Worldwide Web WorldTribune.com

  Commentary . . .


Sol Sanders Archive
Monday, January 19, 2009

The 500-pound gorilla in the foreign policy parlor: China

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

It’s that season when the media is full of speculative stories written by the usual suspects about forthcoming changes in American foreign policy. And to quote the Great Communicator Ronald Reagan it’s dawn in America.

The old issues are dragged out and flogged again, usually with little or no new information or ideas. Rarely is there an admission that unanticipated consequences of earlier policy decisions as well as generally unexpected events will actually dominate the coming months.   

Also In This Edition

All this is compounded by the unique qualities of the most powerful executive in the world, the American presidency. Not only does he have his hand on the throttle of the world’s largest economy and military machine, but he has a gigantic and growing ceremonial function which often obscures real issues. Those two roles — chief of government and embodiment of the national myth — are divided in most other regimes. And the digital revolution has increased rather than lessened the ceremonial role of the American president — especially this year when the new President Barack Obama is celebrated not just as a new political figure but one who personally challenges the American Republic’s oldest problem, the residue of slavery and race.

There had been some hope that the special quality of the vice presidency under Richard Cheney, one of the most experienced and knowledgeable public figures who had renounced the possibility of being a president-in-waiting as has been the vice president’s political role recently, would morph into a badly needed permanent “assistant president”. Despite his becoming the prized target for bitter criticism of the 43rd presidency, Cheney had fulfilled that function. The leftwing media have demonized Cheney, however, and probably simultanously, a technocratic role for the office. There appears to be little hope that, given his background with no executive experience and less charisma, Vice President Joe Biden will be anything but an occupant of an office which one long gone tenant described as not worth a bucket of spit.

The enormity of the hoopla which has accompanied the arrival of Obama, sharpened by the economic crisis which simultaneously has hit the U.S. and the world, will for some time as it always does, obscure the reality. That reality is that American foreign policy is largely — 9/11 was an event which moved old issues into fast forward speeds but actually fundamentally changed little — an agglomeration of old problems and their attempted solutions.

Only an observer, even then, at some future time would be able to discern whether 2009 marks a period when all these old problems are churning — as seems the case to most of us caught in them — at a faster rate than in the past. But Sen. Hillary Clinton’s exposition before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of her endeavor — indeed her promise — to take things more firmly in hand is probably just part of the general attempt to punctuate a seamless narrative that only appears to have chapter headings.

That the entry of a new administration presents opportunities for new initiatives and changes in bad policies is theoretically a valid concept. But the fact is that as in personal lives, rarely is that kind of break with the past as complete or as much of a thrust forward as the new team would hope.

Nowhere is the reality more in evidence for the Obama Administration than in Asia — from Suez to Sakhalin, from the Urals to Fiji.

The Mideast imbroglio in West Asia is at a crucial juncture. Strategically the effort of the Persians to establish footholds on the Mediterranean [and in the Persian Gulf], to extend their Shia fanaticism over the whole Arab world, has taken a beating in Gaza. The Israelis [with tacit support from their old Arab enemy neighbors] have at least given the forces facing Iran's mullahs a breathing space. Whether, indeed, this was a side show — one that the permitted Tehran to continue its pursuit of nuclear weapons which would be a game-changer in the region — remains to be seen. Obama, however much as he believes face-to-face conversations with the mullahs on whatever basis, would be able to talk them out of pursuit of the one goal which would overcome their longer term problems of poverty, corruption, and reliance on the volatile energy markets is doubtful. Only a stringent reinforcement of economic sanctions — which the U.S. European allies have continually violated, notably Germany, as well as the refusal of China and Russia to go along — would halt that progression. Taking out WMD facilities in Iran is a problematical route but one that the Israelis, with or without American acquiescence, may have to resort to if Iran's tenatacles have not been clipped by events in Gaza. But, of course, there is the question of internal dynamics upending the regime which, as in the similar case of North Korea, we can only guess at for the moment.

The new face that Obama’s very variegated foreign policy advisers have promised to put on relations with Russia is equally at the mercy of past policies and unexpected events. The Russian Tsar Vladimir Putin and his siliviki henchmen [ragtail remnants of the old magnificent Soviet repression apparatus] believe they can convert growing European dependence on Russian fossil fuels, and the wimpish nature of its post-Cold War leadership, into a weapon for restoration of Russian big power status. But the collapse, at least temporarily, of the world economy and fossil fuel prices jeopardizes that strategy. The role of vast Central Asian reserves skirting Russian delivery systems, could bolster European courage. And as some Russian historians are increasing reminding us, the two great events of modern Russian history — the overthrow of the tsar and the implosion of the Soviet Union — occurred despite a general assumption that both regimes while troubled and crumbling would be with the world for decades to come.

Obama’s gaggle of advisers appears united on the post-Cold War assumption that India will eventually throw off its nostalgia for the 40-year alliance with the Soviets for a new tacit alliance with Washington, anticipating growing Chinese power and potential aggressive behavior. It’s an old theme now, dating to the Clinton years, but 9/11 threw a monkey wrench into the concept by again pointing up New Delhi’s unresolved problems with its neighbor, Pakistan, and its own huge Moslem minority affiliated with that Siamese twin. The fact that India has no way of stabilizing its western border if Pakistan implodes, that the Islamabad regime is near a failed state, that it has a tactical alliance with China as well as the U.S., are givens that no new Obama policy can avoid. There is also the troubling aspects of India’s overall strategy; whether an enormous buildup of its conventional defense forces can overcome its own increasingly bedeviling local insurgencies and the deficit of its internal security apparatus as demonstrated in the Mumbai Massacre.

Furthermore, although his enormous reservoir of domestic popular goodwill may permit him any number of passes on campaign promises, Obama’s anti-Iraq stance included a continual pounding on Afghanistan as the “real” issue in the war against Islamofascism. He escapes the Iraq problem, perhaps, with an ameliorating situation there which would permit American withdrawal on Bush’s timetable if not his. But in one of those not infrequent ironies of history, having used Iraq as the hated war of Bush [and presidential aspirant Sen John McCain] as a political weapon in the campaign, he has at the same time made Afghanistan his war. It takes noVon Clausewitz to understand that the issues that have dogged the American military in Iraq pale in comparison to fighting asymmetrical warfare in a landlocked region in central Asia with few claims even to nationhood. That “Afghanistan” has become entangled with Pakistan, and therefore the Pakistan-Indian problem, only adds but does not change the fundamental equation nor, probably, what Americans can do about it.

But it is further east that the Obama Administration could well face its greatest challenge, obscured for the moment by other more dramatic events elsewhere.

There are growing signs that China’s great Ponzi scheme is caught up in the worldwide credit crunch and onset of recession. The strategy of modernizing by welcoming foreign investment and technology to set up largely assembly operations for a gigantic export trade to the wealthier economies is coming apart. The strategy always required a rapidly growing gross national product — not necessarily a vast increase in individual income which it did not achieve — to absorb an almost unexhaustible work force. Never mind that the strategy relied on accumulating American debt for growing exports which may well have been produced below costs. Proceeds of that very export drive were used to subsidize the export industries. Some of the rents were used to finance a vast overexpansion of the physical infrastructure [and Bread and Circuses such as the 2008 Olympics] with little relevance to demand. [Want some commercial space in Shanghai or Beijing at bargain rates? Or how about a luxury apartment?] But with the downturn of the world economy, the rate of increase of product is dropping rapidly and is likely soon to fall below the level necessary for minimum politically tolerable increasing employment. Vapid statements about turning to domestic consumption as an alternative to the foreign markets are figments of the Beijing intellectuals’ imagination. Ironically, devoid of any kind of social net — not even the old Chinese extended family — those would-be consumers are increasing their savings. There is no mechanism for such a turn in a rural environment where most Chinese live which has been bled for the industrialization.

It is leading to a crisis of regime, unpredictable in its consequences. The Beijing leadership, nothing like the adventurous and sometimes brilliant Communist leadership of the early days of the regime, but as brutal, is hunkering down with semi-public warnings to its military that it may have to be used to quell already rising internal dissent. That military, growing at a rapid rate, has continually been underestimated by Washington intelligence, particularly its naval aspects. One can only hope Chinese civilian leadership has not made the same mistake, that a Frankenstein has been created with its own ambitions.

There are East Asian sideshows. Japan, which had come to depend on using China’s cheap labor as part of its own continuing over reliance on exports, is facing an economic and political crisis. The Koizumi Revolution aiming to abandon bureaucratic capitalism and establish a market economy with an accompanying issues-oriented/populist political system has stymied, unable to go forward or to retreat to old semifeudal political clan politics. No charismatic personality — or even competent politician — has replaced Junichiro Koizumi's unique role among conservatives. And, as always, there no authentic Japanese left of any dimensions. The country is drifting into an economic-political crisis which the Obama Administration can do little to influence, except to continue a further welding of the military alliance to insure Japan's security against the Chinese and North Korean threats while encouraging Japan’s constitutional process to permit further efforts to integrate it into international mutual defense operations. Another Obush continuation.

Japan’s concern with a faltering American position on North Korea has to be reflected in the Obama strategy. His foreign policy mavim are largely those who have cheered as the Bush Administration plugged for multilateral efforts to defang a rogue state, arming with WMD itself but worse, proliferating them around the world. But Beijing either cannot or will not use its leverage to disarm Pyongyang, perhaps fearing the unknown such a crisis would bring. The bankruptcy of that Bush policy taken to its ultimate extreme by the professionals at outgoing Mme. Secretary’s State Department was evident when a North Korean nuclear installation was plunked down in Syria in the middle of what were supposed to be successful negotiations. Washington had, finally, to permit the Israelis to take it out while everyone at the six party talks looked the other way. The Obama Administration can only hope the North Korean Dear Leader’s physical incapacity and a possible emergence of a new out and out military regime can be bought off — but something South Korea tried unsuccessfully for 12 years.

Thus for all the rhetoric, and not least the pomp and ceremony, the Obama Administration inherits and would likely continue to have to deal with the same old problems, most of them in the same old way.

What is more likely to decide the fate [and success or failure] of the new hands on the levers is what the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told a younger reporter who asked what might take his policy plans off course:

“Events, events, my dear boy”.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

">
About Us     l    Contact Us     l    Geostrategy-Direct.com     l    East-Asia-Intel.com
Copyright © 2009    East West Services, Inc.    All rights reserved.