Dr. Barnett Responds on Sino-American Grand Strategy
In response to my previous post A Short Analysis on The Whyte-Barnett Sino-American Grand Strategy Proposal, Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett wrote in late this morning and I am giving him the floor:
You’re fundamentally right in your analysis.
What we heard from a senior quasi-official (and I’ll leave the description there) was that we should not present the compromises in the form of annexes but to make it a singular sign-it-or-no agreement. Why? That path would suffer the deaths of a thousand-edits and ruin the desired dynamic.
I agreed with the notion for this reason: The American approach to such a document is to carve it up into pieces and to give the Iran piece to the Iran desk and the Taiwan piece to the Taiwan desk and so on, and everybody comes back saying the same thing: “American could never do this one thing!” But, of course, the whole point of the process is to encourage the horse-trading mindset.
Do you, America, want a different path with China?
Do you, America, want the money to flow from China back into the US economy in a useful manner for all? Do you want the trade imbalance balanced?
If you want these things, and see the wisdom of the deepened economic connectivity, then what transparency and strategic trust must be created–minimum list?
Once you see all these “demands” expressed from the Chinese side, do you see a path forward or are these things too much for Beijing to ask for?
Me personally, I want Kim’s regime collapsed–pronto. But I cannot make that argument stand up right now, given the larger tasks at hand and the relationship to be maintained. I hear the Chinese on that subject and I think their offer of a slow soft-kill path makes sense. So I accept the bargain because I see a lot of negative pathways curtailed by it and profoundly positive ones created by it.
But I’m not a China expert who’s incredibly vested in the complexity and opacity of this relationship. It gets better and I still have plenty of opportunity to pursue. I’m also not a regional expert well versed in telling you how something is “impossible!” I approach the issue from the long-range perspective, with more of a businessman’s tendency to look for the deal rather than wait on the perfect architecture or all the policy boxes to get checked. I want progress, and asked the Chinese what it would cost.
I believe that if you put this package in front of the American people, they will not find the costs high at all. But that would take seriously visionary leadership on our side (like Brzezinski’s suggestion in the NYT yesterday). The Chinese have enough of it on their side to move forward. I fear we do not. We are now the muddle-through people, looking frighteningly like Brezhnevian Russia. Nobody is creating any Deng or Gorbachev-like clarity about the path ahead. Where is our 21st-century Alexander Hamilton?
We argue amongst ourselves over piddling things, fighting each conversation to the death. And we lower ourselves in the eyes of others.
John Milligan-Whyte is convinced Obama is a transformational figure–a lawyer’s mind who will understand the terms and act on it. I am less optimistic but felt it was crucial to try.
The Chinese response was–to me–stunning in its openness and flexibility of imagination. Yes, they have their demands and when you look at it from their perspective, they are fairly reasonable, even as I, in my American mindset, find some of them too slow in unfolding. But they took this thing with immense seriousness–even an eagerness. They were like somebody who had long waited to eat a decent meal and were determined to gobble it up with relish, and I found all that sad, because it made me realize what a dead dialogue the SED must be, with its 1-2% improvement goal every year.
But Obama’s crew has no real strategists. They have handlers and politicos and experts, but no strategists or deal-makers. They are too satisfied with the “keeping all balls in the air” bit, ecstatic when China does the littlest effort to rein NorKo in for some SouKo artillery ex–like that’s some great victory! It’s really sad, because the moment is so ripe for imaginative approaches.
We knew the package had to start from the Chinese side and I firmly expected the US side to blow it off, for its lack of proper channels. But it does not stop there–from the Chinese perspective. So our work continues.
January 4th, 2011 at 9:46 pm
I recently finished "Reading Obama" by James Kloppenberg. It is very pro-Obama and I doubt it will win over any converts among conservatives. However, I thought his analysis of Prof. Obama’s approach to teaching Constitutional Law was interesting. Obama approached the constitution as being a process-oriented document, and not a document designed to reach any particulary substantive outcomes. Obama described the constitution as setting up "a conversation" among competing interests, forcing them to compromise in order to reach consensus. While conservatives and many on the left do not like it, I think an objective conclusion would be that Obama has been extremely successful in using this approach to rack up an impressive list of legislative successes (from a Democratic perspective) on domestic policy during his first two years.
However, I think that this may also be why many of us who do like, or want to like, Obama (like me, and to a lesser extent TPMB) have been less than impressed with his approach to foreign policy. There is no international constitution. You can’t accomplish anything in foreign policy merely by setting up "conversations" among bureaucratic fiefdoms in the foreign policy establishment, which seems to be the way Obama has approached foreign policy. That’s why you need grand strategies, like the Monroe Doctrine or the Containment Policy, to set up the governing framework in which meaningful "conversations" can take place. Those grand strategies come from visionaries like John Quincy Adams and George Kennan, and strong executives who are willing to implement them. I’m not sure that Obama really grasps this, and thus far, his foreign policy has been found wanting as a result.
January 5th, 2011 at 1:29 am
The biggest surprise to me in the past few years of reading about foreign policy at this website and elsewhere (in my case, think tankers and books and websites dedicated to India-Pakistan and general South Asian issues) is how, well, the intellectually "thin" the bench seems. By this I don’t mean that the experts and pundits aren’t knowledgeable and intelligent but that there is too much parroting of conventional wisdom – as if what is today will always be so and everything is managerial and timid in nature. Is that what you all are getting at?
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I tell you, as an immigrant from India I am frequently shocked at what I read. Even basic things that almost anyone in my community knows is glossed over.
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Doesn’t it seem as if our DC policy types just don’t have a feel for the cultures of the region despite all of the education and expertise?
– Madhu
January 5th, 2011 at 1:36 am
Of note, B. Raman’s Strategic Analysis points to the following NYT article (excerpt follows:)
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AS a national strategy, China is trying to build an economy that relies on innovation rather than imitation. Clearly, its leaders recognize that being the world’s low-cost workshop for assembling the breakthrough products designed elsewhere — think iPads and a host of other high-tech goods — has its limits.
So can China become a prodigious inventor? The answer, in truth, will play out over decades — and go a long way toward determining not only China’s future, but also the shape of the global economy.
Clues to the Chinese approach emerge from a recent government document containing goals for drastically increasing the nation’s production of patents. It offers a telling glimpse of how China intends to engineer a more innovative society.
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http://ramanstrategicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/01/chinas-advancing-skills-in-engineering.html
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– Madhu
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I find I enjoy reading the Indian websites a bit more these days, perhaps because it allows me to look at things in a completely different way. One of the things I read (and I don’t think it is feasible at the moment) is that India can prove it’s value on the world stage by attempting to serve as an honest broker between the US and Iran. The rest of the world is breaking out into long-term strategic playing around with new ideas. Huh, I just contradicted my previous post. Oh well. A straight line isn’t the only way….
January 5th, 2011 at 1:48 am
Er, I don’t know why I mention the immigrant thing all the time. I grew up in the States. I am such a drama queen. I could never be a serious analyst. My imagination tends to run riot.
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– Madhu
January 5th, 2011 at 1:57 am
Dr. Madhu, The DC policy types don’t have time to have a "feel;" practically no one in this town reads/reflect—much less makes time to do anything but posture and respond. I’m no fan of TPMB, but we’ve not had an administration since Reagan that sought to deal with the world as it is–much less China—Reagan’s guys were motivated more to win the Cold War than anything else. Our national posture is very much like our political posture domestically—react/respond/put out the fire—no strateegery in sight.
January 5th, 2011 at 3:23 am
Dr. Madhu, you are too hard on yourself. The bench is *thin* because many of the "experts", while very bright or at least bright, are superficial people primarily interested in domestic politics -i.e. they are courtiers. Few of them match the caliber of a George Schultz, Brzezinski, Kissinger or Rusk, to say nothing of Acheson, Kennan, Nitze, Stimson, Marshall and so on. Gates makes the cut but he’s pretty much it in the last two administrations
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"However, I thought his analysis of Prof. Obama’s approach to teaching Constitutional Law was interesting. Obama approached the constitution as being a process-oriented document, and not a document designed to reach any particulary substantive outcomes. Obama described the constitution as setting up "a conversation" among competing interests, forcing them to compromise in order to reach consensus. "
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While that is an odd and somewhat alarming view of the Constitution, it makes sense as an explanation of Obama’s modus operandi
January 5th, 2011 at 3:37 am
what does TPMB stand for?
January 5th, 2011 at 5:11 am
Onparkstreet:
You are absolutely right in the first half of this statement — it is the one thing I’ve noticed with extreme frustration, the years I’ve caroused among the strategy-oriented blogosphere and/or read/viewed strategy promulgated elsewhere.I am guessing that there is a fundamental problem when "vision" in the "visionary" is considered by those uniformitarians. How, pray tell, are they or anyone to evaluate what has not historically been the case in so many examples from the past? It is easier to evaluate the familiar. It is also easier to "manage" situations from a uniformitarian approach.Then there are those like Barnett who have some kind of vision, but how are we to know if they are merely highly intelligent idealists able to formulate ideal plans and scenarios or might be on to something that will be pragmatic ultimately? I suppose accepting their visions takes either a leap of faith or the ability to share in the same visions, capable of evaluating them on the basis of so many commonly-held understandings of unwritten fundamentals (abstractions).
January 5th, 2011 at 5:20 am
Note: Let me stress the fact that I do not disbelieve in the existence of fundamentals — although as a skeptic I do question their particular formulations. The difference between the two broadly outlined classes of policy-wonk/strategist is simply that one believes in fundamentals that perennially manifest in exactly the same ways (although some of those same ways may be present or absent for any given region, period, etc.), and the other class believe in fundamentals that may often be expressed in unexpected, non-historical ways, requiring relatively novel responses. (Relative to the responses the first class prescribe, since the first class believes that for every perennial manifestation a response has also already been long known, having been discovered during prior instances of the manifestations.) Ok, enough abstraction there, I think.
January 5th, 2011 at 9:29 am
For information:
Comment from http://eurasia.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/30/eurasia_in_2011_recovery_bolsters_political_stability
*It looks like a relatively calm year for Eurasia. . .*
It depends on the reaction to a new paper: China – US Grand Strategy Agreement Proposal.This attempt at stability is opportune, because the communique from the last G20 noted with concern that the current global political economy is unsustainable. In fact the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rumpoy, has recently written that Globalisation is entering a political phase, and the European Union is ready. The above proposal is likely to be the basis of a paper to the next G20 – which France will chair.
January 5th, 2011 at 11:43 am
The proposal for geopolitical stability includes:"The U.S. and its allies will not attack or seek regime change and will eliminate trade restrictions against Iran and China . . ."
‘EUobserver’ reports today that EU external relations supremo, Catherine Ashton, has failed to persuade the UK and other Beijing-critical member states to lift the EU arms embargo on China. The EU imposed the ban in 1989 in response to China’s killings of thousands of dissidents during protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. It is thought that any change on the embargo could also harm EU-US relations. However France argues that the arms ban is no longer appropriate. The wide quest for geopolitical stability is something that will surely be raised as an issue for the G20, which France currently chairs.
January 5th, 2011 at 2:48 pm
re: Obama is a transformational figure–a lawyer’s mind who will understand the terms and act on it.A close read of Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama, in my interpretation, supplies key contexts, which understood at scale, serve up tells suggesting Obama will argue the affirmative burden for this grand strategy agreement, a great reconciliation.I stand with John Milligan-Whyte that Obama will act on it.
January 5th, 2011 at 5:41 pm
This is a link taking you to my blog where I respond to "I believe that if you put this package in front of the American people, they will not find the costs high at all."
January 5th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Critt,
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I had to guess based on what you sent in, but I only "unapproved" it if you want that comment back. Your links just went to ZP. Send me an email if it is still wrong
January 6th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Zen, it’s all good… Historyguy99, we need to talk publicly about Understanding China & America’s Emerging Partnership/
January 7th, 2011 at 8:56 pm
Do you, America, want a different path with China? .
Do you, America, want the money to flow from China back into the US economy in a useful manner for all? Do you want the trade imbalance balanced?
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The U.S. and its allies will not attack or seek regime change and will eliminate trade restrictions against Iran and China.
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"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.": John Kenneth Galbraith