The appointment by the administration of US President Barack Obama of Charles Freeman as National Intelligence Council (NIC) chairman has caused a stir in many circles, not least among China/Taiwan watchers. Freeman, John Chait warned in the Washington Post, is from the “realist school” and would drop friends like Israel or Taiwan if it were in the US’ interest.
There is no doubt that the realist school of international relations is ascendant in the US. But this situation is not without precedent, as liberalism and realism are two extremes in the pendulum of US foreign policy. Periods of idealism have often been followed by a return to realism, especially in time of crisis. After years of liberalism under president John F. Kennedy and the fiasco in Vietnam, for example, US foreign policy under president Richard Nixon turned realist, leading to Henry Kissinger and other realists dealing with the People’s Republic of China at the expense of Taiwan.
Idealism re-emerged under president Ronald Reagan, which, like no administration until that of George W. Bush, perceived the world in terms of good and evil. The pendulum did not immediately swing after Reagan left office, however, mostly because he was seen to have won the Cold War and US credibility was at its highest level since World War II.
It would be another 20 years before the pendulum swung back, after eight years of neo-conservative idealism under Bush, “seismic events,” as New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger put it in his latest book, “that led America to lose so much standing and leverage in the world.”
But Chait, and the many Zionist organizations who have criticized Freeman’s appointment, overstate the impact he would have on foreign policy. Part of their mistake is to assume that governments speak in one voice, as if the Obama administration would be homogeneously realist. Chait uses Freeman’s favorable review of The Israel Lobby, a book by realists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that criticizes the Israeli lobby in the US, to argue that Freeman is unable to grasp that Americans might have “an affinity for a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships” — in other words, that at their core, Americans are liberal, not realists, when it comes to threatened democracies like Israel and Taiwan.
Despite Freeman’s appointment to the NIC, it is unlikely the US will abandon Israel for the sake of its own “interest,” because the US foreign policy establishment is a plurality of voices. For every Freeman who advocates more cautious support for Israel, there will be equally influential policymakers like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who make no secret of their ideological support for the Jewish state. How else could we explain Washington’s continued support for Israel even after right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu — who played a prominent role in destroying the Oslo Peace accords — comes back to power? If the US thought only in terms of its interest, or if the NIC dictated policy rather than advise the community, it would abandon a troublemaker like Netanyahu with little provocation. But it won’t.
The same applies to Obama’s Asia team. For one, a purely realist administration would not have tapped Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, the high priest of “soft power,” as ambassador to Japan. In other words, despite Freeman’s positions on Taiwan and China — which are indeed worrying — others in the US government will counterbalance him.
The NIC is but one of many government bodies involved in US foreign policy. It is not even the most powerful one, as demonstrated by the lack of traction that its principal product, the National Intelligence Estimate, has had in the White House under previous administrations.
It is too early, therefore, to be overly alarmed by the appointment.
China has quietly unloaded 10 percent, or US$100 billion, of its US Treasury holdings in the first half of the year. During the past 40 years of rapid economic growth after recovering from a quasi-ruined state that officially ended in 1976, China has amassed a huge pile of foreign reserves partially through its trade surplus. The US Treasuries have always been the prime choice for China to park its foreign reserves. What made it run away from the traditional safe haven for its hard-earned foreign reserves? One explanation is that Beijing is leveraging its financial power as the second-largest US Treasury
Sometimes When there is a choice to be made, none of the options are good. The choice between hooking up with communism — in its Chinese iteration, the one that bugs Taiwan the most — and neofascism, of the back-to-the-roots Italian variety or any other kind, is such a choice. The good news is that Taiwan does not have to choose. It neither needs to cozy up to China — the successes of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration, despite its shortcomings, are evidence of that — nor does it need to embrace Italy under its likely new leader, Italian lawmaker Giorgia
For many years, the military’s defense of the Taiwan Strait has been centered around the doctrine of establishing “air and maritime supremacy and repulsing landing forces.” However, after the legislature passed the Sea-Air Combat Power Improvement Plan Purchase Special Regulation (海空戰力提升計畫採購特別條例) last year, the doctrine was altered to “air defense, counterattack, and establish air and maritime supremacy,” with repelling landing forces removed from the equation. Despite the changes to the defense doctrine, landing operations and anti-landing operations still feature at the core of the military’s plans for the defense of the nation. The primary reason that peace in the Taiwan Strait has prevailed
In a China-US war over Taiwan, paradoxically the greatest loss of life could be inflicted on the Muslim Uighurs. Uighurs constitute 45 percent of the Xinjiang population of 25 million people, with over 1 million incarcerated in internment camps in accordance with a policy initiated under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Another half-million children have been placed in state-run boarding schools. Forced sterilization has led to a 24 to 60 percent drop in the birthrate, leading officials from many countries to describe the mass detention as genocide. Estimated annual death rates in the camps of between 5 and 10 percent could
RSS