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BARNETT vs. KAPLAN III: TURNING A GLITTERING EYE TOWARD CHINA

Dave Schuler of the Glittering Eye who, like Curzon of Coming Anarchy, speaks Chinese, has weighed in on the call by Robert D. Kaplan for a second Cold War against China. Dave offers some sage advice to the Sinophobes:

“I’m stealing my own thunder but the points I’m trying to make in my as-yet-unfinished “China’s time bombs” series are that

1. China has problems of its own.

2. China is focused on China in a way that Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have never been.

3. We should be encouraging China to solve its problems rather than worrying about what China’s plans for us might be.”

Well said. Read the whole thing.

A QUICK RUSSIAN LEGAL ROUND-UP

Pundita opines on the Khordokovsky trial and Peter Lavelle covers the trials of the Beslan terrorists and the corrupt local officials who may have been bought off by the Chechen Islamists.

THOSE WHO WOULD PLAN OUR EXPEDITION TO SYRACUSE

Further thoughts on the implications of the great Barnett-Kaplan debate.

During the Peloponnesian War, the democratic Athenians faced a determined and powerful enemy in oligarchic Sparta. The Athenians were a great naval power and were secure from Spartan attack safely behind the ” the long walls” to Piraeus. Control of the sea meant the advantage of greater mobility and the wealth brought in from trade within the empire and thus Athens held the upper hand, though the war was far from won.

It was at this juncture that the citizens of Athens were convinced to turn away from prosecuting the war against Sparta toward an expedition to conquer far-away Syracuse because, someday, Syracuse might grow strong enough to become the enemy of Athens. With great fanfare, the Expedition was launched and it ended, after ruinous expenditure, in the defeat of mighty Athens. The Syracuse campaign reversed the tide of fortune and gave heart to Sparta, which went on to become a passsable sea power in its own right and defeat the now gravely weakened Athenians.

Today we have those for whom the War on Terror, a complicated and shadowy battle against a rising transnational Islamist insurgency that wishes our destruction, is not enough. Instead they look at Russia, a weakened former foe, struggling against part of the same Islamist insurgency and see not a potential ally but a target of opportunity. Others see China rising and call for a ” Cold War II “ based on – well – nostalgia for Cold War I. I can’t think of a better way to isolate the United States than to drive – actively drive – all the other great powers into an active collusion against our interests while we are engaged in a 4GW war against the Islamist terror networks. Even if such a pessimitic analysis of Russia and China is correct there is something to be said for biding one’s time, being subtle and prioritizing objectives.

This isn’t a ” Clash of Civilizations” or even ” The West against the Rest” but a call for ” America vs. The World ” and it represents a strategic vision on par with invading Russia in winter or starting a land war in Asia.

TIME FOR KAPLAN TO COME IN FROM THE COLD WAR

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent“
– Winston Churchill

“ Power flows from the barrel of a gun and that gun must never slip from the grasp of the Communist Party “
– Mao ZeDong

Harsh words from the age of the Cold War. The words however are for that age and not for ours. We have an entirely different enemy today and our war is not the Cold War redux. If we were to follow the advice offered by Robert D. Kaplan in the pages of The Atlantic we would be propelled into the wrong fight at the wrong time with the wrong enemy, which China is not unless we choose to make her so. By counseling as he does, Mr. Kaplan indicates that he not only does not understand China, he clearly doesn’t understand the Cold War either.

This is not an argument that China is a friend or ally of the United States. It is not. Nor will I argue that China’s economic and geopolitical rise does not represent a shift in the global order and a strategic challenge for American policy makers. It does. What I will illustrate is that China in 2005 is not the Soviet Union of 1945 and that to base our strategic policy of how to relate to China as ” Cold War II” is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One crucial difference that Mr. Kaplan does not seem to be aware of is that the fundamental economic and foreign policies of China today and the Soviet Union circa 1945-1949 differ by approximately 180 degrees.

Josef Stalin’s strategy was to hermetically seal off the Soviet bloc from not only Western but all foreign influences, including independent Communist voices such as Tito’s. Stalinist trade policy promoted autarky, preferring barter agreements to cash exchange whenever possible and even aid – whether for famine relief or the Marshall Plan was decisively rebuffed. Eastern Europe had Communist satellite governments imposed upon them and miniature Terrors executed that killed hundreds of thousands of Polish, German, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian and Czechoslovak intellectuals, religious believers and ” reactionaries”.

When after Stalin passed from the scene in 1953 – though not until after Blockading Berlin and sanctioning the Korean War – his successor Nikita Khrushchev made support for ” Wars of National Liberation”the cornerstone of Soviet policy in the Third World. This policy remained unchanged up until the USSR began collapsing in 1990. Khrushchev – who compared to Stalin can be regarded as a ” moderate” – also brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, invaded Hungary and erected the Berlin Wall.

Where or how does China represent anything close to that order of threat magnitude to the United States ? Outside of Taiwan, which remains a true potential flashpoint, have the Chinese in recent decades resembled in their behavior toward their neighbors , the Soviets of the 1940’s ? Or even the Soviets of the 1970’s and 1980’s ?

These are not differences of degree but of kind.

What Kaplan does not realize is that Containment worked well in part because the USSR’s own paranoid totalitarianism complemented our strategy by isolating themselves from all forms of connectivity. Watching any ” flows” of people, ideas or force across the Iron Curtain became a simple surveillance task for our intelligence services and multilateral alliances alike.

How well would George Kennan’s grand strategy have fared if the Soviets sought not isolation but integration ? Not conquest and domination but connectivity, influence and markets ?

The supreme irony of Mr. Kaplan’s argument is that even if China is an enemy, using a Cold War model strategy might doom us to defeat. Different opponent with different objectives who presents a completely unique and primarily longitudinal set of challenges. Few of which are military in nature and none of which are as imminent as the War on Terror that Kaplan has waved away as a ” blip”.

Geopolitics is not a cookie-cutter operation Mr. Kaplan

RELATED LINKS:

Curzon at Coming Anarchy – defending Robert D. Kaplan against Dr. Barnett.

Thomas P. M. Barnett – Burning Bridges

Nadezhda at Liberals Against Terrorism – sees Kaplan as a self-fulfilling prophet as well.