I want you to frickin' behave!Pair of NYT articles about "pliable ally" Turkey now playing "thorn" and China's PLA types being all blunt in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy and perceived meddling (always, the Taiwan thing!).
Naturally, the NYT frets: these are signs of America's diminished power.
Boo hoo! say I. Integrating rising great powers into a stable system ain't for sissies or whiners or the self-doubting types.
The fear and the reality:
Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”
From Turkey’s perspective, however, it is simply finding its footing in its own backyard, a troubled region that has been in turmoil for years, in part as a result of American policy making. Turkey has also been frustrated in its longstanding desire to join the European Union.
“The Americans, no matter what they say, cannot get used to a new world where regional powers want to have a say in regional and global politics,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “This is our neighborhood, and we don’t want trouble. The Americans create havoc, and we are left holding the bag.”
Turkey’s rise as a regional power may seem sudden, but it has been evolving for years, since the end of the cold war, when the world was a simple alignment of black and white and Turkey, a Muslim democracy founded in 1923, was a junior partner in the American camp.
Twenty years later, the map has been redrawn.
Washington does want everybody in their lane all right; it's a very old habit born of a superpower rivalry. And now, there are so many types in DC who are desperate to recast China's rise in the same manner. So when China doesn't start being more American right quick, we get nervous. And those fears expand that much more when previous strategic employees like Turkey start acting like they think they're actual partners--as in people who balance each other's interests instead of just obeying!
Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu seems to have a head on his shoulders:
“Economic interdependence is the best way to achieve peace,” he said at his home in Ankara last weekend. “In the 1990s we had severe tension all around us, and Turkey paid a huge bill because of that. Now we want to establish a peaceful order around us.”
Nations sharing economic interdependencies do get meddlesome in their neighbors's affairs. For a long time, the biggest dependencies for most nations were bilateral ones with the US or a former colonial power. Nowadays, these interlocking relationships are all over the place, so rising powers are taking all sort of cues from all sorts of players, meaning America's voice, while awfully important, no longer drowns out everybody else's.
And so we better get used to being lectured to by powers who expect to do their sharing of lecturing--in addition to the usual receiving of lectures from us.
As for Chinese flag officers getting more forceful in public and closed-door sessions with US officials, understand two things (and no, I don't direct the following rant particularly at the general who made the forceful comments in front of Gates at the recent Asian security gathering, because his comments struck me as pretty routine in their grievance airing):
First, way too many of these guys are political and economic retrogrades, like they are most everywhere else on the planet (yes, there's been huge, beyond-evolutionary improvement in our ranks these past two decades but I do remember the Cold War dinosaurs well). Yes, they know their own business well enough, but almost to a man, these guys have no normal-world experience outside a life lived exclusively in the military. Put a mike in front of them and they will make some of the stupidest economic and political statements you've ever heard. We've gotten used to a whole new generation of flag officers in the West who are so smooth in these circumstances that they sound like PR machines (minus any ideological DNA), but these skills don't yet exist in places like China, where they will utter the most foolishly bold comments with little sense as to how they are perceived (or what bullshit they're spouting). And even when they speak in more military terms, their lack of awareness of any connectivity between their dreams of warfare and that big old world of economics out there is just stunning. They will brag on all sorts of capabilities with almost no understanding of the real-world limits of those capabilities. They're blowhards--pure and simple.
And yeah, our experts and our media tend to lap it up big-time: "Oh my God! Did that Chinese general just say/write that!"). Why? The usual self-serving reasons.
Second, also understand that Chinese general have almost no experience in international or bilateral venues. Most of these guys have been kept under wraps for their entire careers. When I've spoken at military conferences in recent years, it's not unusual to find out that such-and-such an event was only the first or second time the PLA has ever participated, so the experience base just isn't there. These guys therefore tend to be a strange combo of loose cannons and overly-scripted. The more we interact with them and the more they interact with the world, this experience gap will fade, and I've met plenty of mid-level PLA officers (my age) who impress the hell out of me for their superbly sophisticated minds and better skills at expressing themselves, so we won't be waiting for long.
Per the embedded link above to the WAPO story about a Chinese navy admiral voicing the opinion that all that's good in US-Chinese relations is due to them and all that's bad is due to America, I have no doubt that this sort of blunt one-sided is truly thrilling for Chinese officials to witness. They do feel like they're doing all they can and they do harbor significant--and hardly irrational--fears that America will inevitable make them its primary enemy--just out of habit. We will witness plenty such, getting-it-off-their-chest bravado in coming years, and we should take it stride--just like the Brits did with us a century ago. The Chinese have--quite frankly--no idea what they're getting themselves into with assuming more of a global leadership role. So let their arrogance lead them into situations that their wisdom will eventually rescue them from. You can't force socialization on this scale; the Chinese will be who they imagine themselves to be for as long as possible, refusing to change--again, just like we acted for a very long time (arguably, the Chinese will have no such luxury in this rapidly evolving globalization era).
Primary point of this admittedly snotty rant: don't get wrapped around the hype. Countries, just like people, grow into roles. Whether they're "ancient civilizations" or not, their current rise puts them in unfamiliar territory, and no, there ain't no ancient Chinese secrets for what lies ahead. Everybody is making it up as they go along, because a global landscape with multiple rising, prosperous, and strangely peaceful great powers is completely unprecedented.
But it was bought with your US tax dollars, so show some pride and act--as they say in the NFL--like you've been in the great-powers' endzone before. As always: play up to potential and not down to the competition, but respect the competition.