CHINA
AND THE US The lame duck and the
greenhorn By Henry C K Liu
The world's sole superpower is led by a
prematurely lame-duck president with an approval
rating in the low 30% range going into mid-term
congressional elections in the second and final
term of his administration.
Political
columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote on May 8 in the New
York Times: "To anyone who doubts the stakes for
the White House in this year's mid-term
congressional elections, consider that
Representative John Conyers Jr of Michigan, the
Democrat who would become chairman of the
Judiciary Committee if his party recaptured the
House, has called for an inquiry into the possible
impeachment" of the president.
Even President George W Bush's
own Republican Party elders
are reported to have
advised him to dump his law-breaking
neo-conservative vice president and his
over-reachingly hawkish
secretary of defense and to
replenish the entire burned-out White House staff
to try to preserve a Republican congressional
majority in November and to resurrect diminishing
chances of another Republican presidency in 2008.
Having gained the White House by the grace
of a politicized Supreme Court, Bush's first term
was defined by his God-sent mission of faith-based
"war on terrorism" in reaction to terrorist
attacks nine months into office and gave him an
instant war-leader, if not war-hero, aura that
swept him into a second term against an
ineffectual opponent.
The Battle of Iraq,
the second campaign of the open-ended holy war on
terrorism after Afghanistan, was won with
"catastrophic success", but the ensuing peace is
being lost equally catastrophically. The
continuing quagmire in the conquered nation after
three years of undermanned occupation is such a
catastrophic failure that it has reduced the
commander-in-chief of the occupation forces to a
leader with few allies around the world and to a
prematurely lame-duck president at home.
Terrorists and
terrorism Terrorist attacks are specific
acts by specific terrorists, while terrorism is a
broad, abstract mental fanaticism with no specific
pre-identifiable battleground or combatants until
after a terrorist act has been committed.
All suicide bombers are one-act
perpetrators who defy preemptive restraint. Most
of them do not know themselves when they will
cross the line from mental agitation to suicidal
action, or what and where targets would be
selected. The very definition of terrorism is
non-specific, multifaceted and controversial.
Different governments define terrorism differently
and, more important, terrorist groups are
identifiable only with varying pejorative
standards. Terrorism to some is liberation
theology for others. Terrorists to some are heroic
freedom fighters to others. Opposition to British
rule over the American colonies began with
terrorist attacks.
Improvised explosive
devices (roadside bombs) used by insurgents in
asymmetrical warfare are as legitimate as
remote-controlled cruise missiles in conventional
warfare. In one respect, the US "war on terrorism"
is officially an undeclared war within the context
of the US constitution, while the Islamic jihad,
even a jihad by the sword, when declared by a
recognized cleric is a legitimate holy war, a
precept of divine institution. Webster's
Dictionary defines terrorism as "1) the act of
terrorizing, 2) a system of government that seeks
to rule by intimidation, and 3) unlawful acts of
violence committed in an organized attempt to
overthrow a government". A terrorist is one who
adopts or supports a policy of terrorism with
action. State terrorism is frequently the midwife
of insurgent terrorism.
A war on specific
terrorists is arguably fightable by military means
provided sufficient resources, mostly manpower,
are committed, and the price of escalation is
accepted. But a war on terrorism is an
all-inclusive conceptual undertaking that even a
superpower does not possess adequate resources to
conduct, particularly if the fountainhead of such
super-power is the very flawed policies that
force-feed terrorism. A war on terrorism is a
conflict without clear terms of engagement, except
that the more is won on the battlefield the more
is lost in the hearts and minds of the target
population.
In a May 25 Washington press
conference held jointly with British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, Bush openly admitted a good
three years after having declared "mission
accomplished" in Iraq with the end of "major
combat operations" that his macho "bring 'em on"
remark in reference to Iraqi insurgents "sent the
wrong signal to people".
Just as the
Vietnam War deformed US foreign policy of global
anti-communism and paralyzed president Lyndon
Johnson's domestic policies of Great Society by
robbing him of international endorsement and
domestic political support, Bush's war on Iraq has
consumed the hallowed promise of his missionary
presidency both at home and abroad and provided
visible evidence of slow corrosive defeat in his
"war on terrorism".
The
greenhorn On the other side of the globe,
and the opposite end of the ideological spectrum,
the world's most populous nation and
fastest-growing economy is led by a political
greenhorn, at least by traditional Chinese
standards.
President Hu Jintao is a model
alumnus of the Party School of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), nurtured by a process
carefully designed to ensure an orderly
generational transition of the central leadership
to produce a catholic and versatile heir-apparent
acceptable to a wide range of ideological factions
within the world's largest and arguably most
complex political party.
Learning lessons
from the damaging experience of the Cultural
Revolution, in which the winner-takes-all struggle
for the correct ideological line ended with
unimaginable chaos and violence that threatened
the very future of the party, the CCP has since
adopted ways and means to smooth out the
leadership transition process and to reach orderly
resolutions of inevitable ideological and material
conflicts in a complex socio-economic-political
system that leave room for constructive
disagreement and operational compromise. In many
ways the CCP as currently constituted is a
functioning representative democracy within the
context of socialist politics.
Hu Jintao
became general secretary of the CCP Central
Committee in 2002 and was elected president of the
People's Republic of China on March 15, 2003. In
September 2004, he assumed the chairmanship of the
Central Military Commission. When the US-China
summit was originally scheduled for spring of
2005, Hu had officially held full rein of
leadership of China for less than a year at a time
when the nation was at a crossroads in the
deliberation on correct ideological evolution and
appropriate future policies.
After more
than two decades of headlong rush to transform
China from an autarkic centrally planned economy
into a limited open-market economy, Hu is now
leading a nation in the midst of fateful debates
about the most effective and balanced route toward
a modern harmonious socialist society. Autarky has
never been voluntary Chinese policy under
socialism but rather an externally imposed
sanction of the Cold War.
China's shift
toward market economy in the past two and a half
decades was not taken in isolation from world
trends. When Deng Xiaoping introduced the
"open/reform" policies in 1979, toward the end of
the Cold War, it was a rational response to a
world infatuated with the extravagant promises of
neo-liberal free trade. A quarter of a century
later, while such open/reform policies have
achieved spectacular results in bringing China
forward into a modern interdependent world, the
glaring resultant imbalances, such as excessive
dependence on exports, worsening income disparity,
regional development gaps, rampant official
corruption, serious environmental crisis and
near-total collapse of the social-service network
and safety net, are raising calls for rethinking
the wisdom of falling for the empty promises of
neo-liberal globalization.
There is no
disagreement among the youth who are destined to
shoulder the continuing task of national
reconstruction toward economic prosperity and
cultural renaissance on the need for further
opening/reform. The dispute is on the correct
definition and path of opening/reform: open to
neo-colonialism and reform toward social
inequality and moral decay, or open to assuming a
legitimate place as a strong and peaceful nation
in a world order of free sovereign nations of
equality and reform toward creative and scientific
socialist construction based on equality, justice
and freedom for all.
The perfunctory
summit This was the inauspicious backdrop
against which this year's US-China summit was
held. Neither leader was in a position to bring to
the summit new positions to resolve a range of
immediate and developing friction, or the bold
leadership necessary to ease emerging long-term
contradictions between a declining superpower and
a rising regional giant with fundamentally
opposing ideologies.
Already conveniently
postponed once by the Katrina hurricane crisis in
2005 to mark much-needed time with which to
resolve a diplomatic stalemate, the resurrected
summit this April still turned out to be a poorly
staged non-event between an unpopular US leader in
his final term of office and a Chinese leader who
is presiding over uncertain outcomes from
fundamental policy debates at home. Neither leader
carried the clear mandate necessary for the bold
leadership needed for a path-breaking summit of
long-range consequences, nor did either enjoy the
policy flexibility for achieving fruitful
diplomatic breakthroughs.
To appease
pervasive US hostility toward communism, China is
made to feel the need to pretend it has abandoned
the evil ideology, an artificial, self-defeating
posture in view of modern Chinese history. US
policy aims to channel China through "peaceful
evolution" toward the disastrous path of the
former Soviet Union, to implode toward neo-liberal
capitalism and open the country to neo-colonialism
along the model of postwar Japan and Germany as
subservient allies in a Pax Americana.
On
the other hand, China has been following a naive
foreign policy toward the US that is based on
fantasized US goodwill and fundamental friendship
temporarily obscured by misunderstanding. The
reality is that those in the US policy
establishment who are realists on China do not
expect to see communism receding, and thus any
rapprochement between China and the US cannot be
fundamental, only based on temporary expediency,
such as the current need to cooperate on the US
"war on terrorism". The fact is that communism
will continue to evolve as a political
institution, but those waiting for communism to
collapse in China will have to wait for a long
time, perhaps even forever.
Thus while the
"war on terror" is a distraction, the US continues
to see China as its major threat and enemy. Those
in Chinese policy circles who deny this basic fact
will pay a high price for their fantasy. An
appeasement policy toward belligerent US moral
imperialism, especially on the issue of
interference in China's internal affairs, most
glaring in the question of Taiwan on the pretext
of enhancing democracy, will only prevent
fundamental improvement of relations between the
two countries. The best that can be hoped for is
that the fundamental antagonism be managed into a
peaceful competition to avoid open military
conflict. Peace in Asia presupposes US
preparedness to live in peace with a communist
China.
Intense negotiation on the official
categorization and diplomatic protocol details of
the April summit dragged on until the last minute
over whether it was a state visit to seal
diplomatic breakthroughs or a working meeting to
address intractable conflicts, with both parties
more concerned with public relations impact on
domestic politics than achieving real progress on
improving bilateral relations.
Exhaustive
diplomatic efforts were expanded on mundane
protocol issues that have little long-range
consequences. The summit was ensnared in
short-term problems and issues that defy solution
unless long-range visions are clarified as
controlling factors. Alas, such long-range visions
were sadly missing in the publicly reported
official discussions, the absence of which was
camouflaged by the usual diplomatic platitudes to
create an image of a successful summit out of a
perfunctory one.
While both leaders
publicly touted the need for broad convergence in
strategic cooperation based on select operational
commonality in national interests, the two nations
remain far apart on specific issues as well as
broad world views and ideology. The US asserts
that the enlargement of democracy is the
fundamental basis of its foreign policy. China
also proclaims its desire for enhancing democracy.
Yet the two nations do not agree on what democracy
means in different nations and under different
historical conditions and socio-cultural contexts.
US culture celebrates extreme individualism while
Chinese culture puts priority on Confucian
hierarchical social harmony.
The US
promotes free trade and open markets as long as it
is other nation's markets. Free trade for the US
is not freedom to trade, but only trade not in
conflict with US policy of unilateral sanctions.
China is also committed to free trade but in
practice has been engaged only in selling cheap
labor and environmental pollution for dollars that
cannot be used at home. And the two nations are
racing headlong into confrontational disagreement
on the terms of fair bilateral and global trade.
Rising economic nationalism is changing the
domestic politics of both nations, with opposition
to job loss through outsourcing and escalating
trade deficits on the US scene, and opposition to
foreign control of Chinese enterprises and
hegemonic US market power on the Chinese side.
Fundamentally, China, like many other
nations, is beginning to see the US definition of
free trade as a pretext to interfere with the
economic sovereign authority of other nations.
Geopolitically, the Chinese model is being
received in the Third World as an alternative path
to development from the discredited US neo-liberal
trade system. The US is trying to persuade China
to become a belated "stakeholder" in the Pax
Americana, a declining system in which China, like
all developing nations, holds a pitifully small
and underprivileged stake.
China is
beginning to enjoy increasing popularity among the
nations of the world while the US image has been
in steady and rapid decline in recent years. The
one area in which China has a problem with other
nations is in its export trade sector, a sector in
which the US has been most influential in shaping
and where foreign capital dominates.
Non-proliferation Besides
differences in trade and economic relations, a
range of national-security issues present
themselves as both concerns and opportunities to
the leadership of both the US and China. Among
them the issue of non-proliferation of nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction sits
on top of the pyramid.
Every nation
supports the principle of non-proliferation, but
the US definition of the non-proliferation regime
is fatally flawed. Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, an
intergovernmental organization that is part of the
United Nations system, evoked a vivid image when
he said that for a nuclear superpower with tens of
thousands of warheads and the unimpeded means to
deliver them to all corners of the Earth to tell
other nations not to develop nuclear weapons "is
like dangling a lit cigarette from your mouth
while telling everybody else to stop smoking".
World nuclear non-proliferation must start
with the nations that already have such weapons
taking concrete steps toward getting rid of them.
Non-proliferation requires a rollback toward
disarmament as a first step. Despite post-Cold War
reduction, the United States and Russia together
still hold some 20,000 nuclear warheads in their
arsenals, and the US is working on developing new
weapons. There is already a mounting surplus of
enriched uranium and plutonium around the world
for military purposes, yet the "weapons countries"
continue to produce more.
China's alleged
military buildup is cited by the United States as
a justification for US military spending. Yet
China's air force does not have a single
long-range bomber, and according to a story in
Time in June 1999, its entire nuclear arsenal
"packs about as much explosive power as what the
US stuffs into one Trident submarine".
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in January 2005
in Foreign Policy: "Forty years after acquiring
nuclear-weapons technology, China has just 24
ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United
States. Even beyond the realm of strategic
warfare, a country must have the capacity to
attain its political objectives before it will
engage in limited war. It is hard to envisage how
China could promote its objectives when it is
acutely vulnerable to a blockade and isolation
enforced by the United States. In a conflict,
Chinese maritime trade would stop entirely. The
flow of oil would cease, and the Chinese economy
would be paralyzed." This is the basis of China's
bending backward to avoid a military confrontation
with the United States, the danger for which comes
entirely from US preemptive strategy.
ElBaradei characterized the US position on
non-proliferation as hypocritical and said the
alternative to genuine disarmament is seeing "20
or 30 countries with nuclear weapons. That would
be the beginning of the end" of non-proliferation.
Backing non-nuclear-weapon nations into a
defenseless corner, reinforcing their perceptions
of international injustice and national
humiliation, is a formula, he said, for seeing
more, not less, nuclear proliferation.
One
might add that preemptive strikes serve only to
accelerate the pace and strengthen the
rationalization for non-nuclear nations to embark
on nuclear armament. Yet David Sanger, White House
correspondent for the New York Times, reported on
June 16 from Crawford, Texas, the president's home
ranch, that Bush "directed his top
national-security aides to make a doctrine of
preemptive action against states and terrorist
groups trying to develop weapons of mass
destruction into the foundation of a new
national-security strategy".
After waging
a war to remove non-existent weapons of mass
destruction from Iraq, the US continues to try to
get other nuclear nations to pressure North Korea
and Iran to cease and desist with their
nuclear-weapons programs. Learning from the fate
of Iraq, North Korea has discovered that it
commands more leverage in dealing with the US by
claiming already to possess nuclear weapons than
to deny nuclear capability to ward off any threat
of preemptive attacks.
North Korea has
said it needs to develop nuclear weapons to
prevent a possible US invasion. Washington denies
intentions of attacking the communist nation in
one breath while it threatens the use of force in
the next. Nuclear experts believe North Korea has
enough radioactive material to make at least half
a dozen bombs. North Korean negotiators claim
their country already has operational atomic
weapons, but no tests have yet been detected to
confirm such an arsenal.
Many
non-proliferation specialists feel the US should
consider offering all non-nuclear-weapon countries
assurance against foreign attacks, both
conventional and nuclear, and provide them with
the fuels to develop the nuclear power plants they
need for peaceful economic development, rather
than continuing to pursue the economic and
military sanctions that have been in place against
these nuclear-capable countries for decades with
no deterrent effect.
Furthermore, there is
an urgent need to de-escalate the US penchant for
military solutions in the world security regime.
Security assurances to non-nuclear-weapon states
from the nuclear-weapon states are a sine qua
non requirement for non-proliferation.
Non-nuclear-weapon nations are not blind to the
fact that only nations without nuclear retaliatory
capabilities have been attacked via conventional
warfare by nuclear-weapon nations since the
beginning of the nuclear age. As for the nuclear
threat, if Japan had the atomic bomb in 1945, not
one atomic bomb would have been dropped on its
soil, let alone two. The US continues to refuse to
subscribe to the "no first use" principle, wearing
the dubious honor of being the only nation in
history that has used nuclear weapons in war, and
not just once for effect but twice for emphasis.
Arms control vs disarmament Arms
control is the deadly enemy of disarmament. When
disarmament is accepted as unachievable utopia,
arms control becomes the compromise solution. But
arms control implies that disarmament is
unnecessary by presenting itself as a regime that
makes armaments safe and benign.
The UN
Conference on Disarmament (UNCD), established in
1979 as the single multilateral disarmament
negotiating forum of the international community,
was a result of the first Special Session on
Disarmament of the United Nations General Assembly
held in 1978. The terms of reference of the UNCD
include practically all multilateral arms-control
and disarmament problems.
Currently the
UNCD focuses on: cessation of the nuclear arms
race; nuclear disarmament; prevention of nuclear
war; prevention of an arms race in outer space;
effective international arrangements to assure
non-nuclear-weapon states against the use or
threat of use of nuclear weapons, new types of
weapons of mass destruction and new systems of
such weapons, including radiological weapons; and
a comprehensive program of disarmament and
transparency in armaments. After almost three
decades, disarmament is still an impossible dream.
US Ambassador Eric Javits, speaking at the
plenary session of the 66-member UNCD, which met
in Geneva from January 21 to March 29, 2002, said
the US places international peace and security as
a primary goal, but national security is also
necessary and essential, as if the two goals were
mutually exclusive. Javits said on February 7,
2002, that for any arms control treaty to be
effective, the security of all states - termed
mutual advantage - is vital.
The effect
of September 11 The terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001, in New York and near
Washington had profound effects on the US national
psyche, with fundamental political repercussions
on foreign and domestic policy formulation.
On domestic policy, the US opted to
curtail sharply its century-old tradition of civil
liberty and personal privacy in the name of
homeland security. The admirable US tradition of
protecting the innocent at the risk of not
convicting the guilty has been largely abandoned.
The norm now is to err on the side of homeland
security. Ethnic profiling has been revived with a
vengeance.
On foreign policy, hijacked by
faith-based neo-conservative extremists, the US
has found a new enemy in the form of Islamic
extremism to replace its old communist nemeses of
the Cold War, the USSR and China.
History
may eventually cite the September 11 events as a
turning point in global geopolitical order with
unprecedented patterns of cooperation among
previously antagonistic governments. This is
because the US is no longer a safe haven exempt
from foreign attack (see Superpower vulnerability,
December 14, 2005). Thus the 2002 UNCD was of
significance because it was the first occasion in
which the US presented its post-September 11
posture on disarmament as a nation under siege.
On November 14, 2001, merely a month after
the terrorist attacks, Bush and Russian President
Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement in which
they declared that the US and Russia "have
overcome the legacy of the Cold War", adding that
"neither country regards the other as an enemy or
threat". The two presidents of the world's two
major nuclear powers cited their joint
responsibility to contribute to international
security, and went on to say that the US and
Russia "are determined to work together, and with
other nations and international organizations,
including the United Nations, to promote security,
economic well-being, and a peaceful, prosperous,
free world".
Although the word "terrorism"
was not mentioned, the intention was clear that
anti-terrorism, though the official definition of
which was not congruent in the mind of each
leader, was the motivating factor behind the new
spirit of co-existence.
Yet on December
13, 2001, another month later, Bush announced that
the US would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty, pursuant to its provisions
that permit withdrawal after six months' notice.
This was a complete reversal of nuclear-deterrence
scholastics that had evolved in the Cold War that
successfully prevented a nuclear holocaust though
five decades of superpower hostility. The idea
that both superpowers agreed not to undertake
defensive measures to neutralize any advantage of
a first strike by exposing themselves to certain
vulnerability to a counterstrike was a key factor
in stabilizing nuclear escalation.
In
withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, the US now claims
it knows with certainty that some states,
including a number that have sponsored terrorist
attacks in the past, are investing heavily to
acquire ballistic missiles that could conceivably
be used against the US and its allies and
protectorates, and this development is compounded
by the fact that many of these same states, not
content just to acquire missiles, are also seeking
to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear
weapons of mass destruction.
As I wrote
before the invasion of Iraq (War and the
military-industrial complex,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EA31Aa03.html
January 31):
Why should terrorists resort to
intercontinental ballistic missiles that are
costly and difficult to launch when a small
bottle of biological agent can do more damage at
a tiny fraction of the cost? A recent North
Atlantic Treaty Organization study shows that
the costs of conventional weapons ($2,000),
nuclear armaments ($800), and chemical agents
($600) would far outstrip the bargain-basement
price of biological weapons ($1) to produce 50%
casualties per square kilometer (prices at 1969
dollars).
Terrorism can only be fought
with the removal of injustice, not by
anti-ballistic missiles and smart bombs. It is a
straw-man argument to assert the principle of
refusal to yield to terrorist demands. It is a
suicidal policy to refuse to negotiate with
terrorists until terrorism stops, for the
political aim of all terrorism is to force the
otherwise powerful opponent to address the
terrorists' grievances by starting new
negotiations under new terms.
The
solution lies in denying terrorism any stake in
destruction and increasing its stake in
dialogue. This is done with an inclusive economy
and a just world order in which it would be
clear that terrorist destruction of any part of
the world would simply impoverish all, including
those whom terrorists try to help. The US can
increase its own security and the security of
the world by adopting foreign and trade policies
more in tune with its professed value of peace
and justice for all.
In other words,
by shunning unilateralism and hegemonic policies.
Al-Qaeda, a hydra-headed cell-like structure, can
be defeated only by enlisting the support of the
entire international community. That sympathetic
support was spontaneously extended by many after
September 11, but Bush frittered it away with his
unilateral killing rampage on innocent civilians
in the name of collateral damage.
When it
entered office in 2001, the Bush administration
was antagonistic about cooperative relations with
China and North Korea, and instead promised a
fundamental reorientation of US security policy
from the Cold War era to explore a new close
partnership with India, which had been an ally of
the USSR, and showed little enthusiasm toward
multilateral regional organizations such as the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and ASEAN
(Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Regional
Forum.
In his first State of the Union
address in 2002, Bush was forced to declare, after
labeling Iran, Iraq and North Korea an axis of
evil: "We must prevent the terrorists and regimes
who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons
from threatening the United States and the world."
He added, "In this moment of opportunity, a common
danger is erasing old rivalries. America is
working with Russia, China, and India in ways we
never have before to achieve peace and
prosperity."
This was a drastic policy
shift. Time magazine reported in June 2002 that
Bill Clinton's national security adviser Sandy
Berger and counter-terrorism deputy Richard
Clarke, in presenting their transition report to
Berger's successor Condoleezza Rice and her staff
in the first week of January 2001, had cited
al-Qaeda as the greatest threat facing the US as
Clinton left office. Rice thought otherwise and
identified China as the greatest threat. Bush
subsequently referred to China as a strategic
competitor, rather than a strategic partner as the
outgoing Clinton administration had done.
Withdrawal from the ABM Treaty permits the
United States to develop new means of shielding
itself against missile attacks, which enhances
temptation for the US to consider first strikes
against other nuclear nations. The US claims it
needs to update "means of dissuasion" to reduce
the possibility that missiles will be used by
hostile nations as tools of coercion and
aggression against it, more than just against a
stray missile or accidental launch.
Such
"means of dissuasion" are also an essential
element of a strategy to discourage potential
adversaries from seeking to acquire or use weapons
of mass destruction and ballistic missiles - by
removing the assured possibility that such weapons
would have military utility. With US withdrawal
from the ABM Treaty, the deterrence doctrine based
on mutual assured destruction (MAD) became
history, and the notion of a winnable nuclear war
became US policy.
In mid-December 2001,
technical specialists from the United States met
with their Chinese counterparts to explain that US
withdrawal from the ABM Treaty was not aimed at
China, notwithstanding earlier anti-China rhetoric
that accompanied the withdrawal deliberations. The
US wanted now to discuss the possible restart of a
broad strategic dialogue with China in the context
of new US strategic policy based on the "war on
terrorism".
The US further explored
strategic issues and appropriate methods for
enhancing mutual understanding and confidence in
the context of increasingly cooperative relations
between the US and China when Bush visited Beijing
at the invitation of then Chinese president Jiang
Zemin on February 21, 2002, exactly 30 years after
president Richard Nixon's historic visit to China
to exploit geopolitical opportunities arising from
the Chinese-Soviet split. Unfortunately, the Bush
visit in 2002 did not yield any breakthroughs of
historical significance despite US awareness of
the need for Chinese cooperation on its "war on
terrorism".
In some ways, such as on the
issue of US interference in Chinese internal
affairs over the problem of Taiwan, the Bush visit
represented reversals from the commitments made by
Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger
three decades earlier to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai
on US withdrawal from Taiwan. Until those
commitments are meticulously honored, US-China
relations remain devoid of a solid foundation.
Next: US Unilateralism
Henry C K Liu is chairman of a
New York-based private investment group. His
website is HenryCKLiu.com.
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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