China

President Obama didn't get any concessions during his recent visit to the People's Republic of China, and no one should be surprised. One of the most important lessons in life is that if you make a series of big mistakes, you should expect to pay a price for them. Back in 2000, the United States was running a budget surplus, our military was second-to-none, our image in most parts of the world was quite positive, and our economy had been growing steadily for nearly a decade. Some of that growth may have been illusory, however, and the next eight years featured a daunting combination of misfortunes (9/11, Hurricane Katrina), and self-inflicted wounds (e.g., the financial crisis, the invasion of Iraq, the endless war in Afghanistan, the abandonment of any sense of fiscal responsibility, etc.). There's no magic button or clever diplomatic sleight of hand that will allow the United States to retrieve its former position without some real sacrifices, and so far, nobody seems eager to make the changes that might be necessary.

Hence Obama's modest demeanor in Beijing. No president is going to be able to lay down the law on human rights, exchange rates, or sanctions on Iran when China owns over a trillion dollars in U.S. assets, when the U.S. economy is on life support, and when the American military Is mired in two losing wars. Until we get our house in order over here, nobody should expect China to be especially responsive to our wishes or expect its leaders to view the "American model" as especially appealing. An wide-open marketplace of ideas hardly looks attractive when the result is the intellectual ascendancy of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.  

The follies of the past eight years were the greatest gift the United States could have given Beijing, and Obama's conduct in Beijing was the inevitable result. And if we keep doing what we've been doing (see under: Afghanistan, Middle East, etc.), I wouldn't expect things to change.

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The Economist magazine is often a source of clear-eyed, trenchant, and moderately conservative analysis, usually written with a wit and verve that puts most of the content in Time and Newsweek to shame. But nobody's perfect, and the latest issue offers a remarkably obtuse leader on the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. The author complains that "China does not always act like a great power," and concludes that we ought to be especially worried by a rising power whose government "is so insecure."

If you read the piece carefully, however, it's clear that their real complaint is that China actually is acting like a great power, which means that some of its policies aren't to the liking of the Economist's editors. They point out that China is not a "status quo power" -- which is correct -- but neither are most great powers most of the time. The European great powers of a bygone era competed more-or-less constantly, punctuating their rivalries with sometimes long and bloody wars. The United States spent the Cold War trying to both contain and bring down the Soviet regime (and Moscow hoped to do the same to the United States), and while neither side wanted to fight a nuclear war to do it, neither side was interested in "preserving the status quo" either. After the USSR collapsed, George Bush Sr. spoke of "standing alone at the pinnacle of power, with the rarest opportunity to remake the world," which is not exactly a "status quo" sentiment. And has the Economist forgotten that Bush's son subsequently decided it was a good idea to "transform" much of the Middle East at the point of a rifle barrel? By those standards, Chinese revisionism looks mild indeed.

Similarly, the magazine is worried because China put on a big military display as part of its 60th anniversary celebration, is gradually modernizing its armed forces, and isn't telling us everything about its plans to build aircraft carriers and the like. Again, is there anything very surprising about this behavior? All great powers like to brandish their military hardware (e.g., there are over 150 military airshows in the United States this year, and the Air Force does a fly-over at the Super Bowl), and one would expect any rising economic power to translate some of its growing wealth into greater military strength.

They also charge that China "still seems to pick and choose the issues where it is willing to help." Shocking, isn't it? No, I guess not, because other states do that too. They are on safer ground criticizing China for overreacting when others criticize its human rights conduct or when foreign governments allow a visit from the Dalai Lama, but China is hardly unique in reacting harshly to outside criticism.

Lastly, China is said to "put its perceived economic self-interest ahead of strategic common sense," most notably in its response to Iran's nuclear program. Once again, what great power doesn't think first and foremost about "self-interest?" Not only did the United States turn a blind eye when the UK, France, and Israel acquired nuclear weapons (the latter outside the confines of the NPT), but it responded to India and Pakistan's nuclear tests in 1998 by imposing some meaningless and short-lived economic sanctions and then returning to business as usual. In fact, India eventually got rewarded with a strategic cooperation agreement and a forgiving nuclear deal. According to a recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "intensive lobbying by corporate sectors in both the United States and India helped overrule the concerns of the arms control community." I guess other great powers worry about "economic self-interest" too.

In short, what's bugging the Economist is not that China isn't "acting like a great power"; it is that China isn't defining its interests the way some conservative Englishmen would like them to. Sorry, folks, that's just not how great powers act. As China's power grows, it will press its own perceived self-interests vigorously, just as other great powers do. It will continue to join and participate in a wide array of existing institutions, but it will use them to advance its own interests and will also try to shape those institutions according to its own preferences and values. Expecting them to conform their behavior to someone else's idea of what is right and proper is ... well ... not very realistic.

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You know your opponents are worried when they start calling you names.

Jonathan Chait says I'm "paranoid," that I "went bonkers" in a recent blog post, and that my scholarship is "wildly hyperbolic." He says his real objection to Charles Freeman's appointment as chair of the National Intelligence Council is that Freeman is an "ideological fanatic" (isn't it odd that this quality went undetected during Freeman's lengthy career as a public servant?) and that Freeman's other critics were mostly worried about his relations with Saudi Arabia (as if this had nothing to do with their views on other aspects of our Middle East policy). Nice try, but it is abundantly clear to almost everyone that the assault on Freeman has been conducted by individuals -- Chait included -- who are motivated by their commitment to Israel and who are upset that Freeman has criticized some of its past behavior. Of course Chait doesn't broadcast this openly, as it would immediately undermine the case he's trying to make.

As for the others, Michael Goldfarb compares me to Father Coughlin and says I assembled a "blacklist," when in fact I did no such thing. I'm not suggesting that Freeman's critics should lose their jobs or face other forms of  persecution; I just pointed out what they were doing and said it was wrong. Read what I actually wrote, and then ask yourself why Goldfarb would make this up.  Perhaps he's confusing me with Ron Radosh, who did call for the New York Times to fire Roger Cohen for writing a column about Iran that didn't demonize it. Jeffrey Goldberg says that my co-author and I are "viciously anti-Israel," even though we have consistently declared our support for a Jewish state, said we "admired its many achievements," and wrote that the United States "should come to Israel's aid if its survival is ever in jeopardy." M.J. Rosenberg challenges Freeman's critics too, and Goldberg labels him a "professional slander expert."

What explains the false claims and overheated rhetoric these pundits employ? Why can't Chait and his allies represent their opponents' views accurately, and deploy facts and logic instead of invective and character assassination?

Answer: because the case they are defending is so weak. Not the case for Israel's existence, which virtually everyone engaged in these debates supports (including Freeman himself), but the case for continuing to give Israel nearly unconditional backing, even when it continues to build settlements in the Occupied Territories and when its newly-elected leaders openly declare their opposition to a two-state solution, which was the preferred outcome of the Clinton and Bush administrations and is now the stated goal of the Obama administration. Because the case for never criticizing Israel and backing it no matter what it does makes little strategic or moral sense, advocates of that approach have no choice but to misrepresent their opponent's arguments, and to try to portray them as wild-eyed extremists (i.e., "ideological fanatics" or "paranoid"), in an attempt to marginalize them. It never seems to occur to them that what we really have here is a straightforward policy disagreement, and that the policies they prefer might actually be harmful to Israel and the United States.  

Their tactics used to work pretty well, but more and more people understand and resent the game that Israel's hardline supporters are playing. But Messrs. Chait, Goldfarb, and Goldberg don't get this. They don't understand that their mean-spirited fulminations are undermining their own case, much as a loudmouth hogging the mike at a public meeting turns off the rest of the audience. So it's hard to get too upset at all the name-calling. As Napoleon once said, "when your opponent is making a very serious mistake, don’t be impolite and disturb him."  

P.S. The Washington Times reports today that Freeman's appointment is going to be vetted by the DNI's Inspector General, to make sure there are no disqualifying conflicts of interest. I see nothing wrong with that, provided he is judged by the same standards as other government officials in similar roles. The article also quotes several former NIC members who support the vetting process but believe "It has to be looked at, but I don't see anything to disqualify him," and that Freeman "should be a fine choice." 

Remember the lurid warnings suggesting that China was on the march in Africa, busy providing foreign aid and long-term contracts designed to corner the market in strategic commodities?

As Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills show here, such concerns appear to have been misplaced. Not only has the recent economic downturn been a disaster for African states dependent on commodity exports, it has also produced a rapid retrenchment on the part of Chinese investors. Money quote:

The market, not grand strategy, is the Chinese motivation in Africa."

Assuming China continues to develop economically, realist theory would lead us to expect the United States and China to become serious competitors at some point in the future. See here. But let's not jump the gun, or assume that everything they do reflects some nefarious desire to gain the upper hand.