The 70th anniversary of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will be celebrated this March 5 with the prospect that during this decade, there will be appreciably more nuclear weapons states than the five nuclear weapons states (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and United States) that forged the treaty on March 5, 1970. The threat of a nuclear weapons arms race in East Asia and the Middle East is real. Currently, there are three countries that will incite this race: North Korea, Iran and Turkey. It is likely North Korea will continue to defy the international community and continue to build nuclear weapons and, despite sanctions, refuse to denuclearize, assuming their demands are not accepted. Or, equally tragic, if the North is accepted by the international community as a nuclear weapons state, even assuming that they would be willing to cap the number of nuclear weapons they can retain. North Korea with nuclear weapons will encourage other countries in the region to seek their own nuclear deterrence capabilities, regardless of U.S. extended nuclear deterrent commitments. A few former senior South Korean officials have publicly stated that South Korea should seek its own nuclear weapons if North Korea retains any number of nuclear weapons. I’m confident that view is shared by others in the South. Yes, there is a nod to the United States for its offer of a nuclear umbrella, but realistically, many seem to believe that the South’s best defense is having its own nuclear deterrent. Ongoing negotiations with the United States in regard to Seoul’s contribution to funding the 28,500 troops is one of a number of issues that contribute to the view that the South has to be more self-reliant, especially on issues dealing with its national security.

During the 74-year nuclear era, the world has struggled ceaselessly to find a way to keep nuclear weapons under control. Nukes are not the ultimate evil, as some would have us believe. They’re tools, like others man has created, from dynamite to poisonous medications, which can be used for good or bad. Consider the history of nuclear weapons. First the good side: In WWII nukes saved a million U.S. servicemen’s lives, and 10 million Japanese lives, by preventing the invasion of Japan. The landmark Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970 has been immensely effective in controlling proliferation of nukes. It created two tiers of states: Five nuclear weapons states and 185 non-nuclear weapons states. The treaty, however, had one potentially fatal defect: It provided no mechanism to enforce nonproliferation. U.S. nukes prevented WWIII for 46 years during the Cold War. America’s masterful combination of science, strategy, strength, and deterrence secured a sweeping victory against all odds. Not a single nuke was detonated, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and communism became recognized worldwide as a failure. Nuclear weapons had prevented a catastrophe. The paramount achievement of nuclear weapons, however, has rarely been recognized. Now what does history tell us about the bad side? It shows ? dramatically ? that nonproliferation requires enforcement. There must be a cop on the beat. The drafters of the Nonproliferation Treaty recognized this, but they just couldn’t bite the bullet; so they went halfway and approved five nuclear-weapons states in a leadership role.

Western political leaders can’t suffer China’s developmental policies designed to steal business models and intellectual property and transfer them to Chinese domestic competitors. It doesn’t help that Beijing invested enormous national treasure into a military purpose-built to drive the West out of Asia and destroy U.S. armed forces while expanding at the expense of America’s Asian allies and partners. It is unfortunate that Beijing was not as attentive or generous in building a world-class public health system as it has been to building world-leading arsenals of rockets, warships, satellites and offshore naval air stations. America’s grievances in its Chimerica marriage have been building for decades, and Beijing has been indifferent to pleas to change, to respect international norms, to eschew coercive expansionism and to stop filching the fruits of innovation. The CCP’s response has been to fabricate mythological histories to justify expansionism. The CCP saw the West’s attempts to welcome it into the community of advanced economies and normalize its behavior as attacks on the CCP’s dictatorship and set out instead to bend international rule sets to its interests. In coming years when nCoV is behind us, and it will be behind us, its greatest lasting impact may be that it was the moment when the West realized it can live without the CCP in its house. China will soon fully recover and expect to resume life as before, but its relationship with the West may be over. It will come back but find doors locked. The advanced democracies know what the CCP is, know they can live without it, and nothing Beijing does may change their minds.

The 2019 new coronavirus (nCoV) originating in the geographic center of the People’s Republic of China breaks our hearts for the suffering of the Chinese people. It was revealed that Chinese medical system is inadequate and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is incompetent and corrupt. Other nations are concerned about their own well-being and are taking stock of economic consequences as they close potential vectors of the disease emanating from China. Western nations are reconsidering their relationship with the PRC after nCoV. The integration of the U.S. and Chinese economies ― “Chimerica” ― has come to resemble an intolerable marriage. The United States thought it was partnering with China, but found itself hooked up with the controlling and expansionist CCP. Xi Jinping’s dictatorship thieves Western intellectual property, invades its universities with propaganda institutions and coercively attempts to censor the free speech of Westerners from corporate leaders to sports figures to cartoonists. The West endured years of Beijing’s promises to change. Developed nations were already learning they can live without the CCP in their economies. The 2015 stock market crash in China and only China annihilated narratives that Western and Chinese stock markets are inextricably linked. Beijing has been unable to manipulate the United States using its holding of Treasuries as a lever, if anything damaging itself more for its efforts. Manufacturers are working through the issues of establishing supply lines outside of China. Western corporate leaders find it difficult to rationalize dependence on a country with a legal system politicized when not corrupted, in an economy suffering from capricious property rights and thuggish local authorities.

Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy, counts 33 canned or scheduled for disciplinary review since Jan. 24. Firings have persuaded others to do as little as possible to avoid making mistakes and being sacked themselves. These malign incentives reinforce others: China’s officials, for years, have been cautious, hoping to avoid decisions that would attract the attention of Mr. Xi’s ruthless “corruption” investigators. At the moment, censors are scrubbing the Twitter-like Weibo site of reports that Chinese officials were taking Red Cross surgical masks for themselves. Perhaps the real Red Cross scandal, however, involves the mountains of aid boxes that are not being delivered because the government is not functioning well. The breakdown of local governance ? and not just in Wuhan ? suggests that China’s model, despite what Director General Ghebreyesus said, is definitely not worthy of emulation by anyone. Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania said the Wuhan epidemic “proves again how utterly wrong Marx was.” Communism, as Marx said, may know the answers to the great questions of history, but no one at the moment is asking Xi Jinping, who had himself crowned “people’s leader” in December, about them. People are asking him to save their lives. Unfortunately, Mr. Xi is not doing a very good job of meeting his fundamental responsibility. He can make grand pronouncements, as he did on Jan. 20 when issuing his first words on the epidemic, but his commands ? “put people’s lives and health first”? are not substitute for solutions.

Superiority?” Beijing’s response, of course, would have been unnecessary if the party had not suppressed news in December. The first known patient inflicted with the 2019-nCoV virus became ill on Dec. 1. Chinese officials spent almost all that month scrubbing news of the mysterious respiratory disease. The first official announcement was made on Dec. 31 as was a police announcement of the investigation of eight Wuhan doctors for “spreading rumors.” Officials then spent more than half of January ignoring the epidemic or downplaying its severity. For instance, on Jan. 19, when it was evident an epidemic was sweeping the city, Wuhan officials held a public banquet for 40,000 families in an attempt to set a world record. Then, the regime rallied itself. As images of people collapsing in Wuhan streets and corpses littering hospital floors circulated on social media, Beijing immediately began throwing full resources into the fight against the disease. Yet, the image of totalitarian competence, pushed by the Communist Party and the WHO, is now breaking down. For one thing, Wuhan’s mayor damned his own political system. On Jan, 27, Zhou Xianwang publicly said he could not disclose the coronavirus epidemic because he was waiting for authorization from higher-ups. The problem is even more fundamental that Mayor Zhou lets on, however. Ming Xia of the City University of New York told me that there is now “wholesale paralysis” of the Chinese government. Officials fighting the epidemic are being fired on the spot for supposed incompetence. Gone is the health commission chief of Huanggang city, near Wuhan.

Xi Jinping has disappeared from public view. The general secretary of the Communist Party and the president of the Chinese state was not on the front page of People’s Daily, the regime’s most authoritative publication. China Central Television’s Evening News broadcasts were also Xi-free. As the widely-followed Bill Bishop wrote in his Sinocism site, “Now is not the time for the people’s leader to disappear from the view of the people.” Mr. Xi’s reluctance to lead visibly shows, among other things, one of the weaknesses of China’s political system. That system, as it has fought the coronavirus outbreak, has gone into full totalitarian mode in recent days. About 60 million people are now under some type of local travel restriction; men in biohazard gear are patrolling with automatic rifles in Wuhan, the epicenter. State media boast workers built a hospital in the stricken city in 11 days. Media in China speak with one voice: that of the Communist Party. Social media censors are obsessive, thorough and speedy. Many have marveled at the speed of state action. Among the cheerleaders is the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. China News Service, run by the Communist Party, reported that Mr. Ghebreyesus, during a meeting with Mr. Xi in Beijing on Jan. 28, said that China was “winning the admiration of the world.” “The speed and extent of the Chinese mobilization is rarely seen in the world,” he is reported to have said. “This is the superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries.”

It can begin in the Philippines by re-leasing the Subic Bay port for the support the U.S. Navy will need to undertake its future mission in the South China Sea. The U.S. Navy’s fleeting presence in the region has to date been ineffective. Freedom of navigation operations have failed to silence China’s preposterous claim to the South China Sea or halt its unlawful presence and activities in the region. A new U.S. naval base in Southeast Asia is logistically critical to the implementation of a new “Trump Doctrine” and psychologically imperative in projecting America’s power to China. The nations of Southeast Asia, independently or collectively, will not do anything to challenge China out of fear. So, it is for America to take action, with the help of its historical allies, to preserve freedom of the sea (which is in every nation’s national interest) as well as the rights and privileges the nations of Southeast Asia enjoy under international law. Failure to do so will mean the Communist Party prelates will make the rules in the South China Sea. America’s lawmakers seemingly do not recognize what the president and the admirals already know: America is at war with China. The U.S. Congress and Senate should take heed of the words of George Kennan, who headed the U.S. State Department planning staff at the beginning of the first Cold War: “We should cease to talk about vague and ? for the Far East ? unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” Kennan’s advice is as good now as it was in 1948. President Xi Jinping understands straight power concepts.

According to today’s Communist Party prelates, China must regain its status as the “Middle Kingdom,” which implies its superior role as the center of the world. China’s objective is really not much different than the Empire of Japan’s objective of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” the imperialist concept created and promulgated for occupied Asian populations. The history of the Middle Kingdom is also the basis for China’s illegal claim to the South China Sea. It goes something like this: Because Chinese merchant ships sailed the sea lanes of the South China Sea and encamped on its islands for a thousand years, the entire South China Sea is Chinese territory. This is like a businessman who’s been traveling the highway from the suburbs of Connecticut to New York City to work for a number of years and stopping at gas stations along the way claiming ownership of the entire State of Connecticut. President Xi Jinping, through the admiral, sent a chilling message to the other South China Sea claimants which have no significant naval or air capability relative to China (Vietnam, comes to mind), and which have no security alliance with America. Simply by goading one of these claimants into a battle, China could test its naval and air capabilities against a beatable opponent in a limited war and thereby become the de facto superpower in the China Sea. This hypothetical is much more likely to become reality and, therefore, the one which must be prevented. Where the new “Trump Doctrine” begins is not as important as that it must begin now. If not in Cambodia by engaging Cambodia’s ascendant military leaders to stop China from gaining a military foothold in Cambodia, it can begin in Vietnam by entering into a bilateral security alliance to stop China from attacking Vietnam as in the above hypothetical.

In December 2018 Chinese admiral Lou Yuan, deputy chief of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, did propose - in a public setting - using hypersonic missiles to sink two U.S. aircraft carriers as China’s strategy for solving tensions over the South China Sea. And, notwithstanding the debate among U.S. naval officers and specialists in weaponry and naval architecture and wargame designers, the missiles do appear to work, the Chinese having successfully test fired them somewhere in the South China Sea in November 2019. The admiral’s reasoning for this sneak attack a la Pearl Harbor may not be completely unsound either. As for his statement in support of the plan - that America is too weak to fight, the Japanese held the same belief in 1941. Enough said. But, his analysis that America has no strategy to thwart China’s unlawful presence and activities in the South China Sea and its designs to gain military concessions from Southeast Asian nations, is largely correct. The Chinese have been testing America for a reaction to their military ambitions in the region since the Obama presidency when they seized the disputed Scarborough Shoal from America’s treaty ally, the Philippines. Today, they intimidate other South China Sea claimants from pursuit of navigation, fishing and oil exploration activities. Perhaps more concerning than his proposal is the objective the admiral shares with Chinese President Xi Jinping: Resurrecting the traditional hierarchical Asian paradigm in which China acted as the center of a tributary system of levy-paying vassals whose relative power was starkly inferior to China’s.