Not all wars involve blowing things up and killing people. Economic Warfare has been practiced for millenia, using tactics as simple as laying siege to cities or as subtle as dumping state-sponsored counterfeit currency into your enemy's banking system.
The USA is engaged in economic warfare with China. War in the middle east, the trade imbalance, and recent sabre-rattling about currency valuations all point to a long-term strategy of the United States attempting to delay or prevent the ascendency of China.
More after the flip...
Despite Bush's "Mission Accomplished, Hostilities Ended," messages, it's obvious that the USA is still fighting in Iraq.
This is despite the fact that the stated enemy, Saddam Hussain, is in custody; And that his replacement is a US-sponsored Government; and that there's ever-dwindling support for the war at home. The war has shifted into an insurgency, but that hasn't really changed the way it's being fought. The aims change, the enemy changes, but the war stays the same.
Does it matter that the US has successfully removed Hussain, and that there clearly aren't any WMDs, and that the original pretexts for the war have been shown to be tissue-thin? My belief is that no, it doesn't matter to the US at all. Continual warfare in Iraq for any reason at all is perfectly fine according to US foreign policy, because as long as the instability remains, the Iraqi oil industry will be crippled. And when the oil industry is crippled, it won't be selling any of its products on the global open market, so the global open market will be several percentage points smaller than it would be otherwise.
This is important, because products on the global open market can be bought by China. They have demand, they have money to spend, and they're perfectly prepared to buy up all the oil they need. China would like nothing better than to have an economy like the USA's, with economic expansion fuelled by cheap energy, with readily available plastic, with machinery running on diesel revolutionizing their manually-driven agriculture industries, with reliable electric power and with a transportation industry which facilitates the export of products from far-flung corners of their country.
All these things require access to oil. The more the USA can restrict the supply of oil to China, the more it can delay China's inevitable rise to domination of the global economy.
Any disinterested observer would be able to conclude that Iran is next. That's not because the USA doesn't like Iran's Government, nor is it because of human rights violations or nuclear ambitions. The reason the USA will invade Iran is to turn Iran into a decimated client-state just like Iraq, thereby removing Iran's oil supply from the reach of China as well.
This warfare doesn't need to go on forever either. As oil becomes more expensive, the leg-up which it can provide to China will become less significant. Do you think the motor industry in the United States would have become as powerful as it did if gasoline had always been $3 per gallon or higher? What about $10 per gallon? When the cost of using an oil-fuelled vehicle rises to the point where it's higher than the costs created by the inconvenience of using a horse, it'll make sense to use horses. If that threshold is reached before you've had a chance to develop an automotive industry, you'll never develop one.
That principle isn't unique to the automotive industry. Every possible use of oil will be affected in the same way. So to prevent a developing economy from building a plastics industry the USA doesn't have to restrict oil supply forever, they just need to restrict it until plastic is more expensive and less convenient than wood or bronze.
That goes a good way towards explaining the sabre-rattling about currency valuations in zenbowl's diary earlier today. It's not just about the currency, it's about the buying power which that currency represents. Do we want a wheelbarrow-load of yuan to be able to purchase one barrel of oil or 20 barrels of oil? The USA has one answer they'd like to see, China obviously has a completely different answer.
The USA can't attack China militarily, but they can attack them economically. They can strike blows against China which hardly anyone associates as a blow at all, because when people go broke or when provinces starve to death we don't often think about it being caused by coordinated state action.
But that's what it is. Watch the news for the next year or so, and look for the signs. The USA and China are entangled in an undelared economic war, and the next ten years are going to be nasty.