China, Critical Minerals, and the National Security Threat in Your iPhone

We can’t do much without batteries and microchips; they power everything from smartphones to electric cars to defense systems. But the US ceded control of the raw materials required to make them – to its chief rival, China. Is it possible to catch up, especially given America’s more stringent labor and environmental standards?

The ‘rising superpower’ myth about China, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen and Joel Rayburn
Published 3:45 AM EDT, Thu September 7, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen” also on Apple and Spotify. Colonel (Ret.) Joel Rayburn is director of the American Center for Levant Studies and a fellow at New America. He was the US Special Envoy for Syria and the senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon on the National Security Council staff during the Trump administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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There isn’t much of anything that the polarized politicians of Washington, DC agree on, but there is a large degree of bipartisan consensus around one big, supposed threat: China. The purportedly rising nation with a plausible plan to replace the US as the dominant superpower.

The Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy describes China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective.”

Similarly, the Trump administration said in 2020 that the United States was taking action to protect itself and its partners “from an increasingly assertive China.”

In fact, by many measures, China is on the decline.

It’s an error American leaders are prone to making. After 9/11, the US overestimated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and waged a war there based on false assumptions about Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction program and ties to al Qaeda.

Some Americans also initially overestimated Russia’s ability to quickly seize and subdue Ukraine a year and a half ago.

As a result of the perceived threat of a rising China, the US and some of its allies are now undertaking a large retooling of virtually every government sector – from militaries to intelligence and security agencies, diplomacy and economic relations, trade regulations, higher education funding, social media oversight and more.

The Biden administration’s record $842 billion budget request for the Pentagon for fiscal year 2024 is “driven by the seriousness of our strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” according to US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin.

But is this vast reorientation designed to counter a threat from China that could fizzle out in the next decade or so? An examination of China’s dire demographic trends, intensifying economic woes and polling suggesting declining international standing certainly suggests so.

A recipe for demographic disaster

The demographic problem is arguably the long-term trend that should most alarm Chinese officials. China’s “one child” policy, one of history’s boldest experiments in social engineering, which was officially inaugurated in 1980 and ended in 2016, now has produced what it was designed to produce: a sharp, inexorable contraction of the country’s population.

China’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 1.09 last year, according to the country’s Population and Development Research Center, making it the lowest level among countries with a population of more than 100 million.

China’s aging population will present significant problems for Chinese military power. China can now draw from an enormous reservoir of manpower to serve in the large armed forces President Xi Jinping has been building – but that reservoir is shrinking rapidly.

The US Census Bureau estimates China today has about 350 million males aged 15-49, the demographic cohort spanning the bulk of its military. That’s a steep drop from China’s 2012 peak of about 400 million in the same category, and by 2040 that number will drop to just over 299 million.

By contrast, key Chinese rival India already has about 402 million males aged 15-49, and by 2040 that figure will grow to 424 million, according to US Census Bureau figures.

Manpower is not the only important measure of a country’s military potential. The United States, for example, has only about a quarter of the same military-aged male population that China does. (Though that 15-49 year-old bracket, unlike China’s, is predicted to steadily rise in the coming decades.)

But in China’s case, the accelerating contraction of the 15-49 population group is an unprecedented problem – not just in the military sector but in the whole of the Chinese labor force. By 2050, almost 38% of the Chinese population will be over 60, and the country’s elderly population will outnumber its military-aged population by that point, estimates the US Census Bureau.

It’s difficult to see how the Chinese economic model that requires constant growth can sustain itself as its productive population collapses.

An economy in trouble

Then there are China’s myriad of economic problems, many of which are self-inflicted from Xi’s rigid “zero-Covid” policy. (After a rapid spurt of activity following the lifting of Covid-19 lockdowns earlier this year, China’s economy is now flagging.)

Such problems are particularly acute among the young. Unemployment among Chinese 16- to 24-year-olds in urban areas was at a record 21.3% in June. After that, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said it would suspend publishing youth unemployment data in the future.

A large-scale real estate crash also appears to be brewing. Evergrande, one of China’s largest real estate developers, started collapsing in 2021. It is the world’s most indebted developer, according to the Financial Times, with over $340 billion in liabilities. Last week Evergrande’s shares crashed by more than 70%.

These financial failures are important because real estate plays an outsized role in the Chinese economy. In some years, real estate has accounted for a quarter of China’s GDP, yet the most recent available figures from 2018 indicated that about one-fifth of Chinese apartments were vacant, more than 130 million units, according to a study by China’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.

Rocky international standing

At the same time, China’s imprisonment of more than a million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, according to the United Nations citing “credible reports,” has resulted in an economic and political cost for Beijing as the US has imposed trade restrictions on Chinese companies that have any alleged connection to these policies. (China has called the accusations of mass imprisonment “completely untrue”).

Meanwhile, China’s expansive “Belt and Road” investment policies worldwide have proven to be a financial drag as billions of dollars’ worth of loans haven’t been repaid to China.

China has worked hard to position itself as an international peacemaker, as when it brokered a rapprochement agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year.

But on balance, China is losing friends and international standing. Last year, Pew Research Center found “negative views of China remain at or near historic highs in many of the 19 countries” where the organization polled.

What does a weaker China mean?

What does it signify that China’s national power, which today is vast, is almost certain to be weaker in the future? The jury is out on whether Beijing, seeing a closing window of opportunity to achieve its goals by military means, could become more aggressive in the immediate term.

It’s true that declining powers have grown aggressive at times in the past, notably the late 1970s USSR and contemporary Russia. Russia’s Ukraine invasion is a caution to China and everyone else about the danger of overconfidently going to war with a military that lacks recent experience of a major conflict. Aside from brief clashes with Vietnam in 1979 and India in 1962, the last time China fought a major, protracted war was seven decades ago in Korea.

Conversely, it is not hard to envision China in 2035 or 2040 being too overwhelmed by its own socioeconomic crises to project power abroad. After all, the weight of China’s elderly population on the rest of its society, economy and state will be truly crushing just a few years from now.

Other societies in modern history, such as Italy and Japan, have grown as old as China’s population is becoming, but never on such a vast scale and never as a result of an intentional policy of depopulation. China is now offering incentives for having children such as tax deductions for families and strengthening maternity leave, but they seem to have had scant impact so far.

Beijing seems to have no real, workable plan for steering away from the demographic cliff or for managing the end of the Communist Party’s economic growth model. If Xi and his strategists have a feasible plan for nimbly averting China’s demographic doom, they are keeping very quiet about it. What’s more likely is that no such plan does or can exist.

This brings us back to the question of national security strategies for the United States and its allies. Declining or not, China poses clear strategic dangers for the near term. There’s its longtime theft of American intellectual property, its massive cyber breaches of US government institutions, its aggressive efforts to transform the South China Sea from international waters into a Chinese lake, its saber-rattling over Taiwan, its suppression of democracy in Hong Kong and its overall large-scale military buildup.

As a result of some of these trends, the previous Trump administration’s National Security Strategy made the case that China “actively competes” against the United States and is a “revisionist power.” Trump imposed tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods.

The Biden administration has largely kept the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods in place, and last month, it prohibited or restricted a range of American investments in advanced technologies in China, including in AI and quantum computing.

It’s fair to criticize the US and its allies for underestimating the dangers from China for most of the past quarter-century, and it’s right and reasonable to refocus on deterring Chinese aggression in the near term.

But what comes after the near term? It’s a strategic error to underestimate an adversary, but it’s just as great an error to overestimate one.

How Did a 60-Year Old American Veteran Wind Up Fighting in Ukraine?

Malcolm Nance was retired from the U.S. Navy, but the Russian invasion of its neighbor compelled him to dig out his old weapons and equipment, and join up with the International Legion fighting in Ukraine. He explains how the International Legion functions, what it’s like to take a direct hit from a Russian shell, and why he doesn’t believe he and his fellow legionnaires have run afoul of an 18th century law against Americans fighting in other people’s wars.

What if there were a 9/11 Commission for COVID?

Actually, there basically is – led by the same guy. They have found that President Trump didn’t cause the botched response (although they label him a “comorbidity”). Neither did partisan politics (although there are some isolated exceptions). And if you think that’s surprising, wait till you hear how prepared we are (not) for the next pandemic.

Threats to U.S. Security: Russia, China, Iran & Beyond,w 66th Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NATO’s 16th Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis, Denver, CO

Colorado Remembers 9/11
Ellie Caulkins Opera House
Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe Street
Denver, CO 80204
MON SEP 11, 2023 – 6:00 PM
Ages: All Ages
Doors Open: 5:00 PM
Onsale: TUE AUG 15, 2023 – 6:00 AM
66th Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NATO’s 16th Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis, & CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen will address Threats to U.S. Security: Russia, China, Iran & Beyond, part of the state of Colorado and city of Denver’s annual 9/11 commemoration

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How Trump made one of ‘the worst diplomatic agreements’ in US history and how Biden carried it out, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen and Laura Tillman
Updated 5:11 PM EDT, Wed August 9, 2023

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In May 2018, then-President Donald Trump canceled the agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear weapons program, saying “the Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

In fact, the Iran deal was substantially reining in the Iranian nuclear program, according to US intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And oddly enough, Trump soon entered into negotiations for what would become, in reality, one of America’s most one-sided and self-defeating deals: the agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan.

Retired US Gen. David Petraeus, who formerly commanded US troops in Afghanistan, told us in an interview for the Audible podcast, “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” that the deal with the Taliban “ranks with the worst diplomatic agreements in our history. We gave the Taliban what they wanted: We’re leaving. The only thing we got in return was a promise they wouldn’t attack us on the way out.”

President Joe Biden became the second successive president to botch Afghanistan policy when he went ahead and carried out the deal Trump’s team negotiated, leading to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago.

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban marched into Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Since then, they have banned women from jobs and have not allowed girls over the age of 12 to return to school. Afghanistan is the only country in the world that has suspended girls from school and women from universities.

The Taliban have also provided safe haven to around 20 terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, according to a UN report that was released two months ago. As the US military rushed for the exits in the summer of 2021, 70,000 armored vehicles and more than 100 helicopters were left behind, an arsenal worth an estimated $8.5 billion, according to the UN.

Why did Trump and Biden make those mistakes?

Two years ago, the Trump team negotiated the complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan that gave the Taliban the total victory they could never win on the battlefield, while the Biden team went through with this deeply flawed plan.

That withdrawal ended in the hasty retreat of US forces and the chaotic scenes of thousands of desperate Afghans trying to get on flights out of Kabul Airport in August 2021. Televised scenes of the chaos at the airport make the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War look like a dignified exit.

Lisa Curtis was the top official working at the White House on Afghanistan during the Trump administration. In an interview for the Audible podcast, Curtis told us that the US officials who negotiated with the Taliban, beginning in early 2019, gave the Taliban pretty much everything they wanted and got very little in return. The Taliban committed to breaking with al-Qaeda and entering into genuine power-sharing talks with the elected Afghan government, but neither happened.

A Taliban fighter is pictured against the backdrop of Taliban flags installed at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on September 11, 2021. (Photo by Karim SAHIB / AFP) (Photo by KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images)
Opinion: A blistering indictment of the Trump-Biden legacy in Afghanistan
Curtis explained that Trump never really was concerned about the details of the negotiations with the Taliban, saying, “I don’t think he cared about a peace deal. He cared about getting US troops out.” The Taliban were no doubt also aware that Trump had long criticized US involvement in Afghanistan; for instance, Trump tweeted in 2013, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.”

Trump always prided himself on his purported “Art of the Deal,” but his administration’s negotiations with the Taliban were more like a clueless customer shopping for a car who tells the salesman, “I’ll pay the full sticker price,” as a way of beginning the negotiation.

Curtis says that at one point during the negotiations that she was part of in Doha, Qatar, Taliban officials didn’t seem to believe that the US was really leaving Afghanistan, so the top US negotiator, former Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, brought in American military officers to brief the Taliban about what a US withdrawal would look like.

The US officers used a whiteboard to show the Taliban the unclassified locations of American troop positions in Afghanistan. Curtis recalled that one of the Taliban officials joked, “Oh look, they’re bringing out the crown jewels before we’ve even gotten started.” Curtis said this approach told the Taliban that “the US was really desperate to withdraw.”

In response, Khalilzad emailed us to say, “The technical military channel was set up AFTER there was already an agreement in principle on the withdrawal … These technical meetings had the purpose of dealing with the logistics of both our soldiers and our materiel being withdrawn safely and related issues. Note: this was very successful, and we did not lose a single military member after the signing of the agreement at the hands of the Taliban.”

Curtis says the negotiations with the Taliban were also flawed because the US acceded to the Taliban’s demand that the elected Afghan government be excluded from all their negotiations with the US. Curtis says this gave the impression that the US was “shifting our support to the Taliban, and I think it demoralized the Afghan government, which also contributed to the quick fall of the Afghan government.”

Khalilzad says the decision to negotiate with the Taliban directly was made because “the military situation on the ground was continuing to deteriorate with no roadmap to a plausible near-term victory…The plan was that our success in negotiating with the Taliban would open the door to negotiations between the [Afghan] government and the Taliban.” Khalilzad added, “This indeed did happen, though it did not succeed.”

Why did Biden bring “joy” to the Taliban?

Biden’s top military adviser, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, told Biden that unless the US kept a small military force in Afghanistan — at the time, around 2,500 troops — the Afghan military would collapse, which would pave the way for a Taliban victory.

Biden, who had long been a skeptic of the war in Afghanistan, ignored this sound advice and, on April 14, 2021, announced the withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan.

The Taliban couldn’t believe their luck. When we spoke with the top Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, he told us, “When President Biden won the election, we suspected that he might insist on continuing the war. But when he announced that he was withdrawing his forces from Afghanistan, it was a source of joy.”

Compounding the problems of the withdrawal deal with the Taliban, there was acute tension between two key players: the lead American negotiator with the Taliban, Khalilzad, who is Afghan American, and Afghanistan’s then President Ashraf Ghani. The two men had known each other for decades; both had won scholarships to study in the US. Khalilzad received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, while Ghani’s doctorate was from Columbia University. But now that Khalilzad was leading the US-Taliban negotiations, from which Ghani and his government were excluded, their relationship hardened: They loathed each other.

Khalilzad wrote in his email to us that “discussions with President Ghani became difficult once he realized that a political settlement would require a new Afghan government and the end of his presidency. He had a very strong wish to remain in power. But both Trump and Biden were clear that this wish on his part, was not sufficient reason to put the lives of U.S. soldiers or the policy decision on withdrawal at risk. I had to convey this to him — but that was not personal.”

Matin Bek, who was Ghani’s chief of staff and is now a fellow at New America, and who was often in the room with Ghani and Khalilzad, told us that their tense relationship was “like a wrestling match.”

Bek says both Ghani and Khalilzad share in the blame for the Taliban victory: “They are responsible equally.” As the Taliban closed in on Kabul in mid-August 2021, Ghani, and his key advisers, including Bek, were in Ghani’s presidential palace. A backchannel between Afghan government officials and the Taliban had opened up. Bek was hopeful that a peaceful transfer of power would ensure some normal contact with the outside world, such as the continued presence of Western embassies in Kabul.

But then Bek discovered President Ghani had gotten on a helicopter and fled to neighboring Uzbekistan. Bek felt utterly betrayed, telling us, “He was the president of a country in war. In war, these things happen. You have to show leadership.”

Ghani doubtless recalled that the last time the Taliban had taken Kabul in 1996, they had executed a previous Afghan president. Still, many Afghans felt Ghani should not have abandoned his post.

Biden then shifted any blame from himself in a White House briefing. He had gone along with the flawed withdrawal plan that the Trump administration had negotiated, but instead he blamed the Afghans, claiming, “American troops cannot and should not be fighting and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

This observation irked General Petraeus, who said, “I was particularly hurt by statements ‘Well, the Afghans wouldn’t fight for their own county.’ Sixteen times as many Afghans died for their country as did US and coalition forces.”

Indeed, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, more than 66,000 Afghan national military and police died fighting the Taliban, while around 4,000 American and allied forces were killed in the Afghanistan war.

What was lost?

In the two decades before the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan had made striking progress in reducing child mortality, providing jobs for women and schools for girls, nurturing scores of independent media outlets and holding regular, if flawed, presidential elections.

That is all long gone.

Why Biden went through with the withdrawal deal is still something of a puzzle, since there was no large constituency in the Democratic Party clamoring for an exit from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a small contingent of US forces — 2,500 troops — was keeping the elected government of Afghanistan from a Taliban takeover.

When those US troops were stationed in Afghanistan at the beginning of 2021, none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals were in the hands of the Taliban, but by the time these troops were all withdrawn in the summer of 2021, the Taliban had seized all of those provincial capitals. It’s worth noting also that today, seven decades after the end of the Korean War, the US still stations around 10 times more troops in South Korea than the 2,500 it had kept in Afghanistan, which has helped keep the peace on the Korean peninsula.

Today, the Taliban are international pariahs that no country recognizes as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Adding to their estrangement from the rest of the world, 58 Taliban officials have been sanctioned by the UN. Of these, 35 hold cabinet-level positions in the de facto Afghan government.

Meanwhile, all you need to know about the Taliban’s mindset, more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks, can be learned by listening to their top spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, who told us in December that Osama bin Laden wasn’t responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Mujahid asserted, “We do not have evidence that he was directly involved in the attack.” Of course, this is utter nonsense.

Mujahid also claimed to us that the Taliban’s Ministry of Education is making plans to admit teenage girls to school. Two years after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, there is no sign that the Taliban will allow girls over 12 to be educated.

Instead, the Taliban are running a profoundly incompetent theocratic state that is a magnet for many jihadist groups. And we all know how that can end.

How Was Afghanistan Lost to the Taliban – Again? Ep. 2

In the final chaotic days of the US presence in Afghanistan, a young survivor of a Taliban attack was trying to get to the airport, the top American diplomat was doing his best to make the departure as orderly as humanly possible, and the Afghan national security advisor was fleeing with the president on a helicopter. You will hear from all of them and more in this exploration of how the US pullout has reverberated – through individual lives and throughout geopolitics.

©2023 Audible Originals, LLC (P)2023 Audible Originals, LLC

Episode 15: How Was Afghanistan Lost to the Taliban – Again? Ep. 1

By: Peter L. Bergen
Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Aug 1 2023
Length: 40 mins
Podcast

Summary

After a 20-year war that cost the United States two trillion dollars and led to nearly 200,000 deaths, the Taliban are back in power – and offering safe haven to Al Qaeda once again. General David H. Petraeus, Trump advisor Lisa Curtis, Afghan ambassador to the US Roya Rahmani and others, bring us “in the room” to explain how this debacle came to pass, and warn us of the consequences.

Episode 14: What Would a Second Trump Presidency Mean for the World?

When he first ran for president, Donald Trump didn’t have any record on foreign policy. Now he does, and that offers more than a hint of how he might lead if he were to win the White House again in 2024. Peter dissects the Trump record with one of the ex-president’s best-known former foreign policy advisors – and critics – John Bolton, who doesn’t mince words in assessing Trump’s handling of Russia and China, Ukraine and Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. Bolton takes us around the world and on the roller coaster ride that was the West Wing of the Trump White House.

Episode 13: What Makes a Great Authentic Spy Novel?

Double agents, dead drops, and deadly missions enliven some of the most popular and well-known spy novels. But do you need to have been an ACTUAL spy in an intelligence agency like the CIA to write like one? And how do real spies rate the fictional ones?