华尔街日报:标题:(美国)能够遏制中国吗?
提要 在美中关系日益紧张之际,美国的外交政策专家们正在重新拿出冷战时期的一些想法,并对美国长期以来的那种与中国交往的共识提出质疑。对今日的许多美国人而言,美国成为中国外交伙伴的可能性似乎比以往更加遥远。
As tensions with China rise, U.S. foreign policy thinkers are dusting off ideas from the Cold War—and questioning the long-standing consensus for engagement with Beijing
提要 在美中关系日益紧张之际,美国的外交政策专家们正在重新拿出冷战时期的一些想法,并对美国长期以来的那种与中国交往的共识提出质疑。对今日的许多美国人而言,美国成为中国外交伙伴的可能性似乎比以往更加遥远。
As tensions with China rise, U.S. foreign policy thinkers are dusting off ideas from the Cold War—and questioning the long-standing consensus for engagement with Beijing
For many Americans today, the promise of
being diplomatic partners with China seems more remote than ever before.
By ANDREW BROWNE (Wall Journal,June 12, 2015)
Writing in 1967, at the height of the Cold
War, Richard Nixon proclaimed a new American ambition: to “persuade China that
it must change.”
“Taking the long view,” he wrote, “we simply cannot afford to leave
China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies,
cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” Four years later, having
ascended to the White House, Nixon engineered an “opening to China” that
promised to turn the communist giant into a diplomatic partner, one that would
adopt America’s values and maybe even its system of democracy.
For many Americans today, watching the
administration of President Xi Jinping crack down hard on internal dissent
while challenging the U.S. for leadership in Asia, that promise seems more
remote than ever before. In his recently published book “The Hundred-Year
Marathon,” Michael Pillsbury—an Asia specialist and Pentagon official under
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush—writes that China “has failed to
meet nearly all of our rosy expectations.”
U.S. foreign policy has reached a turning
point, as analysts from across the political spectrum have started to dust off
Cold War-era arguments and to speak of the need for a policy of containment
against China. The once solid Washington consensus behind the benefits of
“constructive engagement” with Beijing has fallen apart.
The conviction that engagement is the only
realistic way to encourage liberalization in China has persisted across eight
U.S. administrations, Republican and Democratic alike. Jimmy Carterbequeathed
Nixon’s policy to Ronald Reagan; George W. Bush to Barack Obama.
The turmoil in U.S. policy has been
especially evident in recent months. An unprecedented stream of advisory
reports from leading academic centers and think tanks has proposed everything
from military push back against China to sweeping concessions. The prescriptions
vary, but their starting point is the same: pessimism about the present course
of U.S.-Chinese relations.
The mood shift in Washington may end up
being every bit as consequential as the one that came over the U.S. immediately
after World War II, when it dawned on America that the Soviet Union wasn’t
going to continue to be an ally. That is when the legendary U.S. diplomat and
policy thinker George F. Kennan formulated his plan for containment.
In a 1947 article in Foreign Affairs, he
wrote that the U.S. “has it in its power to increase enormously the strains
under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater
degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent
years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their
outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”
Kennan’s strategy—to bleed the Soviet Union through nonprovocative
resistance—offered comfort to Europeans who feared that they faced a stark
choice between war and capitulation.
A similar anxiety about China’s actions and
intentions has now taken hold among many Asians. U.S. friends and allies in the
region are flocking to America’s side to seek protection as Mr. Xi’s
Chinabuilds up its navy, pushes its fleets farther into the blue ocean and
presses its territorial claims. In what is just the latest assertive move to
alarm the region, China is now dredging tiny coral reefs in the South China Sea
to create runways, apparently for military jets.
The U.S. is resisting. President Obama’s
signature “pivot” to Asia—designed both to calm anxious U.S. friends and to
recognize the region’s vast strategic importance in the 21st century—is
bringing advanced American combat ships to Singapore, Marines to Australia and
military advisers to the Philippines. Japan, America’s key ally in Asia, is
rearming and has adjusted its pacifist postwar constitution to allow its forces
to play a wider role in the region. The purpose of much of this activity is to
preserve the independence of smaller Asian nations who fear they might
otherwise have no choice but to fall into China’s orbit and yield to its
territorial ambitions—in other words, to capitulate.
For its part, China is utterly convinced
that the U.S. is pursuing a policy of containment. Kevin Rudd, the former
Australian prime minister (and himself a China expert), summarized Beijing’s
perception of U.S. goals in five bullet points in a recent Harvard study: to
isolate China, contain it, diminish it, internally divide it and sabotage its
political leadership.
To be sure, the new tension in U.S.-China
relations is not anything like the Cold War stare-down that preoccupied Europe
for decades, when NATO and Warsaw Pact tanks faced each other across lines that
neither side dared to cross. But in one important respect, history is repeating
itself: Both China and the U.S. have started to view each other not as
partners, competitors or rivals but as adversaries.
China’s missile and naval buildup, as well
as its development of new cyber- and space-warfare capabilities, are aimed
squarely at deterring the U.S. military from intervening in any conflict in
Asia. Meanwhile, many of the Pentagon’s pet projects—Star Wars technologies
such as lasers and advanced weapons systems such as a long-range bomber—are
being developed with China in mind.
So what, specifically, should America do?
In one of the most hawkish of the recent think-tank reports,Robert D.
Blackwill, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser and ambassador to
India under President George W. Bush, and Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who also served on the
National Security Council staff under President Bush, write that engagement
with China has served to strengthen a competitor.
It is time, they declare, for a new grand
strategy: less engagement and more “balancing” to ensure the “central
objective” of continued U.S. global primacy. Among other things, America should
beef up its military in Asia, choke off China’s access to military technology,
accelerate missile-defense deployments and increase U.S. offensive cyber
capabilities.
For Michael D. Swaine, also of the Carnegie
Endowment, this is a certain recipe for another Cold War, or worse. He outlines
a sweeping settlement under which America would concede its primacy in East
Asia, turning much of the region into a buffer zone policed by a balance of
forces, including those from a strengthened Japan. All foreign forces would
withdraw from Korea. And China would offer assurances that it wouldn’t launch
hostilities against Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province.
Such arrangements, even if possible, would
take decades to sort out. Meanwhile, warns David M. Lampton, a professor at the
Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, U.S.-China
ties have reached a tipping point. “Our respective fears are nearer to
outweighing our hopes than at any time since normalization,” he said in a
recent speech.
The West has been in this position before.
Optimism about the prospects of transforming an ancient civilization through
engagement, followed by deep disillusion, has been the pattern ever since early
Jesuit missionaries sought to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Those envoys
adopted the gowns of the Mandarin class, grew long beards and even couched
their gospel message in Confucian terms to make it more palatable. The
17th-century German priest Adam Schall got as far as becoming the chief
astronomer of the Qing dynasty. But he fell from favor, and the Jesuits were
later expelled.
The disappointment in the U.S. today is
heightened by the fact that engagement with China has promised so much and
progressed so far. Trade and technology have transformed China beyond anything
that Nixon could have imaged, and the two countries are each other’s
second-largest trading partners. China is America’s biggest creditor. More than
a quarter million Chinese students study at U.S. universities.
But the ideological gap hasn’t narrowed at
all—and now Mr. Xi has taken a sharp anti-Western turn. Mao Zedong made the
bold decision to cut a deal with Nixon, confident enough to embrace American
capitalists even while pressing the radical agenda of his Cultural Revolution.
Later, Deng Xiaoping struck a pragmatic balance between the opportunities of
economic engagement with the West and the dangers posed by an influx of Western
ideas. “When you open the window, flies and mosquitoes come in,” he shrugged.
Today, Mr. Xi is furiously zapping the
bugs. A newly proposed law would put the entire foreign nonprofit sector under
police administration, effectively treating such groups as potential enemies of
the state. State newspapers rail against “hostile foreign forces” and their
local sympathizers. The Chinese Communist Party’s “Document No. 9” prohibits
discussion of Western democracy on college campuses. And as Mr. Xi champions
traditional Chinese culture, authorities in Wenzhou, a heavily Christian
coastal city dubbed China’s “New Jerusalem,” tear down crosses atop churches as
unwanted symbols of Western influence.
The backlash against the West extends well
beyond China’s borders. For decades, China accepted America’s role as a
regional policeman to maintain the peace and keep sea lanes open. But in
Shanghai last year, Mr. Xi declared that “it is for the people of Asia to run
the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of
Asia.”
Washington feels a certain sense of
betrayal. America’s open markets, after all, smoothed China’s export-led rise
to become the world’s second-largest economy, and the two economies are now
thoroughly enmeshed.
Still, it would be a mistake to assume that
mutual dependence will necessarily prevent conflict. Pre-World War I Europe was
also closely entwined through trade and investment.
Even the U.S. business community, once
Beijing’s staunchest advocate in Washington, has lost some of its enthusiasm
for engagement. James McGregor, a former chairman of the American Chamber of
Commerce in China and now the China chairman of APCO Worldwide, a business
consultancy, recalls helping to persuade U.S. trade associations to lobby for
China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, which happened in 2001.
That unity of purpose, he says “has been
splintering ever since.” Today, “they all believe that China is out to screw them.”
China’s fears notwithstanding, the Obama
administration remains very much in favor of engagement. Last year’s
high-profile deal on climate change showed that cooperation is still possible.
Ahead of a planned summit in the U.S. in September, the two countries are
hammering out an ambitious bilateral trade agreement. And it is often pointed
out that not a single problem in the world, from piracy to pollution, can be
solved without their joint efforts.
In an increasingly awkward dance, however,
the Obama administration is trying to sustain this policy of engagement while
also ramping up its military options in Asia. China is playing a similar game.
And it is not clear how long both sides will be able to continue before there
is a clash, by accident or design.
Mr. Obama himself sometimes strikes
adversarial postures on China. In trying to push a massive Asia-Pacific
free-trade zone through a resistant Congress, he has been invoking a China
threat. “If we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules out in that
region,” he told The Wall Street Journal in April.
He also has pursued a campaign—ultimately
futile—to prevent allies such as Britain and Australia from signing on to a
Chinese regional development bank. Although the bank will help deliver much-needed
infrastructure, the White House interpreted it as part of a bid to undermine
America’s leadership in global finance.
For its part, China believes that the U.S.
will never accept the legitimacy of a communist government.
Mr. Xi has proposed a “new model of
great-power relations,” designed to break a pattern of wars through the ages
that occur when a rising power challenges the incumbent one. But America has
turned him down, unwilling to accept a formula that not only assumes that the
two countries are peers but seems to place them on the same moral plane.
Appropriately, perhaps, tensions are coming
to a head in the Spratly Islands, an archipelago of reefs and sandbars in the
South China Sea so hazardous that old British Admiralty sailing charts marked
the entire area as “Dangerous Ground.”
In this mariners’ graveyard, China has
massively expanded several reefs through dredging; one boasts a runway long
enough to land China’s largest military planes. China’s neighbors regard them
as outposts for an eventual Chinese takeover of the whole South China Sea. The
Pentagon presents them as a threat to the U.S. Navy’s unchallenged right to
sail the oceans.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter is
considering a show of force—and is under political pressure to do so. Last
month, Sen. Bob Corker,the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations, complained that the U.S. response to the island-building has
been too passive. “I see no price whatsoever that China is paying for their
activities in the South and East China Seas,” Mr. Corker said. “None. In fact,
I see us paying a price.”
Neither side wants a war. Mr. Xi is not
anti-West in the manner of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and so far, he has
not acted rashly, as Mr. Putin has by grabbing territory in Ukraine. China
still needs U.S. markets and know-how to rise. A war against America would be
an economic catastrophe for China.
The U.S.-China relationship has weathered
storms before. Recall the days following the Chinese army’s 1989 assault on
pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square, when cooperation between the
countries went into a deep freeze. But President George H.W. Bush calculated
that the U.S.-China relationship was too important to sacrifice, and he quickly
sent emissaries to Beijing to ensure that it remained intact.
Today, surely, that calculation carries no
less weight. Moreover, trying to contain China would be immensely costly:
Neither country can succeed economically without the other. Kennan’s
containment strategy worked against the Soviet Union because it was
economically weak, with almost no commercial ties to America. But today’s China
is an economic powerhouse, and its double-digit military budgets are supported
by a deep and diversified industrial base.
Set against these realities, however, is
the fact that the U.S.-China relationship has lost its strategic raison d’être:
the Soviet Union, the common threat that brought the two countries together.
Opposition to Moscow was the logic that
drove Nixon’s opening to China. But even Nixon, a tough-minded realist who was
focused on the balance of power, wasn’t sure how his opening to China would
ultimately play out. As he told the late New York Times columnistWilliam Safire
not long before Nixon’s death in 1994, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”