Page 1 of 3 A new face to US-China ties
By Peter Lee
The Barack Obama administration took office in 2009 determined to move beyond
the unilateralism of the George W Bush years, and reassert America's global
influence as the most principled and powerful guarantor of rule-based
multilateralism.
With respect to China, this approach was presented as a doctrine of "strategic
reassurance".
However, the policy has not yielded the systemic breakthroughs that the Obama
administration hoped to achieve on climate change, non-proliferation, Middle
East security, still less on US-China relations.
Instead, increasingly acrimonious exchanges between Beijing and Washington
reveal the contradictions inherent in attempting to shoehorn an authoritarian,
mercantilist and suspicious nation into
a refurbished world system that ostensibly promotes democracy, open markets,
multilateralism, while forcefully advancing American interests.
Now the Obama administration seems to have accepted a world of lowered
expectations and strives for the more achievable goal of advancing US power at
China's expense. Friction with China has emerged as a regular feature of US
diplomacy - a means to score points in the game of international diplomacy at
the expense of an unpopular, uncooperative, and, at least for the moment,
diplomatically and militarily weaker regime.
Indeed, the US's China policy today looks a lot like good old-fashioned
rollback, isolating China instead of incorporating it into a win-win multipolar
system.
The Western press, distracted by individual issues such as Iran sanctions,
Google and the sinking of a South Korean corvette, seems oblivious to the fact
that the US-China relationship has lurched into zero-sum territory and
relations are in deep freeze, largely as a result of the willingness of the
Obama administration to confront China in pursuit of its agenda. The Chinese
media, on the other hand, talk about nothing else.
Observers who believe that China will yield to US pressure as long as its
access to world markets is assured are ignoring unmistakable signs that Beijing
has decided that, while its economic interests are vital, it must be prepared
to downplay short-term economic gain in order to ensure its geopolitical
position and national future.
Even in its inception, US demands for "strategic reassurance" were inherently
unequal, framed as something that China had to provide up front before the US
would reciprocate. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg described the
doctrine at a Center for a New American Security conference on China in
September 2009. The onus for reassurance was put on China in a way that Beijing
undoubtedly found grating.
Strategic reassurance rests on a core, if
tacit, bargain. Just as we and our allies must make clear that we are prepared
to welcome China's "arrival", as you all have so nicely put it, as a prosperous
and successful power, China must reassure the rest of the world that its
development and growing global role will not come at the expense of security
and well-being of others. Bolstering that bargain must be a priority in the
US-China relationship. And strategic reassurance must find ways to highlight
and reinforce the areas of common interest, while addressing the sources of
mistrust directly, whether they be political, military or economic.
Steinberg proceeded to list five areas of "impressive" cooperation: reviving
the global economy, denuclearizing North Korea, dealing with Iran's nuclear
program, mitigating climate change, and anti-terrorism and anti-piracy.
In retrospect, it is clear that in only two areas - the global economy and
anti-terrorism/piracy - do the US and China share a genuine identity of
interests, while with respect to North Korea, Iran and climate change, among
other issues, US and Chinese positions remain fundamentally at odds. And in the
key area of the global economy, agreement is by no means absolute.
While appreciating the massive Chinese domestic stimulus program (and the
equally massive Chinese purchases of US sovereign debt), US plans for the new
economic order clearly include a stronger Chinese currency - a situation that
Steinberg alluded to when he described the three "continued areas of mistrust
and disagreement": China's military expansion, global resource competition and
the economic relationship.
Indeed, in mid-2010, a bleak but accurate gloss on "strategic reassurance"
might be that the only area of genuine mutual reassurance concerns China's
willingness to sail around the Horn of Africa in a cautious and responsible
manner in search of pirates.
The aggravated US-China relationship is compounded by the Obama
administration's difficulty in making compromises.
At first, the administration's initiatives looked promising. They made no easy
accommodation to habitual US claims to national exceptionalism, and even had
some international appeal.
Indeed, they were designed to repudiate the arrogant American me-firstism that
had seen the US turn its back on the Kyoto climate treaty, the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court and the Law of the Sea
Treaty. In short, rather than deploying the rhetoric of national interest, the
Obama administration presented itself as a promoter of global norms - and
sought to impose those norms on China.
Yet the full brunt of US intentions often only become clear in the foreign
policy-making fine print, such as the somewhat obscure speeches of US deputy
secretaries. As Steinberg put matters with respect to China:
Now,
strategic reassurance does not only apply to the relationship between China and
the United States. Our partners, particularly in Asia, must have the same
certainty that China's expanding role will not come at the expense of their
interests. And this not only requires that the United States bolster its own
bilateral relationships, especially with key allies like Japan, South Korea and
Australia, but also that we lead in updating and strengthening the regional and
international institutions that shape the context in which China's development
occurs, so that change is constructive rather than destabilizing.
When it comes to the international system, we must ensure that new powers like
China - and there are others as well, of course - can take their rightful place
at the table without generating fear or mistrust ... As we pursue these
policies, we will be open to China's growing role, but we will also be looking
for signs and signals of reassurance from China. If China is going to take its
rightful place, it must make those signals clear.
So, when US
initiatives collided with Chinese interests, there was no graceful way to
negotiate between Obama universalism and Chinese particularism or, as it is
usually framed in the Western press, US principle vs Chinese selfishness. The
situation has not been helped by the fact that many of the Obama
administration's grand strategic initiatives have fizzled in practice (or in
the case of something like economically crippling Iran through sanctions, the
outcome may be years in the future).
Complex Rubik's cube diplomacy involving interlocking initiatives and delicate
sequencing on much tougher Iran sanctions, climate change and nuclear
non-proliferation have yielded few breakthroughs. The reasons are numerous, but
in each case, China is part of the story. China has challenged the US on a
number of these issues. For example, Beijing earned the Obama administration's
ire for its high-profile role in opposing US initiatives in the Copenhagen
climate debacle and as a result of its hard bargaining on United Nations
sanctions against Iran.
Partly as a result of Chinese resistance, the climate and nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) treaties and Iran sanctions have, after immense
expenditures of prestige and energy by the United States, degenerated into
little more than unproductive can-kicking down the road of futile multilateral
initiatives. In short, strategic reassurance is not forthcoming in areas of
potential cooperation, a situation that the Obama administration blames on
China, and not on any shortcomings of its own policies.
Frictions, on the other hand, are persistent and apparently structural. It
appears that, in response, the Obama administration has chosen to interpret
"strategic reassurance" as the simple and emotionally satisfying strategy of
rollback - attacking Chinese interests instead of trying to accommodate them.
From the Chinese perspective, the Obama administration's China policy
increasingly looks, walks and quacks like containment. Apparently, the United
States prefers a different term: "pre-empting China's monopoly status".
On his blog Washington Note, foreign policy insider Steve Clemons reported on a
conversation he had in early June with senior administration officials involved
in the international realm.
One of the most interesting comments made
to a question I posed probing the administration's strategy in Asia, was
"Steve, don't watch the hand!"
What this person was saying was "don't get lost in everything going on at the
surface" in US-China relations or US-Japan relations, but rather look at the
other many bits and pieces of America's engagement in the Asia-Pacific that are
enhancing US leverage and generating a greater sense among Pacific Rim
countries that America is there, engaged, and pre-empting China from enjoying
monopoly status.
Either by accident or design, US public
diplomacy campaigns involving climate change, nuclear proliferation, Internet
freedom, Iran and the South Korean boat being sunk, while yielding few concrete
gains, have succeeded in one key respect. They have placed China at a
geopolitical disadvantage, forcing it to line up with pariahs or near pariahs
like Iran, Myanmar and North Korea in opposition to the Western democracies,
Japan and South Korea.
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