What the Bush-Obama China Memos Reveal
Newly declassified documents contain important lessons
for U.S. China policy.
By Michael J. Green, the CEO of the United States
Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and Paul Haenle, the director of
Carnegie China.
April 29, 2023
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/29/us-china-policy-bush-obama-biden-hand-off-transition-memo/
As U.S.-China relations transition from an era of
engagement to one of strategic competition, some in the Biden and former Trump
administrations have claimed to be abandoning four decades of naive American
assumptions about Beijing. Past U.S. policy, they say, was based on a futile
view that engagement would lead to a democratic and cooperative China. This,
however, is not only a misreading of past U.S. policies but also dangerous analytical
ground upon which to build a new national security strategy.
The fact is that no administration since that of
Richard Nixon has made U.S. security dependent on Chinese democratization.
Every administration has combined engagement with strategies to counterbalance
China through alliances, trade agreements, and U.S. military power. Throwing
out all previous U.S. approaches to China would mean throwing out some of the
most important tools the current administration relies on to compete with
China. And the Biden administration will not get its China strategy right until
it is clear about what has worked in the past.
Perhaps the most valuable peek inside what previous
U.S. administrations really thought is the newly declassified set of transition
memoranda prepared by the outgoing George W. Bush administration for the
incoming Obama administration in late 2008 and early 2009. Recently
declassified by former President Bush and edited by former National Security
Advisor Stephen Hadley, the collected analysis of the world as seen by the Bush
National Security Council is available to the public from the Brookings
Institution Press in Hand-Off:
The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama. (Note: We
both served in the National Security Council during the Bush administration and
co-wrote one of the chapters in the book.)
The transition memoranda on China and Asia knock down
the assertion that Bush had a naive set of assumptions about China. Even at a
time when China was materially weaker than the United States or even Japan, the
White House was actively preparing the toolkit that might be needed should
China turn in a more aggressive direction. The administration had already seen
this possibility with the crisis caused by a Chinese Air Force collision with
an EP-3 U.S. surveillance aircraft within the first months of the new Bush team’s
arrival. To be sure, there was less urgency to the China challenge than today.
In the early 2000s, China still had a smaller economy and navy than Japan,
whereas today, the Chinese economy and military power have eclipsed those of
Japan and are challenging the United States. Nor were Chinese leaders Jiang
Zemin or Hu Jintao anywhere near as aggressive as current leader Xi Jinping.
But the question of how China would use its growing
power was still open to shaping, and not just because China had less material
power at the time. Chinese leaders Jiang and Hu did not rebuff Bush’s
entreaties on human rights, religious freedom, or trade the way Xi and his
officials do today. When Washington urged the release of political dissidents
at summits in the early 2000s, Beijing often complied. When Bush spoke to Jiang
or Hu about religious freedom, they listened and engaged, even if they did not
agree. When the United States called for improvements in enforcing intellectual
property rights or transparency about the SARS epidemic, there were small but
positive changes. And Bush pulled no punches: He told Jiang and Hu that the
United States would pursue a comprehensive, constructive, and candid dialogue,
accompanied by regular meetings with the Dalai Lama, engagement with Chinese
political dissidents, and frequent public references to the priority the United
States gave to its democratic allies and its commitments under the Taiwan
Relations Act. Chinese leaders would have preferred the more accommodating
“strategic partnership” they had pursued with the Clinton administration, but
that was no longer on offer.
Instead, the strategic partnerships that mattered to
Bush administration were the same ones that form the basis of the Biden
administration’s approach to China today. Bush elevated Japan’s standing in
U.S. diplomacy to a level it had not enjoyed since the Reagan presidency, with
Bush counting Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi among his closest international
confidants and friends. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, joining
Australia, India, Japan, and the United States was launched in response to the
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. And the Bush administration went through the
painstaking bureaucratic work of clearing obstacles—mainly having to do with
nuclear nonproliferation—to a new strategic partnership with India. All of
these were part of what Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “a
balance of power that favors freedom.” While the engagement side of U.S. policy
is in disrepute today, Bush-era investments in alliances and new strategic
partnerships like India have paid off for the Biden administration as it faces
a more menacing China.
Economic statecraft backed the geopolitics. Progress
with Beijing on China’s predatory trade practices was modest, and the Bush
administration and its allies knew that real progress would require the full
leverage of the most powerful economies in the world. It was against this
backdrop that the administration negotiated bilateral trade agreements with
Australia, Singapore, and South Korea and began negotiations on what became the
Trans-Pacific Partnership and discussions on the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership. These agreements combined would have brought the weight
of almost two-thirds of the world economy to the table in demanding reciprocal
agreements from China. Significant actors within the Chinese economy were ready
to use that pressure to move away from an economic model dominated by
state-owned enterprise to create dynamism that would benefit Chinese consumers
and the private sector at home and abroad based on rules shaped by the United
States and its major allies.
That obviously did not happen. One reason was the
global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, which Beijing wrongly
interpreted as proof that the West was declining and the East is rising, as
China’s propagandists now put it. Perhaps more significant was the emergence of
Xi, whose own penchant for autocratic rule, ideological struggle, and Chinese
coercive dominance of the region signaled a shift that was not predicted even
by China’s own leading experts, many of whom are now living in fear of his
rule. The global financial crisis also broke the political formula in
Washington that had allowed successful trade agreements to underpin U.S. grand
strategy. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the TPP in 2017,
and his successor, President Joe Biden, has made it clear he will never return.
The transition memos in Hand-Off did not
predict any of these developments within China—nobody did—but the memos did lay
out a strategic framework for minimizing risk and maximizing the opportunities
for peace and stability in what we now call the Indo-Pacific. To say this was
naive would be to argue for a strategy of strangling China at a time in its
development when engagement still had some traction and when, more importantly,
U.S. allies and the American public, both of whom mainly saw China as a
partner, would not have supported containment and decoupling.
What are the lessons from Hand-Off going
forward?
The most important lesson is one the Biden
administration already has right: Invest in allies and partners to maintain
that “balance of power that favors freedom.” Biden has elevated the Quad
meetings to a regular summit, and he graciously credited Bush for starting the
Quad when the leaders first assembled in 2022. The Biden administration has
also launched one of the most ambitious security partnerships of the past few
decades with the Australia-United Kingdom-United States agreement (AUKUS) to
help Australia deploy and build nuclear-powered submarines. The pact also aims
to develop advanced technological capabilities by pooling
resources and integrating supply chains for defense-related science,
industry, and supply chains.
Second, the administration needs to reconstruct some
form of the economic statecraft that underpinned U.S. strategies toward China
in the past. Far from helping China compete, agreements like TPP were designed
to force Beijing to play by the rules or lose hundreds of billions of dollars
in trade as tariffs and market barriers among the rule-abiding economies went
down. Now, sadly, it is the United States that is outside the TPP and suffering
from lost access, while Beijing aggressively lobbies the signatories to let the
Chinese economy into the agreement. The Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific
Economic Framework is something of a placeholder to show Washington cares, but
it lacks market access or binding rules that would influence business behavior
and get Beijing’s attention. Multilateral organizations like the World Trade
Organization also matter in this context. The Bush administration probably
could have done more within the WTO to address China’s cheating on its
commitments, but the Trump and Biden administrations have gone too far in
allowing the dispute resolution mechanism of the WTO to wither at a time when
U.S. allies still see it as an important tool to hold China to account.
Third, the Biden administration has left the world
wondering how this all ends with China. French President Emmanuel Macron’s
craven comments on Taiwan after his visit to Beijing were short-sighted and
very damaging to regional security. More responsible U.S. allies like Japan and
Australia are signing on to deeper military and intelligence cooperation with
the United States. But none of them have any clarity about Washington’s
longer-term vision for the relationship with China. Xi’s constant attacks on
the United States, democracy, and U.S. allies make it difficult to imagine a
happy place in U.S.-China relations. But other than blunting Chinese aggression
and coercion, what is this alignment between allies for? What kind of
relationship or strategic equilibrium with China is the United States aiming to
achieve? The Bush administration could answer that question to an extent that
helped rally allies. Biden would do well to engage with U.S. allies on the
proper answer in the current geopolitical environment.
Fourth, resources matter. Some blame the Global War on
Terror for convincing the Bush administration it had to get along with China.
The authors never heard those arguments in our time in the White House, nor is
that alleged tradeoff even hinted at in the declassified memos in Hand-Off.
The fundamentals of the Bush administration’s China strategy did not change
because of 9/11. What did change was the availability of resources. Even after
the Obama administration pledged to pivot to Asia in 2011, resources did not
flow into military and diplomatic efforts the way they should have. Continuing
struggles in the Middle East, federal budget sequestration, and now Russia’s
war on Ukraine have all slowed the long anticipated rebalance of forces to deal
with China. Biden and the U.S. Congress need to resource their strategy of
competition, and finally make the pivot from the Bush administration’s war on
terror real.
CGSRI Email: cgsri@vt.edu
Global China Network: global-china-g@vt.edu
https://twitter.com/globalchina2022
• Freedom under law is like the air we breathe.
-Eisenhower
• The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single
step. Lao Tzu
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Global China" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to global-china-g+unsubscribe@vt.edu.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/vt.edu/d/msgid/global-china-g/531BDFF0-CD32-4BBD-AC53-20FEE763A501%40vt.edu.
没有评论:
发表评论