Except for a spy balloon. China intends to set up a permanent electronic spy platform targeting the United States in close proximity to its coast. The platform in question is quite a famous island. It’s called Cuba.
The news comes from the Wall Street Journal, which attributes it to American intelligence sources. Beijing has reportedly offered Cuba billions of dollars to build the new high-tech spy base just 100 miles off the Florida coast.
The Havana government, which was in serious economic difficulties, would have made its availability available.
In terms of espionage capabilities, this is Beijing’s boldest and most visible challenge to the United States.
It is also a challenge for Russia, of which Cuba has been an ally since the early days of Castro’s revolution and a military and spy base. From a Russian perspective, this Chinese penetration of Cuba can be interpreted as one of the prices Vladimir Putin has to pay Xi Jinping for the support he received in the war in Ukraine.
China’s economic support has been essential to Moscow since the conflict began, but the bill is high. Economically, Putin condemns Russia to becoming a Chinese colony. The costs are also becoming increasingly visible on the geopolitical side. China openly undermines Russian influence in various parts of the world, including in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Now this Chinese advance extends to the Caribbean. That would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. But even a pre-2022 Russia not weakened by the war in Ukraine and sanctions would hardly have allowed Xi Jinping to invade the field.
The Russian presence in Cuba – which includes spy bases against the United States – was one of the salient features of the Cold War. The world was on the verge of World War III and a nuclear explosion when President John Kennedy defied Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev over installing nuclear missiles on the island in 1962. The precedent of the 1962 missile crisis is a reminder that conflict was avoided in the end, Soviet nuclear warheads were not installed because America was reconciled to having a pro-Soviet island not far from Florida.
Today, that island is slipping toward a Sino-Russian condominium, worrying news for Washington. Attempts to regain US influence in Cuba, made during Barack Obama’s presidency, have failed. Obama initiated a diplomatic thaw and lifted some sanctions, but the normalization process was interrupted by Donald Trump and not really revived by Joe Biden. The American right, as well as much of the naturalized Cuban exile community in the United States, disputes the fact that the Havana regime has made no progress on human rights.
China fell into a stalemate, taking advantage of the Castro regime’s economic catastrophe to negotiate its penetration.
The plan to set up a high-tech spy base in the US backyard fits into a climate of growing Chinese aggression.
The escalation of tensions has been confirmed by recent incidents in border areas with China: the most serious being two near misses between fighter-bombers and military ships from the two superpowers in recent weeks. In these cases, both the US (and Canadian) jets and ships were in international transit zones, which China instead treats as under its sovereignty.
In the seas around the People’s Republic and off Taiwan, the principle of freedom of navigation is at stake. The United States considers itself the guarantor of this right and claims that its military fleets enforce it for the good of the entire world. For many decades, the People’s Republic itself tacitly reaped the benefits of the United States’ role as global gendarme. For example, the supertanker ships that transport crude oil from the Persian Gulf to China (the world’s main importer) enjoy protection from terrorist attacks or piracy, largely provided by the US Navy.
Recently, Xi Jinping has shown a growing intolerance of this American role. China appears poised to take on the job of gendarme in an ever-expanding expanse of seas around its shores: that includes Taiwan, but also international waters where trade flows between Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, three democracies allied with the West.
The redefinition of freedom of navigation according to Chinese criteria worries many countries in this area, which have experienced Beijing’s coercive diplomacy and are ready to harshly sanction any acts or statements unwelcome to the regime. Before and after the near collisions in the skies and at sea, the Biden administration attempted to restore dialogue between the military leaders of the two superpowers.
The request for a bilateral meeting at the defense ministers’ level was rejected by China after dialogue was disrupted following the spy balloon incident. So far, the People’s Republic has been ready to resume normal contacts on other levels, from trade negotiations to an upcoming visit to Beijing by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (also canceled after the spy balloon, now planned again).
But in the military arena, the refusal to engage in dialogue harbors risks. The Cuba affair seems to confirm that China no longer accepts the status quo, being in every sense a revisionist superpower in the sense that it wants to review or fundamentally transform the international order. These include the permanent right to set up a spy base a short distance from the US coast, focused on rival observation and with technological capabilities vastly superior to short-lived (and easily destroyed) craft.
Jun 8, 2023 4:43pm – modified Jun 8, 2023 | 4:49 p.m
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