A paper released yesterday by Evan Ellis, the U.S. Army War College’s resident expert on Ibero-American-Chinese relations, under the title “The Strategic Role of Latin America in a Global Conflict Over Taiwan,” reveals that the U.S. military has been assigned to secure the natural, infrastructural, and scientific resources of Ibero-America and the Caribbean for the U.S. in its war drive against China, and deny them to those nations and to the Belt and Road Initiative.
The premise of Ellis’s piece, published in both Spanish and English in Seguridad y Poder Terrestre, the journal of the Peruvian Army’s Center for Strategic Studies (CEEEP), is that there will be a U.S. war with China over Taiwan, probably by 2027, and that that war will be global. Therefore, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command needs to map out ("anticipate") Chinese assets “in other parts of the world, including the Western Hemisphere, [which] could impact the ability of the U.S. to deploy and sustain forces in the Indo-Pacific in the context of such a conflict,” he writes.
The threat to the other governments of the Americas is clear: U.S. war planners consider any commercial or infrastructure project which involves China to be “dual-use,” and therefore must be ended. Chinese diplomatic activities and people-to-people relations are windows through which China can gather intelligence and gain influence; China could potentially convince these governments to remain neutral in a U.S.-China conflict. The many infrastructure projects in the region could be used by China in the projected global conflict as “intermediate staging bases” for attacks against the U.S. supply of food and critical minerals, or perhaps directly against the U.S. homeland, he writes. Peru’s Chancay Port is among the ports and canals specifically viewed as a threat.
Ellis calls it “imperative” that Latin American leaders and military planners “anticipate how the region … could become the subject of struggle” in that conflict. “It is in the interest of political leaders and others in the region to consider how military interactions with the PLA, as well as commercial projects with P.R.C.-based companies … in strategic sectors such as ports, space and the digital domain, may indirectly contribute to the way the Chinese might look to exploit opportunities created by such projects.”
Denying Ibero-America cooperation with China in space is a major focus of attack. The China-CELAC space working group, the five Chinese-Brazilian weather and Earth-monitoring satellites in the CEBRES program, the Bolivian and Venezuelan satellites jointly developed and deployed with China, Argentina’s deep space radar in Neuquén, Peru’s participation in the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, are named as targets, along with Chinese cooperation in the region’s astronomical observatories.
Ellis goes so far as to warn that if one or more additional countries of the region breaks relations with Taiwan and recognizes the P.R.C., that might precipitate Chinese military action to “retake” Taiwan. (Eight of the 14 countries which still recognize Taiwan are in this region.) Ellis worries about a new government taking power in Haiti, because in off-the-record interviews with Haiti experts in October 2022, he found that “the majority of actors interested in replacing Haiti’s unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry, all want to recognize the P.R.C..” Perhaps that is why the Biden administration has kept the drug-tainted Henry in power to continue the ongoing genocide there. (https://revanellis.com/The%20Strategic%20Role%20of%20Latin%20America%20in%20a%20Global%20Conflict%20over%20Taiwan%20-%20R%20Evan%20Ellis.pdf )
