With North Korea unwilling to return to the six-party talks, the U.S. has embarked on a policy of confrontation and saber rattling, terminating military cooperation on servicemen’s remains with the DPKR, “decapitating” the international initiative to provide North Korea with a peaceful nuke power station by removing its director, Charles Kartman, and, as reported in today’s New York Times, dispatching 15 Stealth fighters to South Korea to show Kim Jung-il:
that even though the American military is tied up in Iraq, it can reach his capital, Pyongyang, and the nuclear facilities north of it.
As the LA Times reported on May 28,
A former State Department official, who did not want to be quoted by name, said the suspension of the remains recovery program and Kartman's termination indicated a concerted effort by the administration to tighten the screws on Pyongyang."They are putting all the pieces in place to shut everything down around North Korea," he said.
The current confrontational policy against North Korea eerily recapitulates our campaign against Iraq in 2003.
Once again, the United States has labored mightily to delegitimize an unsavory regime as a pariah state and use incendiary claims about weapons of mass destruction to declare the existence of a pressing global security crisis. However, we have been unable to forge a genuine consensus concerning the nature or severity of the threat, or the proper measures to counter it. Instead of a global coalition, the Bush administration can claim the enthusiastic support of one regional ally—Japan—and the overt resistance and silent opposition of virtually all the major powers, including the dominant presence in Asia--China.
The only difference: this time we are admitting up front we’re not sure the policy will work.
From the New York Times:
But in the absence of(six-party) talks, much of the discussion inside the administration now is about instituting strong punitive measures, including interceptions of any shipments of suspected illicit goods. On Saturday, however, one official said that such an effort "just won't work if we can't get the Chinese to go along."
…
Even as the administration accepts a more pessimistic view of China's willingness to help, almost every option under discussion similarly relies on China.
As I argued in my May 26 post, the Bush administration has knowingly or unwittingly foreclosed its foreign policy options with its freedom crusade rhetoric.
The U.S. simply doesn’t have the credibility anymore to represent itself as an honest broker in the world of diplomacy, sovereignty, and negotiation.
All that’s left is the unilateral, unrestrained superpower “master of war” strategy that the Bush administration feels so comfortable with. But, without the capability to attract or compel Chinese support on North Korea, we are nowhere near being “master of events”.
So we are pursuing a foreign policy option that we understand ahead of time is probably futile.
Perhaps the Bush administration hopes that a hard line will produce some fruitful chaos, a “Perfect Storm” provoking some combination of crisis in North Korea and recalculation in China that will prove beneficial to U.S. interests.
But hope, as they say, is not a plan, and it is disturbing to see the United States resorting to a policy that can be best described as regional reckless endangerment without the mainstream press understanding the issues or the U.S. public having the slightest idea of what’s going on.
An effective resolution of our North Korean dilemma would probably require the repudiation of the Bush unilateral pre-emption doctrine and its authors. Failing that, we can only hope that when, we repeat the absurdities of Bush foreign policy this year, it is as farce, instead of tragedy.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Friday, May 27, 2005
Richard Holbrooke: China Does Matter
In today’s column in the Washington Post, ex Asst Sec of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke kindly echoes the fundamental theme of this blog—that “China Matters” but too few people pay attention:
China's gradual emergence as a political player on the world stage comes when there is a growing impression among other countries in East Asia that Washington is not paying the region sufficient attention…The challenge is obvious, but the lack of clear focus at the highest levels in Washington on our vital national security interests in the region is disturbing.
Actually, Holbrooke is hinting that the wrong people are paying sufficient attention to the region, listing the various interest groups that all share domestic political clout and strong but irreconcilable views on relations with China:
What vastly complicates U.S. relations with China is that every major foreign policy issue between the two countries is also a domestic matter, with its own lobbying groups and nongovernmental organizations ranging across the entire American political spectrum, from human rights to pro-life, from pro-Tibet to organized labor. The bilateral agenda, even a partial one, is daunting: Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, religious freedom, press freedom, the Falun Gong, slave labor, North Korea, Iran, trade, the exchange rate, intellectual property rights, access to Chinese markets, export of sensitive technology and the arms embargo.
In other words, without strong professional leadership (Holbrooke is probably thinking of pin-striped heroes of the State Department like himself), our China policy will be driven by the disparate imperatives of dingbats, do-gooders, and opportunists, and chaos, failure, and damage to American interests will result.
Perhaps Holbrooke’s column was inspired by the spectacle of Treasury Secretary Snow’s rather embarrassing performance on the Chinese yuan revaluation, no doubt at the command of Karl Rove, who is concerned about the political backlash among core Republican groups at the trade deficit with China.
To capture the lede in the hometown papers, Snow first made thundering noises about how the Chinese currency must be reformed, but then admitted a full float was impossible, and finally made it clear he was just begging for a cosmetic shift from the hard 8.3 yuan-to-the-dollar peg—allowing a narrow fluctuation in the yuan and which would have no significant impact on the trade deficit—so President Bush could pretend his administration’s disorganized and distrusted foreign affairs apparatus could claim a victory in its dealings with China.
China's gradual emergence as a political player on the world stage comes when there is a growing impression among other countries in East Asia that Washington is not paying the region sufficient attention…The challenge is obvious, but the lack of clear focus at the highest levels in Washington on our vital national security interests in the region is disturbing.
Actually, Holbrooke is hinting that the wrong people are paying sufficient attention to the region, listing the various interest groups that all share domestic political clout and strong but irreconcilable views on relations with China:
What vastly complicates U.S. relations with China is that every major foreign policy issue between the two countries is also a domestic matter, with its own lobbying groups and nongovernmental organizations ranging across the entire American political spectrum, from human rights to pro-life, from pro-Tibet to organized labor. The bilateral agenda, even a partial one, is daunting: Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, religious freedom, press freedom, the Falun Gong, slave labor, North Korea, Iran, trade, the exchange rate, intellectual property rights, access to Chinese markets, export of sensitive technology and the arms embargo.
In other words, without strong professional leadership (Holbrooke is probably thinking of pin-striped heroes of the State Department like himself), our China policy will be driven by the disparate imperatives of dingbats, do-gooders, and opportunists, and chaos, failure, and damage to American interests will result.
Perhaps Holbrooke’s column was inspired by the spectacle of Treasury Secretary Snow’s rather embarrassing performance on the Chinese yuan revaluation, no doubt at the command of Karl Rove, who is concerned about the political backlash among core Republican groups at the trade deficit with China.
To capture the lede in the hometown papers, Snow first made thundering noises about how the Chinese currency must be reformed, but then admitted a full float was impossible, and finally made it clear he was just begging for a cosmetic shift from the hard 8.3 yuan-to-the-dollar peg—allowing a narrow fluctuation in the yuan and which would have no significant impact on the trade deficit—so President Bush could pretend his administration’s disorganized and distrusted foreign affairs apparatus could claim a victory in its dealings with China.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
More Carrots to Beat North Korea With
In our negotiations with North Korea it looks like the only use we have for carrots is as blunt instruments to beat the DPRK over the head with.
Today, in congressional testimony, the State Department’s Christopher Hill complained about North Korea’s foot-dragging in restarting the six-party talks about its nuclear program.
Richard Lawless, the top Asian guy at the Pentagon, appeared with Hill. In an attempt to show that we’re really angry and the DPRK had better get with the program, the DoD announced the following moves:
suspended virtually the only military cooperation between the U.S. and the DROK—a joint effort to recover the remains of American servicemen—on the flimsiest of pretexts
and
announced portentously that the Pentagon has “plans” in case the six-party talks fail.
The problem here is not just that this saber-rattling sounds pretty unconvincing.
The real problem is that we’re hostages to a confrontational policy with North Korea over its nuclear program—a policy that offers no way out of the Korean impasse because of our over-reliance on the logic, measures, and goals associated with the Bush administration’s beloved policy of regime change.
In other words, the shadow of Iraq hangs over our North Korean policy.
Not only Kim Jung-il but the whole world remembers how the United States parlayed an ostentatious fixation with Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction into an invasion that achieved its actual objective of regime change.
The United States believes that confronting North Korea over its nuclear programs deploys the most effective diplomatic weapons in America’s arsenal: accusation and delegitimization followed by escalation culminating in ultimatum, triumph, and regime change, all powered by unanswerable U.S. moral, diplomatic, and military ascendancy.
But that strategy is so 2003.
Non-proliferation is no longer the universally invincible wedge against our enemies and rallying point for our allies. Our failures in Iraq probably have a lot to do with that.
None of our allies except Japan accept our insistence that North Korea’s nuclear program is a pressing security crisis. And the Chinese—who expect to get a dose of American regime-change medicine some ways down the road—have an active interest in discouraging the view that the North Korean situation is so desperate it requires the East Asian states to toe Washington’s line.
Most of the front-line states in the Korean imbroglio see the nuclear program as an inevitable response by the North Koreans to U.S. regime-change pressures—a legitimate deterrent as well as a cynical bargaining tool.
And North Korea believes that the best way to forestall U.S. pressure—and obtain leverage to obtain the desperately needed economic aid that props up the regime—is to get some real nukes asap.
We are nowhere near having the diplomatic support needed for an escalating process of confrontation leading to that magic “or else” moment that makes North Korea’s protectors to step back and acquiesce to regime change.
At the same time, rapprochement and retreat do not appear to be options for the Bush administration, which has staked White House foreign policy credibility on non-proliferation and counter-proliferation, and its domestic standing on “fire of freedom” rhetoric.
So we’re having our Rumpelstiltskin moment, where we stamp our feet in frustrated fury while the rest of the world waits for us to crash through the floor.
The frustration of the Korea hands in Washington must be all-consuming. By any standard, North Korea should be the lowest-hanging fruit for America’s freedom fighters to pluck.
I’m not claiming to understand the inner workings of North Korean society, but I think that China and South Korea—the two states that border on the DPRK, for you geography-challenged folks—could bring down Kim Jung-il’s regime rather easily by opening their borders and encouraging a flood of refugees.
The South Koreans don’t want it, apparently because of the big costs and disruption of reunification —ranging from $2 to $3 trillion in the gold-plated scenario to $125 billion in the “diplomacy, politics, the free market, and world finance working together like a well-oiled machine” cut-rate proposal which, in the aftermath of the $300 billion and counting Iraq nationbuilding debacle, looks pathetically optimistic.
The Chinese don’t want it, presumably because South Korea and the United States could exploit the power vacuum more quickly and effectively than the PRC could, and the front-line boundary between the West and China would move from the 38th parallel to whatever buffer zone the Chinese would be able to secure near the Yalu.
So the Chinese and the South Koreans have a shared interest in the continued survival of the North Korean regime. They also share a desire for a program of economic growth and reform that would increase North Korea’s viability and turn it into a positive economic force in Northeast Asia, instead of an exasperating strategic burden whose only competitive exports are medium-range missiles and the international anxiety and aggravation provoked by its half-assed nuclear weapons program.
The main obstacle to that kind of reform is the under-siege mentality of the Kim Jung-il regime, which assumes, probably quite rightly, that the stresses, costs, and dislocations of economic reform would quickly destabilize the regime, especially if the United States actively exploited this opportunity to subvert the DPRK.
And that under siege mentality is reinforced—and justified—by American hyperventilating over the DPRK’s nuke program.
Interestingly, at Hill’s congressional appearance, he was pressed to accept bilateral talks with North Korea—the kind of one-on-one horsetrading as equals with Kim Jung-il that is the polar opposite of the dance of death for the North Korean pariah state that the U.S. is trying to choreograph through the six-party talks.
It’s time to acknowledge that the regime-change elixir is not what Northeast Asia needs right now.
In a realpolitik world, the United States would make a deal that would guarantee North Korean sovereignty and provide economic and political assistance for the odious Kim Jung-il regime to execute the reforms and market opening with Chinese and South Korean help that will make it into something other than an economic basket case.
The long-suffering people of North Korea would be denied the freedom and self-determination they crave, and have to endure a Chinese-style totalitarian/free market economy with an overlay of chaebol domination, but it would be better than what they have now.
Then, President Bush can have his Nixon-in-China moment. He can go to Pyongyong, and the two height-challenged hereditary monarchs can exchange the historic handshake that welcomes North Korea back into the world community.
I’d love to see it—but I’m not holding my breath.
Today, in congressional testimony, the State Department’s Christopher Hill complained about North Korea’s foot-dragging in restarting the six-party talks about its nuclear program.
Richard Lawless, the top Asian guy at the Pentagon, appeared with Hill. In an attempt to show that we’re really angry and the DPRK had better get with the program, the DoD announced the following moves:
suspended virtually the only military cooperation between the U.S. and the DROK—a joint effort to recover the remains of American servicemen—on the flimsiest of pretexts
and
announced portentously that the Pentagon has “plans” in case the six-party talks fail.
The problem here is not just that this saber-rattling sounds pretty unconvincing.
The real problem is that we’re hostages to a confrontational policy with North Korea over its nuclear program—a policy that offers no way out of the Korean impasse because of our over-reliance on the logic, measures, and goals associated with the Bush administration’s beloved policy of regime change.
In other words, the shadow of Iraq hangs over our North Korean policy.
Not only Kim Jung-il but the whole world remembers how the United States parlayed an ostentatious fixation with Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction into an invasion that achieved its actual objective of regime change.
The United States believes that confronting North Korea over its nuclear programs deploys the most effective diplomatic weapons in America’s arsenal: accusation and delegitimization followed by escalation culminating in ultimatum, triumph, and regime change, all powered by unanswerable U.S. moral, diplomatic, and military ascendancy.
But that strategy is so 2003.
Non-proliferation is no longer the universally invincible wedge against our enemies and rallying point for our allies. Our failures in Iraq probably have a lot to do with that.
None of our allies except Japan accept our insistence that North Korea’s nuclear program is a pressing security crisis. And the Chinese—who expect to get a dose of American regime-change medicine some ways down the road—have an active interest in discouraging the view that the North Korean situation is so desperate it requires the East Asian states to toe Washington’s line.
Most of the front-line states in the Korean imbroglio see the nuclear program as an inevitable response by the North Koreans to U.S. regime-change pressures—a legitimate deterrent as well as a cynical bargaining tool.
And North Korea believes that the best way to forestall U.S. pressure—and obtain leverage to obtain the desperately needed economic aid that props up the regime—is to get some real nukes asap.
We are nowhere near having the diplomatic support needed for an escalating process of confrontation leading to that magic “or else” moment that makes North Korea’s protectors to step back and acquiesce to regime change.
At the same time, rapprochement and retreat do not appear to be options for the Bush administration, which has staked White House foreign policy credibility on non-proliferation and counter-proliferation, and its domestic standing on “fire of freedom” rhetoric.
So we’re having our Rumpelstiltskin moment, where we stamp our feet in frustrated fury while the rest of the world waits for us to crash through the floor.
The frustration of the Korea hands in Washington must be all-consuming. By any standard, North Korea should be the lowest-hanging fruit for America’s freedom fighters to pluck.
I’m not claiming to understand the inner workings of North Korean society, but I think that China and South Korea—the two states that border on the DPRK, for you geography-challenged folks—could bring down Kim Jung-il’s regime rather easily by opening their borders and encouraging a flood of refugees.
The South Koreans don’t want it, apparently because of the big costs and disruption of reunification —ranging from $2 to $3 trillion in the gold-plated scenario to $125 billion in the “diplomacy, politics, the free market, and world finance working together like a well-oiled machine” cut-rate proposal which, in the aftermath of the $300 billion and counting Iraq nationbuilding debacle, looks pathetically optimistic.
The Chinese don’t want it, presumably because South Korea and the United States could exploit the power vacuum more quickly and effectively than the PRC could, and the front-line boundary between the West and China would move from the 38th parallel to whatever buffer zone the Chinese would be able to secure near the Yalu.
So the Chinese and the South Koreans have a shared interest in the continued survival of the North Korean regime. They also share a desire for a program of economic growth and reform that would increase North Korea’s viability and turn it into a positive economic force in Northeast Asia, instead of an exasperating strategic burden whose only competitive exports are medium-range missiles and the international anxiety and aggravation provoked by its half-assed nuclear weapons program.
The main obstacle to that kind of reform is the under-siege mentality of the Kim Jung-il regime, which assumes, probably quite rightly, that the stresses, costs, and dislocations of economic reform would quickly destabilize the regime, especially if the United States actively exploited this opportunity to subvert the DPRK.
And that under siege mentality is reinforced—and justified—by American hyperventilating over the DPRK’s nuke program.
Interestingly, at Hill’s congressional appearance, he was pressed to accept bilateral talks with North Korea—the kind of one-on-one horsetrading as equals with Kim Jung-il that is the polar opposite of the dance of death for the North Korean pariah state that the U.S. is trying to choreograph through the six-party talks.
It’s time to acknowledge that the regime-change elixir is not what Northeast Asia needs right now.
In a realpolitik world, the United States would make a deal that would guarantee North Korean sovereignty and provide economic and political assistance for the odious Kim Jung-il regime to execute the reforms and market opening with Chinese and South Korean help that will make it into something other than an economic basket case.
The long-suffering people of North Korea would be denied the freedom and self-determination they crave, and have to endure a Chinese-style totalitarian/free market economy with an overlay of chaebol domination, but it would be better than what they have now.
Then, President Bush can have his Nixon-in-China moment. He can go to Pyongyong, and the two height-challenged hereditary monarchs can exchange the historic handshake that welcomes North Korea back into the world community.
I’d love to see it—but I’m not holding my breath.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Arthur Waldron and the Rightward Drift of U.S. Discourse on China
In Joseph Kahn and Chris Buckley’s article in the New York Times, China Gives a Strategic 21-Gun Salute to Visiting Uzbek President, a China expert parses the Chinese desire to cozy up to Uzbekistan as follows:
"Energy is clearly one driver for China in the region," said Arthur Waldron, a China expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "My sense is that they also tend to think that anything that throws sand into the face of the U.S. is a good thing."
Hmmm. Not exactly the way I read it.
In the interests of full disclosure, I think Kahn and Buckley should have identified Waldron as affiliated with the self-identified “Blue Team” of confront-China enthusiasts seeking to permeate the Pentagon and State Department.
Waldron is the former Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; signatory to Project for the New American Century statements on Taiwan and Hong Kong; served on the boards of various right-leaning foundations, and testifies to Congress on the China threat.
In the feisty days when Clinton was president and the Blue Team boasted of its virtuous conspiracy to tilt policy and perceptions toward a harder anti-China stance in the face of panda-hugger persecution, Waldron openly called for regime change in China.
He provides academic credibility and cover for the Blue Team, which is composed largely of anti-PRC enthusiasts with limited backgrounds in Asian affairs, in role similar to the one Bernard Lewis played for the neo-cons over Iraq.
It may be unfair, but I see Waldron, like Lewis, as an academic at best prescribing tough love for his area of study and at worst sounding positively Sinophobic.
In considering 20th century Asia, Waldron has a strong pro-Japan tilt. A flavor of his views, and how he applies them to the current situation, can be gleaned from his piece Japan Emerges, published earlier this year:
So perhaps we should listen to other historians, less well known than those who concentrate on Japanese domestic history {for the origins of the China invasion}, stressing instead a series of completely unexpected developments in the region that even the most liberal Japanese leaders saw as threatening to their country’s security.
Most important of these was a strong but erratically guided rise of Chinese power that saw that country’s government, goading and reacting to the resentments of her people, flout many of the undertakings she had made at Washington {at the Washington Conference of 1921-22--CH}.
Almost simultaneously came political splits and then civil wars in a China that at the time of the Conference had seemed politically stable and set on a course of peaceful economic development. These wars threatened continental interests that Tokyo considered vital, and when the allies who had promised at Washington to consult on such threats and act to protect legitimate interests failed to do so, Japan attempted to do so herself—in a catastrophic way that saw both democracy and millions of Japanese people perish.
One element of a parallel to these developments is already in place. North Korea’s nuclear capability has deeply unsettled Japan…
Translation: The Chinese were asking for it in the 1930s and now they’re asking for it again today.
Most students of the period tend to blame Japanese belligerence and imperial ambition for the catastrophe of the Pacific War, not Chinese provocation.
As Waldron himself admits, he’s in the minority in his reading of modern Asian history.
So it seems to me a sign of the rightward drift in the popular discourse about China that he nevertheless appears to be a go-to guy for the New York Times when some academic insight about the PRC is called for.
When Waldron depicts China’s outreach to the Uzbekistan regime primarily as a move touching on the mother of all American strategic interests—oil—and a provocative nose thumbing at the United States…
…instead of a clumsy embrace driven by China’s fear that weakening of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia will give the Muslims of Xinjiang a thirst for the same kind of populist, anti-government activism and promise of democratic self-determination that has roiled Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan…
…it makes me wonder if he’s trying to create a pressing issue for America in China’s relationship with Uzbekistan that really isn’t there.
If anything, China may be using its ostentatious show of support for Karimov to signal to the United States that China is fully vested in the survival of this pro-American tyrant and the U.S. government should not feel there is any need—or compelling alternative—to abandoning him.
"Energy is clearly one driver for China in the region," said Arthur Waldron, a China expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "My sense is that they also tend to think that anything that throws sand into the face of the U.S. is a good thing."
Hmmm. Not exactly the way I read it.
In the interests of full disclosure, I think Kahn and Buckley should have identified Waldron as affiliated with the self-identified “Blue Team” of confront-China enthusiasts seeking to permeate the Pentagon and State Department.
Waldron is the former Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; signatory to Project for the New American Century statements on Taiwan and Hong Kong; served on the boards of various right-leaning foundations, and testifies to Congress on the China threat.
In the feisty days when Clinton was president and the Blue Team boasted of its virtuous conspiracy to tilt policy and perceptions toward a harder anti-China stance in the face of panda-hugger persecution, Waldron openly called for regime change in China.
He provides academic credibility and cover for the Blue Team, which is composed largely of anti-PRC enthusiasts with limited backgrounds in Asian affairs, in role similar to the one Bernard Lewis played for the neo-cons over Iraq.
It may be unfair, but I see Waldron, like Lewis, as an academic at best prescribing tough love for his area of study and at worst sounding positively Sinophobic.
In considering 20th century Asia, Waldron has a strong pro-Japan tilt. A flavor of his views, and how he applies them to the current situation, can be gleaned from his piece Japan Emerges, published earlier this year:
So perhaps we should listen to other historians, less well known than those who concentrate on Japanese domestic history {for the origins of the China invasion}, stressing instead a series of completely unexpected developments in the region that even the most liberal Japanese leaders saw as threatening to their country’s security.
Most important of these was a strong but erratically guided rise of Chinese power that saw that country’s government, goading and reacting to the resentments of her people, flout many of the undertakings she had made at Washington {at the Washington Conference of 1921-22--CH}.
Almost simultaneously came political splits and then civil wars in a China that at the time of the Conference had seemed politically stable and set on a course of peaceful economic development. These wars threatened continental interests that Tokyo considered vital, and when the allies who had promised at Washington to consult on such threats and act to protect legitimate interests failed to do so, Japan attempted to do so herself—in a catastrophic way that saw both democracy and millions of Japanese people perish.
One element of a parallel to these developments is already in place. North Korea’s nuclear capability has deeply unsettled Japan…
Translation: The Chinese were asking for it in the 1930s and now they’re asking for it again today.
Most students of the period tend to blame Japanese belligerence and imperial ambition for the catastrophe of the Pacific War, not Chinese provocation.
As Waldron himself admits, he’s in the minority in his reading of modern Asian history.
So it seems to me a sign of the rightward drift in the popular discourse about China that he nevertheless appears to be a go-to guy for the New York Times when some academic insight about the PRC is called for.
When Waldron depicts China’s outreach to the Uzbekistan regime primarily as a move touching on the mother of all American strategic interests—oil—and a provocative nose thumbing at the United States…
…instead of a clumsy embrace driven by China’s fear that weakening of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia will give the Muslims of Xinjiang a thirst for the same kind of populist, anti-government activism and promise of democratic self-determination that has roiled Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan…
…it makes me wonder if he’s trying to create a pressing issue for America in China’s relationship with Uzbekistan that really isn’t there.
If anything, China may be using its ostentatious show of support for Karimov to signal to the United States that China is fully vested in the survival of this pro-American tyrant and the U.S. government should not feel there is any need—or compelling alternative—to abandoning him.
Freedom Not Quite on the March in Central Asia This Week
A story that didn’t receive a lot of ink because it doesn’t fit in with the “pastel revolution/freedom on the march in Central Asia” theme was the victory by Nambaryn Enkhbayar of Mongolia's former communist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party in the country's presidential elections.
He promptly announced
"[The] number one economic partner and number one investor in Mongolia is China," he said. "We do have very good normal relations with China, and we do intend to keep on having those relations."
And just as promptly Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi, fresh from delivering a extremely pointed and highly significant snub to Japanese PM Koizumi, jetted to Ulan Bator to sign an 18-point agreement as reported in Ming Pao.
China also hurried to shore up its western flank by welcoming Uzbek bad guy Islam Karimov for a state visit.
Beijing is apparently banking on the hope that his savage crackdown in Andijon will play out in Tian An Men style, stabilize his authoritarian regime, and discourage Xinjiang Muslims from emulating Uzbeki strivings for popular, anti-government self-determination.
China’s main levers in Central Asia are economic, not military, and have unfavorable as well as favorable effects. Chinese economic penetration elicits popular resentment for crowding out local businesses and demonstrating Han Chinese encroachment on local cultures.
Therefore, alliance with China is not a source of political advantage for local leaders seeking to rally the electorate.
So the situation on China’s inner-Asian flank is relatively tenuous and risky, and the Chinese government doesn’t have a lot of tools. The best it can hope for is the continued viability of authoritarian regimes with as much interest in stability and as little interest in popular democratic movements as China itself has.
He promptly announced
"[The] number one economic partner and number one investor in Mongolia is China," he said. "We do have very good normal relations with China, and we do intend to keep on having those relations."
And just as promptly Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi, fresh from delivering a extremely pointed and highly significant snub to Japanese PM Koizumi, jetted to Ulan Bator to sign an 18-point agreement as reported in Ming Pao.
China also hurried to shore up its western flank by welcoming Uzbek bad guy Islam Karimov for a state visit.
Beijing is apparently banking on the hope that his savage crackdown in Andijon will play out in Tian An Men style, stabilize his authoritarian regime, and discourage Xinjiang Muslims from emulating Uzbeki strivings for popular, anti-government self-determination.
China’s main levers in Central Asia are economic, not military, and have unfavorable as well as favorable effects. Chinese economic penetration elicits popular resentment for crowding out local businesses and demonstrating Han Chinese encroachment on local cultures.
Therefore, alliance with China is not a source of political advantage for local leaders seeking to rally the electorate.
So the situation on China’s inner-Asian flank is relatively tenuous and risky, and the Chinese government doesn’t have a lot of tools. The best it can hope for is the continued viability of authoritarian regimes with as much interest in stability and as little interest in popular democratic movements as China itself has.
Nick Kristof Irritates Me
In his recent column, Mr. Kristof engages in one of those hands-on pieces of vainglory that is the unique domain of the celebrity newspaper columnist.
He visits a Chinese chat room, types in a provocative statement about permitting multi-party elections, and dimples with pride as this piece of freedom-loving straight talk is deleted by the censor.
Then he tells us that broadband will be the death of the Communist regime.
Puhleeze!
The Internet has changed the way the world masturbates but, as a digital form of communication that relies on government infrastructure for transmission and can be filtered, monitored, and traced efficiently and on a massive scale with public security computing resources, it is not a perfect, irresistible force for righteous political subversion.
Political movements adopt and exploit the tools of the times: cell phones in the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, big character posters during the Cultural Revolution, cassette tapes in 1970s Iran, chapattis in the Sepoy Rebellion, pamphlets in the American revolutionary war, pancakes at the fall of the Yuan dynasty…
More to the point, as conditions permit, every government works non-stop to accommodate, co-opt, or suppress the media and content that threaten its dominance of information management.
It’s a full-time job, pursued with implacable determination, unlimited resources, and resounding success.
In this connection, I might cite the case of a once-great newspaper whose correspondents and columnists still appear unable to acknowledge the fact that they served as befuddled if willing tools of a government campaign of deception that enabled an unprovoked and catastrophic war of aggression…
…even as thousand of Internet-linked keyboards clattered in furious and principled opposition around the world.
In America, the Internet now peddles so much illusion and confusion fostered by the government and its supporters that its potential as a unique and uniquely powerful political voice for the disenfranchised has been lost.
The Chinese Communists are already busy neutering the Internet, as this roundup from China Digital Times shows.
The threat to the regime will come from people, ideology, and beliefs, not a communications process.
Change in China will require political, moral, and human courage. It will require leadership. When it comes, it will exploit a hundred existing and new channels of communication to get its message out and rally and organize its supporters.
It doesn’t need the Internet.
And it probably doesn’t need Nick Kristof.
He visits a Chinese chat room, types in a provocative statement about permitting multi-party elections, and dimples with pride as this piece of freedom-loving straight talk is deleted by the censor.
Then he tells us that broadband will be the death of the Communist regime.
Puhleeze!
The Internet has changed the way the world masturbates but, as a digital form of communication that relies on government infrastructure for transmission and can be filtered, monitored, and traced efficiently and on a massive scale with public security computing resources, it is not a perfect, irresistible force for righteous political subversion.
Political movements adopt and exploit the tools of the times: cell phones in the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, big character posters during the Cultural Revolution, cassette tapes in 1970s Iran, chapattis in the Sepoy Rebellion, pamphlets in the American revolutionary war, pancakes at the fall of the Yuan dynasty…
More to the point, as conditions permit, every government works non-stop to accommodate, co-opt, or suppress the media and content that threaten its dominance of information management.
It’s a full-time job, pursued with implacable determination, unlimited resources, and resounding success.
In this connection, I might cite the case of a once-great newspaper whose correspondents and columnists still appear unable to acknowledge the fact that they served as befuddled if willing tools of a government campaign of deception that enabled an unprovoked and catastrophic war of aggression…
…even as thousand of Internet-linked keyboards clattered in furious and principled opposition around the world.
In America, the Internet now peddles so much illusion and confusion fostered by the government and its supporters that its potential as a unique and uniquely powerful political voice for the disenfranchised has been lost.
The Chinese Communists are already busy neutering the Internet, as this roundup from China Digital Times shows.
The threat to the regime will come from people, ideology, and beliefs, not a communications process.
Change in China will require political, moral, and human courage. It will require leadership. When it comes, it will exploit a hundred existing and new channels of communication to get its message out and rally and organize its supporters.
It doesn’t need the Internet.
And it probably doesn’t need Nick Kristof.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
What Would Bismarck Do?
Condi thinks he’d acknowledge North Korea’s sovereignty.
A clear indication of Condi Rice’s current, if perhaps transitory, victory over the neo-cons can be found in the transcript of Yale professor John Gaddis’s remarks at Ten O’clock Scholar.
Gaddis, with disingenuous humility and disbelief, describes how he was invited to the White House and found out everybody from George Bush to Condi Rice to Karl Rove are reading his stuff and talking about his take on Otto von Bismarck.
Gaddis’s take on Bismarck is:
And I said that although great grand strategists know the uses of “shock and awe,” they also know when to stop. Here I cited the example of Otto von Bismarck, who had shattered the post-1815 European state system in order to make possible the unification of Germany in 1871, but then had “replaced his destabilizing strategy with a new one aimed at consolidation and reassurance – at persuading his defeated enemies as well as nervous allies and alarmed bystanders that they would be better off living within the new system he had imposed on them than by continuing to fight or fear it.”
…
And that the single greatest mistake the administration had made was to assume that it could shatter the status quo in the Middle East, and that the pieces would then realign themselves spontaneously in patterns favorable to American interests. Bismarck, I said, would never have made such an error.
The absolute dead give-away that George Bush’s interest in Bismarck is a piece of political framing—and theater—for the foreign policy crowd is Gaddis’s delighted discovery
that the piece (an article by Gaddis in Foreign Affairs) had not only been read and circulated around the White House, but it had also been sent out to an e-mail distribution list for columnists and commentators that Karl Rove’s office maintains.
If there is anything at work here, it is Condi Rice’s hope that, with the neo-cons in cold storage, Don Rumsfeld in the doghouse, and with Condi at the president’s ear, America still has enough power, prestige, and credibility to persuade the world that it can sincerely promote the global win-win scenarios associated with traditional diplomacy.
That’s what’s behind the leaking of the apparently unproductive and futile direct meeting with between U.S. and North Korean officials in New York earlier this May, as well as a host of other exercises in conventional diplomacy, handholding, and consensus building recently reported in the press.
Condi is trying to signal that America is back as an engaged, sincere force in the diplomatic initiatives trying to resolve issues in North Korea and Iran.
Condi may not only be underestimating the lasting damage that unapologetic, brazen U.S. war-driven unilateralism in Bush’s first term inflicted on America’s credibility.
She may not be ready to accept how much of that damage was willful and intentional—and irreparable.
The special genius of the neo-cons was to create scenarios of escalation and confrontation that foreclosed diplomatic alternatives and committed the U.S. to a preordained path of extreme actions in order to preserve its prestige and credibility.
It wasn’t just a matter of hurriedly and pre-emptively relegating Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to eternal pariah-state status with the Presidential impratur of “Axis of Evil”.
It was our open, gratuitous pro-Israel tilt, which guaranteed that the Muslim states would be allowed no political role in the Middle East crisis that might serve to moderate American behavior.
It was the aggressive impugning of the United Nations, the vilification of France, Germany, and Old Europe, the withdrawal from the ABM treaty, and the repudiation of the International Criminal Court, which demonstrated that we would repudiate and attack any political or institutional alternatives to American power.
It was a scorched-earth campaign designed to ensure that mistrust and anger at the United States would run deep enough among our enemies and expendable allies to assure that America had no choice but to take the lonely road of sole world hegemon.
George Bush and the neo-cons propelled us into a zero-sum future in which America’s stated willingness to use extreme, unilateral power hangs over everybody else like a dark cloud.
That’s why North Korea—which seeks from the United States above all an acknowledgement of its legitimate sovereignty and right to exist—has discounted an otherwise significant initiative from the State Department:
After a public appeal from North Korea, a State Department envoy met with North Korean officials at the United Nations last week to reiterate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent statement that the Bush administration recognizes the reclusive country's sovereignty, U.S. officials said yesterday.
While George W. Bush—the man who personally inducted North Korea into the Axis of Evil, reportedly because public relations concerns demanded at least one non-Islamic target—still in the White House, North Korea’s distrust of the U.S. administration is fundamental and unalterable.
The situation is described in greater detail below in the post Our Korean Conundrum.
And that’s something that a few diplomatic initiatives—or some lessons from Bismarck—won’t be able to undo.
A clear indication of Condi Rice’s current, if perhaps transitory, victory over the neo-cons can be found in the transcript of Yale professor John Gaddis’s remarks at Ten O’clock Scholar.
Gaddis, with disingenuous humility and disbelief, describes how he was invited to the White House and found out everybody from George Bush to Condi Rice to Karl Rove are reading his stuff and talking about his take on Otto von Bismarck.
Gaddis’s take on Bismarck is:
And I said that although great grand strategists know the uses of “shock and awe,” they also know when to stop. Here I cited the example of Otto von Bismarck, who had shattered the post-1815 European state system in order to make possible the unification of Germany in 1871, but then had “replaced his destabilizing strategy with a new one aimed at consolidation and reassurance – at persuading his defeated enemies as well as nervous allies and alarmed bystanders that they would be better off living within the new system he had imposed on them than by continuing to fight or fear it.”
…
And that the single greatest mistake the administration had made was to assume that it could shatter the status quo in the Middle East, and that the pieces would then realign themselves spontaneously in patterns favorable to American interests. Bismarck, I said, would never have made such an error.
The absolute dead give-away that George Bush’s interest in Bismarck is a piece of political framing—and theater—for the foreign policy crowd is Gaddis’s delighted discovery
that the piece (an article by Gaddis in Foreign Affairs) had not only been read and circulated around the White House, but it had also been sent out to an e-mail distribution list for columnists and commentators that Karl Rove’s office maintains.
If there is anything at work here, it is Condi Rice’s hope that, with the neo-cons in cold storage, Don Rumsfeld in the doghouse, and with Condi at the president’s ear, America still has enough power, prestige, and credibility to persuade the world that it can sincerely promote the global win-win scenarios associated with traditional diplomacy.
That’s what’s behind the leaking of the apparently unproductive and futile direct meeting with between U.S. and North Korean officials in New York earlier this May, as well as a host of other exercises in conventional diplomacy, handholding, and consensus building recently reported in the press.
Condi is trying to signal that America is back as an engaged, sincere force in the diplomatic initiatives trying to resolve issues in North Korea and Iran.
Condi may not only be underestimating the lasting damage that unapologetic, brazen U.S. war-driven unilateralism in Bush’s first term inflicted on America’s credibility.
She may not be ready to accept how much of that damage was willful and intentional—and irreparable.
The special genius of the neo-cons was to create scenarios of escalation and confrontation that foreclosed diplomatic alternatives and committed the U.S. to a preordained path of extreme actions in order to preserve its prestige and credibility.
It wasn’t just a matter of hurriedly and pre-emptively relegating Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to eternal pariah-state status with the Presidential impratur of “Axis of Evil”.
It was our open, gratuitous pro-Israel tilt, which guaranteed that the Muslim states would be allowed no political role in the Middle East crisis that might serve to moderate American behavior.
It was the aggressive impugning of the United Nations, the vilification of France, Germany, and Old Europe, the withdrawal from the ABM treaty, and the repudiation of the International Criminal Court, which demonstrated that we would repudiate and attack any political or institutional alternatives to American power.
It was a scorched-earth campaign designed to ensure that mistrust and anger at the United States would run deep enough among our enemies and expendable allies to assure that America had no choice but to take the lonely road of sole world hegemon.
George Bush and the neo-cons propelled us into a zero-sum future in which America’s stated willingness to use extreme, unilateral power hangs over everybody else like a dark cloud.
That’s why North Korea—which seeks from the United States above all an acknowledgement of its legitimate sovereignty and right to exist—has discounted an otherwise significant initiative from the State Department:
After a public appeal from North Korea, a State Department envoy met with North Korean officials at the United Nations last week to reiterate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent statement that the Bush administration recognizes the reclusive country's sovereignty, U.S. officials said yesterday.
While George W. Bush—the man who personally inducted North Korea into the Axis of Evil, reportedly because public relations concerns demanded at least one non-Islamic target—still in the White House, North Korea’s distrust of the U.S. administration is fundamental and unalterable.
The situation is described in greater detail below in the post Our Korean Conundrum.
And that’s something that a few diplomatic initiatives—or some lessons from Bismarck—won’t be able to undo.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)