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5 CHINA
AND APPEASEMENT, Part 3 China's misguided 'experts'
on the US By Henry C K Liu
policy in particular. It is noteworthy
that the appointment of Friedberg occurred almost
two years after the terrorist attack of September
11, 2001, and two months after "catastrophic
victory" in Iraq, after which US-China relations
were supposedly improved by US attention on a more
pressing enemy.
In an article in the
November 2000 issue of Commentary, an
influential neo-conservative
monthly, titled "The struggle for mastery in
Asia", Friedberg put forth the proposition that
"the United States will find itself engaged in an
open and intense geopolitical rivalry with the
People's Republic of China", and that "there are
reasons to believe it is already under way". This
article was written at the time of the
presidential election of 2000, and the victory of
George W Bush since has given it policy
significance. While the article was written almost
a year before the attacks of September 2001, the
US response to which has affected its subsequent
tactical posture toward China, the
neo-conservative theme of China being a strategic
competitor to US hegemony remains operative for
long-range policy. Friedberg's appointment to
Cheney's staff after the second war in Iraq as
deputy national security adviser and director of
policy planning reinforced this view.
Friedberg's proposition is based on his
openly stated assumption that the US, while
seeking to satisfy China's legitimate ambitions,
will not be willing to abandon its own present
position of preponderance in Asia or to surrender
"pride of place" to China. To permit a potentially
hostile power to dominate East Asia would not only
be out of line with current US policy, it would
mark a deviation from the fundamental pattern of
the US grand strategy since at least the latter
part of the 19th century. These are the necessary
preconditions of a "struggle for mastery" in Asia,
Friedberg concludes. Wang would do well to temper
his complacency about "the US not being China's
permanent enemy" by paying attention to the likes
of Friedberg.
Robert Dreyfuss, in his
article "Vice Squad" about the Office of the Vice
President in The American Prospect, lists Cheney's
leading China specialist, Stephen Yates, and
several other key staffers as having worked for
California congressman Christopher Cox in the
1990s during the congressional investigation into
Chinese political influence in the US that
followed allegations of Beijing's contributions to
the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and Al
Gore.
The long resultant report
characterizes China as a looming threat and rival,
with rapacious need for Middle East oil and
"designs" on Taiwan. Charles W Freeman, a former
US ambassador to China who has known Yates many
years says that Yates, as well as neo-cons Paul
Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, formerly top
officials in Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department,
all see China as the solution to a US
"enemy-deprivation syndrome".
Dreyfuss'
article suggests that the Cheney-dominated Bush
administration sees China as the most serious
long-term threat to US global interests. If
conflict with China is inevitable, then the United
States needs bases in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Iraq and maybe even Iran and Syria. If China is
dependent on Middle East oil, then the US must be
able to control how and where the oil flows from
the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oilfields.
To contain China, the US needs to
cultivate an alliance with India, even risking the
accusation of nuclear hypocrisy in doing so. It is
in US interests to reverse the policies of former
president Clinton, raise tension on the Korean
Peninsula by linking North Korea to Iran and Iraq
as "an axis of evil", dismissing South Korea's
"Sunshine diplomacy" efforts and encouraging Japan
to take a hard line toward Pyongyang. The Bush
administration managed to get Tokyo to declare,
for the first time in history, that the security
of the Taiwan Strait is of common concern to Japan
and the United States. In the name of the "war on
terror", the US has regained a strategic toehold
in the Philippines to malign the growing Filipino
Maoist movement.
The Cheney neo-cons have
a vision of a new transformed world order built on
two pillars: (1) a new "democratic" Middle East
and (2) a long-range containment of China even if
it should turn capitalist. The Middle East vision
since the invasion of Iraq has fallen apart, but
the long-range containment of China may well be
the redeeming war cry that will save this flawed
vision. The neo-con anti-China cancer is now in
remission, but far from being cured. Reforming and
containing China is the one long-term issue that
US Republicans and Democrats agree on, despite
nuances of partisan politics, with each party
operating with a separate agenda.
The June
2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly featured Robert
D Kaplan's "How we would fight China: The next
cold war", as an inevitable war that "will link
China and the United States in a future [conflict]
that may stretch over several generations". By
comparison, "the Middle East is just a blip",
according to Kaplan. New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is
Flat, calls Kaplan among the "most widely
read" authors defining the post-Cold War world,
along with Francis Fukuyama of The End of
History and the Last Man and Samuel P
Huntington of The Clash of Civilizations.
Huntington fantasizes of an "Islamic-Confucian
world" in Eurasia, from the Middle East to China,
as "an arc of crisis" overrun by evil enemies in
an "Islamic-Sinic alliances" that must be tamed by
the good forces of the West, and prophesied that a
war between the US and China will break out by
2010, centering on the oil lanes of the South
China Sea. Huntington's timing may be off, but his
message is loud and clear to the US informed
public.
Thomas Donnelly, a senior fellow
at the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), a member of the China Economic and
Security Review Commission from February 10, 2005,
to December 31, 2006, wrote in an article in the
May 2003 issue of the American Enterprise
Institute's National Security Outlook that the US
needed to use its then-two-month-old victory in
the Iraq war to keep and enlarge Pax
Americana and further institutionalize
superpower unipolarity by "rolling back" radical
Islamism while "containing" the People's Republic
of China, that
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