Middle Kingdom Blues

This piece is not part of the “America at the Crossroads” series.  That series will be interrupted regularly by other topical posts.  Pieces in that series will all be designated with the use of “Crossroads” in the title.

That said, the content here is obviously interrelated with the theme of America making choices at a global crossroads.

The Obama administration certainly did not invent strained relations with China, and the jury must remain out on whether its tenure will represent a low point in our dealings with Beijing.  But January 2010 has seen two major moves by China, and a minor one, that nevertheless serve as evidence that President Obama isn’t exactly having the ameliorating effect on our international relations that his campaign rhetoric promised.

Beijing has made the most recent moves in the last day.  An alert reader vectored me onto this report in the Times of India that China is floating the idea, in principle, of establishing military bases abroad – possibly in Pakistan.  For China to even speak of this is a significant policy decision, and not only because it is contrary – also in principle – to China’s longstanding criticism of the foreign military bases of others.  The true significance of the communication is its warning about a change in Beijing’s fundamental posture.

Whether Americans understand that this is a challenge to the existing order or not, other Asians do. Nations putting in military bases abroad is not a commonplace; it happens when they are either dissatisfied with the status quo, or fear threats to it.  In either case, the association of US power with the status quo inherently makes any such action by China a statement of independence from, and potential opposition to, our policies.  It’s an explicit signal that we can take neither a commitment to the status quo, nor acquiescence in it from China, for granted.  Nations always have the right to sovereignty over their policies, of course, but declaring that in abrupt or noteworthy ways is never a prelude to consensus.

The Chinese will be watching our reaction very closely.  The proximate reason for declaring their option to establish foreign bases is our just-approved arms sale to Taiwan.  They have also suspended military-to-military (“mil-to-mil,” or MTM) exchanges with the US, overtly because of the arms sale.

But these measures follow closely on the heels of an equally significant shift in Chinese policy earlier this month:  the announced test of a ballistic missile defense system, and the change that represents from China favoring mutual assured destruction (MAD) as a basis for strategic stability, to seeking unilateral defense against strategic ballistic missiles.  As I argued at the time, the conditions for that shift were created largely by Obama’s accession to the Russian demand that we give up the European missile defense site.  Our subsequent failure to negotiate a follow-on to the START treaty that expired on 5 December has left the US and Russia without any fully-agreed treaty commitment to arms parity, a situation we have not been in for more than 40 years.  The US currently has no national policy in effect for securing strategic stability:  neither the commitment to a comprehensive national missile defense nor an in-force, verifiable strategic arms treaty with Russia.

This situation of effective drift counts to a dangerous degree on a quiescent inertia.  It relies on no actor disturbing the status quo, even though Obama’s America has signaled that the policies we have intended to be brakes on such initiatives are in a sort of undefined limbo.  The outcome of the current START negotiations is far from certain, moreover, and some aspects of the previous agreement are assuredly lost to us for the foreseeable future.  Principal among them is on-site verification by US and Russian inspectors, a measure Russia has no interest in resurrecting.  Our inspection team left the ICBM production facility at Votkinsk on 5 December, and we can count on not getting back in any time soon – or on being asked to pay, for that privilege, a price in concessions that is too high.

That, of course, would be problematic for ratification of any follow-on START treaty by the US Senate.  There is no guarantee that Obama can get a treaty ratified that does not provide, at a minimum, the same advantages and safeguards as the old START agreement.  The possibility of the US and Russia continuing without a ratified treaty until at least the end of Obama’s current term is very real.

China, surveying the prospect of Russia cut loose from mutually inspectable obligations to the US, will inevitably have more of a sense than she did a year ago of needing to maneuver urgently.  Both Russia and China, meanwhile, are concerned that America’s president has, in the space of three months, abandoned both of the longstanding thrusts of our policy for strategic stability:  a comprehensive national missile defense and the in-force, verifiable arms treaty.  (As mentioned in the CONTENTIONS piece linked above, the Moscow SORT Treaty of 2002, our sole remaining arms agreement with Russia, contains no provisions for verification.)  Americans don’t think in these terms, but Russia and China inevitably do:  what, they have to ask, does Obama plan to hold his country to?  There is no affirmative policy statement or in-force agreement that makes that explicit.

Obama’s actions have come across as oddly anti-thematic in that regard anyway.  Americans recognize the left-wing academic “type” in his career of inappropriate bowing, apologizing, and denigrating his country to foreign audiences.  But at the same time, he has affirmed the right of the US to operate surveillance ships in waters where China objects to them; has slapped punitive tariffs on Chinese goods and filed a complaint against China with the WTO; and is concluding a major arms deal with Taiwan that Beijing objects to strenuously.

We can be certain that the trade sanctions are a response to Obama’s carefully-cultivated union base, a constituency he has tended with great solicitude.  But no effort is made to give these various tactics against China the cover of moral or ideological justification, or to put them in the context of a consistent set of principles for foreign policy or national security.  In comparison with Obama’s ultra-accommodating posture with Russia, his posture with China, in which casual offenses are given no serious diplomatic cover, simply looks cynical.  I have speculated before that he chooses to go ahead with things China objects to as a means of identifying bargaining chips – things to leverage Chinese participation in anti-Iran sanctions with, for example.  But the methodology is high-handed, erratic, and dismissive in a way I don’t recall seeing from a US administration since before Nixon went to China.

It is a problem that Obama doesn’t seem to understand the extent to which US policy on strategic stability has set the conditions for it, for the last 60 years.  We can only conclude from his reversal on the missile defense site in Europe, and his lack of urgency about having an in-force arms treaty with Russia, that he thinks of these as minor, even arcane policy matters, and isn’t aware of what he has done by treating them lightly.  The problem for Russia and China isn’t only that the brake of US policy has been released on a strategic dimension in which they will naturally compete with each other – it’s that now they don’t know what Obama will do, in that or any other realm.

American conservatives may reflexively say that Obama will simply be weak and ineffective, but if you’re China, it sure doesn’t look like that to you.  It looks instead like Obama thinks pulling his punches about internet freedom before a Chinese audience, and delaying his visit with the Dalai Lama until after his state visit to China, constitute suitable diplomatic mitigation for a series of policy pokes in Beijing’s eye.

China unquestionably feels singled out.  The US has been at great diplomatic pains to reassure Russia that our training of Georgian forces to participate in the coalition in Afghanistan will not lead to arms sales to Georgia, or to our intervention in the dispute over Abkhazia and South Ossetia; but we sell arms to Taiwan with no concern for China’s objections.  Of course, we have a Taiwan Relations Act and we don’t have a Georgia Relations Act, but it’s also 2010 and not 1979:  our current justification for an arms sale cannot be merely the spirit of legislation from 30 years ago (see Philip Crowley’s comments in the WaPo article linked above).  The point here is not that we shouldn’t sell the arms to Taiwan, it’s that Obama has laid out no consistent policy that justifies this arms sale in the context of his other initiatives – and concessions – in foreign relations.  It looks, inevitably, like doing what he can get away with, perhaps to satisfy domestic constituencies and build up brownie points with them for down the road.

All of this should concern us as much as it does China (and Russia, for that matter).  Our president has lightly abandoned some longstanding national policies – policies on which the other nuclear nations have predicted their own security calculations – while invoking others in a perfunctory manner, to justify what China regards as great offenses.  Obama doesn’t come off at all as deliberate and prudent.  As they look for clues as to his real policy preferences, the Chinese are likely to assume mainly that he favors the same cynical use of power that is so prominent in Illinois machine politics.