Tag: China
Who is right?
When it comes to vital American interests, little trumps stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Bruce Riedel may be right that we need to begin to imagine how we can live with the prospect, but most of those who worry about these issues would want to maximize at least the non-military effort to prevent it from happening. Ken Pollack and Ray Takeyh think we need first to “double down.” Stephen Walt says that would be counterproductive. Instead we should ease up and try to get an agreement that Iran will not weaponize its nuclear technology. Who is right?
Walt starts from the obvious: pressuring the Iranians hasn’t worked. Regime survival is Tehran’s primary concern. Increasing the pressure implicitly or explicitly threatens the regime, which sees nuclear weapons as a guarantee of regime survival. Pressure will only solidify Tehran’s determination to get them. So why would redoubling work?
Pollack and Takeyh agree that regime survival is Tehran’s primary concern. They propose that we threaten it. Doing so, they argue, will require that we support the Green Movement–Iran’s so far failed popular uprising–as well as ethnic opponents of the regime, try to block (mostly Chinese) investment in the energy sector, target the Revolutionary Guards in ways they claim we have been reluctant to do, and increase criticism of Iran’s human rights record.
I’ll be accused of straddling, or maybe of mixing and matching, but it seems to me the sweet spot lies somewhere in between these stark perspectives. Yes, the United States should talk with the Green Movement and the ethnic groups in Iran and provide what support they think will be productive, so long as they remain nonviolent (violence, especially from the Baloch and Kurds, gives the regime the excuse it needs to crack down). It should certainly be focusing global attention on Iranian human rights abuses.
But it is unlikely that the Chinese are going to pass on energy investment in Iran unless there is a broad international agreement (read Security Council resolution) that asks them to do so, and we’ve got to be cautious about the ways and means used to support the Greens and other oppositions. American support, especially in covert form, can do more to harm them than to help.
Walt may be correct in his analysis of the failure of current policy. But it does not follow that if we ease up now the Iranians will be interested in accommodating our interest in seeing them stop their nuclear program short of weaponization. Why wouldn’t they just plow ahead if there is no clear cost associated with doing so? If making the benefits of stopping clear would help, why wouldn’t it also help to make the costs of plowing ahead clear?
Walt concludes his piece with his “real concern”:
…by falsely portraying the United States as having made numerous generous offers, by dismissing Iran’s security concerns as unfounded reflections of innate suspiciousness or radical ideology, and by prescribing a course of action that hasn’t worked in the past and is likely to fail now, Pollack and Takeyh may be setting the stage for a future article where they admit that “doubling down” didn’t work, and then tell us — with great reluctance, of course — that we have no choice but to go to war again.
That is a separate issue, perhaps the most important of war and peace question of this decade.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Crouching tiger, hidden dragon
Now that the UN Security Council has at least condemned the regime violence in Syria, everybody is looking for President Obama to amp up calls for Bashar al Assad to step aside. The Administration, I am assured, knows perfectly well that an orderly transition to a less autocratic regime in Damascus would be a big improvement from the U.S. perspective.
But what if the President says Bashar has to go, and then he doesn’t? The U.S. hasn’t got lots of leverage, as it did over an Egyptian army that was heavily dependent on U.S. money, training and equipment. The most vulnerable sector in Syria is energy, where European rather than American companies are the critical players. Posing the President as a crouching tiger is better than exposing him as a paper tiger, especially after the week he has just gotten himself through.
And what if the transition is not orderly, but breaks down into sectarian and ethnic violence, with the risk of overflow into Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey? That could be a big mess, one we would regret for many years into the future.
The problem with this argument is that it suggests a quicker transition would be far better for the U.S. than one that drags on . Those who know Syria well are saying Aleppo and Damascus will turn against Bashar sooner rather than later. Sami Moubayed says unemployment, lack of moderate community leaders willing to calm the situation, and the influx of people from all over Syria into the two largest Syrian cities will ensure that the revolution eventually spreads there. In the meanwhile, the demonstrators are straining the security forces and beginning to bend them at the edges.
While Juan Cole is correctly disappointed in the wording and lack of teeth in the UN Security Council statement, I’m more philosophical about it. I see it as a necessary step along the way to ratcheting up pressure on Bashar. Its significance is that it happened at all, not the specific wording.
I wish we could wave a magic wand and make the Syrian army turn into pussycats, but we can’t. Only the demonstrators can make that trick work, by maintaining their nonviolent discipline and convincing some of the soldiers and police that their interests will be better served if they embrace the revolution rather than fight it.
While not often mentioned, it is important to keep an eye on the Chinese, who could either save the Syrian regime with cash for oil contracts or sink it by permitting more action in the Security Council and lining up with the Americans and Europeans. Syria doesn’t have enough oil to be of great interest to the Chinese, and a lot more of it is likely to flow once Bashar is gone. The hidden dragon may well be the deciding factor against the regime.
Meanwhile, the Syrian army has punched into the center of Hama, killing a few dozen more of its own citizens and making an orderly transition less likely. Bashar seems to have decided that he prefers to resist the inevitable, like Gaddafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen, than give in like Mubarak in Egypt or Ben Ali in Tunisia. Yesterday’s scenes of Mubarak caged in a Cairo courtroom will not have encouraged him to rethink.
PS: AJ English continues to do a good job, with a lot of help from courageous friends at Shaam:
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Endgame
Suddenly, it’s all about endgame in AfPak. The death of Osama bin Laden has precipitated a small avalanche of writing about how to get out. James Traub writes about leaving with honor. Karl Inderfurth and Chinmaya Gharekhan suggest a regional political agreement would help the U.S. extract itself. Shuja Nawaz foresees the possibility of U.S.-Pakistani cooperation against the Haqqani group, provided Islamabad and Kabul can reach a political accommodation and the sorry state of relations between Washington and Islamabad does not derail things.
A lot of this strikes me as wishful thinking. The U.S. can of course withdraw from Afghanistan as planned by the end of 2014. The question is, what will it leave behind? Can we expect the Afghan government to maintain itself? Will the Taliban take over large portions of its territory? Will they return to hosting al Qaeda? Will U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan leave Pakistan exposed to infiltration and possible takeover by extremists with a safe haven in Afghanistan? What kind of relationship will we maintain with both Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Dick Holbrooke’s heirs (literal and figurative) are portraying him as saying that it is Pakistan that really counts, not Afghanistan. Those who worry about nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation have long felt that way.
Nothing about the Pakistani state gives me confidence in its ability to meet the challenges it will face once the U.S. is out of Afghanistan. Yesterday’s report in the Wall Street Journal about the Pakistani military’s dodgy billing for its role in the war on terror suggests that we are being robbed by the people who are supposed to be helping protect us, from threats they themselves have nurtured. It doesn’t get much worse than $70 million for air defense radar to protect against an enemy that doesn’t have air assets (and what was the radar looking at during the raid on Abbottabad?). The civilian side of the Pakistani state is widely believed to be just as mendacious.
It is also hard to be optimistic about the Afghan state. While the American military sees signs of tangible progress, especially in the south, efforts to improve governance lag at all levels while the country’s main bank has fallen victim to fraud. Anthony Cordesman argues that the metrics available are not even suitable to measuring progress on “hold” and “build.”
So what do we do? The Administration argues for continuing engagement. In Afghanistan, that is a given until the end of 2014. Savvy experts like Dennis Kux see Pakistan and the U.S. as condemned to a perpetual series of strategic disconnects, but nevertheless bound together by inevitable mutual interests. In this view, our interest is making sure Pakistan is not taken over by extremists. Theirs is in extracting as much military and civilian assistance as possible. The U.S. Congress will want to subject both to some real scrutiny in this difficult budget year, but my guess is that they won’t want to risk shutting it off.
The trouble is that the bilateral approach gives Pakistan incentive to keep the extremist threat alive. It would seem to me preferable to recast Pakistan not as a bilateral problem but rather as a regional one. In this perspective, issues like the Pakistan/Afghanistan border (the Durand line), Kashmir, Pakistan/India relations more generally and the Pakistan/China relationship become more important. The U.S. is not a main protagonist on many of these issues, but rather plays a supportive role. This is where the Century Foundation (Pickering/Brahimi) report on negotiating peace got it right: any settlement in Afghanistan will require a regional approach.
The same is true for Pakistan. Inderfurth and Gharekhan are right. Pakistan faces what it regards as “existential” threats, mainly from India. It is those fears that drive its nuclear policy as well as its posture on Afghanistan. The United States cannot allay those fears, but it can help to nudge Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan into a regional effort to resolve some of the existential threats and shift all concerned in the direction of exploiting their economic opportunities, which have serious potential to incentivate resolution of the political and security issues and encourage the building of stronger states in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
It takes a region
The Pickering/Brahimi report on negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan is on less than firm ground in claiming that its publication happens to coincide with the perfect moment to launch negotiations to end the insurgency in Afghanistan (see my previous post), but its discussion of the regional interests in Afghanistan is better framed. They do not limit themselves to Pakistan, as so many reports seem inclined to do, but look farther to Iran, India, China and Russia.
Still, they leave me with a lot of question marks. They don’t deal with Pakistan’s ISI, which seems rather more wedded to the Taliban than the rest of the Pakistani government. In fact, they treat “Pakistan” as a unified actor, which is certainly not the way it has acted in the past, and I don’t know many analysts who expect it to act that way in the future.
They cite Iran’s interests in controlling drugs, protecting Shia, preventing the Taliban from returning to power and maintaining influence in Herat. But they don’t deal with Tehran’s apparent willingness to provide some military support to Taliban insurgents inside Afghanistan.
The report counts China as a possible influence in the right direction on Pakistan. Beijing might certainly wish it so, as Afghanistan’s minerals are appetizingly close by. But I wonder whether the Pakistan that would have to be influenced is all that interested in what the Chinese have to say on Afghanistan. Again there is that unified actor question.
The treatment of “Central Asian states,” (aka the Stans, I think) and Russia is rather cursory, with a reference to their interests in a stable Afghanistan, their worries about U.S. presence and the possibility of jihadis breaching their borders. It seems to me that they have been surprisingly non-meddling, even helpful. How do we account for that, and is there something more they can do?
The discussion of how the proposed international “facilitator” would deal with the various layers of neighborly and other international interest is well done. The idea would be a series of bilateral consultations, to precede any multilateral meeting (one coming up in Istanbul).
The suggestion that international peacekeepers may be needed post-settlement I find mind-stretching. It’s a bit difficult to imagine Afghanistan safe for peacekeepers, Muslim or not, rather than peace enforcers. But of course that is just the point: if there is a broad political settlement, most of the insurgency would presumably go away.
All of this may be wishful thinking. But it is more realistic wishful thinking–maybe even “visionary” thinking–than believing we are going to be able to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014 without a negotiated political settlement.
I have feared the terms of that settlement inside Afghanistan for human rights, in particular for women. I’ve too often sat in State Department meetings where assistant secretaries promised not to sell out human rights, only to discover a week later that is precisely what was done. And what real leverage do we have over how women are treated in a Helmand governed by Taliban? The best of intentions somehow go astray when faced with the need for a power-sharing agreement with people who have been violating human rights for years, if not decades. That conflict of interests and values, again.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Hu is the better alternative
Michael J. Green in the National Interest has an excellent piece on communique diplomacy with China, but it leaves open the difficult question of the longer-term relationship between Washington and Beijing. While this question is being asked at Brookings and elsewhere, answers seem to be lacking. Clean energy technologies are far too weak a reed to support a long-term U.S./China relationship. While some argue that what is needed is to implement what has already been agreed, that too seems a formula less robust than what is needed.
The basic problem lies in diverging values. This is not just a matter of human rights, but it is also a matter of human rights. First ducking the question and then sounding forthcoming yesterday, President Hu Jintao said China “recognizes and also respects the universality of human rights” and acknowledged that “a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights.” This answer that will cause Hu more trouble in Beijing than in Washington. But expert analysts are having a hard time interpreting what it means, and even whether it is boiler plate or something new. And for the Chinese, human rights include economic and social rights, not just political ones. Where we hear “freedom of expression” they may mean “right to health.”
My own inclination, but I admit it is not a particularly well-informed one, is to think that yesterday’s visit did open some possibilities for improved longer-term relations with China, if only because the two leaders seemed on the same wavelength and free to express their agreements and disagreements clearly and comfortably. Above all, they seemed to agree that the kinds of misunderstandings that plagued the bilateral relationship in 2010 should not be repeated in 2011 and beyond. Tone matters in diplomacy, especially with the Chinese, and yesterday’s tones were harmonious (an important value in Beijing).
The tone of mutual respect hides however a fundamental asymetry. Hu Jintao is the leader of a one-party system. President Obama is not everyone’s favorite in the U.S.–I am getting a lot of Tea Party tweets these days about defeating him at the next elections–but precisely because he won office in a tough political competition he has a kind of democratic legitimacy that Hu Jintao lacks. In fact, democracy of the sort we would recognize as such is still a great threat in China, because it calls into question the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power.
What difference does this make? A great deal, it seems to me. The Chinese are feeling their cheerios: the past decade of rapid economic growth, financial success and infrastructure modernization has given even the man in the Shanghai street the sense that nothing can stop an inevitable rise, one in which competition and potentially conflict with the U.S. is regarded as likely. Chinese nationalism is a serious and rising threat to good relations with the U.S., since it sees the U.S. as hegemonic, or at least as trying to hem in China’s growing power.
There is the irony: Hu Jintao, weak though he is in the panoply of Chinese leaders and lacking though he may be in real democratic legitimacy, is a bulwark (or at least a facade) of sorts against vigorous expressions of Chinese nationalism, which seem to be all the rage these days, especially in the military. So the Americans are once again caught in a situation where the democratic alternative, more nationalistic than the Hu Jintao we witnessed yesterday, would be a lot more difficult to deal with than the less democratic reality.
But China’s one-party system will not persist forever. There will be enormous risk to U.S. interests once that system starts to transition to something more obliged to reflect Chinese nationalism. The kind of cautious, low-key and mutually sensitive approach on display between the two presidents yesterday will not satisfy human rights hawks in the U.S. or Chinese nationalists, but it certainly sets a reasonable tone for the difficult challenges ahead.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Why won’t China rein in North Korea?
That’s the question on my mind, even if much of what I read addresses the less interesting question of why we know better and the Chinese are making a mistake. The explanations for Beijing’s behavior are many and varied. From people who live closer than we do:
1. The South Asia Analysis Group (Subhash Kapila) suggests Pyonyang’s behavior “arises from a calibrated strategy operated in tandem with China’s increasing aggressiveness in East Asia”:
- China exploits North Korea as a strategic proxy against the U.S.;
- Washington responds timidly for fear of alienating China, hoping it may still emerge as a partner, even an ally;
- China is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
2. An Australian offers less dramatic explanations:
- Pyonyang has Beijing in a bind: “North Korea may be a bad friend, but it would be a worse enemy”;
- Beijing doesn’t want the international community to get into the habit of asking it to rein in pariahs;
- China thinks its coaxing will work better in the long term than a more rigorous approach.
Beijing’s main concern is generally thought to be stability. But why don’t they see North Korean behavior as threatening to stability? Are they happy to see the Americans, Japanese and South Koreans discomforted? Are they thinking that recent events will serve them well by hindering any moves towards reunification?
PS: As luck would have it, Victor Cha Sunday morning (I posted on Saturday) has
But because they are the only ones helping the North, China’s leaders are afraid that such a move [cutting off oil supplies to North Korea] would collapse the regime and send millions of starving refugees flooding over its border. The Chinese have no easy way of determining how much pressure they should use, so they remain paralyzed, making ineffectual gestures
Paralysis may not last forever.
PPS: Ed Joseph points out that this question was discussed Sunday on Fareed Zakharia’s GPS: “China experts provided insights on just that question. Most intriguing theory: China fears a precedent and a non-Communist, unified Korea on its border, according to the expert.” You can watch the discussion, which starts just before minute 33, here.
RSS - Posts
