(DV) Eland: Coexisting with a Rising China

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Coexisting with a Rising China?
by Ivan Eland
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 12, 2005

The Bush administration is often guilty of running a reckless, overly militaristic foreign policy but deserves qualified praise for its recent dealings with China. The Chinese have requested—and the United States has accepted—a regular dialogue at senior levels to discuss security, political, and possibly economic issues. But the administration must go farther than merely symbolic meetings in accepting China’s rise—it must translate that new-found respect into real world actions.

Unlike the Bush administration’s threatening behavior to smaller countries, such as Iraq and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the bark of the Bush administration’s policy toward the nuclear-armed China has always exceeded its bite. President Bush took office and stridently labeled China a “strategic competitor,” but then a few months later essentially apologized and paid ransom to get back a U.S. flight crew and spy plane, which was harassed and damaged by Chinese fighters in international airspace. Subsequently, after 9/11, China and the United States have been cooperating more closely.

Improved relations between the two powers are a very positive development for global security. Regular high-level meetings are important for two reasons. First, such talks provide a forum for two nuclear-armed powers to nip tensions or problems in the bud before they turn into crises. Second, and most important, such meetings signal that the status quo superpower has respect for the rising East Asian power. Prior to 1914, Britain failed to acknowledge the new prestige of a rising Germany, one contributing factor to the horrific and unnecessary First World War. China, with a rapidly growing economy and a huge population, desperately wants to be recognized as a great power by the United States and the world.

Unfortunately, in international relations, talk is fairly cheap and the Bush administration will have to follow such meetings with real world changes in policy. Like most rising powers, China will want a regional sphere of influence to enhance its security. Given China’s history of being carved up by imperial powers, it will probably be relentless in pursuit of a wider security buffer. Any move toward attaining this goal, however, will be seen as a threat by the informal, hyper-extended U.S. empire.

In fact, the United States is already running a covert neo-containment strategy to counter China’s rising power. The U.S. government has augmented its network of military bases and alliances in Asia that surround China. The United States has transferred more naval assets into the already powerful U.S. Pacific Fleet and, under the banner of fighting terrorism, opened seemingly permanent bases in Central Asia to the west of China. The United States has also tightened its military alliance with Japan, China’s chief East Asian rival, and improved relations with India and an increasingly autocratic Russia—two nations that could also act as counterweights to a rising China. These developments simply amplify the power of the many existing U.S. military facilities throughout the region, as well as U.S. formal alliances with South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines, and informal alliances with Singapore and Taiwan.

The administration’s tightening of the informal alliance with Taiwan is one of the scariest aspects of U.S. foreign policy—even more unnerving than its invasion of small, sovereign nations, such as Iraq. Although the Chinese have only 20 nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States, while Washington has thousands that could strike China, Taiwan remains an emotional political issue for China. In fact, Taiwan is so important to China, that in a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, no guarantee exists that China would back down in the face of U.S. nuclear superiority. While Taiwan should be lauded for enhancing the freedom of its people, the U.S. government is foolish to risk the safety of American citizens (and others around the world) in a potential nuclear exchange to protect Taiwanese democracy.

Although China is an autocratic state, it still has legitimate security interests. The United States would be smart to show some empathy with those concerns. In recent years, as the United States has become alarmed at China’s expanded military spending, the Chinese have also become alarmed at large increases in the U.S. defense budget and U.S. attacks on the sovereign nations of Serbia and Iraq. Many Chinese see the threat of an expanding U.S. empire that aims at encircling China and preventing its legitimate rise to great power status.

To lessen such perceptions and reduce the chance of conflict between the two nuclear-armed nations, the United States should retract its forward military and alliance posture in Asia, including repudiating any implied commitment to defend Taiwan. With large bodies of water as moats and the most formidable nuclear arsenal in the world, the United States hardly needs a security perimeter that stretches across the entire Pacific Ocean to protect it from China. If the United States continues to maintain an outdated Cold War-style empire, it is bound to come into needless conflict with other powers, especially China.

Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward Germany, the United States should take a page from another chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the fledging United States to rise as a great power, knowing both countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that separated them. Taking advantage of that same kind separation by a major ocean, the United States could also safely allow China to obtain respect as a great power, with a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable sphere of influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well need to mount a challenge. However, at present, little evidence exists of Chinese intent for such expansion, which would run counter to recent Chinese history. Therefore, a U.S. policy of coexistence, rather than neo-containment, might avoid a future catastrophic war or even a nuclear conflagration.

Three seemingly unrelated recent events highlight the imperial nature of the Bush administration's foreign policy: U.S. F-16 sales to Pakistan, the creation of an office in the State Department to plan for future U.S. military interventions in developing nations and the indefinite detention in Guantanamo prison of a German man held on the basis of secret evidence that even U.S. intelligence disputes.

Ever since his second inaugural address, President Bush and his surrogates have launched a grandiose campaign that claims to “democratize” the world. Of course, one of the glaring exceptions to the administration's rhetoric, demonstrating the cynical opportunism of the whole policy, is the U.S. coddling of the Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf. During a period of increased post-9/11 U.S. support, Musharraf has actually made Pakistan less democratic. When Musharraf assumed the civilian presidency, he promised to abandon the post of chief of the Pakistani armed forces, but has failed to step down. Instead, he has tightened his grip on power in Pakistan, winked at and protected the world's worst nuclear smuggling ring emanating from his country, and conducted a half-hearted effort to round up Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda suspects, who are likely on Pakistani soil. The United States has decided to reward such unacceptable behavior with the sale of F-16 fighter jets.

Unfortunately, the end result in Pakistan could resemble that of the Shah's Iran in the late 1970s. Excessive weapons purchases from the United States, buttressing repressive policies by the Shah, caused sluggish economic growth and widespread anti-U.S. sentiment, leading to the overthrow of the Shah by radical Islamic forces. A similar outcome in Pakistan would be even worse, because the radical Islamists would control nuclear weapons.

But the U.S. sale of these sophisticated aircraft to a precarious third world autocrat may not be the worst of it. The nuclear-armed Pakistan is locked in a tense confrontation with India, another nuclear weapons state. In a post-Cold War world, if a nuclear war were to break out, it would most likely occur between these two states. Yet the Bush administration intends to sell aircraft that could improve Pakistan's ability to deliver its nuclear weapons. To soothe India's fears, the Bush administration has also pledged to sell aircraft and other military improvements to that nation. Selling arms to both sides in this tense and dangerous region is not only bad policy but a throwback to the empires of old, which played off regional rivals against each other.

To facilitate this imperial intrigue and smooth the rough edges of the U.S. imperial sword—discovered during the “recent unpleasantness” in Iraq—the Bush administration is setting up a new office in the State Department to manage future occupations of sovereign nations in the wake of U.S. military interventions. The creation of the office assumes the United States should invade and remake foreign societies in the U.S. image. How far we have come from the nation's founders' policy of staying out of other countries' business!

Also taken for granted is that the debacle in Iraq was merely caused by poor planning, which can be corrected by adding a new bureaucracy. Although planning was poor, the main reason for the mess in Iraq is imperial hubris. Popping the top off and then occupying a fractious developing society with no experience in individual liberty and attempting to convert it into a U.S.-style federation is a Herculean task, one that was unlikely to succeed from the beginning.

Finally, a seemingly unrelated development to the Bush administration's brand of modern day imperialism may have the most consequence: the indefinite detention of a German man, Murat Kurnaz, by a kangaroo U.S. military tribunal on the basis of flimsy secret evidence that he is a member of al Qaeda. Yet that evidence shows that U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement agencies had concluded that Kurnaz had no connections to al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. So the U.S. government has known for two years that it was incarcerating an innocent man. The Kurnaz case reinforces a U.S. district judge's opinion that the military tribunals are illegal, unconstitutional, and unfairly prejudicial against those being held in prison.

Detaining people indefinitely without a jury trial, and instead using a military tribunal that allows secret evidence and no legal representation for the defendant, may be normal practice in authoritarian regimes (such as Pakistan) but should not be used in the “home of the free and the brave.” Empires throughout history have experienced “blowback,” and retaliatory terrorism is the unfortunate price the U.S. Empire will continue to pay for its unnecessary meddling in the affairs of other nations and peoples. When that terrorism comes back to bite the United States, the hysteria generated allows the U.S. government to institute Orwellian practices that are clearly unconstitutional. In the end, as in ancient Rome, the destruction of the republic in the course of maintaining the overseas realm is the most dire consequence of empire. Worse than using arms sales to play off opposing sides against one another in volatile conflicts and institutionalizing empire by creating large imperial bureaucracies is the slow erosion of the Founders' notion of republican government. Republic and empire don't mix.

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, CA, and author of the book, Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy. His newest book is, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Independent Institute Books, 2004)