Coexisting with a Rising China?
By Ivan Eland*
April 11, 2005
The Bush administration is often guilty of running a reckless, overly militaristic foreign policy but deserves qualified
praise for its recent dealings with China. The Chinese have requested—and the United States has accepted—a regular
dialogue at senior levels to discuss security, political, and possibly economic issues. But the administration must go
farther than merely symbolic meetings in accepting China’s rise—it must translate that new-found respect into real world
actions.
Unlike the Bush administration’s threatening behavior to smaller countries, such as Iraq and Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan, the bark of the Bush administration’s policy toward the nuclear-armed China has always exceeded its bite.
President Bush took office and stridently labeled China a “strategic competitor,” but then a few months later
essentially apologized and paid ransom to get back a U.S. flight crew and spy plane, which was harassed and damaged by
Chinese fighters in international airspace. Subsequently, after 9/11, China and the United States have been cooperating
more closely.
Improved relations between the two powers are a very positive development for global security. Regular high-level
meetings are important for two reasons. First, such talks provide a forum for two nuclear-armed powers to nip tensions
or problems in the bud before they turn into crises. Second, and most important, such meetings signal that the status
quo superpower has respect for the rising East Asian power. Prior to 1914, Britain failed to acknowledge the new
prestige of a rising Germany, one contributing factor to the horrific and unnecessary First World War. China, with a
rapidly growing economy and a huge population, desperately wants to be recognized as a great power by the United States
and the world.
Unfortunately, in international relations, talk is fairly cheap and the Bush administration will have to follow such
meetings with real world changes in policy. Like most rising powers, China will want a regional sphere of influence to
enhance its security. Given China’s history of being carved up by imperial powers, it will probably be relentless in
pursuit of a wider security buffer. Any move toward attaining this goal, however, will be seen as a threat by the
informal, hyper-extended U.S. empire.
In fact, the United States is already running a covert neo-containment strategy to counter China’s rising power. The
U.S. government has augmented its network of military bases and alliances in Asia that surround China. The United States
has transferred more naval assets into the already powerful U.S. Pacific Fleet and, under the banner of fighting
terrorism, opened seemingly permanent bases in Central Asia to the west of China. The United States has also tightened
its military alliance with Japan, China’s chief East Asian rival, and improved relations with India and an increasingly
autocratic Russia—two nations that could also act as counterweights to a rising China. These developments simply amplify
the power of the many existing U.S. military facilities throughout the region, as well as U.S. formal alliances with
South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines, and informal alliances with Singapore and Taiwan.
The administration’s tightening of the informal alliance with Taiwan is one of the scariest aspects of U.S. foreign
policy—even more unnerving than its invasion of small, sovereign nations, such as Iraq. Although the Chinese have only
20 nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States, while Washington has thousands that could strike China, Taiwan
remains an emotional political issue for China. In fact, Taiwan is so important to China, that in a crisis in the Taiwan
Strait, no guarantee exists that China would back down in the face of U.S. nuclear superiority. While Taiwan should be
lauded for enhancing the freedom of its people, the U.S. government is foolish to risk the safety of American citizens
(and others around the world) in a potential nuclear exchange to protect Taiwanese democracy.
Although China is an autocratic state, it still has legitimate security interests. The United States would be smart to
show some empathy with those concerns. In recent years, as the United States has become alarmed at China’s expanded
military spending, the Chinese have also become alarmed at large increases in the U.S. defense budget and U.S. attacks
on the sovereign nations of Serbia and Iraq. Many Chinese see the threat of an expanding U.S. empire that aims at
encircling China and preventing its legitimate rise to great power status.
To lessen such perceptions and reduce the chance of conflict between the two nuclear-armed nations, the United States
should retract its forward military and alliance posture in Asia, including repudiating any implied commitment to defend
Taiwan. With large bodies of water as moats and the most formidable nuclear arsenal in the world, the United States
hardly needs a security perimeter that stretches across the entire Pacific Ocean to protect it from China. If the United
States continues to maintain an outdated Cold War-style empire, it is bound to come into needless conflict with other
powers, especially China.
Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward Germany, the United States should take a page from
another chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the
fledging United States to rise as a great power, knowing both countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic
Ocean that separated them. Taking advantage of that same kind separation by a major ocean, the United States could also
safely allow China to obtain respect as a great power, with a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond
obtaining a reasonable sphere of influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well
need to mount a challenge. However, at present, little evidence exists of Chinese intent for such expansion, which would
run counter to recent Chinese history. Therefore, a U.S. policy of coexistence, rather than neo-containment, might avoid
a future catastrophic war or even a nuclear conflagration.
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Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and author of the books The Empire Has No Clothes, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.