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.
Not only are Obama’s domestic priorities driving him in the wrong direction with China, perhaps even worse, he seeks the wrong answers from China even on national security issues. US policy on Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programs highlights this anomaly. Both former US president George W. Bush’s and the Obama administrations have allowed China to escape responsibility for stopping Pyongyang’s nuclear program, something it has the unique capacity to do, given the North’s reliance on China for energy, food and other critical resources.
Although China says it opposes a nuclear North Korea, it is unwilling to take tough measures because it fears even more the collapse of the Pyongyang regime and the possible reunification of the Korean Peninsula.
While eliminating North Korea would end Northeast Asia’s nuclear problem and lead to regional and international stability, China will not act for fear of enhancing the US position in the region.
By contrast, on Iran, we face a regime determined to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons, and undeterred by UN Security Council sanctions resolutions. Nonetheless, the Obama administration proclaims that a fourth set will somehow achieve what the first three have failed to do, despite China’s lack of support. Even if another resolution is adopted, would it have an impact? The near-certain answer is: “No.” Instead of begging China for support, the US should make its own decisions to do what is necessary to prevent what now looks almost inevitable absent an Israeli military strike: Iran with nuclear weapons.
Many people blame China for pursuing its national interests, but Beijing is just doing what comes naturally. The real question is why the US is not doing the same.
John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
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