Cornering the dragon
By Conn Hallinan
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
When newly appointed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Porter Goss recently warned that China's modernization of its military posed a direct threat to the United States, was it standard budget time scare tactics, or did it signal the growing influence of hardliners in the administration of President Bush who want to "contain" China and reinstitute the Cold War in Asia?
A day later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld delivered a similar message to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rumsfeld claimed that within a decade the Chinese navy could surpass the US navy, and that China was "increasingly moving their navy further from shore".
The 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review will reportedly take a similarly alarmist view of China's military.
The CIA and Pentagon assessments offer nothing particularly new in their military analysis of China. However, both specifically excluded any mention of US-China cooperation around North Korea or last year's CIA analysis that growing economic ties between China and the US made military conflict less likely.
"It is a little surprising," James Steinberg, former national security advisor in the (former president) Bill Clinton administration told the Financial Times, "that it [the CIA assessment] didn't say anything about the enormous emphasis China places on a stable international environment and constructive relations with the US."
But not so surprising if the long battle between those in the Republican Party who favor engagement with China has begun to tip in favor of those who advocate confrontation and encirclement.
As Nation defense correspondent and Hampshire College professor Michael Klare pointed out in 2001, this division in the Republican Party goes back to the earliest days of the Cold War. For some two decades the hardliners, with their close ties to Chang Kai-shek on Taiwan, dominated US-China policy. But lured by the potential of China's markets, and anxious to widen the Sino-Soviet division, the engagement wing of the party seized the initiative with secretary of state Henry Kissinger's trip to China in 1971, establishing relations with Beijing.
The old confrontationist "China lobby" was hardly dead, however. Using the immense wealth of the Scalife, Olin and Carthage foundations under the umbrella of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the "lobby" recruited a group of well-placed, powerful political figures.
AEI members include neo-conservative icons like Lynne Cheney, Charles Murry, Michael Novak, Irving Kristol, Ben Wattenberg, Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen. The AEI is closely aligned with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the group that successfully lobbied for "regime change" in Iraq and argues that it is a strategic necessity for the US to control the world's oil supplies.
PNAC, the brainchild of the AEI's Kristol, includes among its members Vice President Dick Cheney, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former State Department officials Richard Armitage and John Bolton, and other leading administration figures like Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle and Zalmay Khalilzad, presently US Ambassador to Afghanistan.
The confrontationists' goals are much the same as they were in the opening years of the Cold War: ring China with military bases, support Taiwanese independence, and, in Kristol's words, "Work for the fall of the Communist Party oligarchy in China."
In short, corner the dragon.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GC02Ad08.html