We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia…Or Is It Eurasia?

Current US China policy seems to be “Who Needs Russia?  We’ve got…The Philippines!”

Unless President Obama has absolute faith in the ability of the United States and the Asian democracies to restrain the PRC, there would seem to be some disturbing developments for the United States in Asia.

First of all, the People’s Republic of China parked its HYSY 981 oil rig in waters that Vietnam claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone, triggering a heated response from Vietnam, anguished writhing from ASEAN, and a stern “don’t engage in provocations” fingerwag from the United States.

The PRC, however, is not yielding, implicitly highlighting the fact that the United States is failing in its self-proclaimed mission to assure peace and prosperity in the South China Sea (as I pointed out in a previous piece, the PRC’s oil-rig shenanigans accentuate the essential sovereignty/EEZ character of disputes between China and its South China Sea neighbors, and undercut the “freedom of navigation” hobbyhorse that the US has crafted to ride to the rescue of the SCS).

Although VOA reported it as “US Navy ‘Shaping Events’ in South China Sea”, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert acknowledged that the US has its work cut out for it in the SCS:

“We are starting to shape events. We have got to manage our way through this, in my opinion, through this East China Sea and South China Sea [tensions].  We’re not leaving. They know that. They would be the leadership of the Chinese navy. We believe that we have to manage our way through this."

Also, this week also witnessed a slobbery authoritarian love-fest between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at a confab in Shanghai, also attended by Iran and a bunch of stans, illustrating the completely predictable dynamic of the Western hardline on Ukraine driving Russia and its gas into the arms of the PRC.

As of this writing the gas deal has not gotten done, apparently because of a disagreement over the unit price, and because the PRC is jibbing at the Russian demand for a $25 billion prepayment—a prepayment that, I might add, will relieve Gazprom of the financial embarrassment incurred by shipping Ukraine a few billion dollars of gas that it hasn’t been paid for, provide a nice receivable (if not immediate cash cushion) for Russia as it haggles with Ukraine (and a rather anxious Europe) re the next round of gas shipments to the West, and establish a precedent for demanding prepayment for Ukraine.

If the gas deal doesn’t go down, the US foreign policy commentariat in general and the Obama administration in particular will breathe a quiet sigh of relief that the dreaded Eurasian alliance of ex-Commies and pseudo-Commies in Russia and China has failed to occur.

If the gas deal gets done, especially on the basis of a ruble/yuan settlement that sidelines the dollar, on the other hand, the manure should hit the fan.

Right now, the Western response to these Asian developments has been pretty muted, a sign, I think that the foreign policy consultant/think tank/media complex has not received any useful guidance from the Obama administration.

My personal feeling is that the United States is loath to acknowledge the Eurasian “ghost at the banquet” and is declining to escalate openly at the current awkward juncture.  Instead, the Obama administration is quietly rolling out a sequence of passive-aggressive reproofs to the PRC.

Last week the USN Blue Ridge just happened to cruise past the Scarborough Shoal.

This week, the Justice Department indicted 5 PLA officers for hacking US corporations.

This sort of thing was always in the cards.  Starting in 2011, the Obama administration had been methodically rolling out the PRC cyber-bad-guy product for over a year, to be capped by a formal direct confrontation with Xi Jinping by Barack Obama concerning Chinese cybersins at Sunnylands in June 2013, followed by some public naming and shaming, but then Boom!  Snowden!  Doh!

The Snowden thing seems to have derailed the campaign for a year or so—most of the hacking allegations in the DOJ indictment date to 2012 or before, an indication that the United States is belatedly working off its depreciated pre-Snowden inventory of PRC misbehavior.

In rolling out the indictments yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder was obliged to abandon the pre-Snowden framing—that PRC hacking was a Defcon 1 threat both to the US economy and the global Internet commons—in favor of condemning the PRC hackers for the one kind of hacking that the United States government still asserts it does not do…corporate spying…for corporate advantage.

In context, I should point out that the United States has an unequivocal agenda of espionage on economic matters pertaining to energy, since energy is a matter of “national security”.  As to whether the information on potentially unfavorable developments in oil, gas, and uranium is simply put into a dossier for President Obama to wring his hands over, or whether actionable intelligence somehow makes it to pro-Western energy giants, is something that I and the reader can currently only speculate about.

However, it will be interesting if Glenn Greenwald comes up with any blockbuster revelations concerning Brazil, its over the top anxiety concerning the security and secrecy of the bidding process for its massive “deep salt” offshore oil blocs (first award included Total & two PRC companies), Brazil’s stated desire to disconnect from the US Internet, and any US NSA/CIA hijinks.

Also, I might point out that, in the founding document of the pivot, “America’s Pacific Century” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defined US “economic security” as “national security”, which would conceivably place a broader range of corporate information into the purview of the CIA and NSA.

A look at the indictment seems to indicate that the US wanted to make sure its threat to prosecute looked credible, and not be hamstrung by US corporations’ unwillingness to air matters pertaining to vital proprietary knowledge or the loss thereof in open court.

Many of the hacking infractions pertained to US firms that were involved in various trade disputes with the PRC on issues like solar panels, steel, and whatnot and already involved extensive declarations of fact before the WTO.   

The US grand jury returned the sealed indictment on May 1 and the Department of Justice exercised its discretionary powers to unseal the indictment on May 19; in other words, the timing was a matter of choice by the Obama administration.  I suspect it was a squib fired across the PRC’s bow in response to the PRC’s defiance in the SCS and its romance with Russia.

The PRC has responded with spluttering denials, suspension of a working group on cybersecurity, and threats of a chill in military-to-military ties.  

The Obama administration’s move doesn’t seem to have much of an upside; it scotched the joint US-PRC work on groundrules in cyberwarfare, something that I think is of genuine interest to the Pentagon if not the keyboard commandoes of the national security apparatus; it also threatens military-to-military exchanges, again a priority for the military, which cherishes interactions with opposing commanders it may be called upon to confront or fight; and it provides very little consolation for US high tech businesses like Cisco, which are reeling from the public revelation of their intimate games of footsie with the NSA.

Needless to say, the indictment also did nothing to advance what should be the sin qua non of superpower geopolitics: trying to drive a wedge between the PRC and Russia by highlighting differences in treatment.  But instead of stroking Xi Jinping, we gave him a whack on the snout at the same time we’re pummeling Putin.

That is, it would seem, rather stupid, since Russia is wary of PRC economic dominance, especially in the Siberian east, fears the demographic onslaught of the “Yellow Horde”, and is not an automatic and natural ally of China.

Nevertheless, “Eurasia” is now becoming a thing, and that’s not very good news for the pivot to Asia.  The pallid multilateralism of the pivot, I must confess, does not compare favorably to the muscular posturing of red strongmen that makes the hearts of neo-nationalists, particularly in Russia, go pitty-pat.

The premise of the pivot—that an ostensible united front of the US and Asian democracies will impel the PRC to modify its behavior to adhere to desired Western norms—is taking a hit along with the optics.

As the relative weight of the US and Europe in the world economy diminish, US sanctions encourage disintermediation of the US financial system in the world economy, the US pursues an ineffectual but polarizing all-stick/zero-carrot confrontation with Russia at the very time it is seeking to isolate the PRC diplomatically, and “Eurasia” looks more viable, the PRC’s willingness to bear the cost of defying US soft power increases.

Don’t get me wrong.  PRC aggressiveness in the South China Sea is real.  Problem is, the US will to confront the PRC in the SCS is not.  The Rube Goldberg structure of the pivot announces that fact instead of hiding it.

As the deterrent effect of US soft power in Asia dwindles, the US must decide whether to force developments in Asia into the sphere in which it still exercises unquestioned dominance—the hard power of military action—or resign itself to an ineluctable erosion of US prestige and influence in the region and a retreat to bilateral horsetrading with the unpalatable “Eurasian” powers.

It will also be interesting to see if America recognizes that it has a choice, albeit from an unattractive menu of options.  But if the Western spin of the Ukraine crisis is any guide, the US will console itself with the fantasy that it is merely reacting passively to aggression, the pivot was forced on it, and the PRC can be blamed for the unwise choices that Washington made.

The U.S. is not in the business of acknowledging it made bad foreign policy, even though it has made spectacularly bad foreign policy during the Obama as well as Bush administrations.  The usual temptation is to blame incapable proxies and venal antagonists for crises exacerbated by the United States.  

For a useful illustration, I direct readers to the case of Libya, where the US & NATO destroyed the governing authority, handed the reins over to groups totally incapable of exercising power, and are now apparently backing a coup by an ineffectual strongman who just might make things right; the cavalcade of bloody disaster that is US policy in Syria; the botch in Ukraine; and, for that matter, the massacre and misery of Iraq.  And I almost forgot the disaster that the US-midwifed regime of South Sudan has become.  And how about Yemen?   

Either the US is rather maladroit practitioner of foreign policy, or failure is displaying an inexplicable bias for dogging American actions.

For a classic specimen of US bewilderment at the pickle it’s in, I direct you to “China’s Grand Strategy Disaster” by Brad Glosserman of CSIS.  He is genuinely gobsmacked that the PRC cannot perceive the subtle genius of the pivot, which is so evident from the privileged perspective of the Washington Beltway.  Must be collective terror and/or insanity in the PRC ruling elite:

Why, then, does China stick to this course? Either no one in the upper echelons of the Chinese leadership sees the big picture—which is a very disturbing scenario—or no one in that leadership is prepared to question the wisdom of current policies, because the price of dissent is potentially too high. If true, that should be extremely worrying. That logic implies the momentum of current decisions cannot be diverted and confrontation, if not clashes, will follow.

There is only one convincing explanation for Chinese behavior: Beijing is trying to harvest a new source of energy to fuel its economy—capturing the power generated by Deng Xiaoping as he spins in his grave.

You know, I’m not sure a diagnosis of collective insanity in Zhongnanhai is really going to reassure President Obama that the pivot to Asia is the magic elixir for America’s “Pacific Century”.

There is, of course, another convincing explanation: that the PRC thinks it has enough regional clout to avoid catastrophic long term consequences from the transitory distaste of its neighbors and US for its policies, just as the United States feels it can shove its Ukraine policy down the throats of Germany and the EU.

For the US in Asia, I predict a choice off the confrontation/accommodation menu of “both and neither”, escalating but indecisive sanctions and military posturing, a mish-mash of soft power and hard power antagonism, i.e. an era of ugly and counterproductive muddling.  Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.

Humble pie for on menu for Xi Jinping at Sunnylands

[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on June 6, 2013.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]

The expert consensus is that the Barack Obama-Xi Jinping summit at Sunnylands, California is something of a relationship-building nothingburger. The summit was arranged on short notice, there is no detailed agenda, and the most likely result is that Obama and Xi will get to know each other better and therefore communicate more effectively.

In fact, the main concern of Western adversaries of the People's Republic of China (PRC), from dragon-slayers on the right to human rights crusaders on the left, seems to be that President Obama will surrender to Xi Jinping's burly charm and slacken in his resolve to twist the panda's testicles.

From the right, the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Auslin wrote an op-ed on the Foreign Policy magazine website asserting that the summit shouldn't even have happened.

... [S]summits like this one should be reserved for friends and allies ...

There are almost no shared values between Beijing and Washington, and little complementary policy. The Chinese engage with the United States because it allows them to play the charade of backslapping, while sidestepping tough issues. Unfortunately, Washington finds itself in a dialogue dependency trap ... [1]

Writing at the Asia Society's ChinaFile blog, Professor Andrew Nathan also expressed his concern that excessive comity might break out:

I hope our president avoids signing on to "a new type of great power relationship." This is Chinese code for the US preemptively yielding to what China views as its legitimate security interests. These interests are quite expansive - acceptance of the Chinese regime as it is, human rights violations and all; acceptance of China's territorial demands in the East and South China Seas; deference to China's views on the rules governing international trade, currency, climate change, humanitarian intervention, and so on ... I think a new equilibrium between American and Chinese interests will have to be achieved by painstaking work on concrete issues over a long period of time, often in a contentious environment. [2]

For good measure, Foreign Policy blog's Isaac Fish contributed a post hailing Michelle Obama's non-appearance at the summit, only expressing regret that her absence was officially attributable to obligations surrounding end-of-school for the children in Washington, and not an overt snub to Xi's wife to shame her for her past role as PLA chanteuse.

It is unlikely that President Obama will conduct his meeting with Xi like a middle manager briskly interviewing an unqualified and unattractive job applicant over a latte in the local Starbucks, impatiently checking his Blackberry during the pitch and abruptly leaving to get his car washed.

However, skeptics should be pleased that the United States holds the advantage at this particular juncture of the evolving US-China relationship and is probably prepared to use it.

The "pivot" - also known as "the rebalancing" - is working, albeit in unexpected ways.

The US exercise in "confrontainment" has not produced a united, US-led coalition compelling the PRC to upgrade its adherence to Western universal norms in return for the right to continued full membership in the community of nations.

Instead, Japan, under the rule of the PRC-hostile nationalist Shinzo Abe, is working to co-opt the rhetoric and goals of the pivot to create a favored place for Japan as the crucial economic and security component in an alliance of Asian democracies confronting China, thereby spooking the PRC and also working against the US hegemony in Asia which the pivot was intended to prolong.

Abe is doing the heavy lifting in assembling a Great Wall of Asian democracies containing China, roaming Asia in search of allies (and for the aid/trade/investment opportunities needed to provide some long-term fuel for his program of economic rebirth, "Abenomics").

To China's chagrin, Abe appears to be quite successful in getting open commitments to enhanced economic and security competition with China's regional adversaries (the Philippines, Vietnam), and conducting high profile engagement with erstwhile PRC ally/satellite Myanmar.

The nastiest shock for PRC, however, was the open tilt by India away from China and to Japan. Although Premier Li Keqiang made India the destination for his first overseas trip after assuming office, his visit was overshadowed by a flare-up in border tensions in Ladakh and Indian disgruntlement over China's large surplus in bilateral trade.

Shortly thereafter, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh paid a working visit to Tokyo, and his rhetoric went considerably beyond the triangulating rhetoric usually associated with Indian foreign policy to a full-throated endorsement of the special India-Japan relationship.

An Asia in which the Philippines, Vietnam, and India might be following the lead of Japan in an anti-China coalition is not just a matter of diplomatic embarrassment and potential (if remote) military hazard to the PRC.

There is the matter of the competing trade blocs: the US-led "Trans Pacific Partnership", the "high standards" pact that does not include the PRC, and the ASEAN-based and China-promoted alternative - the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, which has a more hospitable attitude toward mixed economies and state-owned enterprises and does not make a fetish out of the extraterritorial intellectual property and legal rights of multinational corporations as the TPP does; nor does it include the United States.

Japan has seized on TPP as a crucial element in its strategy to push the PRC toward the economic sidelines and assert a more central role for Japan, as a backgrounder in India's Financial Express pointed out:

From its start, the TPP was more than a regional trading arrangement. The US has not shied away from allowing it to be viewed as a response to China's growing economic presence in the Asia-Pacific. Abe has noted that the TPP's impact extends beyond the economic sphere. Participation in the TPP will allow Japan to create a "new economic order" with the US, creating new rules and ensuring stability in the Asia-Pacific region. Importantly, Abe sees the creation of this new order and its new rules as important steps in achieving Japan's national interests. Given that Japan is currently embroiled in a territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku islands, joining the TPP can also be seen as an attempt on the part of Japan to counter increasingly assertive China. ...

On the one hand, regional convergence based on the RCEP model will facilitate China's rise as the dominant Asian power. Conversely, a TPP-driven convergence will allow the US to re-assert itself as the dominant power in Asia. [3]

Since the inner workings of the TPP negotiations are notoriously opaque, it is not clear that Japan's full participation in TPP negotiations will give it the power - which is theoretically the prerogative of other members - to blackball new applicants. However, given Abe's China strategy, it is not unreasonable to speculate that the ability to apply a chokehold to China's TPP plans figured in Japan's decision to join negotiations.

At the same time, Japan is also a participant in the RCEP talks.

Perhaps equally fatally for the PRC's hopes, India, as befits its ambitions if not its location, is also a partner in the TPP talks as well as the RCEP talks.

If Japan and India combine to call for the RCEP to meet the same standards of the TPP, they have enough economic and geopolitical clout to make the TPP negotiations become the de facto standard. The RCEP - and the PRC - can languish on the sidelines.

Sidelining China and allowing Japan to occupy a central position among the smaller Asian maritime democracies - in essence, acting as a big frog in a smaller pond - is a good thing for Abe, but not necessarily for the United States, which will find itself crowding in the smaller pond it will have to share with graying, economically shaky Japan.

With conditions tending towards the unfavorable in Asia, and Japan's independent foreign policy whittling away at US claims to hegemony, the PRC's alternative is to play the US card and persuade the United States there are sound geopolitical advantages in restraining Japan, admonishing India, and allowing China some advantage in its myriad territorial and economic disputes.

In recent days, China has made several conciliatory moves: it sent a high-level delegation to the Shangri La defense ministers gab fest in Singapore to challenge the framing that the PRC is a bunch of confrontational knuckleheads on regional security and territorial issues. The PRC was determined to engage, as Reuters reported in "China turns on the charm at regional security forum":

[T]he charm offensive by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers, less than a week before Chinese President Xi Jinping meets US President Barack Obama for an informal summit, appeared to be designed to tone down the recent assertiveness by emphasizing cooperation and discussion ...

[A] senior US official accompanying Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to the forum saw a big change in the Chinese delegation. "Last year China had a very, very small contingent, a relatively junior-ranking contingent. This year they came in force ... and have been very active in the panels," said the official. "That's very, very good. We want everybody to engage." [4]

Then there was some discreet groveling on the issue of the Trans Pacific Partnership, via People's Daily:

China has been following the talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and hopes for more transparency in the discussions, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Friday.

Hong's remarks came after the US Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, Francisco J Sanchez, said the United States welcomes China to join the TPP. ...

Hong said China is open-minded about cooperation initiatives that are conducive to economic integration and common prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region, including the TPP and the RCEP. [5]

Add to that conciliatory noises on the vexing issue of North Korea via a leak to Reuters designed to communicate that the Chinese leadership got tough with North Korea's envoy when he showed up in Beijing end-May:

Beijing tried to convince Pyongyang to stop its nuclear and missile tests ...

China has grown increasingly frustrated with Pyongyang. It agreed to new UN sanctions after Pyongyang's latest nuclear test in February, and Chinese banks have curbed business with their North Korean counterparts in the wake of US sanctions on the country's main foreign exchange bank.

A former senior US official said Beijing's insistence that North Korea halt testing would be in line with recent signs it was running out of patience with Pyongyang.

"What I've heard from talking to Chinese officials and American officials who are talking to them is that top Chinese officials now emphasize that the principal goal is to terminate the nuclear weapons program of North Korea," the ex-official said. [6]

And immediately prior to President Xi's arrival in the United States:

A US businessman who was unable to leave China for nearly five years has returned to his home in the US. Hu Zhicheng was detained in China in 2008 when a former business partner accused him of commercial theft. ...

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters that Mr Hu had been restricted from leaving China because of an ongoing lawsuit.

"Now these restrictions have been cancelled according to legal proceedings. The relevant judicial cases are being handled," he said. [7]

All these initiatives add up to a message of conciliation from the PRC to the United States.

Are these simply the cynical machinations of a hostile regime determined to disguise its motives and shield its actions? A low-cost diplomatic strategy to grease the wheels for an otherwise meaningless friendly photo-op with President Obama to boost Xi Jinping's domestic stature?

Or is Xi prepared to execute as well as offer some genuine concessions in order to obtain, if not the unlikely "US China partnership", more of a tilt toward China and away from the pivot coalition in Pacific affairs? Probably a key indicator will be how the "cyber-outrage" narrative plays out.

The United States has been methodically hyping the Chinese cyber-threat since November 2011, systematically escalating the attributions, the accusations, and the anxiety from initial suspicions of non-state hacking maybe originating in China to current declarations that the Chinese government and military execute a massive state-directed hacking program against US commercial, governmental, and military assets.

A climax of sort will be reached in Sunnylands when President Obama officially gets into Xi Jinping's grill and provides a dossier of alleged Chinese cyber-outrages and the costs they have inflicted on US businesses.

The US cyber-position is rife with contradictions, starting with the fact that the United States - with its technological assets, its central position in the world communications infrastructure, the National Security Agency's pressing need to build server farms the size of the Astrodome to store the petabytes of data it has accidentally stumbled across (which, by US law, is supposed to exclude communications inside the United States), and the fact that the United States followed up its proud record of nuclear first use at Hiroshima to become the first use state for cyber-weapons with Stuxnet, the attack on Iranian centrifuge facilities - is the king of covert cyber-activity.

As Kenneth Lieberthal of Brookings put it:

President Obama needs to be sensitive to the reality that, from a Chinese perspective, the United States nearly owns the cyber arena. America has the most advanced tools and capabilities, and the Chinese political and financial systems largely run on American software. China assumes the US uses that huge capability to its advantage. That is a perception that will be part of the equation in any serious cyber discussion. [8]

One has to wonder if America's "China cyber-threat" posture has something to do with the realization that the Chinese government had allowed the yuan to appreciate to its natural value and a replacement threat narrative was urgently needed to keep the onus on the PRC as a rogue state.

Today, the traditional narrative that "Chinese companies beat out US companies because of an unfair exchange rate advantage" has been superseded by the borderline racist "Chinese companies can't innovate and can only succeed by stealing US secrets" reboot. Per NPR:

[I]f Chinese businesses can steal US technology, they can blunt the one big advantage US companies have in the global economy, which is their capacity to innovate. It is that spirit that explains the emergence of US companies like Microsoft, Apple or Google. Such companies, business experts say, have been far less likely to originate in China, because the business culture in China does not favor creativity. But they can always steal the products of US creativity. [9]

Then there are the accusations of military espionage, which lend themselves to even more dire narratives:

Lou Dobbs, CNBC: Remember, a little over a year ago, the Joint Chiefs made a similar statement, that in certain instances, intrusions in cyberspace will be considered an act of war against the United States and will be treated as such. What more ... what in God's name would it take to create an act of war? You couldn't do this in anything but the virtual world and have there be any doubt about it. It's an act of war. [10]

The Obama administration's high-profile jihad against Chinese hacking would appear to be an exercise in futility from a legal/diplomatic perspective.

Given the opaque nature of the Internet, it is unlikely that the United States will ever be able to document Chinese cyber-intrusion to a degree sufficient for an international commercial tribunal, let alone achieve the level of proof needed to launch a cyber-attack or cruise missile under international law. But that's not a bug, it's a feature.

What President Obama is presumably threatening is unilateral, discretionary, and unattributable off-the-books cyber-retaliation by executive order for cyber-infractions unless Xi acts on his dossier.

Things get better, in other words, or things get fucked up.

Not exactly the Platonic ideal of justice, but extremely useful to the United States: it can unilaterally define the crime, attribute it, demand punishment, and, inevitably, declare that the punishment was insufficiently thorough and sincere, in a fashion that will be immediately familiar to anyone who recalls the US campaign against Iraq's WMDs and Iran's nuclear program.

I expect that, for the sake of improving relations with the United States, President Xi will consider accepting the dossier and ordering up a few cyber-sacrifices in the digital arena. Accepting the dossier and "doing something" will be a relatively momentous step for Xi, if he undertakes it. If the PRC acknowledges the validity of US cyber-complaints the issue will never, ever go away (unless a new, even more effective instrument of China bashing materializes).

I expect Xi will consider assuming his cyber-enforcement duties with the understanding that nothing he can do will ever be considered sufficient by the United States, any benefits China gains in return are conditional, transitory, and subject to immediate revocation, and his domestic stature will not be enhanced by cooperating with the US on this issue.

This impression will be reinforced by the reshuffling of President Obama's national security team. Tom Donilon, President Obama's National Security Advisor, is stepping down in July and will be replaced by UN Ambassador and erstwhile candidate for secretary of state Susan Rice.

Donilon was the architect of the "rebalancing" to Asia, or perhaps the architect of appropriating Kurt Campbell's conception of the pivot, renaming it, and, in the first months of President Obama's second term, repurposing it to achieve a measure of meaningful engagement with the PRC.

Donilon was known for his focus on managing the national security process and its diverse constituencies to secure a range of foreign policy options for the White House. Reportedly, he was very keen to schedule the Sunnylands summit (the first president-to-president meeting was originally scheduled for the G-20 get together in September), quite possibly viewing it as his swan song and a chance to bring to fruition his project for rebalance-driven engagement.

Donilon is probably right to feel a sense of urgency, since his successor is likely to take a jaundiced view at the possibility of a constructive and productive relationship between China and the US.

Judging by preliminary reports and her performance at the United Nations, including her full-throated advocacy of the Libya intervention and disregard for the consequences for the overseas victims of her flawed moral certainty, Ambassador Rice is more likely to be an advocate for a moral interventionist agenda within the bureaucracy and to the president than an objective facilitator of the national security process. [11]

Rice will be replaced at the UN by Samantha Power, who is, perhaps, even more of a moral interventionist (fun fact: Power, an important adviser to President Obama on foreign policy, had been blocked from a high position in the Obama administration because she had called Hillary Clinton a "monster" while acting as an Obama campaign surrogate in 2008. It would be interesting if the trigger for all this musical-chair activity was the retirement of Hillary Clinton and the possibility to finally slot Ms Power into the high foreign policy position it was felt she deserved. With Rice and Power in the top spots President Obama originally intended for them, it will be interesting to see how much influence John Kerry can exert as secretary of state.)

Given staffing trends, President Obama's own inclinations, and its crude political utility, I expect cyber-indignation to remain at the center of US China policy.

And I expect that President Xi, cognizant of the fact that he needs some goodwill from the US, no matter how transitory, will think seriously about the risky and highly consequential step of validating the US cyber-threat bugbear.

Notes:
1. Xi's Not Ready, Foreign Policy, June 4, 2013.
2. What Should Obama and Xi Accomplish at Their California Summit?, ChinaFile, May 29, 2013.
3. Where does India stand amid changing Asia-Pacific trade dynamics?, Financial Express, April 4, 2013.
4. China turns on the charm at regional security forum, Reuters, June 2, 2013.
5. China hopes for transparent U.S.-led TPP talks, People's Daily Online, June 1, 2013.
6. China tried to convince North Korea to give up nuclear tests - source, Reuters, June 4, 2013.
7. US businessman Hu Zhicheng released from China, BBC News, June 5, 2013.
8. U.S.-China Relations: The Obama-Xi California Summit, Brookings, June 3, 2013.
9. U.S. Turns Up Heat On Costly Commercial Cybertheft In China, NPR, May 7, 2013.
10. Dobbs Wants U.S. to Declare War With China for Hacking, C&L, May 28, 2013.
11. Donilon's Legacy, foreignpolicy.com, June 5, 2013. (Subscription only).

If There’s a War With China…

It’s All Evan Osnos’ Fault!

Evan Osnos is the China columnist for the New Yorker.

My impression is that he usually covers the social issues/human rights/dissident beat.

However, yesterday, riffing off the news about organized Chinese hacking of US government and private websites, he veered off into counter-proliferationblack ops:

The fact is that the United States government has already shown signs of an energetic capacity for cyber war, as in the case of Stuxnet, the software worm that the U.S., working with Israel, is believed to have used to disrupt Iran’s uranium-enrichment program. Coincidentally, I happened to ask some North Korea experts last week if Pyongyang’s latest round of nuclear tests might make it a prime target for a Stuxnet-style intervention. “The only time I heard anything along such lines recently was suspicion that the April launch failure may have resulted from cyber attack—but that was in the realm of conspiracy theory,” John Delury, of Yonsei University, in Seoul, told me. 

As long as it’s in the realm of the theoretical, here’s another twist: given China’s vocal frustration with its erstwhile allies in Pyongyang, and China’s fondness for cyber adventures, any chance that China might try a Stuxnet approach to slow down a headache on its northeast border? From what I gathered, the chances were slim, in part because of operational differences between Iran and North Korea. “Do the Chinese know which industrial-control systems are in place?” Adam Segal, of the Council on Foreign Relations, asked. “Could they deliver the malware to a system that is most likely ‘air gapped’ and not connected to the Internet? Could they be sure that the infection wouldn’t spread—back to China or to U.S. or others? Do D.P.R.K. nuclear scientists travel? Is it possible to leave thumb drives around with no one noticing?”

On a couple of levels I am gobsmacked by Olnos’ blithe presumption.

I will set aside for the time being his rather fanciful view of the dynamics underlying PRC-DPRK relations.  Suffice to say that Beijing’s vision for sustaining its rather precarious economic and political sway over the northern half of the Korean peninsula do not involve sabotaging Pyongyang’s most cherished strategic initiative.

But as to the casual attitude toward a “Stuxnet approach”, Stuxnet was an act of war.  Full stop.  If the PRC or anybody else did that to us, they would face the prospect of direct, escalating retaliation.  

If one is looking for an explanation for why cyberwarfare has become an obsession of the Department of Defense, with the planned addition of thousands of specialists to “Cyber Command”, and why President Obama raised the spectre of cyberwarfare in his State of the Union address, look no further than Stuxnet.

I believe the stories of massive hacking effort condoned and directed by the PRC government, and the significant value of the intellectual property and secrets extracted.

But for the sake of clarity, let’s call it “cyberespionage”.  

Cyberwarfare—the destruction of military, industrial, or infrastructure facilities i.e. acts of war—is qualitatively different.

I also believe that the reason that that the reason that Chinese cyberespionage is hyped today (and conflated into the “cyberwarfare” category) is to distract attention from the US complicity in an irrevocable escalation of cyberwarfare, and to prepare public opinion against the day when this weapon is turned against us.

In the same article that Osnos advances the narrative of the dire character of  Chinese hacking (After years of warnings that Chinese hacking was a rising threat, the Mandiant study, and the willingness of U.S. officials to confirm many of its findings, signal a blunt new American counteroffensive against the era of Chinese cyber attacks), he proposes that the PRC might engage in a Stuxnet-type exploit of cross-border military sabotage.

There’s a qualitative difference in what the PRC has been accused of in the past, and what the US did with Stuxnet.

That’s not because the PRC is run by wonderful, peace-loving people--or because the PRC has not developed any cyberwar weapons (for one thing, I expect the PRC's computer scientists have been interested and involved participants in Iran's struggles with Stuxnet).  

It’s because the PRC is extremely careful to avoid cycles of escalation with US power, preferring to counterpunch asymmetrically.  

In defense matters, the asymettric doctrine is embodied in “non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states” as a bedrock value, one that provides China with a ready, if ever-eroding, bulwark against US “pre-emption” and “R2P” doctrines which leverage US military and technological superiority across national borders, and the ability for unmatchable escalation that is at the heart of the American game.

That isn’t a diplomatic and strategic shield to be abandoned lightly for the transient pleasures of fucking with North Korea’s nuclear program, or other cyberwarfare shenanigans, for that matter.

So I found Osnos’ speculation rather clueless, both in the matter of his understanding of the PRC security mindset and in the matter of his apparent utter gormlessness as to the significance of the Stuxnet exploit.

I will speculate that Olnos’ level of comfort with the “Stuxnet approach” has a lot to do with the fact that “we did it first, so it must be OK.”

Well, it’s not OK, and President Obama realizes it and the Pentagon realizes it, as can be seen from the attached piece. 

But if Evan Osnos thinks it’s OK, and his ignorance is contagious, we’re closer to the day when US cyberaggression against China can be excused and advocated as “less than war” and any Chinese retaliation will, inevitably, be condemned as “an act of war”.

So Evan, if there’s a war with China…it’s your fault!

Crossing the Digital Line

President Obama chose to open the Pandora’s box of cyberwar with the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s centrifuge operations.  In the process, he made a mockery of the Pentagon’s attempts to establish the rules of cyberwarfare in discussions with a most active and interested adversary--China.

Now, it is almost inevitable that, in addition to potential battlefields on land, sea, and in the air, the escalating and repeating cycle of genuine risk, threat inflation, politicized fearmongering, destabilizing challenges, and growing polarization, accompanied by expanded missions and fattened budgets for the security establishment and its defense contractors —will apply to the US-PRC cyber-arena.

China, of course, is an enthusiastic practitioner of every commercial, military, and diplomatic hack known to science and, it can be safely assumed, is developing its own suite of cyberweapons.

I expect Stuxnet also provides adequate inspiration and justification for the Chinese security and defense establishment to further formalize and professionalize its cyberwar operation and bloat its budget.

Chinese hacks against US targets have traditionally been attributed to freelancers indirectly steered by the Chinese government in order to preserve deniability, as I wrote for Asia Times in April 2012:

China is notorious for its interest in cyber-war as an asymmetric counter to the conventional military superiority of the United States ... and for its apparent willingness to farm out, encourage, or benefit from private hacker initiatives.

On 2010, Mara Hvistendahl wrote in Foreign Policy:

[T]he hacking scene in China probably looks more like a few intelligence officers overseeing a jumble of talented - and sometimes unruly - patriotic hackers. Since the 1990s, China has had an intelligence program targeting foreign technology, says James A Lewis, senior fellow for cyber-security and Internet policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Beyond that, however, things get complicated. "The hacking scene can be chaotic," he says. "There are many actors, some directed by the government and others tolerated by it. These actors can include civilian agencies, companies, and individuals." [3]

Patriotic hackers in China are called "hong ke" or "red guest", a pun on the phonetic rendering "hei ke" or "black guest" for hacker.

Their patriotic cyber-duties included destroying the online presence of South Korean boy band Super Junior after an unruly and undignified crowd of Chinese fans clamored to hear the band at the Shanghai World Expo and embarrassed Chinese nationalists. [4]

They also weigh in on foreign issues of greater moment, mixing it up with their Japanese counterparts when Sino-Japanese passions are inflamed by visits to the Yasukuni Shrine or the collision between a Chinese fishing boat and Japanese coast guard vessel off Diaoyutai/Senkaku in 2010.

But their major utility to the Chinese government may be their ability to generate chaff - a barrage of cyber-attacks to distract and overwhelm US security specialists trying to cope with China's pervasive, professional program of industrial and military espionage - and give the People's Republic of China (PRC) government deniability when hacking is traced to a Chinese source.

Chinese industrial cyber-espionage has emerged as a dominant near-term security concern of the United States.