Republican extremes threaten
Sino-US ties By Benjamin A
Shobert
It remains unclear which should be
less of a surprise: that an insipid anti-Islam
film made by an evangelical Christian extremist
provoked riots across Muslim countries, or whether
the US Republican Party found this cause somehow
to blame President Barack Obama for under-reacting
in the aftermath and misunderstanding what should
be made of the Muslim outrage.
While right
now is silly season in US politics, the 2012
presidential election has been marked by a number
of important and unflattering distinctions from
past elections.
The most important
distinction of this election cycle from those in
recent memory is the tortured extremes Republican
nominee Mitt Romney had to embrace to convince his
own party that he was
trustworthy. If elected,
whether he will govern from the middle, as most
political commentators assume, or continue to be
captive to vocal sections of his base who distrust
him remains to be seen. What is known is that to
get this far, Romney has had to move further
toward political extremes on such issues as China,
Iran, the Middle East in general, and the role of
government in American life.
If he loses,
the Republican Party is likely to double down and
become even more orthodox in the belief that what
cost it the election was a candidate who lacked
conviction. If he wins, the hard right of the
party is going to hold Romney to his campaign
statements. Today, the adults in the room choose
to believe these distinctions are only political
theater; the fear is they could tomorrow become
actual policy.
Whether intentionally or
not, President Obama's approach to governing has
turned the modern Republican Party on its head. It
is difficult to distinguish where the philosophy
of government is different between the two parties
based only on the major legislative achievements
of George W Bush's presidency versus those of
Obama. This partially explains the rise of the Tea
Party as a protest against what its members see as
the intrusion of classic liberalism and
progressive politics into Bush's supposedly
conservative policies. An honest appraisal of both
presidencies would admit that in terms of their
respective views of government, they are more
alike than they are different.
In the
aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, many of
the stabilizing actions taken in the last
Republican administration were continued or
renewed by the current Democratic one. With the
exception of having stopped violations of the
Geneva Conventions, the current Democratic
presidency has embraced the fundamental tenets of
the Republican administration's "war on terror".
Guantanamo is still open. The Patriot Act remains
a vibrant part of how the US polices itself, much
to the chagrin of civil libertarians and classic
liberals. The traditional liberal answer to
solving America's health-care crisis - single
payer - was eliminated and the historical
conservative answer - mandatory private insurance
and healthcare exchanges - was implemented
instead.
Each of these illustrates the
ways in which the Democratic Party has embraced
conventional conservative thinking.
Rather
than rejoicing over the many areas in which
Republicans can clearly show they moved popular
opinion so effectively as to force the Democratic
Party to embrace traditionally conservative
positions, the move to the right by Democrats has
left Republicans unsure of how to respond.Instead
of celebrating their success forcing the
opposition to follow them, Republicans seem intent
on marking out increasingly extreme positions on
economic policy, social issues, and foreign
affairs.
If the Democrats of today are
yesterday's Republicans, what are the Republicans
of today? Whatever the answer, one thing remains
clear: They will be marked by increasingly
strident opposition and recalcitrance, even if the
policies they resist now are ones they not too
long ago advocated themselves.
Nowhere is
this more obvious than in foreign policy.
President Obama may have in effect taken foreign
policy off the table as an issue that
traditionally favored Republicans. By showing that
a Democrat can still act forcefully, as he has
done in Libya and with the significant expansion
of drone strikes across the world, he has
countered a common refrain among swing voters that
Democrats cannot be trusted with America's foreign
policy.
Given the chance to recognize
Obama's change is a victory for the sort of
actions Republicans have recently supported, the
modern Republican Party instead feels threatened.
Its response to this fear is to mark out
increasingly vapid and extreme ground, the sort of
which if enacted in actual policy versus only
political rhetoric could upend the world as
severely as the various dystopian scenarios from
America's real and imagined enemies.
If
this realignment leaves America's policies in the
Middle East precariously positioned, it has the
potential to be absolutely devastating for US-Sino
relations.
Historically, regardless of
which party was in control of the White House,
both could be counted on to have reasonably
consistent policies towards China. The executive
branch has been the stoic and stable counter to
the more reactionary Congress. The latter has
frequently acted in ways that have strained
relations between the two countries through poorly
thought-out legislative acts. Now, the Republican
Party appears to have a candidate for the White
House who is willing to echo China's critics in
Congress.
Whether or not Romney wins, if
Obama's foreign-policy tendencies in general
suggest his willingness to follow the Republican
Party, what can China expect from either a Romney
administration or a second Obama one?
Whether Obama, and the Democrats at large,
have followed the Republican Party toward the
center because of a genuine re-evaluation of their
political ideology or this adjustment has been
necessary to stay politically viable is unclear.
What can be said with certainty is that the
Democrats have largely followed the Republicans'
lead.
If the Republican Party now feels
hostility toward China is politically necessary,
in particular viewing China's rise as a threat to
the US, then will Democrats follow? After all, the
latter group has one of the strongest bases of
voters in organized labor who have a long and
terse relationship with globalization in general,
and China specifically. Whatever adjustment it
might be for a Democrat president to take a less
accommodating position toward China, it would be a
very small and widely accepted change as viewed by
many traditional Democratic constituencies. US
politics has become unmoored from any governing
ideology other than winning the next election.
That naked pursuit has set in motion two very
dangerous trends.
First is the tactic of
being even more extreme to court disaffected and
vocal sections of the US electorate. This plays
into America's over-saturated media culture, where
politicians who learn how to use bombastic
rhetoric have an inherent advantage over more
thoughtful leaders who urge temperance, balance,
and an appreciation of complexity.
Second
is the idea that whatever means are used to
consolidate political power are justified. This
partially explains the poorly timed and genuinely
empty response by Mitt Romney's campaign in the
aftermath of ambassador Chris Stevens' death in
Libya.
Absent grounding political
ideologies - for liberals the idea that government
has a role to play in shaping culture and contest,
for conservatives the necessity of individual
responsibility to solve social problems - both
parties wander, leveraging short-term
opportunities to make the other look bad instead
of working toward meaningful policy changes.
The consequence of this for US-China
relations is troubling. US politics may have
already reached the moment where economic
anxieties are so high, and political solutions so
out of reach, that blaming China is the path of
least resistance for both parties. If so, 2012
will be marked as the year when the Republican
Party determined to double down and become even
more hostile toward China, and the Democrats chose
to follow.
Benjamin A Shobert is
the managing director of Rubicon Strategy Group, a
consulting firm specialized in strategy analysis
for companies looking to enter emerging economies.
He is the author of the upcoming bookBlame
China and can be followed at www.CrossTheRubiconBlog.com.
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