By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
President Barack Obama came into office promising a new sort of bilateral relationship with China. It was not meant to be. Washington hasn't changed any of its long list of demands regarding China, and Beijing, true to historical form, has gone out of its way to flex its muscles as a rising power. With the recent series of revelations concerning Chinese military developments, the inside-the-Beltway hyping of the Chinese threat has reached fever pitch, matching the average American's growing fears of China's economic strength.
Of course, the world's established No. 1 power always greets the challenge from a rising No. 2 with fear and trepidation. But in the case of the U.S. and China, there are other reasons why so much of Washington is eager to demonize Beijing. Here's my top 10 list:
1. Unable to curb our spendthrift ways, we demand China do it for us. America has an insatiable appetite for illegal drugs, but instead of rationally dealing with the problem of domestic demand, we push it off onto poorer nations to our south via military aid that does nothing but turn their countries into war zones. Our fight with China over its currency's value is similarly framed: Americans cannot stop spending beyond their means, so we demand China raise its currency to reduce our trade imbalance with the entire world. China has 700 million interior rural poor still awaiting economic uplift, but they're no match for our 535 legislators unable to police themselves.
How can Washington sell this nonsense to the American people? Easy. When polled recently, almost half of Americans wrongly identified China as the world's greatest economic power.
2. China would love to balance trade with America, but America prefers maintaining China in its role as a convenient enemy. I spent December in Beijing speaking with Chinese policy experts, all of whom opined that China would gladly balance its trade with the United States -- if only Washington would allow it. Our government restricts sales of high technology to China, so China buys it in bulk from the European Union. Our government won't sell arms to China. As a result, Russia cleans up. Our government also blocks Chinese investment into "sensitive" industries, so Beijing invests elsewhere. Washington hamstrings our bilateral trade to such a degree because it remains convinced that China is our most-likely opponent in any future great-power war. So today's trade is perceived as aid to tomorrow's enemy.
But have no fear: America sells loads of weapons to all of China's neighbors, so we earn back some of those lost sales.
3. Nixon went to China four decades ago, and the Chinese are still Chinese! After being set on a peaceful path of rapid development under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, the gun-shy Chinese people have most decidedly focused on expanding their economic liberties versus their political rights, continuing to submit to one-party rule. Will this social compact last forever? History says no, but it also says that most such explosively growing countries, especially in Asia, remain de facto single-party states for roughly half a century before a truly competitive multiparty dynamic emerges. That suggests we should expect Chinese democracy to arrive sometime in the 2030s, not tomorrow.
But that's not fast enough for Washington, which puts up with authoritarian allies when it cares to -- and demonizes them when it must.
4. We told Beijing there was only "one China" in 1972, and have sold arms to Taiwan ever since. Think back to the U.S. Civil War. Imagine if Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy's dead-enders had slipped away to Cuba in 1865 to set up their alternative, nose-thumbing version of America on that island. Then fast-forward to, say, 1908, and imagine how much the United States would have tolerated some distant imperial power like England telling us what we could or could not do vis-à-vis this "loser" sitting just off our shore. Imagine where Teddy "San Juan Hill" Roosevelt would have told the Brits they could shove their "Cuban Relations Act of 1879." Well, that's basically what U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was told last week in Beijing when he proposed expanded military-to-military ties with the PLA.
Oddly enough, when you sell arms to somebody's "breakaway" region, they take it personally.
5. Our nuclear nuttiness knows no bounds. Nuclear weapons have a perfect record of preventing great-power war for 65 years and counting. But now Obama wants them all gone. The rest of the world wonders, Who would benefit most from this? The obvious answer is, The world's sole conventional military superpower with a lengthy record of toppling regimes that it does not like. So guess what? Nukes are here to stay. China subscribes to such realism, and therefore does not follow America's orders on Iran and North Korea.
Naturally, Washington sees only suspicious obstructionism in this stance.
6. The U.S. Navy and Air Force need China to survive. Prior to Sept. 11, military "transformers" inside the Pentagon had their sights set firmly on "rising" China. Then the Long War against violent extremists came along and ruined the high-tech party, pointedly favoring the manpower-intensive Army and Marines. Now, as America tires of nation-building and counterinsurgency, the Revolution in Military Affairs aficionados are back at it, freaking out over every Chinese military development with a triumphant, "I told you so!" The Pentagon's new AirSea Battle Concept -- otherwise known as the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act -- seeks to right the bureaucratic wrongs triggered by all those ground casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan by putting the platform-heavy "big war" crowd back on top inside the E-Ring. Five-star Army Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, coiner of the phrase "military-industrial complex," must be rolling in his grave.
7. The neocon fantasy of primacy is alive and well and living in Washington. Per last week's column, it's not enough for America to outspend the world on defense. We've also got to dominate China militarily -- right on its doorstep. Gates last week said that spending anything less than his $553 billion proposed 2012 defense budget would be "potentially calamitous." This week, he vowed to match any Chinese military developments. So what's an alternative? The Long War-strapped U.S. military could use some help in its many overseas responsibilities from the free-riding Chinese. And taking up such an expanded global security role would allow the Chinese to address growing vulnerabilities that result from their dependence on foreign sources of energy, minerals and food. But why should either country's military-industrial complex address real-world challenges together when they can spend so much more money mindlessly scheming against one another?
8. The Pentagon's Big War crowd still dreams of nuclear-free great-power war. Check out the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment's publication, "AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept," because it's a real departure from reality. A guiding assumption of the CSBA's war-scenario analysis is that, despite the high likelihood that a Sino-U.S. conventional conflict over Taiwan "would devolve into a prolonged war" in which China would suffer humiliating defeat across the board, mutual nuclear deterrence would be preserved throughout the conflict. And what if China took the desperate step of a nuclear launch? According to the CSBA, "the character of the conflict would change so drastically as to render discussion of major conventional warfare irrelevant."
As strategic miscalculations go, that's a doozy.
In direct response, China's military is allegedly reconsidering its longstanding pledge not to pre-emptively strike with nuclear weapons, although China officially denied those reports. For its part, the U.S. Air Force is already developing plans to fire conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles around the world in a program dubbed Prompt Global Strike, with weapons in space soon to follow. And you thought MAD was bad.
9. We live in an age of fear-based politics. You know the drill: Every Chinese military development, no matter how far off in the future its induction, is now routinely touted in the mainstream media as "imminently deployed." If the Chinese military test-flies its new stealth fighter on the eve of Gate's recent visit, then it's proof positive that the PLA now calls all the shots in Beijing. Faith-based politics now begets fantasy-based intelligence analysis. Who cares what's actually operational? Let's just watch an animator's rendering of what's conceivable and run with that.
We should know better. After all, that's what Ronald Reagan's Star Wars snow job with the Russkies amounted to!
10. We prefer the myth of a monolithic, inscrutable China to actual reality. David Shambaugh's Washington Quarterly article describing the plethora of foreign-policy schools now battling each other inside Beijing is on the money: I met representatives from all of those factions last month, and they are one contradictory lot. They run the gamut from advocates of Chinese primacy, as boneheaded as their American counterparts, to some of the nicest Kantian airheads you'd ever care to meet. And trust me, this internal struggle is far from over. The sad thing is that Washington has already made its choice.
We have seen the enemy, and he is us. That's what happens when you use a mirror to look at the world.
