US President Barack Obama’s disinterest and inexperience in foreign and national security affairs are nowhere more evident than in his China policy. Consider his administration’s record in just one year:
We have lurched from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissing any possibility of progress on human rights, just before her visit to China last year, to the president planning to meet the Dalai Lama this month.
We announce major new US weapons sales to Taiwan even as we eagerly look to China to fund major portions of Obama’s massive US government budget deficits.
We avoid pressuring China for cyber attacks on US companies, its tolerance of intellectual property theft and other rule-of-law violations, and instead lean on China to reduce its carbon emissions to combat global warming.
We allow China to evade taking serious responsibility for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, while we simultaneously seek its support for additional UN Security Council sanctions against Iran’s program
Pursuing competing or inconsistent priorities is hardly new or unusual for the US, given our global commitments and obligations, which make it nearly impossible to pursue any single priority to the exclusion of others. However, Obama’s China policy is different — and potentially deleterious for the US — because it unfolds in almost random fashion.
It is little wonder that Chinese leaders now question not only the US’ grip on its own economy, but its grip on international politics as well.
The secret of what’s wrong with his foreign policy is what’s wrong with his domestic policies. Obama’s central focus is domestic, and neither his inclinations nor his experience afford him the judgment required for serious foreign-policy decisions. Accordingly, having proposed US$8.5 trillion in deficits over the next decade and lacking enough gall to propose the requisite taxes to fund such extraordinary spending, Obama has only the alternatives of printing money or issuing debt. Both are harmful, but the debt route is a less visible way to debase the currency.
Implicitly, Obama expects China to purchase a major portion of this debt, adding to its enormous share of US Treasury obligations. Unfortunately for the president, however, China appears unwilling to play. In particular, China worries about the devastating effects these mountainous additions to the national debt will have on the US economy, and thus its ability to repay it.
Of course, this is what Washington should be worried about, not Beijing.
This US implosion is mirrored in Obama’s fascination with the multilateral regulatory regimes favored by the Kyoto/Copenhagen global-warming negotiating process. Assuming both the seriousness of global warming, and its anthropogenic causation, however, does not dictate self-evident solutions. In fact, many Copenhagen advocates would favor the same government-imposed “solutions” even if the problem were global cooling, or if there were no earth-temperature issue at all.
Ironically, China is the world’s one large economy that could easily adopt the near-authoritarian, command-and-control economics favored by the Copenhagen crowd, and yet it refuses to do so. Beijing argues that drastic limitations on carbon emissions will thwart its plans for economic growth, which it has no intention of doing. China must wonder why a free-market country like the US is following this statist path.
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