| |
America's confused China policy
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
With Washington focused on invading Iraq and containing
North Korea, its policy toward China appears ever more
schizophrenic.
On the one hand, President George
W Bush hailed China as an "ally" in the war on terrorism
during a visit by outgoing Chinese President Jiang Zemin
to his Texas ranch in October, while senior officials
echo the friendly rhetoric at every opportunity.
In a major policy address last month, for
example, Richard Haass, the head of the State
Department's influential policy planning staff referred
to the relationship as one of a "modern partnership", a
phrase that came provocatively close to the almost
evoked the "strategic partnership" propounded by former
president Bill Clinton that was so strongly derided by
Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Even
the Pentagon - albeit reluctantly - has moved to
normalize military ties that were suspended after the
crisis that followed the collision of a US spy plane
with a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea in April
2001. In November, a US Navy vessel docked at a Chinese
port, while last month the Pentagon hosted a
high-ranking Chinese military delegation for talks on
bilateral security issues.
On the other hand,
the anti-Beijing hawks in the administration have made
clear they still consider China an emerging threat that
will have to be confronted sooner or later. They are
doing what they can to restrict military transfers to
Beijing while upgrading US military ties with Taiwan.
"It is a very confusing picture," admitted one
administration official this week.
In fact, the
two tendencies appear to reflect now-familiar splits
within the administration between the hawks, led by
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President
Dick Cheney, on the one hand, and the realists, led by
Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the other.
Powell in turn is supported by analysts at the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as former top
aides to former president George H W Bush, who has
himself long supported a more conciliatory policy toward
Beijing where he once served as Washington's top
diplomat.
"I think you are seeing this
administration walk with one foot in China and one foot
in Taiwan at this point," said Michael Fonte, an
international consultant who works with the ruling
Democratic People's Party (DPP) in Taiwan. "You've got
people who actively want to engage China as a partner
now because of its position at the UN, its ties to North
Korea, and its role in the war on terrorism, for
example. At the same time, you have people who are far
more confrontational toward China and see Taiwan as a
strategic asset in what they call the 'East Asian
littoral' south of Japan that could play a key role in
containing China militarily."
While the
pro-engagement forces appear to have the momentum,
particularly after Jiang's visit to Bush's Crawford,
Texas, ranch in October, the hawks cannot be counted out
by any means.
That was illustrated by a series
of events over the past week beginning with the
appointment on December 31 of Therese Shaheen as the new
chair of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the
unofficial body that has handled US-Taiwanese ties since
the normalization of relations between Beijing and
Washington in the late 1970s.
Shaheen, who is
married to Rumsfeld's chief of staff, Lawrence DiRita,
has favored high-tech arms transfers to Taiwan that will
make its military and intelligence capabilities more
compatible with Washington's. That is a major priority
of the strongly anti-Beijing "Blue Team", a group of
prominent Washington think-tankers, lobbyists and
Congressional staffers both inside and outside the
administration who have promoted close military ties
between the United States and Taiwan and the inclusion
of the island in Washington's missile-defense plans for
Asia.
A major financial contributor to Bush's
campaign and inaugural celebration, Shaheen has also
worked with Barbara Ledeen, founder of the Independent
Women's Forum (IWF) and an influential player in
Republican Congressional politics, whose husband,
Michael Ledeen, serves on the congressionally appointed
US-China Security Review Commission. In a report
released in July, the commission, which is dominated by
Blue Team loyalists, called for tightening controls on
US exports to China, including a system for monitoring
all US investments in China to assess their potential
risks to the US economy and national security.
To the degree that Shaheen pushes for such
policies, she could clash with Douglas Paal, the
director of the AIT in Taipei who, as a senior East Asia
advisor in Bush's father's administration, is considered
closer to Powell. Paal has come under fire from such
members of the Blue Team as Arthur Waldron and Gary
Schmitt, the director of the neo-conservative Project
for the New American Century (PNAC), who have criticized
his encouragement of closer economic ties between Taipei
and Beijing.
While the hawks appear to have
prevailed on Shaheen's appointment, three other recent
events on the arms- and technology-transfer front have
marked advances by the anti-Beijing crowd.
Last
week, the State Department accused two leading US
aerospace companies - Boeing and Hughes Electronic - of
no fewer than 123 violations of export laws in
connection with the transfer of satellite and rocket
data to China during the 1990s. The violations could
cost the two companies an unprecedented US$60 million,
as well as licenses to export other sensitive technology
to China in the future.
The action was taken by
the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which reports
to Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton, a former lobbyist
for Taiwan and arch-anti-Beijing hawk whose State
Department appointment was secured at the insistence of
Cheney and Rumsfeld despite Powell's reservations.
At the same time, the administration also
secured Israel's agreement to halt all arms sales and
dual-use technology transfers to China on the grounds
that some of its more recent sales, including anti-radar
drone missiles and airborne warning and control aircraft
(which was aborted at Washington's request two years
ago), could be used in an invasion of Taiwan or against
US forces that attempted to defend the island.
Severing the increasingly high-tech military
connection between China and Israel, which boosted its
arms sales to China substantially during the 1990s after
Washington imposed a ban on US military sales to Beijing
in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, has
been a key goal of the Blue Team for several years.
Even staunch supporters of the current
right-wing government in Israel have argued that the
Jewish state was making a strategic mistake by providing
advanced military technology to Beijing, especially
given growing pro-Taiwan sentiment among Republicans in
Congress.
On top of this hat trick of wins came
a fourth with news from Taipei that Washington will send
army personnel to participate in Taiwan's annual Han
Kuang, or Chinese Glory, drills this coming spring for
the first time since normalization of diplomatic ties
with Beijing.
The report about US participation
originally suggested that the US Army personnel would be
there to help simulate an evacuation of US nationals
from Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, but this
was denied by Deputy Defense Minister Chen Chao-ming.
Other sources told reporters, however, that US personnel
will help provide intelligence about Chinese troops
across the Taiwan Strait. On Tuesday, the Taiwanese
press reported that Washington has delivered a new
communications-monitoring system that is likely to be
used in the upcoming exercises.
Anti-Beijing
forces inside the administration are also being boosted
by what appears to be an effort by their friends in the
press to turn the current nuclear crisis over North
Korea into an opportunity to embarrass and pressure
China.
Both William Safire and Charles
Krauthammer, columnists for the New York Times and the
Washington Post, respectively, have argued in the past
week that the key to resolving the North Korea crisis on
Washington's terms lies with pressuring Beijing, in
Safire's words, to "get its client state, its satellite
really, in line".
"We should go to the Chinese
and tell them plainly that if they do not join us in
squeezing North Korea and thus stopping its march to go
nuclear, we will endorse any Japanese attempt to create
a nuclear deterrent of its own," wrote Krauthammer, who
also cited a recent report that China had sent 20 tons
of chemicals used to extract plutonium from spent
reactor fuel to Pyongyang, presumably making them
complicit in Pyongyang's nuclear program.
"If
our nightmare is a nuclear North Korea, China's is a
nuclear Japan," noted Krauthammer, echoing a similar
argument that appeared two days before as an editorial
in the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
