WHEN CHINA ATTACKS: A Warning to America.

• Author: Hoadley, Stephen

Author: Grant Newsham Published by: Regnery Publishing, Washington DC, 2023, 420pp, US$29.99.

The title of this book is arresting and the author's message is alarming. Critics may ask if the danger is really so direct and imminent. Newsham would reply: 'read the book!'. For he has written a forthrightly expressed, conscientiously documented and comprehensively surveyed assessment of the threats from China, mainly to the United States but also to the West in general. Behind the book stand his credentials as a colonel in the US Marine Corps and a post-retirement career of public engagement with international security issues, including think-pieces, blogs and testimony before Congressional committees. He is a senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies and a frequent contributor to the Asia Times.

So, what is the China threat? Newsham argues that the threat is not just imminent: it is already manifest. The war has already begun, he asserts in his chapter on 'The Battles China is Already Fighting and We are Already Losing'. But China's aggressive diplomatic and economic manoeuvres are not recognised by the West as 'war' because of compartmentalised security policy thinking. Whereas we think in terms of discrete government security institutions to be managed parsimoniously by specific policies for specific purposes, and distinguish war from peace, China's strategists think in terms of long-term goals and fluid whole-of-regime combinations of institutions and initiatives on a broad front to enhance China's primacy.

Below, Newsham's chapter titles indicate the multi-faceted nature of China's conduct of its war with the West. Note that each of these is already in play.

* psychological warfare: how communist China does your thinking for you

* lawfare: rules for thee but not for me

* changing--or undermining--global rules and norms

* capturing international organisations

* biological warfare: China sickens America

* chemical warfare: killing Americans by the tens of thousands

* economic warfare: putting America out of business

* financial warfare: defenestrating the US dollar

* cyber warfare: hacking through American defences

* proxy warfare: China's warfare outsourcing.

It is China's military expansion that worries most observers, and Newsham acknowledges this in his chapter entitled 'The Chinese Military: No One Is Laughing Anymore'. He starts his book with a persuasive scenario of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which combines...