Blue Team Takes on Red China

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

What are they up against? The Blue Team strategist puts it bluntly: "Powerful Red Team business representatives have been known to call sub-Cabinet officials and demand that they place or replace people in China-related government jobs. A former Republican secretary of state called a top Clinton Pentagon official to demand a certain DIA guy be put in charge of the China desk -- twice." But now, under Bush, the baffle has been joined.

Blue Team Vindicated Time and Again

Seemingly more than anything else, China's April 1 interception and downing of a U.S. Navy EP-3H intelligence plane in international airspace, its detaining of the 24 crew members and the continued impoundment of the aircraft have served to galvanize opinion among the American public, in Congress and within the Bush administration around positions Blue Teamers long advocated. The incident merely was the most public indicator. In reality, Blue Team adherents participated in -- and were vindicated by -- major congressional commissions investigating China security and military policy.

Those commissions include the Cox commission on Chinese espionage, the Rumsfeld-Deutch commission on ballistic-missile threats, the Rumsfeld commission on security in space and the Pentagon's ubiquitous Office of Net Assessment -- virtually every significant government security-related body studying Beijing in the last several years. Blue Team members and adherents also occupy prominent roles in the new congressionally chartered U.S.-China Security Review Commission but are locked in a battle against those considered the Red Teamers for control of that body.

"We've come a long way since the early [George W.] Bush campaign when we were locked in a mortal battle with some of the China panda-huggers who turned their earlier service to Bush's father into China riches and now wanted their own people in the new president's camp," a Blue Team security-policy veteran tells Insight (see "Differences in China Policy," May 29, 2000). "Sure, some of them are in the present government, but their views are discredited. Some even are agreeing with positions we've been taking from the start." -- JMW