■" China Makes Its Move," op-ed by Richard Holbrooke, Washington Post, 27 May 2005, p. A27.

■"Entrepreneur Mines China's Demand For Steel Products: Mr. Forrest's Vast Ore Claims, Deep in Australian Desert, Draw Money and Questions; Buyers Said to Be 'Desperate,'" by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 27 May 2005, p. A1.

The number of people in the Pentagon who remain relieved that Richard Holbrooke never became Secretary of State are almost too many to count. The man has the capacity to piss people off like almost no one else among the Democrat foreign policy elite. And he manages this while using the sort of diplo-speak that shouldóunder normal circumstancesónever raise the slightest hackle among listeners.

This is one of those great op-eds that only someone of his generation of foreign policy experts can write: it describes much and does so accurately and still manages to say almost nothing of value. In my mind, only Kissinger writes stuff of equal caliberóand equal disutility. It reminds me of an old Talking Heads line: "You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything."

But at least the upshot has value: at the end he notes that there isn't much of a strategic coordination of U.S. government policy vis-‡-vis China. In that diagnosis he is dead on. Besides that counterintuitive "separate lanes" stuff (i.e., making a point to keep all our various bilateral issues with China separate from one another), this administration is clearly of two minds on China: some see the rising potential ally, others simply want to get on with the hot war they've been daydreaming about since the end of the Cold War.

To the administration's credit, the cooler heads have consistently prevailed, but now that Iraq's basically a non-issue security-wise, the Pentagon's debates over budget have simply moved onóor back, as it wereóto China. So the Chinese become the preferred foil again for those Big War elements on the Leviathan side of the house that want to keep their big-ticket items well funded. Leading this charge inside the Pentagon is clearly the navy, spearheaded by the increasingly irrevelant (and don't they know it) submarine community, which had ruled the Navy for most of the Cold War and resents being deposed much like the communists do in Russia still. For most of these guys, it's China or bust, and so we should expect the demonizing campaign to continue.

China will, of course, provide plenty of ammunition for this charge, what with its rising energy demand pushing it into all corners of the globe looking for resources. Just you wait, because soon intell agencies and military strategists will speak of America's growing "vulnerability" to the Chinese cornering certain strategic raw materialsójust like we once fantasized about the Soviets in Africa and the Middle East.