Beware China's Inroads into the Atlantic

From trade deals to bases, Beijing is taking advantage of Washington's diminished presence.

By Michael Rubin


In 1971, the Bamboo Curtain fractured as an American ping pong team entered China, becoming the first official American delegation to visit China in more than twenty years. 

Contrary to popular wisdom, it was not the team’s visit that led to the breakthrough, however. 

In White House Years, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote that the iconic moment did not initiate relations but followed months of secret diplomacy. 

The Chinese communist government had murdered tens of millions of its own citizens and fought U.S. troops directly on the Korean Peninsula less than two decades before, but the prerogatives of realism were at play. 

The growing Soviet threat gave the United States and the People’s Republic of China a common interest.
Sino-American relations developed across administrations. 

Jimmy Carter formally recognized the People’s Republic—withdrawing formal recognition from the Republic of China in Taiwan in the process. 

Over subsequent years, trade with China increased exponentially. 

The United States even provided China with dual-use technology and welcomed Chinese observers to watch operations aboard U.S. aircraft carriers.
Perhaps in hindsight, the Nixon administration’s outreach to China was not a good thing. 

Today, China is more a military threat than a force for peace. 

It is now clear that Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw China’s tremendous economic growth, was less a reformer than an enabler for Xi Jinping’s militancy and the Chinese communist party’s revisionist quest to fundamentally remake the post-World War II order.
Most U.S. threat assessments focus on Chinese aggression in its neighborhood. 

Could China invade Taiwan? 

How much farther will China push in the South China Sea? 

Could China’s claim to the Senkaku Islands lead to conflict with Japan? 

Could China flip traditional Western allies Philippines, Thailand, or even Turkey? 

Could a China-Pakistan axis provoke conflict with India? 

What does the Belt and Road initiative mean for Central Asia and the Indian Ocean basin? 

The Pentagon also worries about direct Chinese asymmetric leaps such as hypersonic missiles, anti-satellite missiles, and carrier killer missiles.
A legacy of both the Obama and Trump administrations may be collectively letting America’s guard down in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean. 

It was during the Obama administration that China flipped many Latin American countries from Taiwan’s camp into China’s. 

China now operates ports at either end of the Panama Canal and may convert a former U.S. Air Force base into another port. 

In December 2018, Xi visited the Canal to inaugurate new locks. 

Chinese leverage over the Canal will tremendously impede the ability of U.S. ships and submarines to transit to the Pacific during a crisis.
The Obama administration for a bevy of bureaucratic and budgetary—rather than strategic reasons—has largely abandoned Lajes Field in the Azores, an archipelago approximately 1,000 miles from the coast of Portugal and 2500 miles from the East Coast of the United States. 

According to a September 20, 2016, letter sent by Rep. Devin Nunes, at the time chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter:
Several high-ranking Chinese officials have visited the Azores in recent years, and I now understand that China has sent a delegation there of nearly twenty officials, all fluent in Portuguese, on a several weeks-long fact-finding expedition, to culminate in a visit by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. 

The Chinese delegation is in negotiations to expand China’s investments and its overall presence on the islands, including in the shipping port on Terceira, and they have also expressed interest in using the runway at Lajes Field.
Nunes was not engaged in hyperbole. 

When I traveled around Terceira, one of the larger islands in the Azores, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and hoteliers were still talking about the Chinese visit, as well as port developments.
Beijing is also lengthening the main airport’s runway and building a port in São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation off Africa’s west coast. 

China is also reaching out to Cape Verde, another African island nation, which has recently joined Beijing’s Belt-and-Road initiative.
From 1951 until 2006, the United States stationed up to five thousand men at Naval Air Station Keflavik, which was also a major anti-submarine warfare center to monitor Soviet submarines seeking to enter the North Atlantic. 

While the Navy is returning P-8A Poseidon submarine hunters to Iceland—perhaps an acknowledgment of the George W. Bush administration’s shortsightedness in shuttering it in the first place, the U.S. presence remains a shadow of its former self. 

China, meanwhile, is cultivating Iceland by trading business and finance for diplomatic inroads into the Arctic.
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cancelled a trip to Greenland as he returned to Washington to handle the growing Iran crisis. 

His plans to restore a U.S. diplomatic presence in Greenland are wise, however, given how China is contesting the world’s largest non-continental island which, while an autonomous Danish territory, is physiographically part of North America. 

The distance between the Greenlandic capital Nuuk and Washington, DC is just two thousand miles, less than the distance between Beijing and New Delhi.

In October 2018, the Danish Institute for International Studies issued a paper on growing Chinese interests in Greenland, including on rare earth mineral mining. 

Yang Jiang, its author, noted that while Greenlandic authorities often dealt directly with Chinese companies rather than the Chinese government, “the Chinese companies always align themselves with Chinese government policy, irrespective of whether they are state-owned or private.” 

A January 2018 Chinese white paper on Arctic policy made clear that China was unhappy with the status quo and sought to be a major Arctic stakeholder as China expanded its shipping routes and mineral exploitation. 

The possibility that China would encourage Greenlandic independence—not withstanding its opposition to a similar right for Taiwan, Tibet, or Xinjiang—remains a topic of discussion in Chinese strategic and think tank circles.
In isolation, China’s actions in the Atlantic might appear innocent. 

Taken together, it appears that China seeks wholesale entry into the North Atlantic, a region that American policymakers have long believed immune from Chinese ambitions or interest. 

China may not seek formal bases in the region but, given how its companies often build commercial port and airfields to military specification, strategists in Beijing may at a minimum seek to disrupt U.S. operations in America’s own backyard. 

Xi and senior Chinese officials must find it reassuring that a decade of successive U.S. administrations are making it easy for China to get its Atlantic foothold.

China will build string of military bases around world

Locations include Middle East, Pakistan, and western Pacific to protect Belt and Road Initiative
The Guardian

Beijing currently has just one overseas military base, in Djibouti. 

The US Defense Department expects China to add military bases around the world to protect its investments in it ambitious One Belt One Road global infrastructure program, according to an official report released on Thursday.
Beijing currently has just one overseas military base, in Djibouti, but is believed planning others, including possibly Pakistan, as it seeks to project itself as a global superpower.
“China’s advancement of projects such as the ‘One Belt, One Road’ Initiative (OBOR) will drive military overseas basing through a perceived need to provide security for OBOR projects,” the Pentagon said in its annual report to Congress on Chinese military and security developments.
“China will seek to establish additional military bases in countries with which it has a longstanding friendly relationship and similar strategic interests, such as Pakistan, and in which there is a precedent for hosting foreign militaries,” the report said.
That effort could be constrained by other countries’ wariness of hosting a full-time presence of the People’s Liberation Army, the report noted.
But target locations for military basing could include the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific.
The report came as the Pentagon also warned that deepening Chinese activities in the Arctic region could also pave the way for a strengthened military presence, including the deployment of submarines to act as deterrents against nuclear attack.
The assessment is included in the US military’s annual report to Congress on China’s armed forces.
The Pentagon report noted that Denmark has expressed concern about China’s interest in Greenland, which has included proposals to establish a research station, establish a satellite ground station, renovate airports and expand mining.
“Civilian research could support a strengthened Chinese military presence in the Arctic Ocean, which could include deploying submarines to the region as a deterrent against nuclear attacks,” the report said.

US commits to aiding Philippines in South China Sea.

China has already established well-armed outposts on contested atolls it build up in the South China Sea.
Last year, there were reportedly discussions on a base in the Wakhan corridor of northwest Afghanistan.
In addition, The Washington Post recently identified an outpost hosting many Chinese troops in eastern Tajikistan, near the strategic junction of the Wakhan Corridor, China, and Pakistan.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has sought to project the country’s power beyond its immediate “back yard” in east and southeast Asia.
This includes strengthening the country’s presence in international institutions, acquiring top-flight technology and establishing a strong economic presence worldwide.
It also includes projecting the country’s military force on land, sea and in space, the report notes.
“China’s leaders are leveraging China’s growing economic, diplomatic, and military clout to establish regional preeminence and expand the country’s international influence,” the report said.
Beijing in particular increasingly see the United States as becoming more confrontational in an effort to contain China’s expanding power, it said.

How the Pentagon Countered China’s Designs on Greenland

Washington urged Denmark to finance airports that Chinese aimed to build on North America’s doorstep
By Drew Hinshaw and Jeremy Page

Apartment buildings in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, population 17,500. Greenland's population, though small, is becoming more and more urbanized. 

NUUK, Greenland––The Pentagon raised an alarm last year over what it deemed a troubling development in this ice-cloaked territory: China was looking to bankroll and build three airports that could give it a military foothold off Canada’s coast.
Greenland’s prime minister had flown to Beijing in 2017 and asked Chinese state-run banks to finance the new commercial airports, including a big one for one of the smallest capitals on earth, Nuuk, which can now be served only by propeller planes.
The bankers were interested, people at the meetings said, so long as a Chinese company constructed the airports.
When word of the incipient offer reached then-U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis early last year, he called on Denmark—whose kingdom includes Greenland as a self-governing territory but whose government had been reluctant to fund the airports.
Beijing must not be allowed to militarize this stretch of the Arctic, Mr. Mattis told his Danish counterpart Claus Frederiksen at a meeting in Washington in May, according to officials close to the discussion.

People boarding an Air Greenland jet bound for Copenhagen at Kangerlussuaq airport, the only air strip in Greenland that can accommodate large jet aircraft.

For years, the U.S. and Europe had generally been spectators to a global Chinese building spree.
To forge new global trade and infrastructure links, Chinese banks have been financing hundreds of projects, mostly built by Chinese companies, including roads, railways, pipelines and power plants.
Western governments have been less willing to lend taxpayers’ money for risky infrastructure in distant lands.
But that reluctance is ebbing as the geopolitical fallout emerges from the financial difficulties several countries face from Chinese infrastructure loans.
In one notable case, Sri Lanka, unable to service a Chinese loan, granted a Chinese company a 99-year lease on a port close to key Indian Ocean shipping lanes.
Alarmed, the U.S. is joining with allies to offer alternative sources of infrastructure financing.
The sums involved are still dwarfed by China’s plans, but in July, the U.S., Japan and Australia announced a partnership to invest in infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific region.
The European Union unveiled similar plans in October.
Pentagon officials expressed worry that Greenland’s aid-dependent government could struggle to repay a loan for the $555 million project, and after a few missed payments, China’s government could take control of runways that could potentially be used by warplanes on an island where the U.S. has a missile-tracking air force base.
A presence in Greenland could also help China access new shipping lanes and resources under the Arctic’s retreating ice.
Months later, after the airports question precipitated a collapse of this polar island’s government and serial visits by U.S. and Danish officials, Greenland announced that its new capital airport would be built with loans backed by the Danish government, as would another 400 miles up the coast. Greenland will finance the third facility, and no role for China is foreseen.

Oqaatsut, a small village of about 30 inhabitants, faces an existential question of survival as the younger generation leaves for larger towns in Greenland.

In an unusual step, the U.S. Defense Department has offered to chip in with airport infrastructure that would help both civilian and military or surveillance planes land on the country’s coast.
Greenlandic officials say they hope the airports will open up one of the world’s most inaccessible places, allowing in affordable flights bearing tourists, repatriates and immigrants.
U.S. officials see the episode as demonstrating one model for countering China’s global ambitions: calling on old allies to engage in places where Beijing’s ascent is challenging American power.
“When you have an issue like this arise, you see the strength of those alliance relationships,” a senior Defense Department official said.
The Chinese foreign ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment on the airport project but in a statement said China had good relations with Greenland and Denmark, adding that it encouraged Chinese companies to help Arctic development.
A former colony of Denmark, which granted it limited self-rule in 2009, Greenland doesn’t have roads between its cities. 
Residents move around using a network of domestic airstrips and helipads that stretches back to World War II.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen repeatedly turned down requests to lend money for international airports on the island, Greenlandic officials say.
After last year’s meeting between Mr. Mattis and Denmark’s defense minister, however, Mr. Rasmussen’s government rapidly pulled together a funding package that Greenlanders found surprisingly favorable.

Street signs in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital and largest city. Residents of the world’s largest island depend on a World War II-era network of airstrips and helipads to get around.

“He was not into it at all—until the Chinese showed interest,” said Aleqa Hammon, Greenland’s former prime minister, speaking of Mr. Rasmussen.
Mr. Rasmussen’s office declined to comment.
Copenhagen’s volte-face is a measure of how China’s economic and military rise is intensifying international competition over the Arctic, especially Greenland, whose tiny government is slowly moving toward independence from Denmark.
China declared itself a “near-Arctic state” last year, outlining plans to carve new shipping routes through the region’s melting ice and exploit the natural resources underneath.
Greenland is key to China’s strategy, which it calls the “Polar Silk Road.”
“China needs to carefully consider the possibility that a small and weak Greenlandic nation could emerge in the Arctic in the next 10 years,” wrote Xiao Yang, director of the Arctic Research Center at Beijing International Studies University, in a recent paper.
“This will be the key node for the successful implementation of the Polar Silk Road.”
In 2016, a Chinese government-owned company tried to buy an abandoned naval base in Greenland; Denmark sent four sailors to live there and shoo away Chinese interest.
Chinese firms hold a stake in uranium and rare-earth mines on the island, and a state-owned university recently announced it would build a polar research antenna here.
The airport contest kicked off with a series of meetings in Beijing in November 2017 between Greenland’s government and Chinese banks.
Denmark, eager to appear supportive of Greenlandic sovereignty, had helped arrange the meetings, including with China Development Bank and the Export Import Bank of China.

Downtown Nuuk. Greenland's population is becoming more and more urbanized, as more people leave a traditional lifestyle and move to the city, which now has about 17,500 inhabitants.

The banks seemed to know little about Greenland, said Johannus Egholm Hansen, board chairman of Greenland’s state-owned Kalaallit Airports company, who attended those meetings.
“It was early days,” he said.
The banks didn’t respond to requests for comment.
After Kalaallit Airports short-listed a Chinese construction firm to build the new airports, Denmark conveyed its alarm to the Pentagon.
After Mr. Mattis got involved, Denmark’s government asked a consortium led by Danske Bank to help assemble an alternative financing package.
Officials in Greenland were pleasantly surprised by the terms.
“Even Chinese funding is not as cheap as this,” Mr. Hansen said.
Denmark undertook to buy equity and guarantee loans at a roughly 1% interest rate.
Greenland’s government expected to spend up to quadruple that in borrowing costs.
The savings will cut $130 from the price of a round-trip ticket from Europe to one of the world’s most unreachable islands, flag carrier Air Greenland estimates.
“This is an investment in national security, an investment to make sure we can stay on a good foot with the United States,“ said retired Adm. Nils Wang, a former head of the Danish navy and an expert on Arctic security affairs.
Not everyone in Greenland has been pleased about the reassertion of Western power in the Arctic.
As the terms of the new deal emerged in September, the government of Prime Minister Kim Kielsen collapsed and Parliament launched into months of arguments.
Pacifists expressed their continued mistrust of the U.S. military, which once secretly started construction on a nuclear-missile base here.
Many lawmakers said they disliked the influence Denmark would gain over the new airports, and a pilot in the legislature quarreled over the technical specifications of the runways.
Finally, in November, exhausted lawmakers approved the project.
“It’s basically going to make Greenland part of the globalized world,” said Air Greenland CEO Jacob Sorensen, “instead of being this isolated island up in the middle of the North Atlantic.”

Chinese Expansionism

Greenland could become China's Arctic base
By John Simpson

Greenland's capital, Nuuk, needs investment -- but could it come from China?

China is flexing its muscles. 

As the second richest economy in the world, its businessmen and politicians are involved just about everywhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Now, though, China is taking a big interest in a very different part of the world: the Arctic.
It has started calling itself a "near-Arctic" power, even though Beijing is almost 3,000km (1,800 miles) from the Arctic Circle. 

It has bought or commissioned several ice-breakers -- including nuclear-powered ones -- to carve out new routes for its goods through the Arctic ice.
And it is eyeing Greenland as a particularly useful way-station on its polar silk road.

Greenland is self-governing, though still nominally controlled by Denmark.
It is important strategically for the United States, which maintains a vast military base at Thule, in the far north. 

Both the Danes and the Americans are deeply worried that China should be showing such an interest in Greenland.

Least densely populated place on Earth
You've got to go there to get an idea of how enormous Greenland is.
It's the 12th-largest territory in the world, 10 times bigger than the United Kingdom: two million square kilometres of rock and ice.Most of Greenland is covered in permanent ice -- a vast frozen wilderness

Yet its population is minuscule at 56,000 – roughly the size of a town in England.
As a result, Greenland is the least densely populated territory on Earth. 

About 88% of the people are Inuit; most of the rest are ethnically Danish.
In terms of investment neither the Americans nor the Danes have put all that much money into Greenland over the years, and Nuuk, the capital, feels pretty poor. 

Denmark does hand over an annual subsidy to help Greenland meet its needs.
Every day, small numbers of people gather in the centre to sell things that will generate a bit of cash: cast-off clothes, children's schoolbooks, cakes they've made, dried fish, reindeer-horn carvings. 

Some people also sell the bloody carcases of the big King Eider ducks, which Inuits are allowed to hunt but aren't supposed to sell for profit.

China's air power
At present you can only fly to Nuuk in small propeller-driven planes. 

In four years, though, that will change spectacularly.
The Greenlandic government has decided to build three big international airports capable of taking large passenger jets.
China is bidding for the contracts.

Airport officials say the planned work is a huge project -- but an important one

There'll be pressure from the Danes and Americans to ensure the Chinese bid doesn't succeed, but that won't stop China's involvement in Greenland.
Interestingly, I found that opinion about the Chinese tended to divide along ethnic lines.
Danish people were worried about it, while Inuits thought it was a good idea.
The Greenlandic prime minister and foreign minister refused to speak to us about their government's attitude to China, but a former prime minister, Kuupik Kleist, told us he thought it would be good for Greenland.
But the foreign affairs spokesman of the main Venstre party in the Danish coalition government, Michael Aastrup Jensen, was forthright about Chinese involvement in Greenland.
"We don't want a communist dictatorship in our own backyard," he said.

Much-needed wealth
China's sales technique in other countries where its companies operate is to offer the kind of infrastructure they badly need: airports, roads, clean water.
The Western powers that once colonised many of them haven't usually stepped in to help, and most of these governments are only too grateful for Chinese aid.
But it comes at a price.

The former prime minister says someone - anyone - has to invest in Greenland

China gets access to each country's raw materials -- minerals, metals, wood, fuel, foodstuffs. 

Still, this doesn't usually mean long-term jobs for local people. 

Large numbers of Chinese are usually brought in to do the work.
Country after country has discovered that Chinese investment helps China's economy a great deal more than it helps them. 

And in some places -- South Africa is one of them -- there are complaints that China's involvement brings greater corruption.
But in Nuuk it's hard to get people to focus on arguments like these.
What counts in this vast, empty, impoverished territory is the thought that big money could be on its way. 

Kuupik Kleist put the argument at its simplest.
"We need it, you see," he said.

Chinese Peril

Coming soon to a military base near us: China
BY DOV S. ZAKHEIM

With China very much in mind, Congress has passed the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, or FIRRMA, mandating the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) to review and, if necessary, block both foreign attempts to acquire real estate in sensitive areas and joint ventures that could involve the transfer of American technology to foreign companies.
At the same time, however, China has established its footprint in key logistical hubs worldwide and is seeking to expand it even further.
Its growing global logistical reach could pose serious national security challenges for the United States and its allies.
China has built a naval base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, from which its ships have been operating since 2017. 

It financed the construction of the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota; when Sri Lanka could not repay its debts to China, Beijing obtained a 99-year lease on the port. 

At the end of June 2018, the Sri Lankan government announced that it would move the headquarters of its southern fleet to the Chinese-operated port. 

Whether this move will result in Chinese constraints upon Sri Lanka’s freedom of action remains to be seen, but it cannot be ruled out.
Yet, it is China’s increasing presence in Europe and its environs that may well be the cause of greatest concern for Washington, and should be for its allies. 

China has obtained a significant presence on the territory of four NATO allies — Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany — and almost managed to do so in a fifth. 

China capitalized on Greece’s financial crisis in 2008 to begin operating a container facility in Piraeus, the port of Athens; it since has acquired a 35 percent stake in Rotterdam’s Euromax container terminal, which can take the world’s largest container ships, as well as a 20 percent holding in Antwerp’s container terminal, one of the fastest-growing terminals in Europe. 

In July 2017, the Hamburg Port Authority awarded the construction of a new container terminal to a Chinese conglomerate.
Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg are Europe’s three biggest ports.
The fifth attempt at a NATO incursion — a near-miss for China — was its attempt through the China Communications Construction Company, a state-owned enterprise, to expand and modernize three disused airfields in Greenland. 

The company asserted its intention was merely to expand tourism in the sparsely populated island. But Greenland hosts an American base in Thule, which operates systems related to missile warning and space-related missions. 

Moreover, should China deploy aircraft to these bases, its reach would extend to at least part of Western Europe. 

Not surprisingly, the Chinese bid was extremely worrying to Danish defense officials, especially since China already had sought to acquire a former American facility in Greenland, only to have the deal vetoed by the Danish government.
In fact, the Chinese attempt to win the construction contract for the three airports posed a much more difficult challenge for the government in Copenhagen. 

Denmark is responsible for Greenland’s foreign policy and national security, but Greenlanders manage their internal affairs — and the government in Nuuk considered the decision regarding the airfields to be a domestic matter. 

It was only at the eleventh hour that a Danish company was able to edge out the Chinese and come up with the winning bid.
Most recently, China has expanded its presence in the eastern Mediterranean, along NATO’s southern flank. 

In addition to operating the port of Piraeus, China now has won the right to build two facilities in Israel’s ports of Haifa and Ashdod. 

Haifa is the headquarters of the Israeli Navy while Ashdod also hosts an Israeli naval base. 

Moreover, American warships, including aircraft carriers, dock at both ports. 

China’s presence in the two Israeli ports thus would enable China to monitor not only Israeli operations and communications but, whenever the U.S. Navy is on a port visit, those of the United States as well.
Retired Israeli and American naval commanders have expressed their concerns about the awarding of these port contracts to the Chinese. 

Israel should take a lesson from the Danes and become far more active in blocking Chinese attempts to penetrate its infrastructure. 

Israel has no equivalent of CFIUS but, clearly, it needs to establish one posthaste, and do so in a manner that, like FIRRMA, has few loopholes. 

Indeed, our other NATO allies should do the same; they must close any loopholes that exist in their foreign investment laws.
Finally, Israel should reconsider the award of the contracts to China or, at a minimum, demonstrate to Washington that China will not be able to monitor American naval operations. 

Should it be unable to do so, Washington should cancel any planned port visits to Israel. 

China’s efforts to gain access to American operations and tactics is troubling enough; our allies and friends should not make it easier for Beijing.