"Kevin Rudd's op-ed "Security, Not Growth, Is Xi's Focus" (Oct. 13) is worth reading, twice.
In 2009 Mr. Rudd was first to notice that China's leaders had grossly misinterpreted the 2007-09 financial crisis for the "general crisis" of capitalism from which there is no recovery, and which Soviet leaders had awaited for decades. The result was that China abandoned its "peaceful rise" policy to assert or loudly reassert territorial claims against Japan, India and the insular countries in between. With China at the time cooperating much more willingly than the Europeans with the Obama administration's Keynesian big-spending recovery plans, there was no interest in Washington in Mr. Rudd's warning, not even when it was laid out in Australia's 2009 defense white paper that presaged today's "Indo-Pacific" containment of China.
Now Mr. Rudd tells us that President Xi Jinping has leveraged his "anticorruption" blackmail powers over other Communist Party officials into a domination so complete that he can become Mao II, infallible leader for life. This despite Mr. Xi's destructive attack on China's high-tech enterprises (this year Alibaba had to fire thousands of employees), his refusal to either import Western vaccines or tolerate some contagion, and a foreign policy that enduringly antagonized India (after seven meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi!) for some square miles of tundra in Ladakh, and Indonesia over Natuna's offshore waters. Mr. Xi also very foolishly offered a "two systems" deal to Taiwan while crushing Hong Kong's version.
I remain a skeptic, however, of any Chinese military adventures against Taiwan.
When Rep. Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and noble columnists hit the front pages with dire warnings of imminent war (seconded by China experts who speak no Chinese), I wrote that China isn't Russia, self-sufficient in energy and food.
Without the 95 million metric tons of annual soybean imports and other multimillion ton proteinic imports as a result of sanctions and a blockade, China would soon be back on a Mao diet.
This reveals the surviving limits to Mr. Xi's powers. He has been speaking about "food security" for years, but local authorities continued to sell arable land to developers. Unless China develops a capacity for landless agriculture on a massive scale, any Chinese ruler will have to choose between war and food. But if Mr. Xi is elevated to Mao II, I hope that this time Mr. Rudd's warning will be heeded.
Edward N. Luttwak
Chevy Chase, Md.
Mr. Luttwak is author of "The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy" and other books." [1]
It is strange that our Russian experts (Mr. Vytautas Landsbergis and his minions) did not warn our allies about such a feature of Russia. After all, the inflation induced by the sanctions threaten the stability of the governments of all our allies. People in the rich world are not blind, they see that sanctions are neither warm nor cold for the Russians, in the literal sense of those words.
1. A Warning to Heed on Xi Jinping's Intentions
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 17 Oct 2022: A.18.
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