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Why the American political mainstream has turned against China

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For the record, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did not say this:

The United States has named China, Iran, Libya, North Korea and 10 other nations that it wants the U.N. to hold accountable for alleged human rights violations. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council said Wednesday “too many governments repress dissent with impunity.”
[….] She said the U.S. opposes China’s “growing number of arrests and detentions of lawyers, activists, bloggers, artists, religious believers, and their families.”

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did say this, however:

“Taiwan inspires all victims of Beijing’s totalitarian oppression that they need not be faint of heart. It is for this very reason, this shining example of liberty, that the cynical old men who still rule in Beijing are so fearful of Taiwan. It is for this very reason that they strive to eliminate this beacon of democracy. And it is for this very reason that Congress, through the Taiwan Relations Act, must strive to help preserve a Taiwan that reflects the aspirations of its people.

Video of her full statement here. Taiwan’s government occasionally makes itself look silly. By contrast, Beijing’s government frequently makes itself look brutal, thuggish, and far too arrogant to concern itself with such trivialities as the consent of the governed. What legitimacy does the Chinese government have to rule, and on what basis can it be said that the Chinese people want that rule to endure? I can see that these are questions that some people would rather not ask or answer, but they’re dispositive to the destiny of China, and consequently, all of Asia.

Today, the grievances against Beijing are widespread, yet fragmentary and isolated:

Who supposes that a government with no legitimacy can suppress those grievances forever, or prevent the fateful day when they coalesce, probably with the assistance of new technologies that the government won’t be able to suppress?

Some cynics will say that the growing hostility of both political parties toward China means that it’s now election season. Other cynics will say that the absence of visible hostility until recently could only mean that it wasn’t election season, though the chairmanship of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has clearly has an outsized effect on our national debate about China. The greater truth is that both trends reflect the deep suspicion and hostility most Americans feel for the Chinese government, trends that Beijing’s recent behavior has amplified, and not just in the United States. My suspicion is that the 2008 Olympics and the Olympic torch relay in particular were a turning point in global perceptions, and there is some evidence that the games coincided with a downturn in global perceptions about China.

There are several ways, none of them very precise or useful, to define the perjorative “neoncon,” but if you define it to mean someone who believes that democratic, representative government is superior to all other forms of government and destined by some Hegelian process to supplant them, your definition includes the entire American political mainstream, and for that matter, probably includes most of the developed world.

12 Responses

  1. I think that, like with the (perhaps) necessary experiment with Sunshine Policy, a lot of people are waking up to the realization that what we had hoped would be a peaceful rise of China as it migrated from communism to capitalism has just meant we have empowered a more powerful thuggish foe.

    There was lots of evidence, but people were holding on to the positives and assuming the negatives would dissolve away. At some point, we have reached a critical mass of negatives such that they can no longer be ignored.

    That’s my take.

    And speaking of China, and opening North Korea: See the DPRK in a Chevrolet!

  2. @Joshua Stanton: “There are several ways, none of them very precise or useful, to define the perjorative “neoncon,” but if you define it to mean someone who believes that democratic, representative government is superior to all other forms of government and destined by some Hegelian process to supplant them, your definition includes the entire American political mainstream, and for that matter, probably includes most of the developed world.”

    No, it means someone who advocates the use of force to create democratic governments based on the controversal notion, that democratic states do not war with one another. What you said is just wide enough not to mean anything. Cute pundit trick!

    @Kushibo: People haven’t even started to evaluate the data, their assumptions are faulty, and China is to some degree relative to the constituency whining a distraction from the same kind of questions that Americans need to ask about their own government.

  3. I didn’t see any of those Taiwanese legislators (at the ‘silly’ link) exercising the fundamental human right to bear arms.

    I hope everybody will click on that ‘suspicion and hostility’ link. Americans mentioned Iran much more often than China as the greatest enemy. Axis-shmaxis lives! Readers of this blog will particularly enjoy ‘North Korea / Korea (nonspecific)’, not to mention ‘United States itself’ and ‘Mexico’. Heck, what happened to Cuba? Where’s Canada? We are so well informed.

    The ‘not just’ link reminds us what a terrible strategic error our war against North Vietnam was.

    Here’s how I define neoncom. 😉

  4. @Hume. Seems to me your novel new definition is wide enough to swallow Barack Obama and all the members of the Soft Reich that are bombing Libya now.

  5. @Joshua Stanton: You should consider the value of a Joshua-Democratic alliance opposing a broad construction of the War Powers Act. If for no other reason, why would the US want to do France’s gruntwork?

  6. Hume, Let me try to give a coherent answer to a somewhat incoherent question.

    First, I think the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and incredibly bad policy, and I wish that President Obama would come out and say that. He doesn’t, because he’s afraid of the masochistic left and, to a lesser extent, the isolationist right. Obama is learning how difficult it is to be an earnestly patriotic President of a country that many of his supporters despise. I commend him for being one in spite of that. Frankly, I think he’s handling Libya just about right. Much of the Republican criticism of his policy smacks of the same unpatriotic opportunism that many Democrats displayed when they first voted to invade Iraq, then demanded that we surrender it to Al Qaeda. Let’s take each criticism in turn:

    – War is bad, mmkay? Next.

    – The humanitarian interests don’t justify intervention. Benghazi was hours from eclipsing Srebrenica. Some would have accepted that casually, but the majority, thankfully, would have been outraged.

    – We have no compelling national interests at stake. I’m sure that isolationists thought that we had little interest in influencing the course of history in Iran in 1979, Somalia in 1990, or Afghanistan in 1993, either. I’m sure they assumed that whatever happened in those places would stay contained within their borders and coastlines. No one can say that about Qaddafi, who has already killed plenty of Americans. He has a history of nuclear proliferation, and he was once the source of most of the IRA’s Semtex, which was used to cause tremendous destruction in Britain. He’s clearly mentally unbalanced, which means that his current hiatus from terrorism and WMD production is far from permanent, and that’s especially true now that we’ve taken him on. He’s a sponsor of instability across sub-Saharan Africa. He runs a thoroughly awful, brutal, unrepresentative regime, and yes, if a more representative and pluralistic one takes its place, that will pay dividends in stability, peace, and security throughout the region and the entire world. It costs much more to secure those interests airport-by-airport, ship-by-ship, country-by-country than it does to give the rebels just enough support to push them past the tipping point.

    – We should let NATO handle it / We should not have relegated this to NATO. We’ve seen both criticisms. Now, given the growing opposition in Congress, maybe politics demands that we deliver the death-blow to Qaddafi sooner. But I see value in the U.S. keeping its level of involvement where it is right now. First, I think just about everyone agrees that NATO and U.S. ground forces should not be directly involved in combat in Libya. (My default position tends to be to support local ground forces with logistics, and if necessary, air support. Does this disqualify me as a neoconservative? I guess that depends on more vague definitions.). With that out of the way, I think it’s useful for the involvement to have a European face. It’s also useful for Europe to confront its own military impotence. Secretary Gates has usefully rubbed NATO’s nose in its own inability to put steel on target. If European nations feel more pressure to buy NATO a credible defense and stop sponging off U.S. taxpayers, so much the better.

    – We don’t know enough about who the rebels are, or what kind of government they will form. These critics often start by noting the very high percentage of Libyans who have become terrorists in Iraq or worked their way into the senior ranks of Al Qaeda. Certainly Qaddafi’s misrule has been fertile ground for radicalism. If Qaddafi reestablishes his supremacy and slaughters everyone who opposed him while America averts its eyes, you can be sure that in five years, Libya will become what Algeria was ten years ago, and perhaps worse. This would effectively compound the error of arch-“Realist” G.H.W. Bush in failing to support the uprising in Iraq in 1991. If Qaddafi can’t reestablish his supremacy, the opposition will fall under the say of whichever faction has the most power — whether that faction is dominated by Al Qaeda sympathizers, Brotherhood followers, or libertine democrats. So, doesn’t it make sense for us to build as much goodwill among the Libyan people as possible, and to ensure that the best-financed, best-funded, best-messaged faction is the one that’s least likely to represent a security threat to us?

    – If we target Qaddafy, why not ___, too? But of course, the cost-benefit analysis changes completely depending on how you fill in that blank. In those terms, Libya is lower-hanging fruit than Syria, and much lower-hanging fruit than North Korea. I happen to think we should be working nigh-and-day to destabilize all of those noxious regimes, but different tactics are appropriate in different situations. I can’t go so far as to say that direct U.S. intervention would be as productive in Syria — much less North Korea — as supporting the opposition in other ways (forceful diplomacy, sanctions, broadcasting, funding, training).

  7. Joshua, that was very well put. It articulates quite clearly much of what I’ve been thinking about the Libya campaign.

  8. I do agree with the President’s critics that he should have consulted with Congress and asked for a supportive joint resolution at the earliest opportunity. The fact that he didn’t is costing him support now, and makes it harder to hold his critics to their own votes. A lot of my anger at the Dems and Iraq was based on the fact that when the majority votes to commit to a war, we have an obligation to close ranks behind that decision and see it through. Here, there was no resolution. Even if only for that reason, there should have been.

  9. I think it is safe to say the US definitively did intervene in Iran in 1979….

    Also just because Gadaffi comes across as a clown doesn’t mean he is one. He ruled a fractious tribal nation for over 40 years. In a region that practices one bullet, one vote that means we should all have respect for his survival abilities. As for nuclear proliferation, Libya has a much better track record than the regimes Obama has gone out of his way to not interfere in. Remember he gave up his nuclear program whereas NK, Iran and Syria carried on with theirs.

    I also disagree Libya was lower lying fruit than Syria. The Syrian regime is far more centralised and there is less of a tribal mish-mash there. Also in terms of bang for buck for influencing the world and certainly the Middle East, Syria is simply a no brainer. I suspect that the real reason is that Libya had the bad luck to get more coverage earlier than Syria did and the US could do one but not both and once Libya was being attacked Syria was safe. Thats before you take into account that Hizbollah – who now run Lebanon – have a history with Libya as their predecessor’s founder was killed by Gadaffi and that Hizbollah is joined at the hip with Assad.