Fornew readers and those who request to be “好友 good friends” please read my 公告栏 first.

The China Bluff

(source: http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-china-bluff-6561)

by Chas Freeman

|

February 23,2012

                            Forty years ago, on a clear, cold afternoon in Beijing, Ifollowed President Nixon onto the tarmac at Beijing’s Capital Airport. I have abelated confession to make. When I tried to sleep on Air Force One on the wayto Beijing, I was jolted awake by a nightmare. I dreamed that GeneralissimoChiang Kai-shek would be standing there with his old political sparring partnerand secret pen pal, Zhou Enlai. In my dream, Chiang stepped forward to greethis former friend and political backer Richard Nixon with a loudly sarcastic"long time, no see!" As we pulled up to the shabby old structure thatwas then the only terminal at Beijing’s airport, I peered anxiously out thewindow. Others were elated to see Premier Zhou emerge to greet us. I was merelyrelieved that he was there pretty much by himself.

It’s almostimpossible today to recall the weirdness of that moment, when an Americanpresident who had made a political career of reviling Chinese communism strodewithout apology into the capital of the People’s Republic of China—a state andgovernment the United States did not recognize—to meet with leaders that ChiangKai-shek—whom we officially viewed as the legal president of all China—called"bandits at the head of a bogus regime." I had entered the foreignservice of the United States and learned Chinese because I thought we wouldeventually have to find a way to recruit China geopolitically. I was thrilledto be the principal American interpreter as our president led an effort to doexactly that. My job was to help him and his secretary of state discuss withChina’s communists what to do about other, even more problematic communists.

Last Tuesday,on the precise anniversary of that February 21, 1972, personal introduction toBeijing, I was back there—not to try to rearrange the world again but to makeChinese financiers aware of specific investment opportunities in the United States.In 1972, it was necessary for the leader of the capitalist world to save Chinafrom Soviet communism. In 2012, the world looks to China to save capitalism,and the world’s capitalists flock to China in search of funds. How very muchwas changed by the forces Nixon and Mao put in motion that afternoon fortyyears ago.

There is nomore Soviet Union; the bipolar world it helped define is gone, as is theunipolar American moment its collapse created. The famous Shanghai Communiquéof 1972 opened with a long recitation of the irreconcilable differences betweenthe United States and China on almost every major international question of thetime. Encounters between Chinese and American leaders now produce far lessdramatic laundry lists of relatively minor and entirely manageable frictions aswell as grumbles, growls and whines about highly technical issues thatlower-level officials in both countries need to work on.

China has risenfrom poverty, impotence and isolation to retake its premodern place atop theworld economic order. The People’s Republic is now a major actor in globalgovernance. It is fully integrated into every aspect of the internationalsystem it once sought to overthrow and, in some ways, more devoted to thatsystem than we are. Forty years ago, China’s backwardness and vulnerabilitywere the wonder of the world. Now, the world envies and ponders the strategicimplications of China’s rapidly growing wealth and power.

Reality, unlikeghosts in China, seldom travels in straight lines. But if current trendsadvance along current lines, as early as 2022 China will have an economy thatis one-third to two-fifths larger than that of the United States. If Chinacontinues to spend roughly 2 percent of its GDP (or 11 percent of itscentral-government budget) on its military as it does now, ten years hence itwill have a defense budget on a par with ours today. Even with theexchange-rate adjustments that will surely take place by 2022, $600 billion orso is likely to buy a lot more in China than it can here. And all that moneywill be concentrated on the defense of China and its periphery, whereas ourmilitary, under current assumptions, will remain configured to project ourpower simultaneously to every region of the globe, not just the Asia-Pacific region.

What sort ofrelationship do we want with the emerging giant that is China? The choice isnot entirely ours, of course. China will have a lot to say about it. To theextent we pay attention to the views of allies like Japan, so will they. But wedo have choices, and their consequences are sufficiently portentous to suggestthat they should be made after due reflection, rather than as the result ofstrategic inertia.

Right now, themilitary-strategic choice we’ve made is clear. We are determined to try tosustain the global supremacy handed to us by Russia’s involuntary default onits Cold War contest with us. In the Asia-Pacific region, this means"full-spectrum dominance" up to China’s twelve-mile limit. In effect,having assumed the mission of defending the global commons against all comers,we have decided to treat the globe beyond the borders of Russia and China as anAmerican sphere of influence in which we hold sway and all others defer to ourviews of what is and is not permissible.

This is a pretty ambitious posture on our part. China’sdefense buildup is explicitly designed to counter it. China has made it clearthat it will not tolerate the threat to its security represented by a foreignmilitary presence at its gates when these foreign forces are engaged inactivities designed to probe Chinese defenses and choreograph a way topenetrate them. There’s no reason to assume that China is any less seriousabout this than we would be if faced with similarly provocative naval and airoperations along our frontiers. So, quite aside from our on-again, off-againmutual posturing over the issue of Taiwan's relationship to the rest of China,we and the Chinese are currently headed for some sort of escalating militaryconfrontation.

At the same time, most Americans recognize that our ownprosperity is closely linked to continued economic development in China. Inrecent years, China has been our fastest growing export market. It is also ourlargest source of manufactured imports, including many of the high-tech itemswe take pride in having designed but do not make. And we know we have to workwith China to address the common problems of mankind.

So our future prosperity has come to depend on economicinterdependence with a nation we are also setting ourselves up to do battlewith. And, at the same time, we hope to cooperate with that nation to assuregood global governance. Pardon me if I perceive a contradiction or two in thisChina policy. It looks to me more like the vector of competing politicalimpulses than the outcome of rational decisionmaking.

Of course, no Washington audience can be the leastsurprised that capitol confusion, intellectual inertia and the prostitution ofpolicy to special interests, rather than strategic reasoning, determine policy.Why should China be an exception to other issues? But even those of us longcalloused by life within the Beltway ought to be able to see that we’ve got aproblem. Our approach to managing our interactions with China does not compute.

Actually, we have a much bigger problem than thatpresented by the challenge of dealing with a rising China. We cannot hope tosustain our global hegemony even in the short term without levels ofexpenditure we are unprepared to tax ourselves to support. Worse, the logic ofthe sort of universal sphere of influence we aspire to administer requires usto treat the growth of others' capabilities relative to our own as directthreats to our hegemony. This means we must match any and all improvements inforeign military power with additions to our own. It is why ourmilitary-related expenditures have grown to exceed those of the rest of theworld combined. There is simply no way that such a militaristic approach tonational security is affordable in the long term, no matter how much it maydelight defense contractors.

In this context, I fear that the so-called"pivot" to Asia will turn out be an unresourced bluff. It's impressiveenough to encourage China to spend more on its military, but what it means, inpractice, is that we will cut military commitments to Asia less than we cutcommitments elsewhere. That is, we will do this if the Middle East comes toneed less attention than we have been giving it. At best, the "pivot"promises more or less more of the same in the Indo-Pacific region. This wouldbe a tough maneuver to bring off even if we had our act together both at homeand in the Middle East. But we do not have our act together at home. Ourposition in West Asia and North Africa is not improving. And some Americans arecurrently actively advocating war with Iran, intervention in Syria, going afterPakistan, and other misguided military adventures in West and South Asia.

So, what’s the affordable alternative approach tosustaining stability in the Asia-Pacific region as China rises? My guess isthat it’s to be found in adjustments in our psychology. We need to get overWorld War II and the Cold War and focus on the realities of the present ratherthan the past.

Japan initially defeated all other powers in theAsia-Pacific, including the United States. We then cleaned Japan's clock andfilled the resulting strategic vacuum. We found our regional preeminence sogratifying that we didn’t notice as the vacuum we had filled proceeded todisappear. Japan restored itself. Southeast Asians came together in the SecondIndochina War. ASEAN incorporated Indochina and Myanmar. India rose from itspost-colonial sick bed and strode forward. Indonesia did the same.

But we have continued to behave as though there is anAsian-Pacific power vacuum only we can fill. And, as China’s rise has begun toshift the strategic equilibrium in the region, we have stepped forward torestore it. We seem to think that, if we Americans don’t provide it, there canbe no balance or peace in Asia. But, quite aside from the fact that there was abalance and peace in the region long before the United States became a Pacificpower, this overlooks the formidable capabilities of re-risen and rising powerslike Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. It is a self-realizingstrategic delusion that powers a self-licking ice-cream cone.

If Americans step forward to balance China for everyoneelse in the region, the nations of the Indo-Pacific will hang back and let ustake the lead. And if we put ourselves between them and China, they will notjust rely on us to back their existing claims against China, they will up theante. It cannot make sense to empower the Philippines, Vietnam and others topick our fights with China for us.

The bottom line is that the return of Japan, South Koreaand China to wealth and power and the impressive development of other countriesin the region should challenge us to rethink the entire structure of ourdefense posture in Asia. Unable to live by our wallets, we must learn to liveby our wits. In my view, President Nixon’s "Guam Doctrine" pointedthe way. We need to find ways to ask Asians to do more in their own interestand their own defense. Our role should be to back them as our interestsdemand, not to pretend that we care more about their national-securityinterests or understand these better than they do, still less to push themaside to take on defense tasks on their behalf.

We need to think very differently than we have done overthe nearly seven decades since the end of World War II. To be sure, a lessforward-leaning American approach to securing our interests in Asia wouldrequire painful adjustments in Japan’s and South Korea’s dependencies on us aswell as in our relations with the member states of ASEAN and India andPakistan. It would almost certainly require an even stronger alliance withAustralia. Paradoxically, it would be more than a little unnerving for China, whichhas come to like most aspects, even if not everything, about the status quo.

It is not in our interest to withdraw from Asia. But,more than six decades after we deployed to stabilize Cold War Asia, we shouldnot be afraid to adapt our strategy and deployments to its new post–Cold Warrealities. Both the strategic circumstances of our times and the more limitedresources available to us demand serious reformulation of current policies.These policies cannot effectively meet the evolving challenges of the world theNixon visit to China—forty years ago this week—helped to create.

Chas Freeman, chairman of Projects International, is aformer Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs and U.S.Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

This article is adapted from remarks delivered at TheCenter for the National Interest on February 16, 2012.