Problems with: The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury
This is a valuable book, which gets into Chinese thinking and strategic planning, showing the threat China poses to America. The author is smart, knowledgeable,and quotes from a wide array of primary Chinese sources. This is a book worth reading.
That being said, since you can easily read many of the overwhelming positive reviews on the book elsewhere, I want to layout some problems with the book.
Pillsbury is upfront about the fact that he used to be a duped fool and had naive analysis. He claims that he learned from it and has now changed his views to be more wary.
To me, it seems, he is still falling into the same trap of being naive. The enemy is still a couple steps ahead of Pillsbury.
His book opens with coverage of Golitsyn, one of the most important defectors the CIA ever got from Russia, and is quite poor.
He dismisses Golitsyn by saying he was a “conspiracy theorist and would later claim that British prime minister Harold Wilson was a KGB informant.” That’s quite a sweeping dismissal with no substantiation.
In December of 1962, the pro-America British labor party leader Gaitskell went to Russia. In January of 1963 he died of sickness at age 56.
Harold Wilson took over the labor party and became Prime Minister. This is a guy who in the 1940s had been traveling to Russia.
Golitsyn, who defected in 1961, said that Wilson was a KGB agent… So how does Wilson rule as Prime Minister? By keeping close ties to KGB agents, handing out jobs to KGB agents, coming under suspicion from MI5, and leaving office in an abrupt resignation.
Then Pillsbury goes on to imply Golitsyn was a Russian plant, notwithstanding the fact that Golitsyn helped catch Philby.
Pillsbury says the real truth teller was Nosenko, the guy who defected right after Oswald killed JFK to say that he had special information showing the KGB was not behind Oswald. He even claimed that, though Oswald had been a marine, operated sensitive radar tech in Japan, and lived in Russia, the KGB had never tried to recruit him.
Give me a break! His take on Golitsyn and Nosenko is so silly it’s hard to understand what he is thinking.
A couple more critiques on the China parts of his book…
He frames China as being run by the “war hawks.” But China is officially run by Communists. Xi sure seems like a Communist. He recently gave an hour long talk on Karl Marx’s anniversary, talking about how amazing Marx was, and comparing Marx to Jesus. But Pillsbury talks very little, or not at all, about China’s Communist ideology. A rather striking and bizarre omission.
Another problem, his views on Assassin’s Mace are myopic. He never talks about the possibility that North Korea itself is their Mace. Further, despite the fact that he repeatedly quotes Chinese manuals which explicitly talk about using electromagnetic weapons — “The side with electromagnetic combat superiority will make full use of that Assassin’s Mace weapon to win naval victory” — he will only very briefly refers euphemistically to an “EMP generation” to attack us… Little or no mention of nuclear EMP attack. He keeps honing in on laser threats, or missiles to destroy our satellites, when it would take just a single nuclear EMP strike to achieve all the things that China says it wants to achieve w Assassin Mace.
So bizarre.