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China hawk settles in neo-cons'
nest
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Neo-conservatives have scored a new victory in the
administration of US President George W Bush with the
hiring by Vice President Richard Cheney of a prominent
hawk on China policy.
China specialist and
Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg has been
named deputy national security advisor and director of
policy planning on Cheney's high-powered, foreign-policy
staff headed by I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, one of the most
influential foreign-policy strategists in the
administration.
Both Friedberg and Libby, as
well as Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and 21
other prominent right-wingers, signed the 1997 founding
charter of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), which called for the adoption of a "'Reaganite'
policy of military strength and moral clarity".
Friedberg also signed another PNAC letter to
Bush on September 20, 2001, which called for the "war on
terrorism" to be directed against Iraq and other
anti-Israel forces in the Middle East, in addition to
al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And the
professor wrote a chapter on the threat posed by China
in Present Dangers, a 2000 book edited by PNAC
co-founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan that also
included chapters by other leading neo-conservative
hawks, including former Defense Policy Board chairman
Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency
chief James Woolsey.
The significance of his
appointment lies both with Cheney's and Libby's
influence in foreign policy-making and the fact that
Friedberg will be the only recognized China expert in
such a senior position.
"There really haven't
been top people under Bush who knew much about China,"
says John Gershman, an Asia specialist at New York
University. "He's the first one."
But according
to Gershman, Friedberg "fits clearly into the group that
has been dominant in the administration" since the
September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
"He's a China-threat person without being
hysterical about it," Gershman continues. "But his
appointment is a clear sign that the cooperation that
has emerged between the US and China on the war on
terrorism and North Korea is entirely tactical, and that
Cheney is still inclined to see China as a strategic
competitor."
The appointment, which will take
effect on June 1, comes at an interesting moment in the
evolution of Sino-US ties under Bush, who came into
office with a significantly harsher view of Beijing than
his predecessor, president Bill Clinton.
An
early test came in the spring of 2001 after a collision
between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet that
destroyed the latter and forced the US plane to land on
Hainan Island, where its crew was detained for several
weeks.
The incident turned out to be an early
indication of the profound split within the
administration between right-wing hawks centered in the
offices of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Secretary of State
Colin Powell, whose successful negotiation of the crew's
return eventually defused a crisis that was avidly
stoked by neo-conservatives, especially Kristol and
Kagan, whose Weekly Standard magazine generally reflects
the views of the administration's hawks.
Bush
himself appeared to mellow on China after the crisis and
a subsequent meeting with then-president Jiang Zemin, a
process that was furthered after September 11 when
Washington actively sought Beijing's cooperation in the
"war on terrorism".
But despite the detente,
Rumsfeld, presumably with Cheney's backing, held up
resumption of military-to-military ties between the
United States and China that were cut off for more than
one year during the crisis.
In addition, the
Pentagon has been trying to persuade a reluctant Taiwan,
which China considers a renegade province, to buy a slew
of weaponry, including destroyers, submarines and
aircraft, which the administration approved for sale to
the island almost two years ago.
According to
last Friday's Wall Street Journal, Washington is now
offering Taiwan its most advanced anti-missile system,
the Patriot-3, a sale, that, if consummated, is almost
certain to result in a Chinese protest.
The
Pentagon has also been eagerly courting the Indian
military over the past year in what one recently leaked
document revealed by Jane's Foreign Report depicted
China as "the most significant threat" to both the US
and India, and called for Delhi to become a "vital,
component of US strategy" vis-a-vis China, particularly
now that Washington is reassessing its military
alliances with Japan and South Korea. In this context
Friedberg's appointment gains significance.
In
his writings over several years, Friedberg has depicted
China as a "strategic competitor" to the United States
that will almost inevitably challenge Washington's own
political and military preeminence in the region.
In a 2000 article titled "The Struggle for
Mastery in Asia", in the leading neo-conservative
monthly Commentary, Friedberg wrote, "over the course of
the next several decades there is a good chance that the
United States will find itself engaged in an open and
intense geopolitical rivalry with the People's Republic
of China (PRC)". While such a situation is not
completely inevitable, he says, it is "quite likely".
"The combination of growing Chinese power,
China's effort to expand its influence, and the
unwillingness of the United States to entirely give way
before it are the necessary preconditions of a 'struggle
for mastery'," he goes on, adding that actual military
confrontation could be either slow to develop or could
happen as a result of "single catalytic event, such as a
showdown over Taiwan".
One of the major problems
that US policymakers will face is balancing the
interests of "powerful business lobbies" - which
Friedberg calls "pro-PRC lobbying groups" - in the
United States determined to expand access to China's
market and labor force against strategic concerns caused
by Beijing's desire to expand its influence in the
region. He also expresses concern that China's growing
economic power in Asia will enable it to exert influence
on the region's governments as part of its "strategic
competition".
Moreover, writes Friedberg, China
"will be a very different kind of strategic competitor
from the Soviet Union", given its size, dynamism and
relative openness, all of which could work against
Washington's ability to contain it in the coming years.
"The thrust of what he writes is the
inevitability of confrontation with the US or of an
attempt to displace the US in Asia," says one former
senior State Department Asia specialist. "The problem
with this is his automatic presumption of a clash rather
than a more careful assumption that confrontation may
not be inevitable."
Indeed, Friedberg's
assumptions were even questioned by Zalmay Khalilzad, a
senior Bush strategist who has handled relations with
Afghanistan and Iraq but has supported a policy of both
engagement and containment - or "congagement" - toward
China.
In a published reply to Friedberg's
Commentary article, Khalilzad criticized his assumption
"that the current Chinese regime and/or its likely
successor will pursue regional hegemony. This is by no
means inevitable," Khalilzad said, arguing that it was
also possible that the relationship would evolve into
"mutual accommodation and partnership", particularly if
Beijing made democratic reforms.
But Friedberg
thinks this unlikely. "Regimes in transition from strict
authoritarianism to greater political openness", he
replied, "have historically been prone to bouts of
aggressive nationalism".
While Washington should
continue to foster trade and investment - though not in
key strategic areas - the priority, he wrote, should be
placed on "serious, sustained, and unchecked efforts to
strengthen our alliances, improve our military
capabilities, and maintain a balance of power in Asia
that is favorable to our interests. Engagement, yes; but
from a position of strength."
(Inter Press
Service)
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