What Our $320B Trade Deficit Buys China

America’s trade deficit with China is financing the Communist dictatorship’s military machine and its Pacific saber-rattling.

Since permanent normalized trade relations with China began in 2000, China’s military expenditure has exploded. As the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown, so, too, has China’s military budget.

In 1989, China’s official military budget was roughly $6.7 billion. By 1999, that budget had increased by just over 200 percent to $13.7 billion.

[lz_table title=”Chinese Military Budget (in billions)” source=”GlobalSecurity.org, Chinese Government”]2000, $14.6B
|2002, $20.0B
|2004, $25.0B
|2006, $35.3B
|2008, $57.2B
|2010, $77.9B
|2012, $106.4B
|2014, $131.5B
|2015, $141.0B
[/lz_table]

By 2009, however, after enjoying nearly 10 years of draining the American economy, the Chinese military budget stood at $70.3 billion, an increase of over 500 percent. By 2015, China’s military budget had doubled again to an incredible $141 billion.

The belligerent fruits of the United States’s running deficit with China are becoming increasingly clear. On Sunday, a Chinese military aircraft landed on the Fiery Cross Reef, one of many artificial islands that China has been building in the South China Sea’s Spratly island chain, Chinese state media reported.

Though allegedly a rescue operation to extract sick construction workers, it is the first public report of a military aircraft landing on the island, and seems to confirm fears that China’s artificial archipelago could be — and may be — used for military purposes.

“We’re aware that a Chinese military aircraft landed at Fiery Cross Reef on Sunday in what China described as a humanitarian operation to evacuate three ill workers,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said in a statement. However it “is unclear why the Chinese used a military aircraft, as opposed to a civilian one.”

The island’s 10,000 foot-long runway only opened to civilian flights in January, so it’s possible that Sunday’s rescue mission was some sort of test run. Then again, it’s unlikely such a test run would have been necessary, as the runway’s length is more than enough to support long-range bombers.

[lz_table title=”U.S. Trade Deficit with China (in billions)” source=”Congressional Budget Office”]2000, $83.8B
|2002, $103.0B
|2004, $162.2B
|2006, $234.1B
|2008, $268.0B
|2010, $273.0B
|2012, $315.1B
|2014, $343.0B
|2015, $365.7B
[/lz_table]

China has constructed seven of these artificial islands in the Spratly chain — 3,000 acres of artificial island in the last two years or so, to be precise. At best, these islands are designed to reinforce China’s claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea. At worst, however, they would be an ideal staging ground for an attack on future U.S. bases in the Philippines.

The South China Sea is an incredibly important bit of ocean real estate. Over $5 trillion of international trade flows through the area every year, with the U.S. bilateral trade alone contributing over $1 trillion of the total.

The military landing on Fiery Cross Reef is just one of many aggressive acts China has taken in 2016 as it continues to pursue its South China Sea claim. In mid-February, it was reported that the Communist country had installed surface-to-air missile launchers on Woody Island in the Paracel Islands, northwest of the Spratly island chain.

Less than a week after the discovery of the missile sites, China sent fighter jets to the same island. “After the deployment of fighter jets to Woody Island, officials are concerned the Chinese might send them south to the Spratly islands next,” Fox News reported at the time.

Barely two months later and what U.S. officials feared has come to pass — and it will only increase tensions with China. The reality is that China is one of the greatest — if not the greatest — military threats to the United States in the 21st century.

That the U.S. is effectively funding the Chinese war machine and its aggressive island-building through trade deficits may go down in history as one of the nation’s biggest strategic blunders of all time.