One of my posts yesterday touched on the subject of the timeliness of revisiting establish U. S. policies, particularly with respect to our traditional postures in East Asia. A comment was made in the comments thread of that post that had such merit that I don’t want it to be lost in there.
In that comment sometimes commenter CuriousOnlooker concisely summarized the assumptions in place when our China policies were formed and how weak those assumptions are now:
The current American policy on China and Taiwan rests on assumptions from when Nixon reoriented policy in the 1970’s. The assumptions were,
(1) Previous previous policy failed with Asia being unstable and the US having fought poorly in Korea, Vietnam.
(2) Mainland China is a lesser threat then the Soviet Union and both China and the US have a stronger interest in weakening the Soviet Union then each in working with the Soviet Union.
(3) Mainland China is a 3rd world country, so any commerce with it, won’t meaningfully hurt the US, and needs to be encouraged as an investment in the future
(4) Taiwan is also a backwater, with no American core interests involved.
(5) Most people in Taiwan still view themselves as “Chineseâ€
Read the whole comment. To make a very long story short, China is changing very rapidly while our policies have remained the same.
Until relatively recently China’s leaders have mostly been old revolutionaries. President Xi in contrast came of age during the Cultural Revolution. I suspect that’s one of the factors motivating him to consolidate power as he is clearly doing. Leaders who came of age during the Cultural Revolution will inevitably have different views than those who have come of age after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. How that will be reflected in Chinese politics or foreign policy we can only imagine.
I have long thought that American politicians have long erred in imagining that China’s leaders are just like them. They aren’t. Our systems are different enough that completely different strategies are required to assume or retain power. We ignore those differences at our peril.
One last remark. I have more knowledge of Russia and Russian politics than I do of China and Chinese politics but I strongly suggest that Russia and China cannot maintain any lengthy alliance. China presents grave risks to Russia, particularly Asian Russia which is geographically most of the Russian Federation, and those risks can’t just be waved away. If we were not maintaining as steadfastly adversarial stance with respect to Russia that we have been, the Russians would, correctly, see China as the greater threat to them.
Update
While you’re forming an opinion on the merits of the issue, you owe it to yourself to read this piece from William Murchison, formerly an editor for the Dallas Morning News:
When President Jimmy Carter, in 1978, said he was ending diplomatic relations with the Nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan, The Dallas Morning News, a journal widely admired at the time for its robustly conservative viewpoint, called the administration’s action “shameful.”
I should know. I wrote the editorial.
Why choose the word “shameful”? For a very good reason. By giving the back of his diplomatic hand to the Nationalists so as to embrace, and cavort with, the communists of the mainland, Carter brought shame to his country.
Update 2
George Friedman remarks on how the circumstances under which our policy with respect to Taiwan have changed:
Much time has passed since that deal, and a few things have happened. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Vietnam War ended. Vietnam is the U.S.’ partner and is hostile to China. Chairman Mao is dead, and China has surged economically as the last generation’s low-wage, high-growth economy. The U.S. is obsessed with the Islamic world. The foundations of the agreement on Taiwan have evaporated, but the reality is the same. Taiwan is an independent country despite what anyone – including Taiwan – says, and it is a close U.S. ally.
In addition, Chinese exports have undercut American industry, as the movement of the U.S. industrial sector to China, among many other countries, has created an economic and social crisis in the U.S. Trump won the election because of that social crisis, and one of his major commitments was to restructure the U.S.-China relationship.
Hence the phone call. By making the call Trump signaled to China that he is prepared to act unilaterally if the Chinese are not prepared to renegotiate the relationship, and everything is on the table. Trump selected a high-visibility, low-content issue – Taiwan – to demonstrate his indifference to prior understandings. Critics say Trump attacked the foundations of U.S.-Chinese relations. It’s true in a way, but Trump had pledged to change the foundations of that relationship.
The one thing I think that Friedman gets but past presidents and the foreign policy establishment don’t is that we’re actually bargaining with China from a position of strength. Our position is actually stronger than theirs but you’d never guess it from all of the bowing, scraping, and forelock-tugging.
I second the endorsement of the linked comment. Kissenger was recently interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic, and they way he put it was that Taiwan was the sole issue that the Americans and Chinese had regular communications. Setting it aside, was the way to open a lot more avenues for discussion. I suppose the question is whether no longer setting it aside would stop discussions on trade, Russia, radical Islam, etc.?
By the way, this was the Kissinger criticism of Obama:
“Obama’s point is accurate in terms of how national interests are conceived. But the administration seems to treat these interests as fixed, operating automatically, and regionally defined. Since it believes as well that the global trends are moving in a direction favorable to our values, the overwhelming strategic obligation of the United States becomes to avoid getting in the way of the inevitable. But the national interest can also be treated as dynamic and not static, as global rather than regional; indeed that regional interests are subdivisions of a global concept of order. The art of foreign policy is to recognize when seemingly peripheral interests merge into core ones, which is the basis of collective security. To an extent, foreign policy can seek to merge competing core interests—and that is the means of turning confrontation into cooperation (i.e., the opening to China). Assessing the evolution of future trends is therefore always part of the strategic reflection of the moment. It is the difference between static and mobile, between essentially passive and somewhat preemptive, diplomacy.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/kissinger-order-and-chaos/506876/
As long as the US Empire wants to maintain occupation of Europe it will regard Russia as an enemy, more so even than China. Especially as long as Russia is in alliance with any enemy capable of doing much damage to Israel.
At the time of Kissinger’s Russophobic encirclement policy, the Soviet was publishing more anti-Zionist propaganda than the rest of the world combined, and allied with the “Rejectionists.”
Thank you Dave, coming from you is high praise indeed.
Despite your lack of familiarity with china, your comment is bingo! More insightful than 99% of the commentary.
A broader theme is need to rethink assumptions is not only needed for china, and as you have mentioned, russia, but Europe, and the Middle East.
I used to think in any area, one policy “side” was always superior forever – but now i think only a few things are like that. In most policy (esp economics and foreign policy) it really depends on the situation – and a willingness to recheck assumptions determines success.