Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses the recent Chinese naval conflict with the U.S., the increase in China’s regional stature and popular nationalism, the broad spectrum of U.S. interest groups that have grievances with China and why open relations are preferable to military confrontation.
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All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, antiwar.com slash radio, chaosradioaustin.org and 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and I guess you guys have probably seen the news.
There's a red dragon rising.
The Chinese have picked a fight with the American Navy on the high seas for no reason.
And I guess we probably need to sell a bunch of really expensive fighter planes to the U.S. government now or something.
So I'm glad that we have Doug Bandow here.
He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
He's got an archive at antiwar.com slash Bandow and is very well versed in American foreign policy issues concerning that part of the world.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
Happy to be on.
Well, so am I supposed to be scared, do you think, of the billion-man army over there, the yellow peril?
Oh, I wouldn't worry an awful lot.
China clearly is a rising power.
It's going to be tougher in its own neighborhood, and I think that's clearly the message they're sending here.
But I don't think you have to worry about Chinese aircraft carriers showing up off of San Francisco any time soon.
Oh, well, that's good.
Now, what exactly happened here?
I have to tell you, especially when I was reading Justin Armando's article today, he's got pictures of the U.S. Navy ship and then the Chinese ships, which apparently were harassing it.
And I've got to tell you, it looked like a pretty unfair match, advantage, U.S.
Well, we have a much bigger and a much better Navy.
For everybody who talks about China as some kind of rising military threat, the reality is the U.S. is far, far ahead on essentially every measure of military power.
That includes naval.
So we have better ships, bigger ships, and bigger in terms of military equipment.
This sort of thing is not unusual.
We find that in the air as well.
We found that throughout the Cold War.
The U.S. was going relatively close to the Chinese coast, but still technically in our international waters, clearly on an intelligence-gathering mission.
China clearly is wanting to kind of push out and say, don't come too close to us.
We can imagine what would happen if Chinese ships showed up a few miles off the coast of the United States.
We would have the same kind of reaction.
So none of this really surprises me.
There's nothing to be worried about.
Well, it seems like the meme going out over the TV anyway is that this is really aggressive action and never really mind the fact that it took place off of China's coast instead of America's coast or anything like that.
That apparently isn't really relevant here.
What's relevant is that these ships came anywhere near what looks to be, and I guess it's a two-dimensional picture, I don't really know, but what looks to be this massive ship.
I mean, again, the worry here, I mean, you go back to the beginning of the Bush administration, the U.S., the EP-3 plane was brought down by a very aggressive Chinese flyer, who I think, if you're just looking at blame, would have been the Chinese fighter pilot, kind of hot-dogging it, got very close and clipped the U.S. plane.
So the worry here is that any kind of a collision is bad news, even though the U.S. ship would come out better.
Nobody wants that.
So this is kind of a game of chicken.
The U.S. argument is, no, you shouldn't be playing these games.
But I think the critical thing to recognize is that this is occurring near China, not here, that this is clearly part of an assertion of Chinese power, saying that we're no longer in the Cold War, we're no longer a tiny country, there's a changing world here and you can't dominate this region the way you once did.
Back off.
And I think that's clearly the message that they were sending.
It's a far more important kind of political subtext than anything of the ships themselves.
Well, but they can't really think that America's going to back off, right?
Oh, no.
But again, part of it's a game of chicken.
Part of it's simply sending a message that this is something that wouldn't have happened 20 years ago.
What China is, I think, sending a message here, they plan on building a navy.
They plan on being more active.
They are going to become a more serious power.
So my guess, this is part of that.
There's no campaign going on here, but this is just a little signal in the wind that we should pay attention to.
Well, do you know much about the war party in China and how big they are inside the Apollo Bureau, that kind of thing, compared to America?
Oh, it's very hard to assess.
I mean, they have factions that go from kind of far left that don't like the market opening, that have been very antagonistic towards the West.
They clearly have nationalists who aren't particularly communist, feel very strongly in a greater China, a powerful China.
And they also have some folks who are very more internationally oriented, more oriented, open on economic issues.
They have been very pragmatic so far.
So I'd say if you look at their policies, the policies have been more generally openness towards the West, economic reform, engagement in international organizations.
That suggests to me that the war party, whatever it is, is not dominant.
But I think this is probably more nationalism than war party.
They don't want war, but they clearly want to assert China has arrived.
And I think this is what that really says is, you're here off of China's coast, we know you're there, we're going to become a bigger power, you're not going to get away with this forever.
So it's really just supposed to be kind of a foreshadowing of their strength in the future, I guess.
That would be my guess.
What really matters here is not today playing games with the ship, but it's what happens 5, 10, 15 years from now.
And I think that China is signaling it's going to be a very different world then.
So we need to keep that in mind.
Well, I guess it's looking more and more like that, as our economy dips more toward their level and theirs rises toward ours.
It's kind of a convergence going on there.
We obviously just cannot continue to try to patrol the entire globe and be a global empire.
We clearly couldn't afford it before the economic collapse, and we certainly can't afford it now.
And that's going to be even more so in the future.
Well, you know, in the late 1990s, well, of course, Bill Clinton hired John Wong to work in the Commerce Department and license missile technology transfers and all these kinds of things.
There was a lot of hype, and then they did the Cox Committee report saying that the Chinese were spying on us all the time.
And there seemed to be sort of a group on the American right, and I'm not really sure exactly how centered at the Pentagon this group of people are or what, but it seemed like there was a lot of people who were already ready already to pick up the anti-China mantle.
And I guess the neocons talked a lot about the rise of China in their early PNAC documents and that kind of thing.
How big is the war party in America in terms of, you know, the people who want to take an aggressive posture toward Iran?
I don't necessarily mean want war, but people who, how big are the factions or who makes up the factions that are the anti-China parties here?
Well, the neocons are clearly a very important part of that.
I mean, people like Bill Kristol and others thought the Bush administration should have taken a much harder line towards China than the P3 spy plane that they viewed the administration essentially as appeasing and whatnot.
They weren't at all happy.
So they're out there, and you're right, the PNAC documents and other stuff, this has long been kind of a cause for them.
And then some of the more traditional conservative hawks have also done, there's been a number of books, you know, China is the next enemy.
I mean, there's a long kind of history of that, going back to American support for Chiang Kai-shek, that I think really helps explain that.
I mean, that's never really died, it's not so much neoconservative, it's a very traditional kind of hawkish conservatism, which has always viewed kind of the reds over there, and don't clearly view the changes as being as important as I think they are.
And that mixes in, frankly, with some human rights activists and others who, for understandable reasons, don't like China's human rights record and would like to take a much more aggressive stance on that, as well as some of the religious right activists, who to some degree have the same kind of perspective.
They see China as a problem because of religious persecution, and then you throw on top of that some of the protectionists.
I mean, there's a fairly potent anti-China coalition that in the past has been held in check in many ways by the economic issues, but it might have more potency in this administration, not so much the military hawkishness, but issues like trade and human rights might loom larger with the Obama administration.
Now that's really interesting, you know, when you have, I guess, protectionists on the left and the right, labor union types and certain businesses, on both sides of the aisle there.
As you say, the human rights activists on both sides of the aisle there because of the abortion issue there on the right.
And I guess human life only matters before it's born.
I'm not sure how it works with those people.
That does seem to be a strange, you know, some of these war supporters, you do kind of wonder about that.
Yeah, it really is strange.
So wait a minute, it sounds like, if I'm counting on my fingers right, really the only people, the only coalition of people with power in this country who oppose a hawkish stance on China and want to keep relations as open as possible is basically those greedy, self-interested pigs on Wall Street who now have fallen way out of favor, right?
Yeah, I think they're the most important ones.
I mean, there's also to some degree kind of a diplomatic establishment or internationalist kind of group of folks, some of whom are businessmen, some of whom are other things, academics and others, who also recognize the importance of the China relationship.
But I think there are traditional, I mean, look, Charles Freeman, I mean, he's an example.
I mean, traditionalist conservatives who are not the uber hawks.
These are people who recognize how China was an important, reaching out to China was important during the Cold War and also understand that this relationship is extraordinarily important.
You know, this century, so it's not just the business people, but politically they were the most important part of the kind of pro-China coalition, and you're right, they have at the moment not nearly as much influence.
So I do worry about where the relationship might go with this administration.
It's going to be weighted towards criticism, and this is not a relationship you want to tank at a time where the economy is going down, trade is shrinking, and there are a lot of people who want a more hawkish stand towards them.
Well, I'm sure that you probably, being a libertarian you are, agree with me, and I guess I've read you riding along these lines before, but could you make the case then for the listeners of why, for example, the relationship with China, maybe even now more than ever, must stay as open as possible, and why we should avoid letting the hawkish groups on either side get any kind of real sway over the policy here?
Well, yeah, I look at it this way.
China is clearly a rising power.
We're the superpower, they're a power.
The economy is going to be bigger than ours at some point in the next 20, 30, 40 years.
They are not going to remain in a docile position in East Asia.
So trying to make these two countries work together internationally is critically important.
We saw what happened with the rise of Germany.
We ended up with two world wars as the international system tried to sort itself out.
If China and the U.S. work together for good, they can achieve an awful lot, and engagement is the best strategy.
It doesn't guarantee anything.
I'm no economic determinist, but if you actually want a positive, democratic, capitalist China, it's far better to engage them.
Isolation of China, retaliation, trade sanctions, all of that stuff is going to push it in a more nationalistic and antagonistic direction.
The outcome of that is good for no one.
If you want better human rights, we need a better engaged policy with China, where China is part of the international order, and see something at stake in joining with the values that we in the West believe in.
So to my mind, there is no alternative but to engagement.
If you really want a serious war, imagine going to war with China.
I'll tell you, America's allies in the region sure don't want that.
We won't have any friends if that happens.
Japan and South Korea aren't going to make themselves targets for our policy.
Yeah, well, certainly not.
The thing is, too, I was just reading the headline the other day where a Chinese minister gave a speech and said, we're not going to be like the Americans at all.
We're not going to follow your democratic system at all.
And I was just thinking of what a poor example we've been making for the rest of the world to follow.
Just before I brought you on here, I played this old clip of William Jennings Bryan talking about how the American republic can bring down monarchies with its silent example.
How do you like that?
And yet, here, to probably the average Chinaman, the Americans are nothing but hypocrites when they talk about their declaration of independence.
And young Chinese are very nationalistic, and while they like a lot of the values in the West, they also don't like having the U.S. preach to them and make demands on them.
And we have to take that into account.
We wouldn't like it if other Chinese officials showed up in the U.S. and started telling us how to run our affairs.
Chinese don't like it when we show up telling them how to run their affairs.
So, again, if you want to encourage the right people in China, openness, engagement, trade are the best way to encourage them.
If you try to close off China, you're going to encourage the worst factions there, and the ultimate result is going to be bad for everybody.
All right, everybody, that's Doug Bandow.
The book is Foreign Follies.
You can find his Antiwar.com archive at Antiwar.com slash Bandow, and you can now find him back again as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
That's Cato.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Doug.
Hey, happy to be on.
Take care now.
Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back.
