Introduction

On the surface, the US has been saying it wants Russia's cooperation on Iran's nuclear program in the Security Council this week. So praktike wonders what to make of the timing of Cheney's anti-Russia speech in Lithuania, in which he accused the Russia government of using oil and natural gas as "tools for intimidation and blackmail," "unfairly and improperly restrict[ing] the rights of her people," and taking "actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements."

After that bit of raw chutzpah, Cheney proceeded, in the words of the NYT, to wade into the energy battles in Kazakhstan while embracing Nazerbayev with smiling praise for Kazakhstan's "political development." Cheney finished his tour in Dubrovnik with the endorsement of NATO membership for an unlikely trio of candidates, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia.

Altogether, the trip was a tour de force -- a nicely judged combination of high-minded Cold War-style ideological conflict with cynical Great Game competition, carefully tailored at each stop to play to the specific anti-Russian (and pro-US) interests of key local players.

Strategic linkages

I don't think there can be any question that the Bush Admin has been making a number of anti-Russian moves in recent weeks and that Cheney's trip was deliberately designed to be provocative. It appears to me that the Russophobe hardliners within the Bush Admin, led by Cheney, have won the internal debates about how to deal with Russia leading up to next month's G-8 summit in St Petersburg.

As important, I also think the provocations directed toward Russia are part of a parallel program to delegitimize the UN process for dealing with Iran, where the US is transparently engaged in faux diplomacy.

In my view, recent moves by the Bush Admin are comprehensible only when they are seen as linked -- part of a broader "forward-leaning" effort to aggressively reassert US hegemony. My fear is that the tactics the US is using in playing the "diplomatic route" re Iran may not only be extremely dangerous as a way of dealing with Iran itself. Those tactics are likely to have far broader and more profound long-term effects on the structure of the international system.

Where are US foreign policy elites?

Why so little reaction to the Bush Admin's tougher line on Russia by American foreign policy elites ("realists" and "liberal internationalists") who aren't the natural allies ("neocons" and "national greatness" conservatives) of the Bush Admin? Perhaps it's because most foreign policy elites tend to be experts in one area or another with limited overlap -- e.g. nuclear proliferation, Middle East, former Soviet Union, China, Latin America, defense, etc. Or perhaps it's because they've lost the old Cold War habits of seeing linkages across diplomatic and security issues and across regions.

I also think, in part, it's because almost all "schools" of American foreign policy share unquestioningly the assumption that being the sole superpower is in the natural order of things. American hegemony is, at least in principle, assumed to be necessary and/or benign, and its maintenance and assertion is a good thing. What the various schools quarrel about is how best to maintain and assert American power (soft and hard) and "leadership." When liberal internationalists like John Ikenberry and Anne Marie Slaughter question whether maintenance of a unipolar system is actually in American interests, note how gingerly they approach the issue in order to avoid being treated as anti-American heretics.

"Realists" and "liberal internationalists" may tut at Cheney's confrontational style, and some may question his blatant hypocrisy on the subject of democracy. But I'm rarely seeing any challenge to the basic narrative that Russia deserves a smack-down from the US. First, it's become conventional wisdom (albeit of the ahistorical variety) that Russia is rolling back democracy and increasingly flirting with dictatorship at home [ed. - without really explaining why, it seems to be assumed that Putin's "soft authoritarianism" at home should automatically have a negative impact on US-Russia relations on everything from terrorism to trade]. Second, there's a general feeling that Russia has been getting a bit uppity abroad [ed. - Russia is seen as somehow "meddling" where it doesn't belong, even where some American elites actually agree more with Russia's position than that of the Bush Admin -- e.g. issues such as Iran or the Palestinians]

So maybe it's not surprising that it takes a rabid anti-imperialist who doesn't belong to any of the mainstream foreign policy schools, Justin Raimondo, to produce the first article I've read that condemns Cheney's anti-Russia attacks as something more than just undiplomatic and hypocritical. Even Raimondo, however, doesn't fully link Cheney's moves with the diplomatic games vis a vis Iran.

A five-pronged strategic offensive?

To see how recent Bush Admin policy moves are part of a broader strategy of reasserting hegemony, I find especially helpful the following observation by DrLeoStrauss (Stop the Spirit of Zossen).

The U.S. is currently conducting five separate strategic grand offensives:

(a) the roll back of the old Soviet imperial periphery across Eastern Europe, down through the Russian 'Near Abroad' of Ukraine and Georgia and Central Asia;

(b) the on again off again stuttering efforts to isolate China as the new 'Peer Competitor' across both the Asian Pacific rim and also in Central Asia [ed. - and in recent months, competition in Africa has been added to the list];

(c) conduct an international war on 'terrorism' (such as it is);

(d) lead new international cooperation regarding nuclear and WMD proliferation [ed. - "lead" is a charitably neutral way of describing the Bush Admin goals of (i) leaving to the US the determination of which countries are worthy of obtaining nuclear technology and weapons and (ii) ensuring that no unfriendly state can achieve deterrence against the US use of force]; and

(e) bootstrap the Middle East into modernity through unilateral American force of arms.

(Sprinkle 'democracy' on all of the above).

What's remarkable is that Iran intersects with all five "grand strategic offensives" plus "democracy." That helps explain how and why the Bush Admin has turned the nuclear dispute with Iran into a "crisis" (with considerable help from the Iranians themselves, of course). The Iranian situation offers the Bush Admin an opportunity to make "progress" on a number of its strategic offensives simultaneously -- not just with Iran or with the nuclear proliferation regime but with China and Russia as well.

The UN process is set up for "failure" in the sense that the Bush Admin is not going to obtain the sort of robust steps against Iran that it has sought. Either the Security Council negotiations will produce some sort of deadlock over the statement or, as Bolton has suggested this weekend, the US intends to proceed without Chinese and Russian support. Either outcome would give the US the excuse to ignore the Security Council going forward -- Rice has already been claiming that the Security Council would suffer a fatal "loss of credibility" if it fails to take action on Iran. Next stop, as again Rice has already suggested, is "coalitions of the wiling."

The Bush Admin will likely pin the blame for failure on the "ineffectiveness" of the UN (and international institutions), in general, and on China and Russia, in particular. We should expect the bill of particulars against China and Russia to be three-fold:

• they are authoritarian regimes that cozy up to tyrants for their own narrow economic and geopolitical purposes
• they threaten global energy security (in their roles as major consumer and major producer, respectively), and
• they are potential threats to their neighbors.

Marketing the program

This three-pronged attack draws on several different policy rationales or motives, each with a different way of defining "threats" to American interests:

• Cold War-style: ideologically-defined enemies, based on the "nature of the regime";
• Great Game-style: challenges to US influence/control of global energy;
• US "global leadership"-style: threats to US predominance in any region.

As DrLeoStrauss suggests, even if the Bush Admin's strategic goals were commendable (which I dispute), the simultaneous pursuit of such an ambitious collection of strategic objectives is likely to produce considerable incoherence in execution. Furthermore, as Cheney's trip illustrated, that incoherence will be compounded by relying on such a mix of "styles." It's difficult to reconcile the Cold War-style (e.g. Cheney's ideological assault on Putin's supposed lack of democracy) with the Great Game-style (e.g. fishing for gas deals with Nazerbayev while praising his fifteen-year contribution to Kazakhstan's "political development").

The advantage of this mixed bag of rationales, however, is the same the Bush Admin enjoyed in assembling support for the Iraq war: a bit of something for everyone -- liberal hawks, ideological warriors, "national greatness" conservatives, and old-fashioned military hawks. The fact that no one can explain the "real reason" the US went to war in Iraq isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Of course, such an ambitious program can't be left entirely to the Bush Admin. They need help from pundits and politicians to frame, legitimize and sell the program. Not surprisingly, we've already begun to hear from the usual suspects. A mere four days before Cheney's appearance in Lithuania, Robert Kagan warned in the op-ed pages of the WashPost of a global threat to liberalism potentially greater than Al Qaeda: a "League of Dictators" (read China and Russia) that will use their positions at the UN to undermine the promise of a new international order. Although Kagan's essay is primarily an example of the Cold War-style, he deftly weaves in the "energy security" card by showing how China's ideological and strategic interests (i.e., access to energy) are likely to coincide in places like Africa or Venezuela.

Max Boot has similarly been busy on the op-ed pages. The day before Cheney began his trip in Vilnius, Boot was lamenting the "dictatorship dividend" -- the windfall from rising oil prices enjoyed by "noxious dictators" like Putin and Chavez. Boot hit the trifecta -- the challenge to global "energy security," an ideological conflict, and the threat of "regional contagion."

Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez can buy off their publics with generous subsidies and ignore Western pressure while sabotaging democratic developments from Central America to Central Asia.

Since in this article Boot is concerned with nefarious energy suppliers, his list of villains doesn't include China, with which he is willing for the US to make common cause, at least as fellow energy consumers. In a longer piece, I'm confident he'd be able to find a way to lodge China in the enemy camp a la Kagan. As Matt Yglesias notes, Francis Fukuyama reminds us that the PNAC folks always need an enemy, and China was their pre-9/11 favorite. So they may just be reverting to form.

If John McCain's speech at the Brussels Forum on transatlantic relations a week ago is any indication, the "national greatness" conservatives are on the same page as the neocons and, according to Dan Drezner, the "muscular liberals" in the person of Richard Holbrooke are in full agreement with McCain. And of course the human rights folks and democracy true believers have long had China in their sights and are delighted to hear Cheney take on the Russians.

Reporting on his attendance at the Brussels Forum, Drezner notes:

The general tenor of the conference so far has been to focus less on transatlantic frictions and more on the geopolitical and geoeconomic difficulties that Russia and China are posing to the West as a whole. More later, but a question to readers -- will the realpolitik of a rising China and a renegade Russia... be the ultimate driver for a closer transatlantic partnership? And should that be the main driver?

Snark aside, Kagan and Boot give us a taste of the sort of arguments, from the same unholy alliance that brought us Iraq, that I expect to hear against Russia and China as the Bush Admin seeks to reassert American hegemony.

This post certainly requires quite a bit more fleshing out, so let's call it an "Intro." As and if I develop some of these thoughts further, I'll update with links to future posts.

cross-posted at American Footprints

This fascinating tidbit comes from Mahalanobis:

A study ($) of Chinese and American students has found that the two groups looked at scenes in photographs in distinct ways. The findings indicate that previously observed cultural differences in judgment and memory between East Asians and North Americans derive from differences in what they actually see. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that whereas North Americans tend to be more analytic when evaluating a scenario, fixating on the focal object, East Asians are generally more holistic, giving more consideration to the context.
[...]
As the team predicted, the American students homed in on the focal subject sooner and longer than did the Chinese students, who paid more attention to the background imagery. This suggests that the Americans encoded more visual details for the focal objects than did the Chinese, which would explain why the Americans fared better when it came to determining whether they had seen a given subject before, even when it was presented against a new backdrop.

Nisbett and his collaborators posit that these differences in attention to object and context arise through socialization practices. "East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning," the scientists observe. "In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context.

Now wouldn't it be interesting to see what sort of differences, if any, correlate with greater exposure to other cultures, such as traveling or living abroad. One could speculate that paying greater attention to context might not be all that bad an acquired perspective for some Americans.

Howard W French of the NYT shifts attention from the future of China's internal economic and political system, and asks a thought-provoking question about China on the world stage: "What sort of power does China aspire to be?"

Those who fret most about China’s rise... seem to ignore some very basic, and as yet unanswered, questions. No matter how fast its economy grows, can a country make a successful transition to great-power status without real friendships, without associating itself meaningfully with any global ideal, or without bearing a more generous share of humanity’s burdens?

Outside observers who fail to take such questions into account are not alone. At least since Deng Xiaoping declared China should “lay low at a time of adversity,” the country’s leaders have seemed seduced by the anachronistic notion that their country, which boasts one of the world’s most vigorously globalizing economies, can best advance by keeping its head down and simply worrying about its own internal development.

French, author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, not surprisingly uses China's increased economic profile in Africa as his text for spotlighting the limited scope of China's contributions and ambitions. Some interesting comments as well from several Chinese foreign policy academics.

Within China's top officialdom, a more open debate appears to be is emerging over the tensions between growth and stability. So discerns Eric Teo Chu Cheow, in an IHT op-ed, from a reading of several recent columns appearing in the Chinese press. A recent front page commentary in the People's Daily, on the authorities' commitment to enforcing the law in the interest of stability, took the position that "widening inequality is an inevitable phase of development." By contrast, the threats to social solidarity from a focus on profits by greedy hospitals was criticized by the Health Minister in a newspaper report. And the Culture Ministry is trying to "safeguard national cultural safety" by increasing controls over foreign television programming.

Of course, tensions between growth and stability have long been of concern at the highest levels of Chinese policymaking. Managing those tensions has been a major factor in the methods adopted to introduce reforms into the Chinese economy, especially the penchant for local "experiments" that are tested and, the thinking goes, "understood" before they are allowed to be rolled out on a wider scale or eventually become national policy. What is "new" is that the degree of inequality and threats to stability are becoming more visible and pronounced. Economic growth is no longer producing the sort of significant reductions in poverty levels and infant mortality rates that China enjoyed during its earlier reform periods. The crisis in the countryside over land and incomes -- which could be compared to England's enclosure movement of the 18th century -- and the strains in the cities from China's awesome pace of urbanization are threatening the "Latin Americanization" of China. Reports are increasingly making it into the Western media of local protests over corrupt officials taking land, or working conditions in factories, or degradation of environmental resources, especially water. Indeed, a top agriculture expert astonished (and bemused) many commentators when, in a recent interview, he praised peasants "for their democratic awareness as well as the willingness to fight for their rights." For a useful overview, see Sharif Shuja's The Limits of Chinese Economic Reform (August 2 2005 Jamestown Foundation China Brief).

Eric Teo Chu Cheow suggests that these issues are starting to shape a debate that will have major implications in two key areas: battles for political power inside China's leadership, and the broader trajectory of China's economic, social and political development in the coming years.

These signals point to the tension that currently underlies Chinese society. There is clearly a growing contradiction between the ideological tenets of the Communist Party and Deng Xiaoping's philosophy that "to grow rich is glorious." This ideology-versus-economics debate will ultimately determine the direction of China in the next decades, as social tensions increase in a society that is revolutionizing much faster than Western societies have in the past century.

This growing debate could accelerate in the lead-up to the 17th Party Congress in autumn 2007, at which President Hu and his team are expected to fully consolidate their power. Potential rivals of Hu could exploit this debate to challenge his power, especially if the Chinese economy falters or social stability deteriorates.

This socio-ideological debate is critical not only for China but also for the rest of Asia, where a new socioeconomic model of development may emerge to "complement" the continent's expected rise this century.

As the winds of change sweep through China, it is this philosophical and social debate - and not the yuan revaluation or the Unocal debacle - that will ultimately determine the direction of China's economy and society, as well as its "peaceful rise" and its continuous social revolution.

Asia and the world should pay more attention to this fundamental debate, which could also determine the outcome of Hu's political position at the 17th Party Congress and hence the ultimate stability of Asia's rising dragon.

[IHT article via A Glimpse of the World]

About a month ago, on the occasion of a lecture by Donald Rumsfeld at a confab of defense minister types in Singapore, I wondered idly how one says "chutzpah" in Chinese.

We've just received the answer courtesy of Justin Logan in, of all places, Astana, Kazakhstan where, at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we also learned how it's said in Russian and a few other languages of the region. As Justin notes, the participants included as honored guests nearby countries such as India, Pakistan and Iran.

Given the recent reemergence of security challenges in Afghanistan, and the apparent scrambling to beef up security -- shifting UK forces from Iraq, a few Aussie SAS to join special ops, etc. -- perhaps there's a bit of reassessment going on right now in Washington? Is there time still before the current Quadrennial Defense Review is due to rethink some of those lily pads ?

Donald Rumsfeld is off in Singapore, at a conference of defense types, lecturing the Chinese on their military modernization expenditures. "Whadda ya need all that military hardware for?" he asks. "Who's threatening you? Some of your neighbors might take it the wrong way!"

The Chinese must be biting their tongues not to say, "We were wondering the same about you, with your plans to spend billions on "military transformation" and your precious "lily pads" sprouting nearby." Especially since the Bush Administration apparently expects the Chinese central bank to provide the financing.

From The Scotsman:

A major row has broken out between China and Russia over the location for joint military exercises.

According to the Kommersant daily newspaper, the Russian military had suggested the Xinjiang autonomous region of China, because of the area’s problem with Uigur separatists and its proximity to Central Asia, a focus for the international fight against terrorism.

However, Beijing flatly rejected the proposal, and instead suggested the Zhejiang province near Taiwan.

Exercises in this area, the newspaper noted in its report yesterday, “would look too provocative and trigger a strong reaction not only in Taiwan, but in the US and Japan, which recently included the island in their zone of common strategic interests.”

“Beijing is trying to use Russia as an additional lever of pressure on the disobedient island,” it said.

Beijing is presumably also mindful of the history of Russian influence in Xinjiang prior to the assumption of full PRC control (the warlord Sheng Shicai who ruled the province prior to the arrival of KMT nationalists during the 1930s operated under heavy Soviet patronage, and the Soviets invested in the area during the period of the second East Turkestan Republic in the late 40s), which might explain why they would be leery about inviting the Russians into what remains a sensitive area.

There were articles on it inside the Times and the Post today so I assume most people have heard of it by now, but Rebiya Kadeer, a leading Uyghur businesswoman, civic leader, and prominent political prisoner for the past five years, has been released from China in advance of Condoleeza Rice's visit to the region. No one has missed the fact that the White House has returned the gesture by dropping a resolution against China's human rights practices in the UN Human Rights Commission, something groups like Human Rights Watch have decried as rewarding China's tendency to release a small handful of high-profile prisoners at moments of greater public scrutiny in order to gain rights concessions from the US. While undoubtedly true, her release still comes as a relief to her family, human rights advocates, and the Uyghur community.

The "crimes" for which Kadeer was imprisoned, as has been widely reported, consisted of mailing Xinjiang newspaper clippings to her husband Sidik Rouzi, an activist in the Uyghur expatriate community living in the United States and working for the US Radio Free Asia service. Dave reports from Under the Tenement Palm that the Han gossip mills in Xinjiang are suggesting much worse about her (without any supporting evidence to the effect, of course), and that no mention has been made of her release at all in Xinjiang itself, reinforcing the notion that this was intended primarily for foreign consumption rather than telegraphing any sort of shift in policies towards the Uyghurs (you can read more about those policies in my paper on the subject from last fall). He promises further updates as knowledge of Kadeer's release becomes more widespread in the community; upon her arrival in Chicago Kadeer was quoted speaking to Radio Free Asia sounding fairly upbeat for someone who's just suffered the past five years in a PRC prison:

"I can smile at my people. I can work for my people, and I can work for the entire Uyghur nation. I can shout out 'Greetings' to my people. For the rest of my life, I will create my own history.”

I'll be curious to know what kind of role Kadeer plays in Uyghur diaspora politics now that she's been freed, but for now it's worth some celebration.

In other Uyghur news, the US is having trouble finding somewhere willing to take captured Uyghur militants due to be released from Guantanamo, since Europe, looking to improve its ties to China, doesn't want to take them. Wu'er Kaixi, probably the second most famous individual Uyghur dissident after Ms. Kadeer (he was a student leader during the Tianenmen protests) takes the Europeans to task for their eagerness to conduct arms sales in the (unfortunately subscription-only) Asian Wall Street Journal.

As an antidote to my case of apparently chronic crankiness, I highly recommend this priceless piece, courtesy one of my favorite daily reads from Asia/Latin America, EastSouthWestNorth. (Yes, I know it's a rather peculiar combo, but it sorta makes sense and is an absolute must if you're interested in things Chinese.)

From the Taipei Times on the occasion of Bill Clinton's visit, Taiwan meets triangulation, or with friends like these...

I'm taking a break from hacking away at my Uyghur paper in order to cut it down to the six pages max requested by the New America Foundation for its application writing sample — a painful task if there ever was one, considering the original version runs in at 26 in full — in order to note the release of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. Many of its findings confirm the continuation of policies previously detailed in my paper; not too suprisingly, the situation is not good for Xinjiang's Uyghurs.   more »