Blue Team Takes on Red China

Insight on the News, June 4, 2001 by J. Michael Waller

A community of top congressional staffers, academics, journalists, scholars, think-tank analysts and intelligence officers has emerged as a counterbalance to the China lobby.

Like a bolt from the blue, it has become one of the most influential foreign-policy forces in Washington. It has no leader, no charter, no organization, no office and no formal membership. It receives no foundation grants, corporate subsidies or government funding. Formless, with no head and no body, it is defined by a common sense of mission. Its adherents are found in both houses of Congress, the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI and the White House, as well as in universities, think tanks and the press.

It's the "Blue Team," the truest case of David versus Goliath in the big-money world of Washington foreign-policymaking. It's the answer to the "Red Team", the otherwise unnamed foe in Pentagon war-gaming. And it is posing the biggest-ever challenge to the generously funded China lobby of the Democratic and Republican establishments.

"Nobody in Washington ever suffered professionally for being too friendly to Beijing," senior Senate staff member William Triplett, the most often-quoted Blue Team member, tells Insight. Indeed, the professional careers of some Blue Team founders have failed to advance -- and even suffered -- because of their skeptical views of the Chinese Communist leadership and its intentions. Unlike much of what they call the Red Team, which is blamed for putting business concerns above national security, Blue Teamers aren't in it for the money.

But their cause has advanced in recent months thanks to a confluence of events: the election of President George W. Bush, his appointment of Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense and the Chinese government's threatening behavior. This includes greater militance toward seizing Taiwan, an in-your-face military buildup, the April 1 interception and downing of a U.S. Navy intelligence plane in international airspace and the detaining of the crew and continued impoundment of the aircraft.

Now, with increased receptivity to their concerns, Blue Team members are being invited into the new Bush administration. Indeed, some were active in or with the presidential campaign. They warned against the advice of other Bush figures who took a softer view of Beijing that, as it turned out, would have proved mightily embarrassing. Congress, too, is far more receptive this year than last, when Republican leaders rammed through a renamed "most favored nation" trade status for the People's Republic of China (PRC). And the press as well has reported more aggressively about Chinese human-rights abuses and military provocations that lend wider appreciation of the Blue Team's early warnings.

That has brought more attention on the Blue Team. But most press coverage of the movement has been shallow and sometimes offered little more than a caricature.

The Blue Team was founded in the mid-1990s by seven or eight congressional staffers, journalists, think-tank analysts, scholars and intelligence officers in an all-night meeting around a woodstove in a library above a suburban Maryland garage. Its members -- all national-security specialists, though few of them began with formal training as sinologists -- recognized the ascendancy of the PRC as a potential superpower adversary within the next two decades. They committed to work together out of frustration at a lack of attention to the problem in academic, journalistic, policy and intelligence circles.

"We felt like an underground group," says a former congressional staffer present at the founding. "[Bill] Clinton was president, we had few influential allies in Congress, China hands from the previous Bush administration were hostile to our view, the Pentagon and CIA were watering down intelligence reports, and the `trade-will-set-you-free' mantra was conventional thinking among policymakers."

All that has changed. Today, the Blue Team no longer is merely a small group of individuals but a movement. "The Blue Team is kind of like the neoconservative movement," says Thor Ronay of the Center for Security Policy. "It began among just a few people who worked together, but gradually grew into an intellectual movement and policy community."

Critics sometimes portray the Blue Team as a gang of Cold War yahoos desperate for a new, post-Soviet enemy. But interviews and conversations with its founders indicate otherwise. Some are motivated by concerns about human rights, free labor and religious freedom. Others are professional defense analysts who study geostrategic trends for defense planning. Still others are more general strategists and historians, some of whom are tenured professors at the country's most prestigious universities.

None carries the baggage of the guild of China-area mandarins who have dominated U.S. thinking about Beijing during the last several decades. For one thing, few sinologists are trained in military or strategic issues. Michael Pillsbury of the National Defense University, a noted expert on the Chinese military, observes, "Our government and universities invest very little in understanding Chinese security issues, probably less than 10 percent of what is spent on analyzing the former Soviet Union."