America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  I came to Washington on a visiting fellowship in 1996, fresh from covering the immense retreat of Russia from empire—with the partial exception of Britain, by far the greatest peaceful abandonment of empire in all history. I had also covered both the Russian military defeat in the first Chechen war (a war not for empire, but against the secession of part of the Russian Federation itself), and the mixture of corruption, cynicism, materialism, and political apathy that gripped Russian society after the fall of Communism.50

  On arrival, I was first astonished, and then horrified, to find large portions of the American elites—serving officials as well as unofficial commentators—dedicated to creating an image of Russia in the minds of the American people that bore only a tangential relation to reality; and this line was swallowed by large portions of the American media and public opinion.51 As far as many members of the U.S. establishment were concerned, the fall of Communism and the end of the Soviet Union hardly changed at all their hostility toward Russia as a state—unless that state adopted a position of complete subservience to American wishes not only in the world as a whole, but in Russia’s own region. With this experience behind me, I was not too surprised by the success of the Bush administration and its media allies in conflating Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and of the Israel lobby in conflating Al Qaeda and the Palestinians.52

  A mixture of exaggerated fear of Russia and rhetoric of America’s duty to spread freedom and democracy was used to justify the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into the former Soviet Union, something that Russians found deeply threatening. Here was another case where the language of American civic nationalism was used to shut down internal debate—since anyone who opposed this expansion was likely to be accused of lacking in commitment to freedom and democracy, and faith in America’s mission.53

  American Nationalism and the Rise of China

  This past history has worrying implications for the U.S. handling of by far the biggest challenge for U.S. foreign and security policy—and indeed for the entire American nation—over the coming decades: the rise of Chinese power relative to that of the United States. The appearance of new great powers has always created an extra potential for conflict. In the case of China, this risk is heightened by China’s own prickly nationalism, which contains both strong historical resentments and a strong sense of historical entitlement to hegemony within China’s own region.

  More pessimistic observers have compared China’s rise to that of imperial Germany in the decades before World War I and have argued that the probable resulting tensions between China, China’s neighbors, and the United States pose a comparable threat to world peace.54 The question for the present book is what role American nationalism will play in shaping U.S. policy toward China, and the answer does not seem a very encouraging one.

  In these circumstances of China’s rise, U.S. policy toward China will need to be guided by a cool head and an iron nerve. At home, if the United States is to revive its economy in ways that will allow it to compete successfully with China, it may need a capacity for radical new thinking and the junking of old shibboleths comparable to that displayed by Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese leadership when they jettisoned Maoism and adopted capitalism after 1979.

  In the past, the United States has proved capable of such transformations. If, however, the analysis of different aspects of American nationalism presented in this book is correct, then today they point in the opposite direction: toward a combination of outbursts of paranoia and a hysterical desire to return to a vanished past. It must also be said that while, in the past, American statesmen have often displayed cool heads and iron nerves, they have equally often had to do so in the teeth of some of the popular impulses described in this book.

  If American elites decide that only fury and fear at China’s overtaking the United States can mobilize the white middle class behind a program of radical domestic reform and self-sacrifice, they may find themselves in the same position as the Truman administration when it sought to overcome U.S. isolationism and mobilize support for the Marshall Plan and NATO by stirring up anti-Communism. The result was a wave of hysterical chauvinism that threatened the Truman administration at home and risked nuclear war abroad.55

  Some fascinating insights into the difficulties that America will face in dealing with China’s rise are to be found in an article by the neoconservative Irwin Stelzer in the right-wing Weekly Standard of January 2011, “Our Broken China Policy.”56 After an acute examination of the brilliant success to date of China’s industrial policy (albeit qualified by routine praise of the risk of Chinese political upheaval and the superiority of American democracy), Stelzer presents his ideas for how the United States should respond. Two of his key recommendations are the following:

  Recast trade and tax policy so that the incentives facing the private sector coincide more closely with the broader public interest. Recognize that private corporations, charged with maximizing shareholder value, cannot factor into their operations all of the externalities, most especially national security considerations, that China’s state-managed companies are required to consider.

  Get our economic house in order and reduce dependence on our creditor in chief. If that means some tax increases, well, the Tea Party will just have to live with it. If that means some reductions in entitlements and other programs, well, the liberals will just have to live with it. And if that means an end to—let’s be realistic, a reduction in—corporate welfare, well the corpocracy will just have to live with it.

  The point is of course that there is no way that the Tea Parties or a Republican Party heavily influenced by them would “live with” tax increases and a state-directed program of economic change. Nor indeed would the Tea Parties live with sharply reduced middle class entitlements or the Republican elites live with reduced corporate subsidies. For reasons set out in this book, Americans’ nationalist belief in the innate superiority of their own system will make such radical change extremely difficult.

  If the Republican Party remains in its present form, and is also able to block Democratic administrations from adopting such policies, then all that will be left of Stelzer’s recommendations are those arguing that America should stop “apologizing” and “bending the knee” to China, and that America must “do whatever is needed to maintain superiority in the Asia-Pacific region, as our allies and potential allies are urging us to do.” If, however, the United States attempts to contain China militarily and diplomatically, and attacks her rhetorically, while all the while America gets relatively weaker economically, well, the dangers of this course should be obvious.

  If a future Republican administration does adopt a strategy of confronting China, it will be building on a previous Republican approach that was partially derailed by 9/11 but never quite disappeared even in the depths of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.57 The hope of hard-line Republican analysts—and some Democrats—in the later 1990s was to create a U.S. security strategy of “containing” China, modeled on the “containment” of the Soviet Union during the cold war; to attempt to bankrupt the Chinese state by forcing it into an unsustainable arms race; and to undermine the Chinese state from within by encouraging movements for democratic revolution and ethnic secession. Meanwhile, the Chinese nuclear deterrent was to be neutralized by an American system of missile defense.

  These views were pushed especially hard by the so-called Blue Team, an informal grouping of anti-Chinese junior officials, think-tank members, and Congressional staffers, and had considerable impact in Congress, though much less within the official community. The Blue Team was a conscious attempt to imitate the success of the so-called B Team, a similar (but more senior) group of officials and propagandists of the 1980s who set out to dramatize the supposed extent of Soviet power. The curious thing is, of course, that virtually every proposition advanced by the B Team concerning the Soviet Union has since been proved to be false.

  Some of the anti-Chinese agenda of the Blue Team appears
to have been embodied in the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington think tank with strong Taiwanese links founded in 2008.58 This group is also strongly committed to containing China and maintaining U.S. primacy in East Asia.

  In 1999 Republicans in Congress mounted a classic scare of the “missile gap” type, with the “Cox Committee” accusing China of having spied so successfully on the United States as to be able in a short space of time to match American nuclear technology and threaten the U.S. mainland. The report also declared that “essentially all Chinese visitors to the US are potential spies.”59 The report set off an orchestrated Republican media campaign attacking the Clinton administration for “weakness” and pushing for tougher policies against China. It was replete with phrases like “the greatest nuclear theft since the Rosenbergs” and “every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal has been compromised.” Former United Nations Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick declared—incredibly—that “it renders us immediately a great deal more vulnerable than we have ever been in our history.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it “the largest espionage success against the United States since the Soviet Union in the 1940s.”60

  Echoing “yellow peril” racist stereotypes that long predated the cold war, the Washington Times reported that “both Mrs. Kirkpatrick and Mr. Gingrich believe the Chinese are capable of launching a missile at American troops, allied targets, and even American cities. Mrs. Kirkpatrick said the Chinese do not value human life and might be willing to suffer retaliatory consequences for the psychological benefit of striking American soil with a missile.”61

  Among many right-wing politicians, such attitudes toward China continued unabated even after 9/11, with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in June 2003 publicly calling China “a backward, corrupt anachronism, run by decrepit tyrants, old apparatchiks clinging to a dying regime.”62

  In the first months of the Bush administration it seemed that this anti-Chinese approach, like their anti-Russian approach, might be adopted as official U.S. policy. Given the ferocious views of the Chinese system that he had expressed in the media, the appointment of John Bolton to the State Department could have been taken in itself as an anti-Chinese act.63 Like Condoleezza Rice, Bush repeatedly called China a “strategic competitor,” and called for a range of tougher U.S. policies.64 Rice called on the United States to build up India as a strategic counter to China, and to take a more firmly pro-Taiwan stance in its relations with Beijing.65 Time magazine reported the Bush administration in its first weeks in office as “hosing down China with acid.”66

  The approach consisted of a familiar cold war mixture of exaggerating China’s military capabilities (at that stage still very limited) and calling for tougher condemnation of China over democracy and human rights. In effect, China was to be cast as the new cold war enemy, along the lines of the former Soviet Union.67 Richard Clarke and others alleged that the Bush administration’s obsession with China and Russia helped blind them to the threat from Islamist terrorism before 9/11, despite warnings from counterterrorism officials like himself.68

  After 9/11 the Bush administration pursued a much more diplomatic and pragmatic policy toward China—which included backing away from confrontation with North Korea, even when that country conducted nuclear tests. The Obama administration in effect continued this policy. It should be noted, however, that the Democratic foreign and security elites have also contained their share of hawks with regard to China. One senior Clinton administration defense official quoted by Chalmers Johnson actively celebrated the fact in government departments dealing with China that experts on China were being pushed aside by a “new strategic class” of generalists from strategic studies and international relations, who might not know much about China but would be watchful “for signs of China’s capacity for menace”—a most revealing statement.69

  Above all, while the language of Democrats may be less aggressive and their approach more sophisticated, they are equally determined to maintain American “leadership” in East Asia and to prevent China from achieving parity, let alone superiority. Both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear their commitment to American leadership in Asia and continued U.S. military superiority.70 There is almost no understanding in U.S. policy circles that other countries might not see absolute American military superiority as a given, or that the Pacific Ocean is by nature “an American lake.”

  This American goal of primacy is not in itself illegitimate, since many states in East and Southeast Asia do in fact prefer U.S. hegemony to that of China. However, it is something that China is bound to oppose, particularly if China’s economy does indeed overtake that of the United States. A strong form of containment, as advocated by many Republicans, would mean essentially a return to the U.S. strategy of the 1950s—but under circumstances where China is vastly richer and more powerful. The probable Chinese response was summarized by Xu Yunhong, writing in a journal of the Communist Party Central Committee, Qiushi, in early 2011:

  The U.S. seems highly interested in forming a very strong anti-China alliance. It not only made a high-profile announcement of its return to East Asia but also claimed to lead in Asia…What is especially unbearable is how the U.S. blatantly encourages China’s neighbouring countries to go against China…

  Countries like Japan, India, Vietnam, Australia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Korea are trying to join the anti-China group because they either had a war or another conflict of interest with China…Our wishes to persuade the imperialists and those who are against China to be kind-hearted and repent are fruitless. The only way is to organise forces to fight against them…If friends come, treat them with wine; if jackals come, we have shotguns for them.71

  In these circumstances, for America to lead regional states in balancing against China without this leading to conflict will require American diplomacy of the highest order. This will require an accurate assessment of what constitutes vital as opposed to secondary U.S. interests, an avoidance of unnecessary points of conflict, a wariness of the agendas and ambitions of local allies, and an ability to carry out tactical retreats when necessary. Ideally Washington should pursue a strategy outlined by Hugh White, that of drawing China into a “concert of powers” in East and Southeast Asia, that would accommodate Chinese interests without yielding to Chinese hegemony.

  A wise U.S. strategy with regard to China is threatened by aspects of American nationalism. As with Russia after the end of the cold war, this threat comes partly from chauvinism. The United States does not contain the anti-Russian ethnic lobbies whose national agendas bedeviled U.S.–Russian relations, but if the white middle class comes to blame China for their economic decline, that will provide an even more potent source of hatred.

  Equally dangerous, however, could be some of the civic nationalist impulses analyzed in the second chapter of this book. If both the past and the present language of the Republicans is anything to go by, any strategy of creating a new alliance to contain China is bound to be accompanied by a great flood of rhetoric justifying this in terms of “defending freedom” in the region. This stems from both conviction and the need to co-opt the support of American liberal intellectuals (as in the case of the Iraq War) and convince American public opinion to support what would be an extremely expensive (not to say dangerous) project, which would have to be pushed through amidst cuts to domestic services and programs.72

  To ideologize an alliance against China would bring with it two great dangers. The first is that it would most probably be accompanied by increased rhetoric in support of democracy within China. The Chinese authorities would be likely to see this as an existential threat—and as the following very frank passage by Max Boot makes clear, they would not be wrong to do so:

  Beyond containment, deterrence, and economic integration lies a strategy that the British never employed against either Germany or Japan—internal subversion. Sorry, the polite euphemisms are “democracy promotion” and “human rights protection,” but these amount to the
same thing: The freer China becomes, the less power the Communist oligarchy will enjoy. The United States should aim to “Taiwanize” the mainland—to spread democracy through such steps as increased radio broadcasts and Internet postings…In general, the U.S. government should elevate the issue of human rights in our dealings with China. The State Department wrote in its most recent human rights report that the Chinese government’s “human rights record remained poor, and the Government continued to commit numerous and serious abuses.” The U.S. government should do much more to publicize and denounce such abuses. We need to champion Chinese dissidents, intellectuals, and political prisoners, and help make them as famous as Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, and Lech Walesa.73

  In response, not only would the Chinese establishment adopt a much stronger anti-American strategy abroad, but (like the Russian, Iranian, Cuban, and other regimes) they would seek to neutralize domestic threats by stirring up Chinese nationalism and seeking to brand members of the opposition as American agents. In turn, a new upsurge of mass nationalism in China would make it even more difficult for the Chinese leadership on its side to seek pragmatic accommodations with the United States on points of difference.

  Equally dangerous might be the befuddlement on the American side that would result from ideologizing the rivalry with China and turning it in American eyes into another crusade of the kind described in chapter 2, for this would make it even more difficult for Americans to conduct the pragmatic accommodations and tactical retreats that would be essential if this rivalry were not to lead to conflict.

  A melancholy precedent for this would be set by U.S. policy toward Russia after the end of the cold war, and especially the plan to expand NATO to take in Georgia and Ukraine. Attempts to discuss in practical terms the dangers and costs of this strategy, and to question whether specific aspects were in America’s interest, were liable to be drowned in a flood of words about America’s duty to support “nations struggling to be free” and to defend their sovereignty.