November 8, 2010
USING CHINA AS AN EXCUSE FOR PROTECTIONISM...:
Obama's China Ambush:The President will skip China on his Asia tour, but his itinerary signals America's growing unease with the superpower's global clout. Peter Beinart on why Obama's cozying up to China's rivals this week—and how his policy is more hawkish than Bush's. (Peter Beinart, 11/08/10, Daily Beast)
The interesting thing about looking at American foreign policy through an Asia-centric, rather than Middle East-centric, lens is that it is suddenly no longer so clear who the hawks and doves are. President Obama began his dealings with Beijing in a conciliatory vein, but almost two years in, his policy is more hawkish than President Bush’s. He’s angered human rights types by restoring military ties to the Indonesian Special Forces and, according to The Economist, may cut a nuclear deal with Vietnam that allows it to enrich uranium outside of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And if Obama is more hawkish than Bush, the Democrats are, in some ways, more hawkish than the GOP. In September, when the House passed a resolution aimed at pressuring China to revalue its currency, Democrats supported it almost unanimously while Republicans were split. Paul Krugman regularly excoriates China for its currency policies. Nancy Pelosi has long excoriated it over human rights; in 2008 she urged Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics.What makes the China debate different from foreign policy debates during the Cold War and the “war on terror” is the role of economics. Since the USSR offered few opportunities for lucrative trade and investment, American businessmen (with a few exceptions, like Armand Hammer) had no problem with the Republican Party taking a hard anti-Soviet line. Similarly, after 9/11, there was no powerful business constituency invested in maintaining ties to the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. But China is different. If the neocons want a new cold war with China, they’ll have to take on corporate America in the process, which would make for very interesting times in the GOP.
...is a way of making war on capitalism, not on communism.
