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President Obama recently announced the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq and plans to pull them out of Afghanistan. But the administration is sending Marines to a new U.S. military base—in Australia. Although the number of the Marines is small, perhaps a symbolic move, many interpret it as part of an American “pivot” from the Middle East to the Far East. And the Far East is a code word for China, increasingly viewed as a major threat to American interests.
All but the most hawkish hawks agree that the Chinese military will not pose a threat to the United States for decades. Still, some argue that Washington must scale up its military for that future—particularly increasing capabilities of the navy and air force—because such preparations take decades.
The United States often acts as if a confrontation with China is on the immediate horizon, as if attempts to make China a global partner have already failed. To be sure, Washington is still talking engagement and partnership but also is moving to contain and balance China, positioning its forces close to and within the Chinese arena. Recently the administration released a new defense strategy stating that in light of “the growth of China’s military power . . . the United States will continue to make the necessary investments to ensure that we maintain regional access and the ability to operate freely in keeping with our treaty obligations and with international law.” A Chinese spokesman responded by insisting that U.S. concerns “are totally baseless.”
Through a role reversal, we can see the way these U.S. moves might appear to China. Imagine China announces that it sees itself as the guarantor of security in the Americas, the way President Obama stated the United States sees itself as “a resident Pacific power” and “a guarantor of security in the Asia Pacific region.” In this scenario, China sends its Marines to Venezuela, paralleling those the United States is sending to Australia; provides Cuba with the same arms Washington sold to Taiwan; and positions aircraft carriers up and down the east and west coasts of the United States, the way the United States sent the USS George Washington to the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan.
Assume further that China begins conducting military exercises close to U.S. borders, as the United States did with the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam, and builds up the navies of Mexico and Nicaragua, as the United States is doing with the Philippines and Vietnam. And most provocatively, imagine China regularly sending its trawlers and military reconnaissance planes on patrol close to U.S. shorelines, just as Washington sends reconnaissance patrols near China, a practice the Pentagon says is “fairly routine.” (China responded to such close scrutiny by harassing American surveillance ships and warplanes, leading the United States to see China as belligerent.)
There are different assessments about the scope of Chinese military modernization and the country’s intentions; however, there is little doubt that China notes America’s six-fold budget advantage on defense. The United States maintains a stockpile of 5,113 nuclear active and inactive warheads. China has about 250. The United States has eleven aircraft carriers; China has one. Moreover, China’s military has little battle experience. And China’s history contains many chapters of occupation by foreign powers bringing great suffering. In short, China sees itself as weak and vulnerable.
At the same time, China is proud of its recent economic growth and sensitive to outside criticism and pressure. Hence military moves that command the attention of a much stronger, longer-established power reverberate strongly in Beijing. More of these moves are likely to push China to accelerate its military buildup and become less cooperative with the West. Indeed, they could quite readily lead to the kind of vicious cycle of which psychologists have long warned, in which the perceived threats of one nation lead the other to respond, leading the first to feel its fears have been validated, and so on—ultimately resulting in an arms race, if not in war.
This kind of escalation is always distressing, but particularly at a time when both the United States and China need to dedicate their economic resources to domestic pursuits: Washington must reduce its debt (and dependence on Chinese financing) and restore economic growth; much of China’s population is growing restless as their living standards lag behind affluent urban centers. Anybody who imagines an arms race that will bankrupt China—as the United States did with the USSR—should remember that for now China is growing strong, while the U.S. economy remains in the doldrums.
Amitai Etzioni served as a senior advisor to the Carter White House; taught at Columbia University, Harvard and The University of California at Berkeley; and is a university professor and professor of international relations at The George Washington University.
Comments
This is a highly disingenuous piece. I'm surprised the editors allowed it in. Let's look closely at it. First, there is no mention of anything negative about China. The reader never learns that China has territorial demands on its neighbors, including the entire South China Sea, the Senkaku Islands of Japan, Taiwan, and sundry other territories. By making this context disappear, Etzioni presents a false picture of events in Asia to his readers. Claims like this... <i>imagine China regularly sending its trawlers and military reconnaissance planes on patrol close to U.S. shorelines</i> ...make sense only because they are decontextualized. The reason China does not send trawlers and surveillance vessels in great numbers of the shores of the US is because they are busy in the South China Sea and in the waters around Japan and other nations whose territories Beijing claims. The US sends surveillance vessels to those areas because that's where the action is. China has the largest fleet of surveillance vessels in Asia -- does Etzioni think those ships sit benignly in its ports? Of particular interest to Etzioni should be China's claims to the Senkakus, invented in the late 1960s after Japanese scientists announced the possibility of oil there, and its claims to the South China Sea, again a postwar invention with no precedent in the history of any of China's many empires. Both of those claims infringe on the territories of democracies allied to the United States (Japan and Philippines), with which the US has formal defense treaties. These treaties provide a moral and legal basis for US defense activities in international waters off China. Recently China expanded its famous "Cow's Tongue" map of claims another 80 kms closer to Philippines. I'm curious as to why this expansion, our alliances, and our treaty commitments are ignored in Etzioni's presentation. Again, decontextualization of US activity. Note that Etzioni refers to US military exercises near China's borders, without ever mentioning why they exist. Again, decontextualization makes it appear the US is behaving provocatively for no reason at all. The US does regularly conduct military exercises in the area around China. For example, the US has conducted exercises in the Senkaku Islands. These are clearly aimed at China, because Beijing claims the islands and threatens war with Japan over them. But if Etzioni were to refer concretely to where and why the exercises were conducted, he would have to refer to the problems of China's territorial expansion. Again, observe how Etzioni's presentation decontextualizes the arms sales to Taiwan. Taiwan is NOT equivalent to Cuba. Taiwan is an independent state off China, which China claims, and which the US regards as a territory whose status is undetermined. It is also an allied democracy. We sell weapons to it so it can fend off the China threat (again, Etzioni does not discuss why we sell weapons...). Living here in Taiwan where hardly anyone wants to be another satrapy of Beijing, I find Etzioni's claims particularly galling, uninformed, and morally indefensible. So to flip Etzioni's rather bizarre paragraph on its head... imagine if the US claimed all the territory in the western hemisphere, because they were all "Americas". Imagine if it had annexed Canada, and was shooting Canadian resistors on a regular basis. Imagine if further it claimed Greenland from Denmark on the grounds that Inuit lived there, and all Inuit were "Americans" since the US had annexed Canada. Imagine further if the US claimed Cuba because US marines had occupied it a century ago, though no Cuban considered themselves American and none wanted to be annexed to the US. Imagine further if the US claimed the entire Atlantic Ocean and was threatening war with Europe and Africa over it, and had already evicted their owners from the Canaries and from the Falklands. That is the problem we face with China. To wit: the US did not cause China to invade Tibet, East Turkestan, the Paracels and the Spratlys. The US did not cause China to demand the annexation of Taiwan. It did not impel China to demand the annexation of Arunachal Pradesh of India. It did not cause China to put forth the "cow's tongue" map of the South China Sea with a baseless, belligerent claim to that entire body of water. It did not cause China to demand the Senkakus from Japan, nor did it enter the secret heart of Chinese right-wingers and cause them to regard Okinawa as stolen territory. It is of course a fine thing to criticize US policy in Asia. However, it is utterly disingenuous to pretend that the US is the cause of the problem. It's time for my fellow Lefties to grow up and acknowledge what is happening in Asia. Michael TurtonThe View from Taiwan
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