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THE STRUGGLE FOR
HARMONY
Part 1: Myths and realities about
China
By Henry C K Liu
Aaron
L Friedberg, a 47-year-old professor of politics and
international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at
Princeton University, joined US Vice President Dick
Cheney's staff as a deputy national security advisor and
director of policy planning on June 1 for a term of one
year, taking a public-service leave from the WWS. The
appointment has renewed speculation about
neo-conservative cooption of US foreign policy in
general and China policy in particular.
Friedberg had been at the WWS since 1987, and
was the director of the School's Center of International
Studies at the time of his departure for Washington. He
has authored two books, one on US Cold War strategy and
a prize-winning book on Britain's decline at the
beginning of the 20th century. His areas of expertise
include international relations, international security,
foreign policy and defense policy. Friedberg has been a
fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, the Norwegian Nobel
Institute, and Harvard University's Center for
International Affairs, and he has served as a consultant
to several agencies of the US government. From 2001-02
he was the first holder of the Henry Alfred Kissinger
Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at
the US Library of Congress.
Ideas that have
harmed mankind include racism, imperialism, militarism,
chauvinism, fanaticism, extremism, intolerance and
hubris. These ideas have of late enjoyed resurgence in
the form of pugnacious catch phrases such as Francis
Fukuyama's "The End of History" and Samuel P
Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations". Now, the
distortion of A J P Taylor's "Struggle for Mastery", a
book title that would have been more accurately phrased
as "The Penalty for the Struggle for Mastery", has
joined the growing lexicon of neo-conservatism.
In an article in the November 2000 issue of
Commentary, an influential neo-conservative monthly,
titled "The Struggle for Mastery in Asia", Friedberg put
forth the proposition that "the United States will find
itself engaged in an open and intense geopolitical
rivalry with the People's Republic of China (PRC)", and
that "there are reasons to believe it is already under
way". This article was written at the time of the
presidential election of 2000, and the victory of George
W Bush since has given it policy significance. While the
article was written almost a year before the attacks of
September 11, 2001, the US response to which has
affected its subsequent tactical posture toward China,
the neo-conservative theme of China being a strategic
competitor to US hegemony remains operative for
long-range policy. Friedberg's appointment to Cheney's
staff after the second war in Iraq as deputy national
security advisor and director of policy planning
reinforces this view.
Friedberg's proposition is
based on his openly stated assumption that the United
States, while seeking to satisfy China's legitimate
ambitions, will not be willing to abandon its own
present position of preponderance in Asia or to
surrender pride of place to China. To permit a
potentially hostile power to dominate East Asia would
not only be out of line with current US policy, it would
also mark a deviation from the fundamental pattern of
the United States' grand strategy since at least the
latter part of the 19th century. These are the necessary
preconditions of a "struggle for mastery" in Asia,
Friedberg concludes.
Friedberg adopted the
phrase "struggle for mastery" from the title of a book
by British revisionist historian A J P Taylor, The
Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918,
notwithstanding Taylor's theme that it was the failure
to prevent a struggle for mastery in Europe that had led
to World War I. Taylor's concept of a struggle for
mastery in Europe describes a world of a century ago. It
is questionable whether the concept of mastery can
remain operational in the contemporary world where
slavery is, or at least should be, an anachronism.
Responsible nations no longer quest for mastery of any
kind. In the 21st century, civilized nations struggle
for harmony. Therein lies the fundamental fallacy of
Friedberg's analysis.
It is predictable that
neo-conservatives would appreciate Taylor, who, like
many neo-cons, came out of radical left roots. While a
student at Oxford, Taylor was an active supporter of the
Communist Party of Great Britain. In the summer of 1925,
Taylor, together with his mother and her political
protege Henry Sara (a founding member of the Communist
Party of Great Britain), visited the Soviet Union in the
midst of its New Economic Policy phase. Taylor saw
Lenin, heard Grigori Zinoviev speak, and met Lev Kamenev
and Maxim Litvinov. Back in Oxford, however, Taylor's
involvement with communism ended because of his
disillusionment with the party's inaction in the General
Strike of 1926. Taylor also provided some famous quotes,
including "Freedom does not always win."
Taylor's The Origins of the Second World
War, written between 1957 and 1961, challenged the
then-accepted view that Adolf Hitler had been a uniquely
evil plotter of war by presenting a view of Hitler as an
opportunist who had enjoyed much popular support in
Germany and Austria. Hitler pushed for reform of the
Versailles Treaty to secure concessions that would
placate Germanic sentiment. The unraveling of the
absurdities of the Versailles Treaty could have been
managed rationally, as in the early stages of British
and French appeasement over the Rhineland and Germany's
anschluss of Austria. After Munich, in 1938,
having appeased Berlin over more contestable territorial
issues over the Sudetenland, the British changed their
stance and decided to fight over Danzig and the Polish
Corridor, where the German case for revision was
stronger. Great Britain and France had up to that point
vacillated between policies of appeasement and
resistance. The result, Taylor maintained, was a war in
Europe that nobody wanted and that personally dismayed
Hitler. World War II began simply as an accident. Hitler
never imagined that the democracies would actually go to
war over Poland, especially because London and Paris
could do almost nothing to defend the Poles. And in 1773
Poland had been the first nation in the European system
to be partitioned out of existence without a war, a
source of great satisfaction to the participating
powers: Russia, Austria and Prussia.
Taylor
separated the Third Reich's racist monstrosity from its
geopolitical maneuvering. His statement "in principle
and doctrine, Hitler was no more wicked and unscrupulous
than many a contemporary statesman" outraged many in the
liberal community who thought state racism implemented
with death camps as being monstrously evil. Taylor did,
however, say of Hitler: "In wicked acts he outdid them
all." During the Cold War, Taylor advocated an alliance
between Britain and the Soviet Union. "Anyone who claims
to learn from history," he wrote with breathtaking
assurance in 1967, "should devote himself to promoting
an Anglo-Soviet alliance, the most harmless and pacific
of all possible combinations."
Taylor argued
that war was not caused by rival ideologies of fascism
and communism and liberalism, nor righteous ideals vs
evil Hitler, nor any blueprint for world conquest by
Hitler the megalomaniac. Rather, war was the result of
blunders, opportunism and failure of balance-of-power
realpolitik. Taylor believed "human blunders shape
history more than human wickedness". Hitler was a
"traditional European statesman" seeking to restore
Germany. He "simply leaned on the door hoping to gain
entrance and the whole house fell in". Hitler's
anti-Semitism might have been excessive but it was not
unique; he merely took advantage of the prevalent mood
throughout Europe and the United States.
Germany, growing and expanding since Otto von
Bismarck in the 1870s, had been the dynamic element in
European geopolitics. Article 231 of The Covenant of the
League of Nations reads like a victor's hymn: "The
Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany
accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for
causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and
Associated Governments and their nationals have been
subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them
by the aggression of Germany and her allies." Showing
his British bias, Taylor thought Article 231 correct to
blame Germany for World War I. Yet he observed
accurately that Hitler's revanchism had much popular
support in Germany. Hitler and Benito Mussolini reacted
to the postwar actions of the other victorious powers.
There was no mastery control; there was no global plot.
France and England pursued their own separate national
interests. Poland was weak, corrupt, elitist, and an
artificial re-creation of the Big Four at Versailles.
The United States was predominantly isolationist
and abrogated its responsibility of Article 10, which
states: "The Members of the League undertake to respect
and preserve as against external aggression the
territorial integrity and existing political
independence of all Members of the League. In case of
any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger
of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the
means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled." The
US did not enter World War II until after Japanese
attack of Pearl Harbor and declared war on Germany on
the ground on the Axis alliance and not because of
German hostility toward the United States. Once in the
war, despite the indignity suffered unexpectedly at the
hand of allegedly inferior Japan, the US naturally took
care of Europe first, a fact that Asians have not
forgotten.
The Taylor thesis is deterministic
that the Second World War was inevitably caused by peace
settlements of the First World War, with German
nationalism as the driving force.
Notwithstanding that Taylor's views fit poorly
the neo-conservative penchant for preemptive strikes
against a convenient "axis of evil", Friedberg sees the
struggle for mastery in Asia as one between the United
States, a morally narcissistic established superpower,
and China, a rising power with alleged moral defects.
Friedberg predicts "a period of gradual deterioration
punctuated by one or a series of crises (like the one
that followed the accidental American bombing of the
Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999), no
one of which might seem in itself to be of overwhelming
importance but which, taken together, could culminate in
a much more contentious relationship".
Friedberg
challenges the belief that trade leads to peace and that
mutual economic exchange forges a shared interest in
good relations and a powerful disincentive to conflict.
He proposes a fallback strategy in the event
"engagement" with the PRC through international trade
and investment to fuel economic growth does not speed
democratization in China to make it less likely to use
force or threats against other democracies, including
the United States. In that event, the United States will
be faced with a challenge with which it has not had to
cope in more than a century: a strategic rival that is
economically and technologically dynamic, is deeply
engaged in the world economy, and whose total output may
come eventually to approach America's own.
Friedberg notes that China has placed heavy
emphasis on the development and deployment of missiles:
short-, intermediate-, and long-range, nuclear and
conventional, cruise and ballistic. He acknowledges that
China's interest in missiles may be due in part to the
fact that, as opposed to manned long-range aircraft,
submarines, or surface naval vessels such as carrier
task forces, they are relatively cheap, comparatively
simple, and potentially very effective. While the
Chinese air force and navy continue to work at acquiring
and improving conventional military systems, missiles
are the sole credible long-range firepower projection
assets China can deploy. Yet Friedberg ignores the
obvious fact that as China subscribes to the
no-first-use doctrine, its intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs) function only as deterrence against US
first strikes. No serious strategic analyst has
suggested that Chinese strategic missile capability is
offensive in nature. Moreover, rocketry had been
originally invented in China long before the West copied
from China the secret of gunpowder. Wernher von Braun
did not invent it and the United States can hardly claim
a monopoly on it.
The United States has been
developing and moving toward the deployment of both
national and theater ballistic-missile defense systems
(NMD and TMD), driven by technological imperative, with
the excuse of countering first a Soviet threat, then
threats from "rogue" states, and now as defense against
Chinese missiles. Experts have characterized such
systems as a technological solution looking for a
geopolitical problem. Chinese strategists have no option
except to assume that US missile-defense programs are
designed to neutralize Chinese deterrence against US
first strikes. Friedberg suggests that a TMD system
deployed on or around Taiwan could blunt missiles,
China's most potent threat against the island, perhaps
opening the way for moves toward formal Taiwan
independence. No Chinese government will use a nuclear
weapon on Chinese soil on Chinese citizens, including
Taiwan. Nevertheless, China has repeatedly made clear
that a move by Taiwan toward independence will trigger a
decisive and immediate military response regardless of
cost, but it will not be a nuclear option. The
Kuomingtang (KMT) on Taiwan is also opposed to
independence and there is every expectation that a
runaway independence movement fanned by US extremists
would bring about a third round of cooperation between
the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party to stop it with
force. If the US 7th Fleet intervened under such
conditions, its combat effectiveness would be
neutralized by Chinese asymmetrical means that focus on
disrupting its communication capabilities.
All
through the Cold War, US military strategy was based on
deploying its power-projection superiority for defensive
purposes to support containment of global communist
expansion. After the Cold War, as the sole remaining
superpower, the United States has restructured its
military as an offensive force to support hegemonic aims
around the world. Friedberg observes that in Asia, the
US today is able to project conventional air and naval
power virtually unimpeded anywhere in the western
Pacific, including all along China's eastern seaboard
and, conceivably, hundreds of kilometers inland. Its
strategic nuclear reach covers the entire globe. This
Friedberg acknowledges as obvious. What Friedberg misses
is that China does not view such power-projection
capability as a direct threat, for the simple reason
that the US still lacks any credible capability to
prevail in a land war in Asia, short of massive nuclear
attacks to massacre one-fifth of the world's population.
Friedberg warns that at present and for the
foreseeable future, the ability of the United States to
sustain air and naval operations in the western Pacific
depends heavily on access to a small number of
facilities in Japan and South Korea. If these (plus a
handful of others in Singapore, Australia, and perhaps
in the Philippines and Guam) can be destroyed militarily
or rendered unusable diplomatically, America's ability
to project power will fall precipitously. The
difficulties experienced during the second war on Iraq
in the use of US bases on foreign territories for the
support of US war plans are causing new worries in the
Pentagon.
Friedberg observes that China can
acquire weapons to sink US surface ships, and especially
the aircraft carriers on which the United States now
relies so heavily. In most conflicts involving US and
Chinese forces, these vessels would have to operate at
the far western edge of the Pacific and might therefore
be especially vulnerable to attacks by enemy cruise
missiles, torpedoes, and intelligent mines. Such
anti-ship weapons could be unleashed in large numbers
from swarms of relatively inexpensive platforms,
including small submarines and surface ships, and
remotely piloted aerial vehicles. Anti-carrier attacks
by land-based ballistic missiles are another
possibility.
More challenging than sinking
carriers but of potentially even greater battle impact
would be the capacity to disable US intelligence,
communications, and navigation satellites and to disrupt
its information systems, both in the region and beyond.
In contrast to China, which in conflicts close to home
would enjoy the benefits of interior lines of
communication, the United States would have to control
its forces at great distances from home and across a
vast theater of operations. Even temporary disruptions
in communication could have devastating and potentially
disastrous consequences in modern war. Friedberg thinks
this is something that has not escaped the attention of
Chinese planners. US reliance on communications,
reconnaissance, and navigation satellites is a potential
Achilles' heel, highly vulnerable to ground-based
lasers, jammers, and kinetic kill vehicles. In other
word, Friedberg sees a technological imperative in
US-China conflict.
Friedberg forgets that for
China, defeating US power projection in Asia means
defending Chinese territory against airborne attack by
US forces, not a strategy for invasion of the US
homeland. Toward this end, China has apparently been
devoting considerable resources to developing a
nationwide air-defense system capable of locating,
tracking, and intercepting aircraft and cruise missiles,
including those with stealthy characteristics. Improved
coastal defenses, perhaps including
antisubmarine-warfare ships, attack submarines and
aircraft, could also force US cruise-missile-launching
submarines to operate at greater distances from China's
shores, thereby reducing the array of targets they could
cover. Yet all these threats to US force projection
presuppose US initiation of hostilities against China.
China will rely on asymmetrical warfare as a defense
strategy against the US attack. China has no offensive
war plan against the United States. This fact appears to
have escaped Friedberg.
US containment policy
against China during the Cold War was executed through
defense alliances with Asian allies against potential
attack by China. Until very recently, the United States
enjoyed the comfort of virtual immunity from direct
Chinese attack on US soil. Thus the cost to the US in
taking on China to defend US allies never struck home.
The development of Chinese long-range strike
capabilities and, in particular, a visible and
substantial increase in China's ability to hit the
continental United States with nuclear weapons could
raise profound questions in Asia about the continuing
utility of the US nuclear "umbrella" for its allies.
Would the US risk Los Angles to save Tokyo? Would US
bases in Japan enhance Japanese security or risk it if
such bases were used by the US to attack China?
During the Cold War, US forward bases were
protected by deterrence threats on Soviet forward bases.
China has no forward bases outside of China to perform
such a function, thus exposing US forward bases on ally
soil to the political vulnerability of uncertain US
willingness to risk attacks on the US homeland to
protect them.
Without a national missile-defense
system in the United States, the deployment by China of
a fairly limited number of sea- and land-based mobile
missiles will effectively guarantee it a secure
second-strike capability. As things now stand, the small
Chinese ICBM force would take hours to make ready for
launch, and it could conceivably be destroyed in a
preemptive attack by the US, perhaps one involving only
the use of precision conventional weapons. A larger,
more diverse, and more mobile force of solid-fueled
rockets would be far less vulnerable. Such a force could
conceivably also be used to conduct limited attacks on
US military targets rather than simply lobbing a few
large and inaccurate warheads at a handful of US cities,
Friedberg warns.
Friedberg sees a potential
Chinese threat as having a similarity with anticipated
Soviet development of intercontinental bombers and
ballistic missiles in the early phase of the Cold War.
US policymakers were long preoccupied with convincing
their North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies,
the Soviets, and perhaps themselves that the United
States would indeed intervene in a European war even if
in doing so it risked nuclear attack on its own soil.
Just as much as what the United States did in Europe was
motivated by the desire to strengthen deterrence in the
face of increasing Soviet intercontinental-strike
capabilities, the US now faces the same challenge in
Asia. China might try to use doubts about US resolve on
the part of its allies as a way of undermining the
United States' position in Asia.
Friedberg
reminds readers that in 1995, a high-ranking Chinese
official was widely quoted as having told a visitor that
the United States would not come to Taiwan's rescue
because, in the end, Americans cared more about Los
Angeles than Taipei. More recently, during the run-up to
the March 2000 Taiwanese presidential election, China's
official armed-forces newspaper warned that, unlike Iraq
or Yugoslavia, China is "a country that has certain
abilities of launching strategic counterattack and the
capacity of launching a long-distance strike ... It is
not a wise move to be at war with a country such as
China, a point which the US policymakers know fairly
well also."
Friedberg acknowledges that these
threats were evidently intended to give pause to anyone
contemplating possible conventional strikes on Chinese
forces or territory in the context of military conflict
over Taiwan. Yet he speculates that in the future,
Chinese strategists might issue more generalized
warnings, perhaps suggesting that the growth in their
striking power means that the United States will have to
contemplate sacrificing Washington to save Tokyo, or
Seoul, or Sydney, or Manila, or Singapore. Such comments
would be directed more at Asian than at US audiences,
and their aim would be not so much to deter the United
States as to raise questions about its ability to deter
China. The ultimate aim would be to raise doubts in the
minds of Asian observers as to the continuing value of
US security commitments.
Yet Friedberg needs to
allow that security analysts of US allies are not
children. They have long contemplated the logic of this
issue without any suggestion from China. Such doubts
exist on their own logic, and not as a result of Chinese
psychological warfare. There is no rational basis to
contemplate a Chinese invasion of Japan, Korea,
Australia, the Philippines or any other nation. China
has not declared those who are not with it are against
it. US bases in these countries would be subject to
Chinese attack only if the US attacked China from these
bases.
What Friedberg misses in this line of
thinking is that Chinese reunification of Taiwan is of a
fundamentally different character from the fantastic
prospect of China attacking Japan. Taiwan is an internal
affair of China, a leftover issue of a civil war that
remains unresolved only because of US interference. None
of the Asian allies of the United States is prepared to
risk a war with China over Taiwan. On this issue, even
official US policy is ambiguous, with commitment only to
help Taiwan defend itself, stopping short of direct US
intervention. Chinese action on Taiwan is not an act of
international aggression.
Outside of the Taiwan
issue and US fantasy about regime change in China,
military rivalry between the United States and China
falls into the category of idle speculation. Even in its
most radical, belligerent phase, China never
contemplated any role in bringing about regime change in
the United States. That is an issue for US voters to
decide. The same cannot be said of US policy toward
China or other nations. Thus the whole world knows who
is the belligerent party in US-China relations.
Friedberg sees the political or diplomatic realm
as the third dimension of a possible future struggle in
Asia between the US and China and the central issue of
this particular contest would be the making and breaking
of alliances. As in the military arena, Friedberg sees
the United States as starting with a number of very
considerable advantages: it enjoys good relations with
most countries in East Asia and has alliance ties or
other security connections with many of them, including
most of the wealthiest and most powerful. China, on the
other hand, is seen as having problematic relationships
with a number of major players in both East and South
Asia and its closest collaborators (North Korea,
Myanmar, Pakistan, and Russia) as suffering from
profound domestic liabilities.
Friedberg
exaggerates the political affinity between the US and
its Asian allies. Such "good relations" were imposed by
Cold War geopolitics through US interference in the
internal affairs of many Asian nations in the name of
anti-communism. The United States is a non-Asian culture
with alien values that most Asians find strange and
intrusive. The US position in Japan remains that of
victor in war, and the United States has inherited much
of the European colonial system throughout Asia in the
name of free markets. General Douglas MacArthur, acting
as de facto occupation emperor, created the postwar
Japanese one-party political system. Real democracy was
aborted early during the US occupation to prevent the
rise of socialism in Japan. The remnants of the South
East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which was
disbanded in 1977, cannot be resurrected easily from a
defunct anti-communist alliance into an anti-China
alliance.
Friedberg sees the United States as
also benefiting from what is, for the moment at least, a
major geopolitical advantage: the possible threat posed
by the sheer magnitude of its material power is offset
to a degree by its remoteness from the heart of Asia.
Because it is far away, the US is less menacing than
China, which is nearby and thus potentially
overwhelming. Indeed, as China's capabilities grow,
there may be a strong tendency on the part of the other
Asian states to draw closer to one another, and to the
United States, in order to counterbalance Chinese power
and preserve their own independence, Friedberg hopes.
But experience has taught Asian nations that
distance has not prevented US hegemony in the region in
the decades after World War II. Distance only keeps US
doctrinal policymaking in Washington from being tampered
with in appreciation of the reality of the region. The
reason the United States feels welcome in Asia is
because many regimes friendly to it have been installed
through US hegemonic interference. Since the 1997 Asian
financial crisis, which caused the fall of several Asian
governments, the US system has found itself on the
defensive from Japan to Indonesia and from South Korea
to Malaysia. More and more nations in Asia are viewing
the Chinese model as a potential for strong growth and
independence.
Friedberg thinks power-balancing
is not automatic and inevitable. Thus the United States
cannot afford to sit back and let nature take its course
on his theory of natural centrifugal force against
China. He warns that the societies of Northeast and
Southeast Asia also have long historical experience with
Chinese preponderance, and they could choose to live
with it again in the future. This is especially likely
if the only alternative appeared to be a period of
protracted and dangerous rivalry between China and the
United States. Moreover, if the United States appears
weak and vacillating, or if its withdrawal from the
region begins to seem inevitable, these countries may
conclude that they have little choice but to cut the
best deal they can with China.
Friedberg
concludes that the aim of Chinese diplomatic strategy,
therefore, will be to turn America's geographical
remoteness from an advantage to a disadvantage,
weakening existing US relationships and preventing the
formation of new ones, feeding doubts about US resolve
and staying power, and making China's rise seem both as
inevitable, and as unthreatening, as possible.
China's strategy is not well understood by US
analysts, including Friedberg, who are frequently
fixated exclusively on US perspectives. For example, the
view that China wants the United States out of Asia is
totally unfounded. If anything, Chinese strategy expects
and accepts a perpetual US involvement in Asia as long
as it does not predispose itself as inherently hostile
toward China. This posture parallels those of other
Asian nations that would not like to see their friendly
relations with the United States as incurring a price of
collateral hostility toward China and consequently
soliciting reactive Chinese hostility toward them. Thus
no Asian nation, including Japan and South Korea and
China itself, sees benefits in US-China conflict.
The United States would pose itself as a threat
to the security of Asian nations if its presence should
invoke Chinese hostility on host nations. A cordial
relationship with China is indispensable to US claims on
its legitimate national interest in Asia. The US system
has many positives and also many faults. The same is
true with the Chinese system. But that is no reason to
let moral imperialism raise its ugly head to preempt the
prospect of regional harmony and world peace.
Friedberg discerns that Chinese leaders could
transform their country's long-standing but largely
rhetorical opposition to bilateral military alliances
into a central feature of their foreign policy. In the
1970s and 1980s, the Chinese were willing to accept that
America's Asian alliances served the useful purpose of
countering Soviet "hegemonism". During the 1990s, China
preferred that Japan continue under US tutelage rather
than being left free to expand its power and pursue its
own objectives. But, as has already begun to happen,
deteriorating US-PRC relations and stepped-up efforts at
US-Japan security cooperation will cause Chinese
strategists to re-examine their permissive position and
ultimately to take a much tougher, anti-alliance stance.
At the same time, deterioration in US-China relations
creates uneasiness in Japan, South Korea, and even
Australia.
The campaign against US hegemony and
US cultural and economic neo-imperialism is by no means
exclusively Chinese. Seeking friends among those in Asia
(and beyond) who feel they have suffered at the hands of
US corporations, US-led international institutions,
and/or US efforts to enforce conformity with US views on
political liberties and human rights, has become an easy
task worldwide because the adverse effects of US-led
globalization are by now undeniable. At the same time
that it seeks to gain the benefits of greater
integration into the world economy, China has yet to
emerge as a leading critic of the ills of globalization
and a leading proponent of various kinds of regional (as
opposed to global and hence US-dominated) institutions.
Friedberg even suggests that Chinese policy
might even take on a racial aspect, perhaps appealing to
those who share ethnic and cultural characteristics
across East Asia or, more generally, making the case
against "the West" and for "Asia for the Asians".
Friedberg must realize that very few Asians need
convincing that the United States is a racist culture,
for without exception, all Asians who have had personal
experience in the West, including the US, have
experienced incidents of overt prejudice. China is
highly sensitive to the danger of "big-nationism",
(daguo zhuyi), and the presence of Americans in
Asia will defuse anti-Chinese sentiments. The principal
theme behind Chinese foreign policy has always been that
all countries, big or small, are sovereign equals in the
community of nation states. Asia for Asians can include
Americans if Americans consider themselves Asians. The
opposite of Asia for Asians does not translate into Asia
for Americans.
Friedberg anticipates that China
will no doubt become an even more engaging participant
in multilateral security dialogues and other forums in
Asia, using them to convey the image of a good
international citizen and an open, unthreatening power.
Active Chinese participation will naturally want to
ensure that multilateral mechanisms cannot be used
against the PRC's interests. It is a puzzle why
Friedberg feels this is a threat to the United States.
Friedberg thinks China might also begin to advocate new
institutions that will exclude "non-Asian" powers and
seek "local" solutions to regional economic,
environmental, and security problems. But this is a
threat to US interest only if the US considers itself a
non-Asian nation because of its traditional Eurocentric
fixation. For the United States to protect its interests
in Asia, it must begin to see itself as a bi-coastal
country facing both the Atlantic as well as the Pacific
and act accordingly. The US is not a European nation,
but it has an Asian presence physically. In this
respect, both the US and Australia have the same problem
of being foreigners in their own region.
Friedberg thinks that China's strictures against
bilateral alliances notwithstanding, China will also
attempt to develop its own "strategic partnerships",
both in Asia and beyond. In some cases (as in its
current dealings with Russia, Israel, and a number of
European countries), China's goal will be to obtain
military hardware and advanced technology. In others
(as, most likely, with Pakistan), the PRC will be
supporting the enemy of an enemy (India). Yet bilateral
alliance is not required for arms purchase, only money.
To underwrite the cost of armaments, most arms-producing
nations will sell arms to all comers except specific
direct enemies. As for China's relationship to Pakistan
and India, the matter is much more complex than a
simplistic "enemy of my enemy is my friend" calculation,
involving the policies of the US and Russia.
Friedberg suggests that in order to circumvent
US efforts to apply economic sanctions or technology
controls, China may hope to cultivate a much closer
relationship with a more independent and perhaps openly
anti-American European Union. In the Persian Gulf
region, it may align itself more openly with Iran as a
way of deflecting US attention and scarce military
resources from East Asia, and in order to ensure its own
access to oil. In continental Southeast Asia (especially
Myanmar and Thailand), it may use threats and
inducements to gain access to facilities for its own
military forces or to deny access to the forces of its
rivals. In Central Asia, it may work to establish client
regimes that will protect oil pipelines and control
Islamic groups that might otherwise foment discontent
among China's own non-Han minorities. Yet all these
options are made necessary only by US hostility toward
China, not intrinsically China's own doing. At any rate,
from the perspective of all the nations mentioned above,
China is only a peripheral issue when it comes to their
own relations with the United States.
Finally,
Friedberg suggests that while China will probably
continue to shun any pretension to global power, it may
provide assistance to states or non-state actors around
the world that see themselves as being opposed to the
United States. Like the Soviet Union before it, albeit
more for geopolitical than for ideological reasons,
China could become a low-key but important supporter of
rebel movements, "rogue states", and terrorist groups
throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Central
and Latin America. This suggestion borders on the
lunatic fringe. While the United States has been engaged
in all manner of covert destabilization schemes around
the world, some of which have turned around to bite the
hand that fed them, China's record on rejecting
terrorism is immaculate. As for the sale of missile
technology to states that temporarily suffer disapproval
from the US, logic would suggest that while the United
States continue to supply arms to Taiwan, it loses all
credibility in its demand on China to stopping selling
arms to anybody.
But it is in East Asia that
Friedberg thinks Chinese strategists will most want to
focus attention, aiming first to secure their
continental "rear areas". Toward this end, China will
work hard to maintain a good relationship with Russia
and to avoid being drawn into debilitating conflicts in
Central Asia. In South Asia, although China will
probably opt to continue its present policy of
supporting Pakistan to distract India, it could also try
to take India out of the larger strategic equation by
offering a spheres-of-influence arrangement that would
leave India dominant on the subcontinent in exchange for
its continued nonalignment. These observations by
Friedberg, while not particularly profound, have all
been made inoperative by events after September 11,
2001.
Next: Imagined danger
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New
York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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