Tag: China
Optimism/diplomats = courage/soldiers
Chas Freeman appeared Thursday at the Carnegie Endowment to introduce his new collection of essays on China, Interesting Times: China, America and the Shifting Balance of Prestige. Those who know Washington will understand right away that such an event promises more wonkish amusement than dry analysis, as Chas is one America’s premier racconteurs and iconoclasts. From his early reference to DC’s “belief tanks” to his later claim that optimism is to diplomats what courage is to soldiers, Chas was in good form. To acclaim by several in the audience, he characterized the Chinese system as a unique form of “cadre capitalism”: a party-based system of political boosterism and entrepreneurialism.
But he was also serious in trying to dispel the misperceptions that cloud American and Chinese views of each other. Americans view the Chinese as their mirror image. But in fact the Chinese do not share our interest in military power, especially of the naval sort. China is an Asian land power as much as it is an Asian Pacific sea power. The Chinese are emerging from a lengthy period of weakness and humiliation, but their main concerns are economic and social. Our focus on the military dimensions of competition with China could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Americans need a more multidimensional and multilateral approach to China. This should not aim for dominance. Chinese power is growing far too rapidly for that. We have to be realistic about our own influence and power, especially in the current political and budgetary environment. The pivot to Asia was the right thing to do, but we should be careful not to let it be seen as antagonistic to China. Polarization will not serve our purposes. Nor will the Trans-Pacific Partnership. How can we hope to establish an economic partnership that excludes the biggest and most important economy in the region?
Chinese leaders are feeling domestically vulnerable, as the ideological underpinnings of the Communist system have rotted away. The leadership knows China needs economic, legal and political reform. Legitimacy is now based excessively on development, including breakneck export growth that has to give way to greater domestic consumption. Rule of law is lacking. The Chinese are defensive and suspicious, as they have no political model to offer the rest of the world. But the leadership is trying to dampen nationalism, not inflame it. Beijing wants to avoid territorial conflicts with neighbors, which in any event should not concern the US. China will not challenge freedom of navigation. It defends the Westphalian state system. We are the revolutionaries introducing new elements like responsibility to protect, which the Chinese see as destabilizing.
The “China dream” is not something Americans should fear. It is still inchoate. Xi Jingping thinks a great nation needs a great dream, but he hasn’t really said what it is to be. The Chinese are creating alternatives to the Bretton Woods financial institutions, but that is due to our own refusal to institute governance reforms that reflect the growing power of the BRICs and other emerging powers. On the many demographic, environmental and social challenges China faces, Chas was confident the Chinese would be able to manage.
What did he say about optimism and diplomats?
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The dogs of war: bark or bite?
Tension has been building for weeks on the Korean peninsula. Kim Jong-un has unleashed a string of threats against South Korea and the United States after conducting a missile launch in December and a nuclear test in February in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. He gains domestic traction from this belligerence, something he no doubt needs after succeeding to the presidency last December at under 30 years of age. He also hopes for payoffs from the international community, which have been a common response to North Korean provocations in the past.
President Obama had been inclined to a low key response. The North Korean threats all too clearly aim at extorting aid and trade from the outer world. The President has said he won’t play that game.
Yesterday the Americans chose a different course: they advertised the flight of B2 stealth bombers from the United States that conducted a mock bombing mission at a range in South Korea. This was part of a military exercise the Americans and South Koreans regard as routine but the North objects to. The implication was clear: if the North attacks the South, the United States will assist in the military response.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The best account I’ve heard of the rest of it is Tom Gjelten’s piece on NPR this morning. It makes clear that the United States has committed itself to joint, coordinated action with the South against the North, if the North attacks and the Americans are consulted and agree on the response. But the bottom line of the piece is that the North may be getting enough of what it wants from threatening to attack and therefore will not go through with it.
For the Americans, there is a great temptation here. Diplomatic efforts to block North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and longer-range missiles with which to deliver them have failed. It is now only a matter of a few years before North Korea acquires and deploys a serious nuclear arsenal. This, it figures, will deter efforts at regime change and ensure regime survival, nullifying both internal and external threats. A sufficient Northern military provocation could give the Americans a reason to strike at Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear infrastructure. While some of it is hardened, the US could conceivably set back the North’s efforts at least a few years. Someone might hope Iran would take heed too.
The failure of diplomatic efforts may make that attractive to some in Washington. Making it appear a real possibility might also be useful in rousing China to do its best to restrain the North Koreans. The last thing Beijing wants is an American air intervention next door, especially one that might generate large numbers of refugees.
The United States does not need a war on the Korean peninsula either. However it turns out–and there is never a guarantee that things go well in war–it would cause serious damage to relations with China and give the pivot to Asia–intended as a peaceful and diplomatic effort–an entirely different cast. South Korea also has a great deal to lose if things get out of hand: the North can unleash a frightening barrage of artillery on Seoul. Let’s hope the dogs of war are barking and not biting.
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How serious is the cyber threat?
By now, Americans should be thoroughly acclimated to exaggerations of threat: the Soviet threat was inflated, the Iraq weapons of mass destruction threat was inflated, and the global terrorism threat has been inflated. Now we’ve got the Defense Science Board (DSB) and the Director of National Intelligence warning about cyber threats and the National Security Advisor fingering China. So how serious is the situation, and how far should we go in responding to it?
Like all the threats that came before it, cyber sounds serious enough: foreign powers could not only steal your emails and block your internet access but also disrupt power and water supplies, purloin valuable commercial secrets and render US military operations unusable, including our nuclear forces. If you believe the newspapers, we know the Chinese are already grabbing emails from organizations they are interested in as well as intercepting commercially important plans and data. We also know from the press that Israel and the US have used cyber attacks to slow the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, which suggests a capability to disrupt vital infrastructure. Iranians are smart–if we’ve done something to them, you can be pretty sure they are trying to figure out how to do it to us. The Chinese won’t be sitting on their laurels either.
The DSB gives this graphic description of the consequences of a full-spectrum cyber attack on US forces:
…attacks would be expected to include denial of service, data corruption, supply chain corruption, traitorous insiders, kinetic and related non-kinetic attacks at all altitudes from underwater to space. U.S. guns, missiles, and bombs may not fire, or may be directed against our own troops. Resupply, including food, water, ammunition, and fuel may not arrive when or where needed. Military Commanders may rapidly lose trust in the information and ability to control U.S. systems and forces. Once lost, that trust is very difficult to regain.
But that is only the military piece. A full-spectrum cyber attack would also target civilian systems:
The impact of a destructive cyber attack on the civilian population would be even greater with no electricity, money, communications, TV, radio, or fuel (electrically pumped). In a short time, food and medicine distribution systems would be ineffective; transportation would fail or become so chaotic as to be useless. Law enforcement, medical staff, and emergency personnel capabilities could be expected to be barely functional in the short term and dysfunctional over sustained periods. If the attack’s effects were reversible, damage could be limited to an impact equivalent to a power outage lasting a few days. If an attack’s effects cause physical damage to control systems, pumps, engines, generators, controllers, etc., the unavailability of parts and manufacturing capacity could mean months to years are required to rebuild and reestablish basic infrastructure operation.
While warning about the societal threats, the DSB focuses its recommendations on the Department of Defense. Most of what they say seems reasonable to me, though I confess I find it difficult to imagine–as the DSB does–the use of nuclear weapons to deter an “existential” cyber attack. We are going to threaten to nuke the nerds? We are not even likely to know which country they’ve launched their attack from.
The DSB proposes a three-tiered response to cyberthreats: defense, consequence management and deterrence. Here is where things get hard. Exaggeration of a threat is not in and of itself necessarily harmful, except insofar as it diverts resources from higher priorities. But it is arguable that we’ve done more damage to ourselves responding to threats than the threats themselves were likely to do. There aren’t too many people who think the Iraq war was worth it, since Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons and we’ll be paying the trillion-dollar bill for decades. The Soviet space threat got us excited enough to go to the moon, but how much good has that done for people in Peoria?
It would be easy to do serious damage to the openness of the internet and the social media it has spawned by too much concern about cybersecurity. Lots of us are already struggling to remember all our damn passwords and usernames. Adding levels of unnecessary security will make our entire economy less efficient and the benefits of openness more difficult to obtain. I’m really not all that concerned with the Chinese reading my emails. In fact, it might make them a bit less competitive than they would otherwise be.
I don’t mean to pooh-pooh the threat. I only mean to urge us not to overreact. Wisdom, not panic, should be the mood. What really needs to be done to reduce the vulnerability of our vital infrastructure? What are the cheapest and best means? The DSB takes a “systems” approach. That seems to me right: rather than clamping down on everything, which is the natural bureaucratic reaction, lets look at what is most serious and deal with that first. If our nuclear deterrent has to be protected from cyberattack, I’m all for it. But let’s not treat my emails the same way.
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Talk is cheap
Calls for negotiated solutions are all the rage. Secretary of State Kerry wants one in Syria. The Washington Post thinks one is possible in Bahrain. Everyone wants one for Iran. Despite several years of failure, many are still hoping for negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ditto Israel/Palestine. Asia needs them for its maritime issues.
It is a good time to remember the classic requirement for successful negotiations: “ripeness,” defined as a mutually hurting stalemate in which both parties come to the conclusion that they cannot gain without negotiations and may well lose. I might hope this condition is close to being met in Syria and Bahrain, but neither President Asad nor the Al Khalifa monarchy seems fully convinced, partly because Iran and Saudi Arabia are respectively providing unqualified support to the regimes under fire. Ripeness may well require greater external pressure: from Russia in the case of Syria and from the United States in the case of Bahrain, which hosts the US Fifth Fleet.
It is difficult to tell where things stand in the Afghanistan negotiations. While the Taliban seem uninterested, Pakistan appears readier than at times in the past. The Americans are committed to getting out of the fight by the end of 2014. President Karzai is anxious for his security forces to take over primary responsibility sooner rather than later. But are they capable of doing so, and what kind of deal are the Afghans likely to cut as the Americans leave?
Israel and Palestine have one way or another been negotiating and fighting on and off since before 1948. Objectively, there would appear to be a mutually hurting stalemate, but neither side sees it that way. Israel has the advantage of vast military superiority, which it has repeatedly used as an alternative to negotiation to get its way in the West Bank and Gaza. A settlement might end that option. The Palestinians have used asymmetric means (terrorism, rocket fire, acceptance at the UN as a non-member state, boycott) to counter and gain they regard as a viable state.
The Iran nuclear negotiations are critical, as their failure could lead not just to an American strike but also to Iranian retaliation around the world and a requirement to continue military action as Tehran rebuilds its nuclear program. The United States is trying to bring about ripeness by ratcheting up sanctions pressure on Tehran, which fears that giving up its nuclear program will put the regime at risk. It is not clear that the US is prepared to strike a bargain that ensures regime survival in exchange for limits on the nuclear program. We may know more after the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China + Germany) meet with Iran February 26 in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Asia’s conflicts have only rarely come to actual violence. China, Korea (North and South), Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and India are sparring over trade routes, islands, resources and ultimately hegemony. This risks arousing nationalist sentiments that will be hard to control, driving countries that have a good deal to gain from keeping the peace in some of the world’s fastest growing economies into wars that the regimes involved will find it difficult to back away from. Asia lacks an over-arching security structure like those in Europe (NATO, OSCE, G8, Council of Europe, etc) and has long depended on the US as a balancing force to preserve the peace. This has been a successful approach since the 1980s, but the economic rise of China has put its future in doubt, even with the Obama Administration’s much-vaunted pivot to Asia.
This is a world that really does need diplomacy. None of the current negotiations seem destined for success, though all have some at least small probability of positive outcomes. Talk really is cheap. I don’t remember anyone complaining that we had spent too much money on it, though some would argue that delay associated with negotiations has sometimes been costly. The French would say that about their recent adventure in Mali.
But war is extraordinarily expensive. Hastening to it is more often than not unwise. That is part of what put the United States into deep economic difficulty since 2003. If we want to conserve our strength for an uncertain future, we need to give talk its due.
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A better way
North Korea’s third nuclear weapons test yesterday raises three questions:
- Why are they doing this?
- What difference does it make?
- How should the rest of the world respond?
Why does North Korea develop nuclear weapons?
If you believe what Pyongyang says, the answer is clear: to defy and threaten the United States, which the North Koreans see as their primary enemy. But this should not be understood as a classic state-to-state conflict. North Korea poses, at least for now, little military threat to the United States. But Pyongyang believes Washington wants to end its dictatorship (I certainly hope there is some truth in that–even paranoids have enemies). The North Koreans see nuclear weapons as a guarantee of regime survival. No one wants to run the risk of regime collapse if the regime holds nuclear weapons, for fear that they could end up in the wrong hands. NATO attacked Libya only after Qaddafi had given up his nuclear program. So the North Koreans view nuclear weapons as guaranteeing regime survival.
What difference does it make?
South Korea and Japan have reason to be nervous about North Korea’s nuclear weapons and improving missile capability to deliver them. But it is going to be a long time before North Korea can seriously threaten the US with nuclear weapons. And the US holds a capacity to respond massively.
The larger significance of the North Korean nuclear program is the breach it puts in the world’s nuclear nonproliferation regime, which has been remarkably successful in limiting the number of nuclear powers, especially in Asia. But Taiwan, South Korea and Japan face real difficulty in maintaining their abstinence if North Korea is going to arm itself and threaten its neighbors. There are not a lot of worse scenarios for the world’s nonproliferation regime than an expanded nuclear arms race in Asia, where China, India and Pakistan are already armed with nuclear weapons.
How should the rest of the world respond?
This is where the issues get difficult. There are already international sanctions on North Korea, which has managed to survive them so far with a bit of help from Iran on missile technology and China on economic ties. More can be done, especially if the Chinese crack down on illicit trade across the border. But the North Korean objective is juche (self-reliance), so tightening sanctions may help rather than weaken the regime.
The Economist last week suggested the efforts to block the nuclear program have failed and that the international community should instead now focus on regime change, by promoting North Korean travel, media access, Church-sponsored propaganda and trade. This would mean a partial reversal of the efforts to isolate North Korea and a new strategy of building power centers that might compete with the regime, especially among the growing class of entrepreneurs and capitalists operating more or less illicitly in North Korea.
We are not good at reversals of policy. But the failure of our decades-long attempts to isolate the Castro regime in Cuba is instructive. Communism did not fall in Eastern Europe to sanctions. It fell to people who took to the streets seeking a better life, one they learned about on TV and radio as well as in illegally circulated manuscripts. Isolation alone seems unlikely to work. Isolation of the regime with a more concerted effort to inform and educate the people might be a better approach.
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Keeping an eye on Asia
Trying to catch up on my Asia reading, as things are heating up there:
- The Japanese scrambled jets last week in response to a Russian violation of airspace over the Kuril Islands.
- China has been pressuring North Korea not to conduct an announced nuclear test.
- Tokyo is complaining that Chinese radar “locked on” to Japanese ships, a step generally associated with initiating an attack, in the East China Sea (where the two countries dispute sovereignty over the Senkaku/Daioyu islands).
The smart money is still betting that China and Japan won’t go to war over uninhabited islands that Japan administers but China claims. There have been recent rumblings of a possible accord between Russia and Japan on the Kurils. It is of course welcome that China should restrain its North Korean friends from defying the UN Security Council again with another nuclear test. It is unclear whether Beijing will succeed.
The US Navy, facing budget and reducing its presence in the Middle East, has found a useful “hegemon” and bully in China. In the mist of preparations for the Quadrennial Defense Review, naval advocates would like to regain at least some of the budget momentum they lost when Mitt Romney–a strong naval advocate–was defeated for the presidency.
But that doesn’t mean the needs are not real. America’s ships are vulnerable, even to Iranian never mind Chinese cruise and other missiles. Washington has a lot of obligations in Asia: to Japan, to Taiwan, the Philippines, to South Korea. It also has some relatively new friends to oblige: Vietnam and Burma in particular. It is not going to be easy to meet all the needs in a severely constrained budget environment.
Those who complain about US inattention to Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and even the Balkans need to remember how many other commitments need to be fulfilled. Asia represents an important slice of the future of world economic growth. It also represents a serious risk of armed conflict on a scale that would have global consequences. We may not all be able to pivot to Asia, but we should keep an eye on it.
And I just realized: I am in Asia today, in Antalya, Turkey. Maybe that’s why my eyes have turned east, though the East I am writing about here lies thousands of miles away. Here’s the scenery from my hotel room:
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