The specter of economic doomsday makes war between China and the United States... unthinkable..... Or does it? In fact, Chinese and U.S. military planners are thinking in exquisite detail..., about how to win such a conflict. — David Gompert, former Acting Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama, Los Angeles Times, 8/26/13.

Imperialist war is inevitable under capitalism. Only war can resolve the imperialist powers’ competition for resources and exploitable labor, the lifeblood of their brutal profit system. History shows that the capitalists will sacrifice millions of workers to defend those profits.
But history also shows that the greatest danger to capitalism — the international working class — can transform world war into communist revolution. It happened in the Soviet Union after World War I. It happened in China after World War II. And it can happen again if a mass communist movement is organized under the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. With communist leadership, we can turn a quantitative capitalist crisis into qualitative change — into a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs.  
In his description of the tensions between the United States and China, David Gompert, a ruling-class insider, challenges the myth that financial ties between capitalist nations ensure everlasting peace. He recognizes what Vladimir Lenin, the great Soviet leader and thinker, concluded a century ago: Imperialist competition is inescapably violent. But while capitalist policy analysts are in general accord over the looming conflict with China, they have deep divisions when it comes to strategies and tactics.
Bosses’ Strategic Split
At the moment, the bosses are split between two diametrically opposed concepts: “AirSea Battle” and “Offshore Control.” This strategic dispute involves inter-service rivalry and likely explains the recent test-cheating scandals in the Air Force and Navy. These scandals that disgrace Air Force and Navy brass probably aim at cutting the influence of these services back to size amid tortuous strategizing for war on China. It also exposes the spending constraints imposed by the Great Recession on even the biggest, most globally engaged U.S. capitalists.
AirSea Battle envisions a quick, cheap U.S. first strike — conducted largely by the Air Force — at command and control sites deep in China’s mainland. Offshore Control stands for a longer-term U.S. naval blockade that would choke off the overseas commerce that China’s rulers depend upon.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created in 2000, has a Congressional mandate to “monitor the national security implications of the economic relationship.” Last month it heard conflicting testimony from a number of conflicted testifiers — notably Roger Cliff, an East Asian security expert newly appointed to the Atlantic Council, an imperialist think tank with a long range outlook. (Before Chuck Hagel gave up the Council’s chairmanship last year to become Obama’s Secretary of Defense, he proposed forging a U.S.-led coalition — including India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey — for the next world war.)
To counter a Chinese buildup for the seizure of Taiwan, Cliff proposed a limited, near-term U.S. strike on China’s command center. This attack would need to be executed before 2020, he noted, when China will have “significant numbers of medium-range ballistic missiles and land-attack cruise missiles capable of reaching any of the U.S. facilities in Japan, which are the closest to Taiwan.”
Cliff told the Council that an AirSea Battle could be effective in defense of Taiwan and “would probably entail large-scale force commitments and high, but not unlimited, levels of escalation.” But he also acknowledged that Chinese bosses, thus provoked, might unleash an army in the hundreds of millions, along with their formidable nuclear arsenal: “Conflict over issues that threatened China’s national survival could potentially entail the commitment of all of China’s military forces and unlimited levels of escalation.”
Contradictions and Constraints
The contradictions in Cliff’s testimony reflect his personal career path but also the state of indecision within the dominant, finance capital faction of the U.S. ruling class. Before joining the Atlantic Council, Cliff worked for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a war-on-the-cheap think tank. (The Center is bankrolled by Pete DuPont IV, the former Congressman and Delaware governor who has championed the fight for income tax cuts.) But the Atlantic Council, backed by ExxonMobil, Rockefeller Financial and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, sits squarely in the finance capital camp. These forces normally bang the drum for an expensive, long-term war with China. Cliff’s remarks suggest that the finance capital wing, currently strapped for cash, may be entertaining a cheaper and quicker way to defend Taiwan as well.
But five days before Cliff’s startling speech, David Gompert — a trusted Obama advisor — spoke to the same China war planning board. He warned against sole reliance on AirSea Battle, which “implies a U.S. threat of early strikes on Chinese territory” and “would be perceived as – indeed, would be — escalatory.” As an alternative, Gompert urged an Offshore Control blockade option and “multilateral maritime-security cooperation in the Western Pacific.”
None of these capitalist experts are acknowledging the elephant in the room. Neither AirSea Battle nor Offshore Control take into account the potential for the costly and lethal repercussions of a clash between two imperialist empires: massive territorial invasion and/or multiple nuclear holocausts. Both strategies ignore the real prospect of a land war in China, a country that could mobilize over one hundred million fighting men and women. (The U.S. mustered a tenth of its population in World War II.) And neither strategy outlines a role for the Army, the U.S. military’s largest branch.
In reality, these doctrines commit the Air Force and Navy far beyond their capabilities in all-out warfare. In the current issue of Air Force Magazine, the CSBA’s Benjamin Lambeth boasted:

Airpower has eclipsed land power as the primary means of destroying enemy forces. Since the Cold War’s end, the classic roles of airpower and land power have changed places in major combat against modern
mechanized opponents. In this role reversal, ground forces have come to do most of the shaping and fixing of enemy forces, while airpower now does most of the actual killing.

But killing from 40,000 feet or dominating the seas is not the same as occupying or controlling a country, let alone conquering one. The futile U.S. adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, nations with a tiny fraction of China’s military resources, make that much clear.
War and Revolution
Most of all, the capitalists continue to overlook the most important repercussion of a broader inter-imperialist conflict: the rise of an international, revolutionary working class. As the rulers resort to more naked fascism — racism, sexism, mass unemployment and wage cuts — workers will inevitably fight back. Once armed with the bosses’ weapons and with communist ideas, they will turn the guns around — as they did in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949.
The Progressive Labor Party cannot prevent World War III. We can’t control how or when the bosses start their next conflict. But if we build a mass revolutionary movement, we can determine how that war ends and what comes out of it. We can finish the bosses and their profit system and create a communist world in their place. Join us!