What Reagan’s Star Wars Did to Soviet Union, Bush’s Missile Defense Can Do to Red China
For Immediate Release
August 14, 2001
Contact Scott Weinberg
(540) 622-5240
WASHINGTON, D.C. — “President Bush’s theatre missile defense will do more than just protect the free world from attacks by rogue nations like Iraq, Libya, and China,” said Steven Mosher, president of Population Research Institute, and best-selling author of Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World. “This new defensive system, to be developed with Germany, Italy, Japan and Israel, will put tremendous pressure on Red China to evolve into a free market democracy or die.”
“Just as Ronald Reagan’s strategic defense initiative pushed Soviet leaders into desperate measures that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its rebirth as a democracy, so George Bush, by laying down the first layer of ‘hit-and-kill’ technologies, may push China into a similar systemic crisis,” Mosher added.
In a recent issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Mosher was quoted as saying that building a missile defense “would eventually break the back of China’s military budget,” and that missile defense may help China “go the way of the former Soviet Union” (“United States missile defense action,” by John Isaacs, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1, 2001, No. 4, Vol. 57; Pg. 20 ; ISSN: 0096-3402).
Mosher said that “China’s main strategic objective is to stealthily build up a conventional and nuclear weapons force able to intimidate Taiwan and defeat U.S. forces in Asia, while avoiding an all-out arms race with the U.S. By upping the ante with missile defense, Bush is forcing the Chinese Politburo into a stark choice: Go head-to-head with the U.S. and run the risk of systemic collapse, or defer military competition for a generation in favor of peacefully building up China’s infrastructure. Odds are that Beijing will choose plowshares over swords. In buying time for ourselves, we buy time for China’s democracy movement.”
Mosher concluded: “The Bush Administration must be praised for its firm commitment to missile defense today. Twenty years from now, when Chinese hegemony has ceased being a threat to Asia, Americans will liken this peaceful initiative to Reagan’s Cold War victory over the former Soviet Union.”
Steven W. Mosher is president of Population Research Institute and expert on US/China relations and military affairs.
