|
|
|
WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
China’s Response to the Bush Doctrine The American political scientist Mike Lampton has captured just the right image in Chinese for understanding America’s relationship with China: tong chuang yi meng (“same bed, different dreams”). America and China are like two lovers in bed, with very different understandings about why they are there and what the future may hold.1 For more than 30 years, beginning with Richard Nixon’s accommodation with Mao Zedong in 1971–72, capitalist America and communist China have cooperated with each other off and on, but always with very different agendas in mind. This is no less true today. After 9/11, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) sided with the United States in Bush’s “war on terror,” but virtually every aspect of the Bush Doctrine (e.g., unilateralism, preemption, and missile defense) raises serious security problems for China. Faced with this series of strategic initiatives from Washington, Beijing is responding in an unexpected way, and has now begun to lay down an alternative strategic design to the Bush Doctrine. How relations between the United States and China evolve will probably be decisive in determining whether there is peace or war in the region. In this essay, I first examine the strategic implications of the Bush Doctrine to date, then analyze the PRC’s response, and, finally, highlight key issues for the next four years. From the presidential election campaign of 2000 through George W. Bush’s first months in office before the attacks of 9/11, there were strong indications of what was to come. Bush had staffed his administration with conservative Republicans, who, especially on defense and security issues, had articulated a hard-line, unilateralist position. Their strategic priorities included missile defense, withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the creation of a high-tech, rapid-reaction military of overwhelming scope and power, and the revitalization of the U.S. nuclear weapons industry. Their Manichean worldview led them to view U.S. security in terms of the development of such overwhelming capabilities (military, economic, and technological) that no other state or coalition of states would dare confront the United States. To some people, it looked as though the Bush leadership did not understand what international relations theorists call the “security dilemma,” the idea that when one country builds up its military capability to enhance its defense, an adversary may see that buildup as an offensive threat and increase its own military capabilities, thereby igniting an arms race in which both countries become less secure. Other commentators thought that President Bush and his advisors understood the security dilemma only too well. The Chinese strategic analyst Yan Xuetong, in an interview in Beijing in April 2001, agreed that when the power capabilities of two states are roughly equal, the security dilemma is likely to have the expected outcome: namely, neither side benefits. But, he said, when one state is much stronger than other states it might deliberately create a security dilemma between itself and its perceived adversaries in order to intimidate and dominate them. That, Yan argued, is what the Bush administration was trying to do. Writing in these pages after 9/11 but before the invasion of Iraq, the political scientist David Hendrickson explained the logic of the Bush Doctrine as a “quest for absolute security.” Unilateralism and a strategic doctrine of preventive war were the key elements of this futile search. Hendrickson argued that these were “momentous steps,” standing in “direct antagonism to fundamental values in our political tradition,” which threaten “to wreck an international order that has been patiently built up for 50 years, inviting a fundamental delegitimation of American power.”2 Hendrickson concluded his essay with a quote from Henry Kissinger that sums up the basic flaw in a search for absolute security: “The desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others.”3 The invasion of Iraq, for the Bush leadership, became the prototype of this search for absolute security: “regime change” by military force to punish any adversary who dared to stand up to American power. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was intended to show the world that opposition to the Bush grand design was futile. Washington would have its way, through the use of overwhelming military force if necessary, even in the face of opposition by major allies. However, the deteriorating security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continued bloodletting in the Israel-Palestine conflict have demonstrated that there are limits to what even the most powerful state in the world can do in imposing its will on other nations.4 President Bush, at his first press conference after his reelection, told the world: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the—af-ter the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election—and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is—you’ve heard the agenda: Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.”5 So, presumably, the Bush Doctrine will remain firmly in place. The contrast between the preferences of the U.S. electorate and world opinion is sharp and potentially calamitous. While George Bush won reelection in 2004 with markedly improved margins of support over 2000, including clear control of both houses of Congress, world opinion has shifted sharply against his policies. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted almost universal sympathy for the victims and support for the United States, but President Bush has squandered that “capital” over the past three years by his contempt for international law and institutions, and his disdain for any who might dare to disagree with him. His administration has shown little concern for either legitimacy or the moral dimensions of the exercise of power.6 During the past two years, I have worked on a collaborative project with colleagues from around the Asia-Pacific on responses to the Bush Doctrine.7 From our discussions, and informed by the insights of other colleagues like Yan Xuetong and David Hendrickson, we can infer four general propositions that are amply illustrated by the efforts of the Bush administration to date. First, there is no such thing as absolute security, which is simply unattainable for any country, including the United States, the most powerful state the world has ever seen. Second, the world is confounded by a unique and complex range of military, political, economic, environmental, and public health insecurities that we are only beginning to comprehend. For example, some scientists cogently argue that climate change, by itself, is the greatest threat to our existence. At the same time, specialists on Islam are convinced that if we do not treat the global problems of human security seriously, terrorism will be with us forever. Third, no individual state, no matter how powerful, can adequately manage this range of insecurities alone. An effective response to the broad range of threats to national security presented by these problems requires a multilateral response. Obviously, the leaders of every independent state will attempt to advance their own interests as best they can, but the realist assumption that strategies based on narrow self-interest might be adequate to protect the security of a country are utopian in today’s world.8 Fourth, the more the most powerful states seek to achieve absolute security by building up their economic and military power and operating with impunity to advance their perceived national interests, the more insecure the world—and they them-selves—become.9 The Bush Doctrine is simply not sustainable in its current form. It is often remarked that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no longer any state or group of states with the political will and material capabilities to balance U.S. power, and that following the delegitimation of socialism as a developmental alternative to capitalism, there is no longer any ideological alternative to market economics and representative democracy. Where does one stand intellectually in response to the Bush Doctrine, one is asked, other than to argue that the neoconservatives are not practicing what they preach when they say that what they are trying to do is to bring freedom and democracy to the world? On what basis can a systematic alternative to the Bush Doctrine be built? The most substantive and promising international reaction to date has been Bei-jing’s response. Rather than initiate an arms race to challenge U.S. hegemonic power directly, as one might expect, China reacted cautiously at first and then began to promote a fully elaborated response to the Bush Doctrine. The Chinese Response The Chinese leadership was aware of the hard-line political views of many of the people chosen for top positions in the new administration when George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001. Right-wing opinion in the United States had it that China was the most likely challenger to U.S. hegemony and that the “China threat”should be a priority for the new administration. When President Bush chose to identify certain “rogue states” as the main danger in his early speeches on national security, many analysts inferred that the main, unnamed rogue that the administration had in mind was China. When the classified Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 was leaked to the press, it identified China as one of seven possible targets for nuclear attack by the United States, and a PRC-Taiwan confrontation as one of three likely scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be used.10 The ad-ministration’s commitment to both missile defense and preemptive or preventive war further raised Chinese concerns.11 Official Chinese reaction to the Bush Doctrine has gone through three distinct stages: avoidance, collaboration, and strategic response. At first, Chinese policy seemed designed to avoid confrontation with the new president. As the administration set about putting its foreign and security policies in place, Beijing could see that many of the Bush initiatives clashed with China’s interests. But rather than confront the new president directly, the Chinese leadership appeared determined to stand aside from the hard-line bulldozer, apparently hoping that Washington’s enthusiasm for missile defense and preventive action against “rogue states” would wane over time. However, September 11 changed all that. The terrorist attacks on the United States provided China with an opportunity to find common ground with the new administration—to collaborate with Washington in the new “war on terror.” This second stage began almost immediately after the attacks, when Chinese president Jiang Zemin telephoned Bush to offer his sympathy and support. In effect, Beijing’s message was: We have terrorists too (among China’s 10 million Muslims), and we want to work with you in the struggle against terrorism.12 When it came to invading Iraq, however, China joined France and Russia in opposition. If the United Nations Security Council had put a second resolution on Iraq to a vote, one that proposed to endorse a U.S.-led invasion, it was unclear whether China would have joined France and Russia in vetoing that resolution. But China clearly opposed the invasion. Nor did China join in other U.S. undertakings, such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, a multilateral effort to interdict shipments of weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems. Meanwhile, Beijing began to implement a strategic response to the Bush Doctrine. In this third stage, the focus has been on Asia. The core of the Chinese alternative has been a cooperative security response to Bush’s unilateralist, preventive war strategy. In response to America’s determination to reshape the world by force, China now proposed to build cooperation among different groupings of states in creating new international institutions for achieving solutions to common problems. For Beijing, these initiatives were unprecedented. From dynastic times to the present, China had adopted a largely realist view of the world, and, like the United States, it had preferred a bilateral approach to foreign relations. Moreover, neither in its dynastic past nor in its communist present had China been any more benevolent toward its neighbors, or more hesitant to use military force than most major powers.13 For China now to adopt a multilateral, coopera-tive-security design was something new and important. By the mid-1990s, some analysts had begun to identify China as a “responsible” power, pointing to Beijing’s increasing participation in international institutions like APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum, and the World Trade Organization. By seeking and winning the opportunity to host the Olympics in 2008, and in other ways, Beijing began to signal that it was aware of its growing stake in the status quo and was prepared to help in maintaining the strategic stability that is a prerequisite for the continued economic prosperity of East Asia. From this beginning emerged the strategic response to the Bush Doctrine. Some called this “China’s new diplomacy,”14 but it was much more than that. Beijing followed the establishment of “ASEAN+3” (yearly meetings between the ten member countries of ASEAN with China, Japan, and South Korea) with the establishment of “ASEAN+1” (the ASEAN countries and China alone). China took the lead in creating the first multilateral institution in Central Asia, the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan),15 and worked to demonstrate to its neighbors that both economic and strategic security could be based on a new design: cooperation for mutual benefit among potential adversaries rather than the building of military alliances against a perceived common threat. In the name of “nontraditional” security cooperation to deal with terrorism and other transnational crime, Beijing even normalized its relations with its former adversary India,16 and conducted unprecedented, joint naval exercises with both India and Pakistan in the East China Sea near Shanghai in late 2003. Chinese commentators emphasized the cooperative-security theoretical basis for these initiatives: “China has been a proponent of mutual understanding and trust through international security cooperation and opposed any military alliance directed at any other countries,” and “China won’t accept any military cooperation that is directed at other countries.”17 In October 2003, China signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (the first non-ASEAN country to do so), and negotiated a “strategic partnership for peace and prosperity” with the ten ASEAN member countries. The objective is to build an East Asian Community founded on economic, social, and security cooperation.18 Beijing also demonstrated its new approach by offering to host the six-party negotiations to find a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. The key distinguishing features of the Bush administration’s and Beijing’s very different approaches to dealing with the post–Cold War world, stated schematically, are the following:
Beijing’s approach is by no means a pacifist design. China is clearly seeking to modernize its military capability and giving very serious thought to exactly what kind of military would be most effective in dealing with the dangers of today’s world, including a potential U.S. threat.19 The military specialist Paul Godwin notes that “a primary objective of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is to exploit perceived U.S. vulnera-bilities.”20 For example, the PRC has made a careful study of so-called asymmetrical warfare and how weaker powers might successfully confront stronger powers. But it would be a mistake to understand the Chinese modernization project as predicated on launching an arms race with the United States—at least not yet. To date, Chinese nuclear doctrine has focused on maintaining a “minimum nuclear deterrent” capable of launching a retaliatory strike after surviving an initial nuclear attack, rather than on building huge arsenals of more and more powerful nuclear weap-ons.21 Beijing is well aware of the great disparity in military capabilities between China and the United States, as well as the disparity in financial and technological capacity. It is also aware of the argument that one of the key factors that finally broke the back of the former Soviet Union was its inability to sustain the arms race with the United States. It does not want to fall into that trap. Chinese analysts have described their strategy as a design for heping jueqi,or“peaceful rise.” Zheng Bijian, forme rvice president of the Central Chinese Communist Party School, says that this approach is prompted by the conviction that “China must seek a peaceful global environment to develop its economy even as it tries to safeguard world peace through development.”22 Building relations based on mutual benefit with all of its neighbors is a central objective of this strategy. Beijing wants to demonstrate that closer trade, investment, and even security relations with China can be beneficial to its neighbors. Singapore commentator Eric Teo Chu Cheow has suggested that this new strategy resembles an old one: “China’s Ming/Qing tributary system was based on three cardinal points: First, China considered itself the ‘central heart’ of the region; this tributary system assured China of its overall security environment. Second, to ensure its internal stability and prosperity, China needed a stable environment immediately surrounding the Middle Kingdom. Third, the Chinese emperor would in principle give more favors to tributary states or kingdoms than he received from them; for this generosity, the emperor obtained their respect and good-will.”23 Obviously, the international relations of the twenty-first century are very different from China’s imperial relations during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but the idea of establishing mutually beneficial economic and security ties with neighboring states makes sense for everyone in Asia. Meanwhile, if successful, such a concert of power (in this case, among states that are formally equals rather than dependents of China) would help to maintain the strategic stability that China needs for its economic modernization. Critics, like activist Cao Siyuan, argue that to be successful, the “peaceful rise” strategy must be accompanied by substantial domestic political liberalization and greater transparency with respect to China’s military posture: “Diplomacy is often the extension of domestic policy. A leadership’s commitment to global fraternity and solidarity will be called into doubt if it is so reluctant to give its own people adequate human rights.”24 Can China practice at home what it has begun to preach abroad? Beijing’s new strategy has yet to be tested. How will Beijing’s commitment to cooperative security hold up when disputes with neighbors over territory or political differences reemerge? Will it also apply to cross-strait relations with Taiwan? Yet when compared with Bush’s record of making war to achieve peace in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Chinese response has substantial appeal, especially among the ASEAN countries, where cooperative security ideas have long been popular. Clearly, China wants to avoid a conflict with the United States. The Japanese journalist Funabashi Yoichi quotes one Chinese think tank researcher as saying: “We are studying the origin of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Why did it happen? Was there no way to prevent it? Some see that a U.S.-China cold war is inevitable, but what can we do to prevent it?”25 China’s strategic response to the Bush Doctrine is not confrontational toward the United States and does not require China’s Asian neighbors to choose between Beijing and Washington, something none of them wants to have to do.26 Though it is not a design for what realists would call “balancing” against the United States, it challenges Washington to think and act in ways quite different from the policies prescribed by the Bush Doctrine when trying to resolve problems in international relations. What Is to Come? Leaders in both the United States and the PRC have recently consolidated their power: George W. Bush has been reelected, and Hu Jintao has finally moved former president Jiang Zemin into retirement from his Central Military Commission chairmanship and assumed the preeminent leadership of China’s party, army, and state institutions. But there the similarities end. While Beijing has been preoccupied with trying to cool down its burgeoning economy, which has been growing at the astonishing rate of some 9 percent a year, the United States appears stretched to the breaking point to meet its global commitments as the world’s sole superpower. And despite the customary statements made by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his PRC counterpart about Sino-America cooperation and harmony, Qian Qichen, China’s former vice premier and foreign minister, published an attack on the Bush Doctrine just before the U.S. presidential election that perhaps presented a more accurate picture of Chinese leadership thinking than the official Foreign Ministry statements. Although it was immediately disowned by Beijing as in any sense reflecting official PRC views, Qian’s article charged that the Bush Doctrine had opened a Pandora’s box in advancing the notion that the United States “should rule over the whole world with overwhelming force, military force in particular.” The Iraq war, Qian wrote, “has made the United States even more unpopular in the international community than its war in Vietnam.” Washington, he said, was practicing “the same catastrophic strategy applied by former empires in history.” But, he concluded, “it is incapable of realizing [its] goal.” In his view, “the troubles and disasters the United States has met do not stem from threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance.”27 China is not without its own problems, of course. A society of 1.3 billion people ruled by a Communist Party that insists on a monopoly of political power while trying to manage an increasingly open market economy is never going to be short of problems. Corruption, growing income inequality, and devastating environmental problems lead the list. Meanwhile, in terms of purchasing power parity, China is already the second-largest economy in the world. It is also second to the United States in energy consumption, having shifted over the past decade from being an oil exporter to an oil importer: China is now dependent on foreign sources for some 40 percent of its crude oil requirements, a number that is expected to rise to as much as 75 percent by 2025.28 But while China may be suffering from too much exuberance, the United States appears to be increasingly overextended. Nearly two decades ago, the historian Paul Kennedy sounded a warning about what he called “imperial overstretch,” when a state’s geopolitical ambitions exceed its material capabilities to sustain such ambitions.29 In early 2001, when George W. Bush first took office, the Congressional Budget Office projected a federal budget surplus of $5 trillion over the next ten years; but following what the Economist has characterized as Bush’s “binge of tax-cutting and spending,” economists are now projecting instead a $5 trillion budget deficit.30 Since Bush took office, the federal debt has increased by 40 percent, or $2.1 trillion, and Congress has been required to raise the federal debt ceiling several times already.31 Meanwhile, the burden of U.S. military commitments in Afghanistanand Iraq, where tours of duty have been extended to keep sufficient troops on the ground, appears to preclude any new “preemptive” assaults on additional countries. China, for its part, is concerned about Japanese participation in the U.S. missile defense system, new legislation to permit Japanese forces to play a larger supporting role in Bush initiatives, and the possible revision of Japan’s constitution to facilitate a more substantial military modernization;32 but except for possible miscalculation over the issue of Taiwan, there appears to be little likelihood of direct confrontation between the United States and China. Beijing and Washington understand each other much better today than they did in 1995–96 when China launched its “missile exercises” in a failed effort to influence the presidential elections in Taiwan, and since then, they have established a variety of communication links in order to avoid misperception and miscommunication if tensions in the Taiwan Strait should reemerge. Taiwan will continue to be an issue in Sino-American relations, but it is Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that should provide the best indicators of their strategic competition. China and the United States take very different positions with respect to each of the three states demonized by President Bush as an “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union Address, and each one raises a separate kind of problem for the Bush Doctrine. The most serious and immediate case is, of course, Iraq. China opposed the U.S. invasion and totally rejects the doctrine of preventive war. The PRC, like the other major powers, fears a disruption in petroleum imports from the Middle East if the U.S. intervention fails and Iraq descends into chaos, but Beijing clearly does not want the U.S. policy of unilateral military interven-tion to become the norm. Iran’s nuclear program raises a different issue, since it is unlikely that the United States will have the military capability in the near future to threaten an invasion of the country. It is possible that Bush might endorse at some point an Israeli air assault on the Iranian nuclear facilities, like the Israeli “surgical strike” on Iraq’s plutonium-producing Osirak research reactor in 1981, but rather than a site for a new preventive war, Iran is currently a test case for Under Secretary of State John Bolton’s policy of “counterproliferation,” a coercive-diplomacy strategy designed to use international pressure to force Iran to give up its potential nuclear weapons capability.33 China, like many of the European allies, rejects this approach in favor of a more conventional “arms control” or “nonproliferation” approach.34 Finally, by hosting the six-party talks on North Korea, China directly confronts the Bush Doctrine with its own cooperative security approach to conflict resolution.35 China is no less concerned to stop nuclear weapons proliferation in Northeast Asia than the United States, fearing that a nuclear North Korea could prompt Japan, South Korea, and possibly even Taiwan to follow suit. But having rejected the coercive U.S. Proliferation Security Initiative, Chinais proposing instead a multilateral security mechanism for the region to engage and to incorporate the existing North Korean regime. When Beijing and Washington come face to face, there are always a great many issues to discuss: Taiwan, the U.S, trade deficit with the PRC, and Beijing’s concern about the falling U.S. dollar (China is heavily invested in U.S. Treasury bonds), as well as North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and other security problems. Beijing will wait to see who will hold the key foreign policy and security posts in the second Bush administration, and it will have to learn to work more closely with Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state after Colin Powell is gone. China and the United States are still “in the same bed but dreaming different dreams,” as Beijing and Washington each appeal to the world to support their distinctive approaches to resolving the problems of the twenty-first century. President Chen Sui-bian’s failure to win a majority for his pro-independence position in Taiwan’s legislature in the December 11 elections should help ease tensions over the Taiwan issue, but policies toward the “axis of evil” countries remain in dispute. For the next chapter in the Sino-American saga, it would be a good idea to keep a close watch on North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Notes
* Peter Van Ness is a visiting fellow in the Contemporary China Centre and lectures on security in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University. His new book, Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific, edited with Melvin Gurtov and published by RoutledgeCurzon, is the basis for this essay. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
|
|
||
