Page 1 of
2 US
learns hard lessons of Asia
'pivot' By Peter Lee
The real action in Sino-US relations this
week was not the predictable China-bashing in the
third election debate between US President Barack
Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney in
Florida on October 22: it was the little-noticed
concurrent visit to Asia of a high-powered team of
retired US diplomats.
The team, a
bipartisan affair consisting of Richard Armitage,
Stephen Hadley, James Steinberg and Joseph Nye,
had a tough task.
With sanction from
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as a
quasi-official delegation, these Asian-affairs
worthies were called on to demonstrate that the
Obama administration's strategy for Asia - the
famous "pivot" of military forces, diplomatic and
economic initiatives, and strategic attention -
can deliver effective diplomatic engagement with
the People's Republic of China, and
not just produce a
threatened and angry Chinese panda.
The
team's task is probably impossible - which is
probably why it is being undertaken by a group of
retirees and not snub-sensitive government
officials. The PRC is in no mood to support US
pretensions to being the only, indispensable
honest broker in the region. Beijing wants to
punish the United States for the pivot, which it
sees as nothing more or less than a tilt away from
China.
These are tense times for "the
pivot". The PRC is testing the US strategy in what
appears to be an unexpected way: leaving the US
alone and selectively beating up on US ally Japan
on the issue of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. This
is an eventuality the United States does not seem
to have planned for.
At the end of
September, in a lengthy interview with senior
fellow Mike Chinoy at the University of Southern
California East Asia Center, Kurt Campbell made
the case for the pivot as a savvy piece of US
statecraft.
Campbell is a Japan hand. His
elevation to the post of assistant US secretary
for East Asia - and the later departure from the
State Department of China hand James Steinberg -
was seen as the manifestation of an important
shift in the Obama administration's strategic
thinking vis-a-vis the PRC.
China was no
longer viewed optimistically as a rising power
whose liberal democratic evolution would track its
runaway economic growth, albeit with a lag of a
few years. Multiple disappointments from climate
change to North Korea to currency valuation
persuaded the Obama administration that, for
practical purposes, the PRC had to be handled as
an authoritarian state whose elite is
constitutionally unsympathetic to the United
States and its aims.
Dealing with China,
in other words, was not a matter of appealing to
common values and interests; instead, it demanded
carrots and sticks. Exit James Steinberg and, from
the National Security Council, Jeffrey Bader. And
enter Kurt Campbell, and the pivot.
In his
September interview, Campbell makes the pitch for
the pivot as a win-win for China and the planet,
in a reassuring, measured baritone I associate
with a funeral director selling a fine casket to a
rich and flustered widow. Campbell makes the
obvious point that China's nervous neighbors would
welcome a US "return to Asia".
He also
makes the somewhat more debatable assertions that
the pivot was designed with China's well-being in
mind, that multilateralizing China's bilateral
territorial spats in the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations was an initiative to help out
Beijing, that the US rapprochement with Myanmar
wasn't about China, and Air-Sea Battle, the plan
for conventional-warfare Armageddon against the
PRC, was simply an expression of the US Navy's
"centuries-old" natural rambunctiousness.
In turning to the awkward issue of
"sovereignty disputes" - the PRC's clashes with
neighbors emboldened by the pivot - Campbell
opined hopefully that China's leaders recognized
the overriding importance of maintaining good
relations with the United States and would
therefore look beyond the current
unpleasantnesses.
As he put it:
Our sense is that
[president-in-waiting Xi Jinping] is a person
that's committed to continuing a strong
relationship between China and the United States
... [prospective premier] Li Keqiang ... was
very clear on his determination to keep US-China
relations on a steady course ... So I think we
have some confidence that the leadership will
follow through accordingly ... Still, we think
it is profoundly and deeply in China's interest
to maintain a good relationship with the United
States ... and we think cooler heads will likely
prevail in that assessment during the next
leadership cycle [to get underway in November]
... [1]
Beyond Campbell's confidence
that the Chinese leadership would consider it
absurd to try to go toe to toe with the United
States, there was probably reliance on a (to the
United States) virtuous cycle that would kick in
if China did push back.
It would seem that
the PRC's freedom of action would be constrained
by the fact that overt Chinese pushiness would be
counterproductive, driving allies closer to the
United States, further isolating the PRC and
strengthening the case for the pivot.
A
perfect plan ... not.
I do not believe
that Campbell and company reckoned with the PRC's
evolutionary adaptation to the serial island
provocations committed by Vietnam, the Philippines
and Japan, or its determination to make a stand
against what it sees as an unambiguous US exercise
in containment.
Having learned its lesson
about Western command of the diplomatic and
international trade battlefield in the first
humiliating dust-up over Captain Zhan Qixiong and
the disputed Senkaku / Diaoyu islands in 2010, the
PRC switched to a strategy of using domestic
popular demonstrations and boycott to deliver an
economic and political mugging to Japan.
As an indication of China's resolve in
this matter, it should be remembered that the
central Japanese government's purchase of the
Senkakus was conceived in large part as a
conciliatory act, to deny the China-bashing
xenophobe Shintara Ishihara the chance to buy the
islands and use them to engage in serial
provocation against China.
At this
juncture, perhaps considering that the Obama
administration had little appetite for a hot China
conflict in the middle of the presidential race,
the PRC decided to seize upon the act of the
purchase and whip up popular anger to mete out
harsh if calibrated punishment to Japan's
interests inside China, while eschewing official
actions that could be construed as military or
economic aggression against Japan or the world
free-trade regime.
At the Chinese Foreign
Ministry, it's all Diaoyus all the time. The
regime is making it clear that it will not back
down on the issue regardless of what foreigners
might say about the damage to China's regional
standing, its economy, or its future as the
world's beloved cuddly soft-power panda.
These economic hostilities, while damaging
to Chinese interests, are certainly not welcome to
Japan. In a generally bleak economy, it is
impossible to untangle the Senkaku factor from
other international trade and investment issues.
However, Japanese exports to China dropped
14.3% year on year in September, contributing
(together with a disastrous drop in exports to the
euro zone) to only the second monthly trade
deficit for Japan in the past 30 years. Japanese
manufacturers are reportedly holding back on China
investments, for understandable reasons; time will
tell if this harms China, or simply opens up more
opportunities for non-Japanese competitors. In any
case, the impassioned argument over the
uninhabited Senkakus isn't doing Japan's
corporations a world of financial good. [2]
In 2012, by its carefully delineated
domestic move against Japan, the PRC has cast the
United States in the unwelcome role of helpless
giant, unable to bring its military might, its
prestige or its domination of crucial multilateral
diplomatic of financial institutions to bear on
Japan's behalf.
So the superhero league of
retired and rusticated diplomats was summoned from
think-tanks and stately manors to jet to Tokyo and
Beijing.
The team included two
Republicans: Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of
state under George W Bush and a close associate of
former secretary of state and chairman of the
joint chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and Stephen
Hadley, another Bush administration official but
with more of a neoconservative bent and touted as
a close adviser to Mitt Romney on foreign affairs.
The two Democrats were James Steinberg,
the ex-Obama administration China hand, and Joseph
Nye, liberal think-tanker and creator of the "soft
power" concept.
In Tokyo, their mission
was to advise the Japanese government that there
would be no dramatic US lurching on China matters
even if Romney is elected president.
Since
Romney has promised to go harder on China than
President Obama, one can assume the purpose of the
bipartisan delegation was to communicate to the
Japanese government that it should not expect any
upgrade in US military or diplomatic backing for
Japan's Senkaku position if Mr Romney becomes
President Romney.
Perhaps the team was
also able to pass the message to Liberal
Democratic Party president Shinzo Abe. With the
government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda
showing a mere 18% approval rating, Abe - who
threw his own gasoline on the Senkaku fire
recently with a public visit to the Yasukuni
Shrine - has a good chance of becoming prime
minister again next summer, if not earlier.
Armitage had already provided an
interesting - and, to Japan, not very positive -
take on the Senkaku issue in an interview with The
Japan Times in early October, indicating that the
US government, when given the opportunity, did not
treat Japanese claims very seriously:
According to Armitage, the US
decided not to take sides on the issue after the
reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control in
1972, as Washington was asked by both [mainland]
China and Taiwan at that time not to recognize
Japanese sovereignty over the islets.
[3]
The delegation also had the
pleasure of addressing resurgent Okinawan fury at
the US military presence - a fulcrum upon which
the US pivot depends - as uproar over the gang
rape of an Okinawan girl by US servicemen,
opposition to the deployment of Osprey vertical
takeoff and landing aircraft, and festering anger
at the foot-dragging over the promised relocation
of US forces highlighted the real-world political
price of an ivory-tower strategic gambit, one that
posited that only China would bear the real costs
in a zero-sum stare-down with the United States.
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