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Rumsfeld strikes a positive note

Demystification, not containment. This was the central theme of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's comments regarding China at this year's Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, the Asia-Pacific region's largest unofficial gathering of defense officials and security specialists.

Unlike his comments at the annual International Institute for Strategic Studies gathering last year, when comments on China (and the war on terrorism) dominated his formal remarks, only one short paragraph in a four-page prepared text referenced the People's Republic of China. Rumsfeld first praised China's "great potential" and its "strong economic growth" and "industrious workforce." "But," he cautioned, "there are aspects of China's actions that can complicate their [sic] relationships with other nations. The lack of transparency with respect to their military investments understandably causes concerns for some of its neighbors."

That was it. Beyond this, Rumsfeld largely stressed the positive: "In the past five years, in terms of defense and security cooperation, the United States has done more things, with more nations, in more constructive ways, than at any other time in our history."

Reinforcing the central theme of the Bush administration's 2006 National Security Strategy, Rumsfeld stressed the importance of promoting and preserving freedom and democracy, noting "paradoxically, more nations are freer than ever before, yet freedom is increasingly under assault."

As expected, he warned against "violent extremism" in the region, while challenging North Korea to "choose a path which leads back to membership in the community of nations," a relatively gentle (for the defense department) admonition.

If China was not a central theme in his prepared remarks, it remained the subject of over half the questions posed to Rumsfeld during the on-the-record question-and-answer session that followed. While several questioners tried to draw him into a discussion of the Chinese threat, he was not about to go there, perhaps remembering the challenges he received last year when he questioned China's growing defense expenditures and expanding power projection forces.

Instead, he merely called for China to be more transparent about its military capabilities and doctrine.

To paraphrase: "Countries have a right to develop the military they choose, but others have a right, and a need, to know what they are doing and why."

It would be in China's interest, Rumsfeld said, if it "demystified" what it was doing militarily. He predicted that China would eventually see the wisdom in doing just that.

Even on Taiwan, Rumsfeld merely observed that the US should "take China at its word" when it says it seeks peaceful reunification as its first choice, noting that the US and the Taiwanese also want a peaceful resolution to the problem.

Rumsfeld also stressed that the term "responsible stakeholder," while coined by US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, represented a "coordinated US perspective" regarding China. The US had no "grand design" in Asia, other than to "contribute to peace and stability," stressing again that the goal of US-China military-to-military relations was "to demystify one another."

Rumsfeld was evasive, however, in addressing several questions (including one by this author) dealing with US attitudes toward Asian multilateral initiatives that did not include Washington, such as ASEAN Plus Three (A+3, involving China, Japan, and South Korea), the East Asia Summit (A+3 plus three: India, Australia, New Zealand), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, involving China, Russia and several Central Asian nations).

While noting that "countries could join together as they wish," he stressed that most problems were global and thus lent themselves to multinational rather than single country or small group solutions. He also unapologetically stood by his "mission defines the coalition, not vice-versa" mantra, citing the success of the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, a "coalition of the willing" involving some 70 nations who shared a commitment to prevent weapons of mass destruction from being transported to or from terrorists or rogue regimes.

He did, in response to a question about the invitation to Iran to join the SCO, comment that he found it "passing strange" that an organization whose charter proclaims a commitment to combat terrorism would invite a known supporter of terrorism to join its ranks.

Finally, he acknowledged that the US had to be more sensitive to world public opinion and admitted that he was concerned about Washington's image, but also argued that "the facts are better than we get credit for."

It would be too kind (and too out of character for me) to claim that Rumsfeld hit a home run in Singapore. But, if he struck out last year, this year he hit at least a double.

His more nuanced views toward China -- perhaps informed by his first visit to Beijing as defense secretary last October and by the adverse reaction to last year's Shangri-La presentation -- were much better received; the desire for Chinese transparency is widely held in Asia.

Unfortunately, the Chinese Defense Ministry and the Peoples' Liberation Army chose once again to boycott the gathering -- China was represented by a relatively low-level foreign ministry official and the heads of several Chinese think tanks -- thus missing an important opportunity to demonstrate Beijing's professed commitment to greater defense cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region.

Ralph Cossa is president of the Pacific Forum CSIS (pacforum@hawaii.rr.com), a Honolulu-based non-profit research institute affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
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