at hand. The only question now is how many Hong Kong citizens the CCP will kill, imprison, or force to flee to the US or other free nations in the process.
The next piece of business Xi will try to take care of is almost certainly Taiwan. Recent reference by China’s Premier Li Keqiang to the ‘reunification’ of the island with the Chinese communist state absent the heretofore obligatory descriptor “peaceful” signals a dangerous shift in CCP policy. Chinese navy and air force exercises close to or over Taiwan territory, actions that are clearly intended to intimidate the Taipei government, also serve to test American resolve and willingness to assist the island state should China move forcibly against it.
As part of his attempt to re-direct the internal unease engendered by COVID and an economy slowed by prudent decisions by the US and others to de-couple their supply chains from the PRC, XI has stirred up border tensions with India. He has also continued to lawlessly assert PRC sovereignty over international waters and other people’s territory in the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan. Because Xi is working off a timeline dictated by factors beyond his control – particularly his own actuarial calendar and the rapidity with which the US can move beyond COVID and its current absorption with internal matters to again focus on its geo-strategic interests in East Asia - such provocations will continue and expand for as long as the CCP sees opportunity in them. There is, however, a real danger that Xi will overreach in so doing should he mistake US distraction for irresolution. We must do all we can to ensure he does not.
Before U.S. Grant came east from the western theater of the Civil War to take command of Union forces, a series of mediocre Union commanders had beat hasty retreats after bringing Lee’s army to battle on the killing ground between Washington and Richmond. When, in the wake of the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, Grant instead turned the Army of the Potomac south to continue grinding his adversary down, Lincoln knew he had found a man who could face that ‘awful arithmetic’.
The threat the CCP poses to the US goes well beyond the boastful, xenophobic howls of China’s so-called ‘wolf diplomats’. Our opponent is the CCP, not the Chinese people. We must appeal to the aspirations for freedom of the latter while doing all we can to discredit the former. Working with allies, we must harness all means and levers at our disposal to shape, contain and, if need be, confront the actions of the Chinese Communist regime.[2] This should include a relentless intelligence focus on the PRC as well as a rapid build-up of sufficient military force to deal with the threat its armed forces present. Given the conduct of an increasingly emboldened and aggressive Xi, armed conflict with China may well be inevitable. Such an outcome is to be avoided if possible, or at least delayed until we have had time to better prepare ourselves for it militarily. But if we don’t move resolutely now to thwart and contain the CCP’s imperial ambitions it is a virtual certainty that Xi will force us, like Grant, to do some ‘awful arithmetic’ of our own.
[1] Jeffry D. Wert, Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 208. “There is, he told his secretary, an ‘awful arithmetic’ to the conflict. The disparity in casualties between the Federal s and Confederates in the battle had been staggering. But in Lincoln’s reckoning, if the two armies fought each other for a week and sustained a similar casualty rate, the Rebels would be wiped out, and the Army of the Potomac would still be ‘a mighty host’.”
[2] Credit for the shape, contain, and confront formula goes to Michael Auslin of the Hoover Institution speaking during an interview on the John Batchelor Show, May 29, 2020.
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