by Obama Barack
Cracks in the Russia-Iran relationship deepened after I handed Medvedev and Lavrov an intelligence bombshell during a private meeting on the margins of UNGA: We’d discovered that Iran was on the verge of completing construction of a secret enrichment facility buried deep inside a mountain near the ancient city of Qom. Everything about the facility—its size, configuration, and location on a military installation—indicated Iran’s interest in shielding its activities from both detection and attack, features inconsistent with a civilian program. I told Medvedev we were showing him the evidence first, before we made it public, because the time for half measures was over. Without Russian agreement on a forceful international response, the chance for a diplomatic resolution with Iran would likely slip away.
Our presentation seemed to rattle the Russians. Rather than try to defend Iran’s actions, Medvedev expressed his disappointment with the regime and acknowledged the need for a recalibration of the P5+1’s approach. He went even further in public remarks afterward, telling the press that “sanctions rarely lead to productive results…but in some cases sanctions are inevitable.” For our side, the statement was a welcome surprise, confirming our growing sense of Medvedev’s reliability as a partner.
We decided against revealing the existence of the Qom facility during a U.N. Security Council meeting on nuclear security issues that I was scheduled to chair; although the iconic setting would have made for good theater, we needed time to thoroughly brief the IAEA and the other P5+1 members. We also wanted to avoid drawing comparisons to the dramatic—and ultimately discredited—Security Council presentation regarding Iraqi WMDs made by Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq War. Instead, we gave the story to The New York Times just before G20 leaders were scheduled to meet in Pittsburgh.
The effect was galvanizing. Reporters speculated about possible Israeli missile strikes on Qom. Members of Congress called for immediate action. At a joint press conference with French president Sarkozy and British prime minister Brown, I emphasized the need for a strong international response but refrained from getting specific on sanctions so as to avoid boxing in Medvedev before he’d had a chance to work through the issue with Putin. Assuming we could keep Medvedev engaged, we had just one more major diplomatic hurdle to clear: convincing a skeptical Chinese government to cast a vote for sanctions against one of its main oil suppliers.
“How likely is that?” McFaul asked me.
“Don’t know yet,” I said. “Turns out avoiding a war is harder than getting into one.”
* * *
—
SEVEN WEEKS LATER, Air Force One touched down in Beijing for my first official visit to China. We were instructed to leave any non-governmental electronic devices on the plane and to operate under the assumption that our communications were being monitored.
Even across oceans, Chinese surveillance capabilities were impressive. During the campaign, they’d hacked into our headquarters’ computer system. (I took it as a positive sign for my election prospects.) Their ability to remotely convert any mobile phone into a recording device was widely known. To make calls involving national security matters from our hotel, I had to go to a suite down the hall fitted with a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF)—a big blue tent plopped down in the middle of the room that hummed with an eerie, psychedelic buzz designed to block any nearby listening devices. Some members of our team dressed and even showered in the dark to avoid the hidden cameras we could assume had been strategically placed in every room. (Marvin, on the other hand, said he made a point of walking around his room naked and with the lights on—whether out of pride or in protest wasn’t entirely clear.)
Occasionally, the brazenness of Chinese intelligence verged on comedy. At one point, my commerce secretary, Gary Locke, was on his way to a prep session when he realized he’d forgotten something in his suite. Upon opening the door, he discovered a pair of housekeepers making up his bed while two gentlemen in suits carefully thumbed through the papers on his desk. When Gary asked what they were doing, the men walked wordlessly past him and disappeared. The housekeepers never looked up, just moved on to changing out the towels in the bathroom as if Gary were invisible. Gary’s story generated plenty of head shakes and chuckles from our team, and I’m sure that someone down the diplomatic food chain eventually filed a formal complaint. But no one brought up the incident when we sat down later for our official meeting with President Hu Jintao and the rest of the Chinese delegation. We had too much business to do with the Chinese—and did enough of our own spying on them—to want to make a stink.
This about summed up the state of U.S.-China affairs at the time. On the surface, the relationship we’d inherited looked relatively stable, without the high-profile diplomatic ruptures we’d seen with the Russians. Out of the gate, Tim Geithner and Hillary had met repeatedly with their Chinese counterparts and formalized a working group to address various bilateral concerns. In my meetings with President Hu during the London G20, we’d talked of pursuing win-win policies that could benefit our two countries. But beneath the diplomatic niceties lurked long-simmering tensions and mistrust—not only around specific issues like trade or espionage but also around the fundamental question of what China’s resurgence meant for the international order and America’s position in the world.
That China and the United States had managed to avoid open conflict for more than three decades was not just luck. From the start of China’s economic reforms and decisive opening to the West back in the 1970s, the Chinese government had faithfully followed Deng Xiaoping’s counsel to “hide your strength and bide your time.” It prioritized industrialization over a massive military buildup. It invited U.S. companies searching for low-wage labor to move their operations to China and cultivated successive U.S. administrations to help it obtain World Trade Organization (WTO) membership in 2001, which in turn gave China greater access to U.S. markets. Although the Chinese Communist Party maintained tight control over the country’s politics, it made no effort to export its ideology; China transacted business with all comers, whether democracies or dictatorships, claiming virtue in not judging the way other countries managed their internal affairs. China could throw its elbows around when it felt its territorial claims being challenged, and it bristled at Western criticism of its human rights record. But even on flashpoints like U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Chinese officials did their best to ritualize disputes—registering displeasure through strongly worded letters or the cancellation of bilateral meetings but never letting things escalate to the point where they might impede the flow of shipping containers full of Chinese-made sneakers, electronics, and auto parts into U.S. ports and a Walmart near you.
This strategic patience had helped China husband its resources and avoid costly foreign adventures. It had also helped obscure how systematically China kept evading, bending, or breaking just about every agreed-upon rule of international commerce during its “peaceful rise.” For years, it had used state subsidies, as well as currency manipulation and trade dumping, to artificially depress the price of its exports and undercut manufacturing operations in the United States. Its disregard for labor and environmental standards accomplished the same thing. Meanwhile, China used nontariff barriers like quotas and embargoes; it also engaged in the theft of U.S. intellectual property and placed constant pressure on U.S. companies doing business in China to surrender key technologies to help speed China’s ascent up the global supply chain.
None of this made China unique. Just about every rich country, from the United States to Japan, had used mercantilist strategies at various stages of their development to boost their economies. And from China’s perspective, you couldn’t argue with the results: Only a generation after millions died of mass starvation, China had transformed itself into the world’s third-largest economy, accounting for nearly half of the world’s steel production, 20 percent of its manufacturing, and 40 percent of the clothing Americans bought.
<
br /> What was surprising was Washington’s mild response. Back in the early 1990s, leaders of organized labor had sounded the alarm about China’s increasingly unfair trading practices, and they’d found plenty of congressional Democrats, particularly from rust-belt states, to champion the cause. The Republican Party had its share of China critics as well, a mix of Pat Buchanan–style populists enraged by what they saw as America’s slow surrender to a foreign power and aging Cold War hawks still worried about communism’s godless advance.
But as globalization shifted into overdrive during the Clinton and Bush years, these voices found themselves in the minority. There was too much money to be made. U.S. corporations and their shareholders liked the reduced labor costs and soaring profits that resulted from shifting production to China. U.S. farmers liked all the new Chinese customers buying their soybeans and pork. Wall Street firms liked the scores of Chinese billionaires looking to invest their newfound wealth, as did the slew of lawyers, consultants, and lobbyists brought on to service the expanding U.S.-China commerce. Even as most congressional Democrats remained unhappy with China’s trading practices, and the Bush administration filed a handful of complaints against China with the WTO, by the time I took office, a rough consensus had emerged among U.S. foreign-policy-making elites and big party donors: Instead of engaging in protectionism, America needed to take a page from the Chinese playbook. If we wanted to stay number one, we needed to work harder, save more money, and teach our kids more math, science, engineering—and Mandarin.
My own views on China didn’t fit neatly in any camp. I didn’t share my union supporters’ instinctive opposition to free trade, and I didn’t believe we could fully reverse globalization, any more than it was possible to shut down the internet. I thought that Clinton and Bush had made the right call in encouraging China’s integration into the global economy—history told me that a chaotic and impoverished China posed a bigger threat to the United States than a prosperous one. I considered China’s success at lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty to be a towering human achievement.
Still, the fact remained that China’s gaming of the international trading system had too often come at America’s expense. Automation and advanced robotics may have been the bigger culprit in the decline of U.S. manufacturing jobs, but Chinese practices—with the help of corporate outsourcing—had accelerated those losses. The flood of Chinese goods into the United States had made flat-screen TVs cheaper and helped keep inflation low, but only at the price of depressing the wages of U.S. workers. I’d promised to fight on those workers’ behalf for a better deal on trade, and I intended to keep that promise.
With the world’s economy hanging by a thread, though, I had to consider when and how best to do that. China held more than $700 billion in U.S. debt and had massive foreign currency reserves, making it a necessary partner in managing the financial crisis. To pull ourselves and the rest of the world out of the recession, we needed China’s economy growing, not contracting. China wasn’t going to change its trading practices without firm pressure from my administration; I just had to make sure we didn’t start a trade war that tipped the world into a depression and harmed the very workers I’d vowed to help.
In the run-up to our China trip, my team and I settled on a strategy to thread the needle between too tough and not tough enough. We’d start by presenting President Hu with a list of problem areas we wanted to see fixed over a realistic time frame, while avoiding a public confrontation that might further spook the jittery financial markets. If the Chinese failed to act, we’d steadily ratchet up the public pressure and take retaliatory actions—ideally in an economic environment that was no longer so fragile.
To nudge China toward better behavior, we also hoped to enlist the help of its neighbors. That was going to take some work. The Bush administration’s total absorption with problems in the Middle East, as well as the Wall Street fiasco, had led some Asian leaders to question America’s relevance in the region. Meanwhile, China’s booming economy made even close U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea increasingly dependent on its markets and wary of getting on its bad side. The one thing we had going for us was that in recent years China had started overplaying its hand, demanding one-sided concessions from weaker trading partners and threatening the Philippines and Vietnam over control of a handful of small but strategic islands in the South China Sea. U.S. diplomats reported a growing resentment toward such heavy-handed tactics—and a desire for a more sustained American presence as a counterweight to Chinese power.
To take advantage of this opening, we scheduled stops for me in Japan and South Korea, as well as a meeting in Singapore with the ten countries that made up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Along the way, I’d announce my intention to pick up the baton on an ambitious new U.S.-Asia trade agreement the Bush administration had started to negotiate—with an emphasis on locking in the types of enforceable labor and environmental provisions that Democrats and unions complained had been missing in previous deals, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). We explained to reporters that the overall goal of what we later called a “pivot to Asia” wasn’t to contain China or stifle its growth. Rather, it was to reaffirm U.S. ties to the region, and to strengthen the very framework of international law that had allowed countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region—including China—to make so much progress in such a short time.
I doubted the Chinese would see it that way.
* * *
—
IT HAD BEEN more than twenty years since I’d traveled to Asia. Our seven-day tour started in Tokyo, where I delivered a speech on the future of the U.S.-Japan alliance and met with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to discuss the economic crisis, North Korea, and the proposed relocation of the U.S. Marine base in Okinawa. A pleasant if awkward fellow, Hatoyama was Japan’s fourth prime minister in less than three years and the second since I’d taken office—a symptom of the sclerotic, aimless politics that had plagued Japan for much of the decade. He’d be gone seven months later.
A brief visit with Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the Imperial Palace left a more lasting impression. Diminutive and well into their seventies, they greeted me in impeccable English, with him dressed in a Western suit and her in a brocaded silk kimono, and I bowed as a gesture of respect. They led me into a receiving room, cream-colored and sparsely decorated in the traditional Japanese style, and over tea they inquired about Michelle, the girls, and my impression of U.S.-Japan relations. Their manners were at once formal and self-effacing, their voices soft as the patter of rain, and I found myself trying to imagine the emperor’s life. What must it have been like, I wondered, to be born to a father who’d been considered a god, and then forced to assume a largely symbolic throne decades after the Japanese Empire had suffered its fiery defeat? The empress’s story interested me even more: The daughter of a wealthy industrialist, she’d been educated in Catholic schools and graduated from college with a degree in English literature; she was also the first commoner in the twenty-six-hundred-year history of the Chrysanthemum Throne to marry into the imperial family—a fact that endeared her to the Japanese public but reputedly caused strains with her in-laws. As a departing gift, the empress gave me a composition she’d written for the piano, explaining with surprising frankness how her love of music and poetry had helped her survive bouts of loneliness.
Later, I learned that my simple bow to my elderly Japanese hosts had sent conservative commentators into a fit back home. When one obscure blogger called it “treasonous,” his words got picked up and amplified in the mainstream press. Hearing all this, I pictured the emperor entombed in his ceremonial duties and the empress, with her finely worn, graying beauty and smile brushed with melancholy, and I wondered when exactly such a sizable portion of the American Right had become so frightened and insecure that they’d completely lost their minds.
From Tok
yo, I traveled to Singapore to meet with the leaders of the ten ASEAN countries. My attendance wasn’t without potential controversy: Myanmar, one of ASEAN’s members, had been ruled for more than forty years by a brutal, repressive military junta, and both Presidents Clinton and Bush had declined invitations to meet with the group so long as Myanmar was included. To me, though, alienating nine Southeast Asian countries to signal disapproval toward one didn’t make much sense, especially since the United States maintained friendly relations with a number of the ASEAN countries that were hardly paragons of democratic virtue, including Vietnam and Brunei. With Myanmar, the United States had comprehensive sanctions in place. Our best chance of influencing its government beyond that, we decided, would come from showing a willingness to talk.
Myanmar’s prime minister was a mild-mannered, elfish general named Thein Sein, and as it turned out my interaction with him went no further than a brief handshake and didn’t cause much of a stir. The ASEAN leaders expressed enthusiasm for our message of U.S. reengagement, while the Asian press emphasized my childhood ties to the region—a first for an American president and evident, they said, in my fondness for local street food and my ability to greet the Indonesian president in Bahasa.
The truth is that I’d forgotten most of my Indonesian beyond simple greetings and ordering off a menu. But despite my long absence, I was struck by how familiar Southeast Asia felt to me, with its languorous, humid air, the whiffs of fruit and spice, the subtle restraint in the way people interacted. Singapore, though, with its wide boulevards, public gardens, and high-rise office buildings, was hardly the tidy former British colony I remembered from childhood. Even in the 1960s, it had been one of the region’s success stories—a city-state populated by Malays, Indians, and Chinese that, thanks to a combination of free-market policies, bureaucratic competence, minimal corruption, and notoriously stringent political and social control, had become a center for foreign investment. But globalization and broader growth trends in Asia had sent the country’s economy soaring even higher. With its fine restaurants and designer stores packed with businessmen in suits and young people in the latest hip-hop fashion, the wealth on display now rivaled that of New York or Los Angeles.
