Scissors Cut Paper
I’m intrigued by this discussion of the potential benefits of China’s rise, and I agree with Josh and others that the overseas business community could care less about liberal values taking root in China (it’s not just the potential of a billion consumers but the reality of an enormous pool of cheap labor).
But I want to take up T.A. Frank’s question about the “whack jobs” and their take on China’s soft power. I would ask him, and others: Who needs whack jobs when the U.S. military budget is topping $600 billion?
The defense department is getting pretty much everything it is asking for. While some Asia hands would like to see some of the Iraq supplemental money go to beefing up U.S. military presence in Asia Pacific, there’s been no need to play up the China threat to convince Congress to crank up military spending. China scoring points with its charm offensive? That’s a concern for the Council on Foreign Relations, for centrists like Kurt Campbell. The hardliners are not going to lose any sleep over China’s soft power success any more than they take seriously the polls that show how much the world hates the United States. The more relevant issue here is: they’re not losing sleep because the Bush administration is largely following their recommendations on the hard power front.
Yes, hardliners have called for rollback policies toward China, instead of more traditional military containment, and they’ve been disappointed that the Bush administration didn’t go all Blue Team on taking office. But they have no doubt taken solace from more than just the current military budget on steroids. Here are a few more reasons why China’s soft power successes will not generate a slew of hardline op-eds trumpeting China's latest soft-power threat.
In Africa, as Josh rightly points out, the United States has been pushing NEPAD as a soft power approach to closing the development gap. But NEPAD hasn’t translated into very much concrete, which is why African countries have been turning to China. The Bush administration’s response? To create a new Africa Command that will put a military spin on what would, previously, have fallen to the State Department and its soft-power strategies. It’s the perfect hardliner response: scissors cut paper.
China consolidating its Eurasian landmass power with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization? Big deal: Washington goes for maritime encirclement. The Bush administration concludes a dreadful nuclear deal with India, all because we need to have a South Asian anchor in the perimeter defense against China. It twists South Korea’s arm by forcing it to sign on to the doctrine of “strategic flexibility.” Although Japan is still, sixty years after World War II, distrusted in East Asia, the administration is helping it revise its constitution and develop the means to bomb countries in the region. Does Japan want to buy F-22 stealth fighters to deliver humanitarian aid after the next tsunami? And then there’s the new base at Geraldton that will bring Australia even more tightly into the anti-ballistic missile system that China fears will knock out its nuclear deterrent.
So, what does the Project for a New American Century and others have to complain about? Let China score some soft power points. It wants Liberia? Be our guest. Cozying up to Mugabe and Karimov? Not a problem. The Bush administration is quietly doing what it thinks it does best: hard power. The United States might lose out to China 20 or 30 years hence. But hey, at least we'll go down swinging...
Comments (21)
What do you mean by "lose out to China?"
It seems to me that cutting the defense budget in half, lowering taxes, shifting procurement funds to energy R&D and keeping trade flowing (and DFI) will create a mutual dependency that will be mutually beneficial.
The greatest security risk China presents to the US is environmental. Finding ways to produce electricity and drive cars that doesn't require burning coal is our most pressing security concern wrt China. The idea that another carrier group more or less or a new generation fighter is going to make any strategic difference is laughable.
June 29, 2007 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's my prediction: the Chinese economy will collapse sometime in the next 20-30 years. Overpopulation and environmental degradation will lead to a large underclass. This group will become involved in civil unrest, which will in turn lead to harsh repression by the military itself guided by the ruling party.
The signs are already there, desertification, water shortages, inability to feed itself anymore without imports and over 80,000 peasant protests a year.
How the repression will play out is also clear, we have the succession of such policies that have been tried since 1948 as examples. The last of these was well within the memory of most adults in China.
The recent scandals which have reached the US (tainted food and other products) are just the tip of the iceberg. The domestic market is filled with many more such outrages. It's like the days of the US robber barons are being replayed in China. The excesses in the US that led to the original muckrakers are being repeated. The difference is that China doesn't have a free press and democratic institutions which can lead to reforms.
The only alternative then becomes civil unrest.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
June 29, 2007 12:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Two questions: What happens when China can't maintain the economic growth they presently have and Vietnam is already trying to undercut China as a low cost produce what happens when China is not the low cost produce is more areas?
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 29, 2007 2:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Probably the same thing that happened to the U.S. Japan was once the low cost producer, just as the U.S. was once the low cost producer.
June 29, 2007 3:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wouldn't be so sure about that - The Chinese just stopped the building of a chemical plant, through blogging and text messaging which led to protests. The government got the message.
June 29, 2007 3:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
However both Japan and the U.S. have the fexibility of a democratic political system. It is not clear that China's system will be able to surrive the loss of low paying jobs. Also in the 1980s Japan was going to take over the world instead they reliquified the U.S. had the value of their assests collapse and plunged into a 15 year near depression. Drawing a straight line from todays trends endlessly into the future is often a mistake.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 29, 2007 5:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, I was trying to make the point that most countries develop in the same way and China's economic development seems to mirror ours - the production of cheap goods through the pirating of technology and manufacturing processes, the influx of international investment and the exploitation of cheap labour.
I doubt that the Chinese system will collapse, in my opinion, it will evolve.
June 30, 2007 5:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you are correct, and I both think you are and hope you are, then the effort to make China the Left's equivalent of Islamofascism, an enemy who Americans need to fear seems rather misplaced.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 30, 2007 7:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Making China the Left's equivalent of Islamofascism"?
I can't read a phrase like that without bursting out laughing. Man, America is just vanishing up its own hubris.
First, there is no such thing as Islamofascism. It's a meaningless term conflated by right wing morons and bandied about by other right wing morons for domestic political purposes. It describes nothing in the real world, and misdescribes real world parties and events, leading to disastrous action.
Second, China-phobia is a right wing vice. It's not some lefty bogeyman. Go back and read the Neocons writing, their ultimate fear and ultimate enemy is always China. In their books, the whole middle-east adventure is just positioning America for its big showdown with China. All this talk of rogue states has China at the back of its mind.
The notion that 'hard power' is worth more than a bucket of warm spit has been exploded in Iraq and Afghanistan, were a 600 billion dollar military machine is being ground down to powder.
Seriously, what the hell does hard power mean any more. Every time the U.S. gets involved in a land war in Asia - on the side of the Kuomintang in the Chinese revolution, in Korea, in Vietnam, with Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, the results have been uniformly disastrous.
So, I'm supposed to accept that the United States is prepared, able or willing to engage a land war in Asia, this time not with some two bit third world pocket country, but a subcontinental mass with an effectively infinite reservoir of population and industrial capacity.
Seriously, I'm busting a gut here, this is so funny.
So, what's hard power going to do? The Iraq treatment? "No fly zones" over China? Random bombing campaigns a la Desert Fox? Sanctions and blockades? Give me a break. The US won't get away with mining Chinese harbours the way it did with Nicaragua. It won't get away with the same shit it pulled on Iraq.
So then what? What does hard power give anyone? Are we going to nuke China? Threaten to nuke China?
Give me a break
June 30, 2007 8:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
The right-wing loon-hawks are, and always have been, dilettantes on military matters. They know nothing more than what they've learned from John Wayne, Tom Clancy and Sylvester Stallone. The proof is there for all to see in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While China's military build-up is a concern, it is not a critical concern in the short term. Yes, they are adding fairly modern air-to-air, surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles to their inventory; they are upgrading their army to be more of a modern combined-arms force; they are modernizing their antiquated air force; they are adding ships to their navy. However, all their modernization still does not add up to a military that can project power around the globe. They still have no aircraft carriers, and even if they got one tomorrow, their navy has no experience in carrier-group operations. What they can do is threaten Taiwan, and to a lesser extent, Japan. But if they tried to use their navy to invade Taiwan, our Navy would almost certainly oppose the effort. If it actually came to that, we would likely have losses, but the Chinese would very likely lose most, if not all, of their naval forces.
The Chinese know this. Unlike North Korea, their leadership is a fairly serious, objective, and rational bunch. Additonally, the whole communist/capitalist ideological conflict is almost entirely a thing of the past with them. The Chinese Communist Party is obviously communist in name only (CINO?). These folks are busy making money right now, and their economic fortunes are now so entwined with ours that armed conflict between us is remote. Consequently, the remaining arenas for contension between us are the economic and diplomatic.
Obviously, the economic arena is the true driver. We can trust the Chinese to do everything they can to increase their national wealth and their economic influence over as much of the rest of the world as possible. Gee, didn't we do exactly the same thing after WWII? This battle is going to go on largely out of sight, and the results will be seen in our GNP and eventually in our take-home pay. Unfortunately, I have to give the advantage here to the Chinese in terms of long range vision versus the typical American profit-now-at-the-expense-of-tomorrow attitude.
On the diplomatic front, we're going to need to recongize Chinese diplomacy as economic war by other means. We play this hand too, but the Chinese are likely to be far more subtle at it, even if we purge the State Department of all those ham-fisted, gonadal neo-cons eighteen months hence.
On both these fronts, I have to give the Chinese the advantage in soft power. I think the Chinese evaluation is the same, and you can be certain they've read their Sun Tzu. They won't attack our strength (hard power) they'll attack our weakness. With ol' Duhbya goin' round pissin' on and pissin' off the rest of the world, and the loons cheering him on, we're only making ourselves weaker.
(Parenthetically, the loons, for all of their pontificating about free markets, are hampering our competitiveness just so they can have a new guilded age: reversing the ban on minimum pricing agreements, for instance.)
June 30, 2007 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
a typical Val screed. Anyone who doesn't believe there is actually an Islamic fascist ideology out there is not paying attention to what radical Muslims are saying and what their goals are. Perhaps he can come up with a better label for the Taliban. If that's not fascism what would he call it?
Democrats are a lot more harsh in their rhetoric right now vis-a-vis China than Republicans. The Chinese would much rather have Guiliani in office than a more protectionist John Edwards who would actually call them out on unfair trade practices and outsourcing.
June 30, 2007 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good post. A war with the US would seriously harm China's economy and create political problems no one would benefit from. Their integration into the global grid is our greatest protection.
You shouldn't ignore how they use their soft power now in a bullying fashion though. If you're a small country and you allow the Dalai Lama a visa, you'll suddenly find it much more difficult to gain access to the Chinese markets. Ditto for countries that voice their criticism of Beijing too loudly. They can get away with this, because they operate under the radar screen. There are advantages not being the top dog on the block.
June 30, 2007 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Radical Islamic Fundamentalism, perhaps? Or simply Islamic Fundamentalism.
Fascism is a political and economic philosophy which has at its core a sort of populist state/corporate governance, based in principles of nationalism and personal virtue. Fascism elevates concepts or race, individual will and of the state to a near mystical level, without reconciling the inherent conflicts within each.
Fascism as formally constituted emerged first in Italy in the 1920's, in response to political and social instability. It took power in Italy, Germany and eventually Spain. Fascist movements emerged throughout Europe, including both Britain and France and in Latin America. Outside of Japan and perhaps 1930's Iraq, Fascism did not make much of an impression in Africa, Asia or the Middle-East.
Defeat in WWII largely discredited fascism, although arguably, the movement hung on in attenuated forms in Spain and Latin America into the 60's and 70's.
One defining aspect of fascism is that fascists generally make no bones about being fascists. It's their word, their name to identify their political movement. The German national socialists called themselves Nazi's. The Phalangists called themselves Phalangists.
In the Islamic world, the political movement which most closely resembled fascism would have been the Baathist or pseudo-Baathist movement as seen in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria.
These movements were characterized by an emphasis on nationalism - either state nationalism or pan-arabism. Other defining features were a commitment to modernization or westernization through military or authoritarian government. However, they differed from typical fascism in lacking the mode of 'corporate governance.' Their orientation economically is more socialist or quasi-socialist. They also lack the hyperbolic emphasis on personal virtue and the mystic aspects.
Saddam's regime in Iraq, and for that matter Assad's in Syria and Mubarak's in bears resemblances to fascist regimes, but do not fit all the criteria.
These regimes could not be described as Islamo-fascist because they are or were all inherently secular. These regimes saw Islamic movements both as a threat to their own security and a threat to overall progress.
And for the record, they've never called themselves Fascist or Islamo-Fascist.
For that matter, neither the Taliban nor Al Quaeda have ever described themselves as fascist or islamofascist. Which is a dead giveaway of the uselessness of the term.
The Taliban, Al Quaeda and related movements have no historical or ideological connection to European fascist movements. In this sense, Islamofascism is a profoundly misleading term.
Further to this, there are no meaningful parallels between Al Quaeda/Taliban ideology and European fascism.
Whereas in European fascism, religion was a tool subordinate to and in service to the state, for the Taliban & Co, religion is the transcendent organizing principle. Talibanism in theory eschews notions of mystical personal virtue, nationalism, racialism and even the state as an entity as being un-Islamic or anti-Islamic. Rather than these qualities being inherent defining features, when Talibanism acknowledges them, they acknowledge them in context of, subordinate to and emanating from Allah.
Indeed, the Taliban and Al Quaeda and related movements specifically reject key aspects of fascism - particularly the concept of corporate governance and the state as the ultimate entity.
While its true that there are points of intersection, these are essentially random. There are far more points of intersection between fascism and the current American government, and indeed, genuine ideological parallels.
The key point is that Islamo-Fascism is not a meaningful or descriptive term for the Taliban, Al Quaeda, Saddam Hussein or any other Islamic or Arab political movement. Nor is the term used by any of these groups to identify themselves or describe their ideology.
Indeed, the term is meaningless, unless you reduce the concept of 'Fascism' to political baby talk, ie: Fascism = Bad/Violent. But a discussion on a level that superficial is worthless.
The real history of the term 'Islamo-Fascist' is one of dishonest propaganda.
It was a term used to link the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein (Fascist), with the extremist movement of Al Quaeda (Islamo).
Use of the term was a sort of meme to suggest that Al Quaeda and Iraq were engaged in a pan-ideological conspiracy together. It was disgusting example of misleading propaganda, more vile in its way than the 'babies thrown out of incubators' story during the Gulf War.
Did it work? Even today a large number of Americans believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11. This belief came about and was reinforced through precisely these kinds of a-rational buzzwords and slogans.
Now that Saddam is gone and Syria is not a significant player, the only leg left is Al Quaeda and its allies. They, by default, inherit the whole mantle of Islamo-fascism.
As I said, its a meaningless, invented term, used by right wing nutcases to short circuit logic and facts. It's vile and disgusting propaganda by idiots for idiots.
There is no "Islamic Fascist Ideology." There never was. Its a term and a notion conceived and crafted to mislead.
What we deal with in the Taliban is Islamic Theocracy or Islamic Fundmentalism.
I have now wasted an hour explaining an elementally simple concept. Thanks a lot.
July 1, 2007 9:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
China's military build up constitutes them spending less than one tenth the amount on defense that the united states expends.
The American military budget is 600 billion dollars. The Chinese military budget is 45 to 60 billion.
Yet, for all the emphasis on America's hard power, and for all America's overwhelming 'hard power' military strength, it is not clear that this translates to any real advantage.
For instance, if China chose to invade Taiwan, would or could the United States do anything about it? Most American forces are locked up in the Gulf. There's no possibility of American ground forces making any real difference in a ground campaign in Taiwan. Either the Taiwanese would beat off the Chinese invaders themselves, or they wouldn't.
Would an American naval blockade or interdiction in such a case make a difference? I don't know. Certainly such a tactic would put American warships in range of Chinese ground based missiles and warships. Given this vulnerability, the efficacy of sea power in a defensive campaign would be doubtful. America might lose a great deal of its committed fleet with very little long term benefit.
Howard Berkowitz is probably much more qualified to assess these issues than I am. I suspect that Howard's view is that it would be a place he wouldn't recommend us going to.
Moreover, American hard power is completely irrelevant to Chinese ability to threaten its neighbors. If China is determined to put a nuke in Taiwan, or Tokyo or Pyonyang, the United States can't stop it. No missile defense can stop it.
America's only deterrent is MAD, the risk of escalating to a full nuclear exchange with China. Given the massive disparity between Chinese and American nuclear stockpiles, we can assume that America could devastate China utterly while suffering only mortal losses (30 million dead, 50 million, 90 million). But the outcome would also see the devastation of the allies we were defending anyway.
And in any case, how committed is America to these allies? Is America really prepared to risk 30 million casualties to defend the rights of a small Island which is legally a renegage province of China?
So much for hard power.
July 1, 2007 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
In real terms ... purchasing power parity rather than exchange rate ... China will have the largest economy in the world in under a decade ... maybe less than five years.
And recall that within 20-30 years after the US became the largest economy in the world, our economy collapsed. We call it the Great Depression.
So there is certainly precedent for this.
Luckily, the US worked out a way to uncollapse its economy. Worryingly, this involved a healthy dose of military spending.
July 1, 2007 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Precisely. And this is why the soft power battle for Africa is important. The Americas alone are not an adequate National Life Space for the US to retain a position of co-equal Big Power with China ... and if the US is not to bleed its economy dry in Imperial overstretch, its National Life Space is not going to be found in central Asia and the Middle East.
Rather, it will be found in the natural extension of the Americas as an economic region, in Southern and Central Africa.
And, indeed, it is only with Southern and Central Africa as part of the economic region that working with India as a balance of power move on the Asian mainland is going to be economically self-sustaining ... which is crucial when the US can no longer rely on the status of the largest single national economy on earth to sustain an expensive globe-spanning network of military bases, matching the expensive, globe-spanning military itself.
July 1, 2007 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
there are plenty on the left calling Bush a fascist. In the popular vernacular it's taken to mean any seeming un-democratic government action, so their use of Islamo-fascism is the same as yours of Islamic fundamentalism.
And btw, Iran meets all your criteria. Not only are they theocratic, they subscribe to a feirce nationalism as well -- distinct from the Arab world. At the end of the day, the Supreme Leader of Iran is an Islamo-fascist dictator with absolute power.
July 1, 2007 11:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
On size alone, China cannot be "knocked off its perch" by Vietnam ... it can lose some market share in some industries, but Vietnam simply is not big enough to take over China's new role as workshop of the world.
July 1, 2007 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
any battle over Taiwan would be strictly naval on our part, and we already have a fleet there on constant patrol. China would most likely subject Taiwan to a devastating missile attack, which as you pointed out cannot be stopped, but Taiwan has missles of it's own that China can't stop.
There is absolutely nothing to be gained by such an attack and a helluva lot to lose.
China will most likely try to bribe their way into Taiwanese politics, and gain influence that way, then use their overwhelming economic power to woo the Taiwanese public into supporting greater integration. That's a lot less expensive than a war.
July 1, 2007 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
The essence of my argument was that, presently, while the Chinese could inflict significant losses on us in, say, an attempted invasion of Taiwan, the toll on their Navy, and though I didn't address it, their Air Force also, would be far more severe. This is, of course, IMHO. But the risks to the Chinese are fairly clear.
My second observation was that the Chinese leadership is rational (far more so than the lunatic fringe currently ensconced in the WH). If they see the US as competition, and I see no reason not to think they do, then, having read their Sun Tzu (and our Clausewitz), they will challenge us where we are weak, or where the cost to them of losing is small.
Thus, economic and diplomatic conflict with China is what we can expect in the near future. This doesn't mean that 20 years hence, when the Chinese economy is dominating the globe, they won't invade Taiwan if the Taiwanese haven't yet seen the "error of their ways." But I would also expect, that in proper adherence to Sun Tzu, they will have already won the war before it begins. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if we didn't see voluntary re-integration of Taiwan into China in a manner along the lines of Hong Kong. Everyone, except the US, will have saved face, and everyone will keep making lots of money; well, those in power, anyway.
July 1, 2007 6:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
But no one is moronic enough to call Bush an Islamo-fascist. Islamo-fascist is simply a moronic term used for misleading propagand.
And Iran is not Fascist or Islamo-Fascist. Iran is a theocratic republic with Democratic trappings.
Now frankly, I'm not going to cater to you with a reply to every stupid thing you feel the need to say.
July 1, 2007 7:37 PM | Reply | Permalink