Two for this week’s column

NEWS ANALYSIS: “A Bump in India-U.S. Rapport: Defining ‘Ally,’” by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 23 August 2007, p. A3.

ARTICLE: “As Japan and India Forge Economic Ties, a Counterweight to China Is Seen: The 2 leaders meet this week and will back a project linking New Delhi to the sea,” by Heather Timmons, New York Times, 21 August 2007, p. C3.

The most unimaginative thing we can do with China’s rise is pull out the old containment strategy, which, because it worked in the Cold War against the Sovs, is considered the tried-and-true answer for every great power we fear--rising or otherwise.

But it’s not a good answer for a rising power, because it only feeds their natural fears and promotes friction out of our own lack of self-confidence. It’s an especially bad choice when the rising power in question is simply following your long-time advice to emulate your economics.

Plus, trying the “separate lanes” notion of hedging against a military rise while embracing an economic one is just bad diplomacy. As I point out in this week’s column (and in others), you can’t expect a country to experience a dramatic ramp-up of its external economic connectivity and not naturally feel the impulse to build up its capacity to protect that connectivity.

Doing so gives us, the prospective mentor, a huge opportunity. We keep preaching the “stakeholder” route and nothing will get China there faster than trying to narrow that gap between capabilities and perceived exposure. Look at U.S. history in the latter decades of the 19th century and imagine how we would have perceived an external power’s attempt to hem us in just as our rising economic connectivity demanded a more global pol-mil presence. Would that not seem threatening? Or how about those regimes, whose government style differed greatly from our own, proposing that we needed to make our political systems look more like their own in order to gain their trust in our emergence? Imagine how most Americans would have viewed that demand.

We can expect a lot of frantic behavior locally, from India and Japan, for example, but we shouldn’t be in the business of encouraging that, but rather, we should be exploiting those fears to ramp up the regional security dialogue that further cements China’s stakeholder status (again!).

Truth is, for all the talk about moving beyond “realism” with this administration, its principals still display a lot of adherence to concepts of balance of power at a point in history when that thinking will do far more damage than good, primarily by replicating the errors of the past that so many “realists” keep advocating we study.

Comments

[Al Alborn]

I hope Ms. Rice and the rest of the folks at State (and Defense) read this week's column. You have my vote for Secretary of State (or the Department of Peace).