This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: China
The most important task confronting American, and Chinese, foreign policy is to avoid a war between the two countries. This is so obvious it should not even need to be said, but so few in the American media or political class are saying it
This contract ratchets up tension not just between Australia and China, but between the US and China. That, not the contracting question itself, is the more important story here.
Today the idea of America as the indispensable, or more charitably, essential, nation is badly frayed. In some respects, the last four years gave the rest of the world, whether friend or foe of the US, a glimpse of what a world without American leadership might look like. No country paid closer attention to that than China, because it is clear by now that if American leadership continues to wane, China is the country that will fill that void.
The Hobby Lobby case has generally been framed as being primarily about the freedom of employers to exercise religious views. The freedom of the worker to do whatever she wants to with the compensation she has earned by her work, however, seems to be overlooked in that paradigm. Health insurance is not some kind of largesse bestowed upon workers by generous employers. It is something that employers over a certain size are required by law to provide, like social security payments of a minimum wage. In this regard it is part of the basic compensation package for employees.
This entire episode has been bad for the U.S. for several reasons, but one that has been largely overlooked it the extent to which it makes the U.S. look weak. Spying on citizens, tracking their phone calls and other communications is what one expects from vulnerable authoritarian regimes, not from governments claiming to be the leaders of the free world. Strong countries have a functioning modern state that can assure secrecy and do not seek to cut fiscal corners by contracting out key functions to private companies who often enjoy useful ties to current and former government officials. Again, this kind of incompetence and weak state is not what the most powerful country in the world should be projecting.
The WBC is far from perfect, with occasionally uneven play and many of the game's best players deciding to concentrate on spring training rather than the tournament, but it is also a lot of fun for many people and an opportunity to highlight one of baseball's biggest accomplishments in recent years. Selig has gotten a lot of things wrong, but should be recognized for getting this one right.
The air of invulnerability which surrounded the Putin regime during most of its first decade in power has been replaced by uncertainty. Putin may, indeed, remain in power after the election, but he will have to use means other than personal popularity and a growing economy to buttress his repressive regime. Without these assets, it would seem that Putin is faced with several options: liberalize and allow the opposition to win something, do nothing and hope for the best, or crackdown more to ensure that the regime stays in place for the short term.
The U.S. is asking, without success, for the Iranian, Syrian, Russian and Chinese governments to do things that, from their perspective, are not in their interests. It is not really a big surprise that Iran is not giving up their weapons because the U.S. wants them to or that Moscow and Beijing are less anxious than the U.S. to call for a leader to resign because he has used excessive force on the citizens of his own country. The U.S., on the other hand, is asking Egypt to do something that is neither against their interests nor a very big reques
To a significant extent, the more interesting foreign policy developments in the election do not have much to do with either of the two men who are likely to be there party’s nominees. These developments may also have more bearing on 2016 than 2012. Nonetheless, at least three Republican candidates, Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Herman Cain have made statements, or taken positions on foreign policy that could prove important harbingers of the future of the foreign policy debate in the U.S.
U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, and in many regards since end of World War II has rested on several assumptions not about the nature of the world or of the threats facing the U.S., but about the U.S. and America’s perception of itself. Several key components of American foreign policy in its internationalist form including democracy promotion, foreign assistance generally, the unique role the U.S. seeks to play in global security issues, the U.S. military presence in almost every corner of the world, and the emphasis on human rights all are based upon the U.S. viewing itself as both able to make an impact and affluent enough to afford trying.
It is something of an unusual development that the opposition party in a major economic power put the global economy at risk and contributes to downgrading their own country’s credit rating for little reason other than their desire to make the incumbent chief executive look bad and modestly improve their own party’s chances in the national elections which are still 15 months away. The story of one of that party’s leading candidates reacting to all this by holding a rally to call upon divine intervention to help his country and to mobilize his party’s fundamentalist religious base, is also notable. This is, of course, the state of political affairs in the U.S. as it might be seen from Moscow, Brussels, or from Beijing, America’s biggest creditor.
The problem the Republicans have created for themselves is that by empowering the far right of their party to lead the battle against Obama in 2009 and 2010, they have unleashed a flood of candidates who enjoy high name recognition and pockets of intense support on the far right, but no broad support from the electorate more generally. More damagingly, for the Republican Party, the far right may be sufficiently powerful to stop the nomination of any candidate who deviates from their extremist views. This is the test which Romney and the party face; and it cannot be avoided by Jon Huntsman or Rick Perry, jumping into the race fresh from Texas, Beijing, or anyplace else.
The criticism of the intervention in NATO on the grounds that if the west intervenes to stop mass killings in Libya, they should do it everywhere else as well, is troubling because the corollary is that if the west cannot stop mass killing somewhere, it shouldn’t try to do it anywhere. Nonetheless, the intervention in Libya sets a precedent and creates expectations in the region that can create problems for the U.S. and its European allies.
Since 1989, most authoritarian leaders have probably thought that the consequences for blithely killing hundreds of demonstrators in the main square of the capital, including being cut off from foreign assistance, facing massive civil unrest facilitated by better communication technology, trade sanctions or foreign intervention outweigh the short term gains those actions would bring. The Syrian government is currently challenging this received wisdom of the last two decades. Ironically, because Syria is a much smaller, less powerful and more ordinary country than China what happens there may be more important for other countries than what happened in China 22 years ago. Therefore, if the al-Assad regime remains in power after killing and torturing hundreds of its own people, it is likely that will set a more powerful precedent than the Chinese government set in 1989.
The Obama administration’s decision to intervene militarily in Libya has been largely justified on the grounds that the U.S. and its allies were compelled to do this because if left on his own Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi would have killed many innocent Libyans guilty of nothing more than wanting a better life and more freedom. The general outline of this explanation is almost certainly true, but it is not entirely sufficient and leaves too many questions unanswered. Answering these questions is essential for winning enduring public support for this action, developing a strategy for winding down this intervention and for ensuring that it sets a positive precedent for the future.
This tsunami is also illustrative of the unique position in which the U.S. still finds itself in this increasingly multi-polar world, and a reminder that in some important ways the U.S. remains the world’s only true superpower. One way to see this is that the U.S. is the only country that is going to be heavily involved, financially and otherwise, in addressing the two biggest global developments this year, the tsunami and the rapidly changing the Middle East. China, for example, may play a role in helping Japan, but will not be investing any resources in trying to make a smooth transition in the new Middle East. Several European countries will come to Japan’s assistance, but not to the extent that the U.S. will.
China is clearly an economic power which can become the world’s major power if the U.S. continues to make mistakes and if China avoids some major economic, political and environmental crises that are on its own horizon. However, China’s rise to global supremacy is hardly an inevitability and should not be seen as one. For the U.S., therefore, it is important both not to underestimate China’s potential, but also not to overestimate it either. Recent media coverage of China seems to have clearly veered towards the latter mistake.
Freedom House’s finding should not come as a surprise to anybody who even casually consumes international news. Fraudulent election in Belarus, Iraq and Afghanistan being, at best, stuck in some kind of post-conflict semi-democratic morass, and the stubborn persistency of authoritarian regimes from Pyongyang to Havana all support these findings. Democracy is frequently spoken about in waves, with the third wave beginning in southern Europe in the 1970s. For the last few years, however, democracy has been in something of a trough with few advances or breakthroughs and a paucity of hope.
It is likely that by the time 2011 winds down, the major international affairs questions dominating the news will include issues that seem distant in the first week of the year. Every year brings surprises, unforeseen wars, natural disasters and the like, but it is also possible to look with some confidence towards the New Year and identify some foreign policy issues, or questions, that are likely to become more important during the year.
American irritation at China trying to have it both ways is certainly reasonable but it is also somewhat hollow, or even hypocritical. When the American diplomats and politicians refer to international laws, norms of behavior of the like, they are really referring to laws and norms which were created by the U.S. and its allies. As the world’s most powerful country for much of the last sixty years, and the world’s only superpower for roughly a third of that time, it should be no surprise that the U.S. has played a major role in crafting and forming these laws and norms. However, if another country, other than for example traditional allies with whom the U.S. crafted these laws, is asked to accept the responsibility of being a superpower, than that country probably should have a right to help further develop these norms. The U.S. is asking China to play by the rules it, the U.S., has created as part of the cost of being a superpower. It is no wonder that this is not well received in Beijing. The U.S. is thus also trying to have it both ways as well by asking China to step up and meet its new responsibilities as a rising power, but seeking to make sure that those responsibilities remain defined by the U.S. and its allies.