Friday, 08.08.08

Still Waiting on that Pacific Century

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

In a speech on the eve of the Olympics, George W. Bush prodded China on human rights.

Well, sort of. That's what's in the news, but in reality Bush was (to use one of his father's words) "prudent" in his comments about human rights in China. His speech was released 18 hours before he actually gave it (probably with even more back-channel advance notice to the Chinese); it was delivered not in Beijing but in Bangkok; and it was followed by a string of events that spotlighted abuses in Burma rather than China. The Chinese responded with boilerplate about how the United States shouldn't interfere in China's internal affairs. Mission accomplished. On to the U.S.-China Olympics basketball matchup!

To me, the more remarkable aspect of Bush's Bangkok speech was his effort to take a trans-Pacific victory lap for his administration's achievements in the region. It's true: every American should stop watching the "Paris Hilton for President" video long enough to thank God that no shooting war has broken out in Northeast Asia. This happy outcome was not a foregone conclusion in January 2001, when the incoming administration promised to get tough with China and North Korea. Moreover, despite complaints that Bush has neglected Asia, in terms of cowboy boots on the ground, at least, he's done pretty well: Bush has visited China four times, for example, compared with one visit by Bill Clinton. (More amazingly, according to USA Today, Bush has outstripped Clinton as the country's most traveled president.) Bush also rightly deserves the credit he claims in the speech for new defense arrangements with our five treaty allies and for signing several new bilateral free-trade treaties.

But more than a few gaping omissions and falsehoods jump out from between the lines of his text. If 9/11 hadn't happened, and the U.S. hadn't developed an urgent need for China's help in the "Global War on Terror," China would be well enshrined by now as the neoconservatives' Public Enemy No. One. (As one former State Department colleague reminded me, Colin Powell also helped tone down the belligerence of U.S. policy toward China by successfully defusing the crisis caused by the forced landing of an American spy plane on Hainan Island in April 2001.) On North Korea, the Bush administration first repudiated the Clinton administration's policies and then, three years later, basically picked up where the Clintonistas left off. The North Koreans, meanwhile, have proceeded with missile tests, a nuclear explosion, and nuclear assistance to Libya, Syria, and Kim Jong Il-knows-who-else.

Bush asserts in his speech that when he took office, "our relations with many free nations in Asia were strained." Thanks to his administration's efforts, he says, his successor will find that "America's alliances will be the strongest they have ever been." That would be news to the citizens of Indonesia, Japan, and several other Asian countries, where favorable ratings of the United States are well below what they were in 2000. For all the ballyhooing of trade agreements with small players like Singapore, the U.S. goods trade deficit with China in 2007 was more than twice as large as it was in 2001. It's also risen with Japan, where talks on market access still take a backseat to issues like where to base American troops. The march of democracy has also stumbled: the shiny new Asia Pacific Democracy Partnership touted by the president presumably won't be taking up the issue of de facto U.S. assent to the September 2006 military coup in Thailand, which unseated the democratically elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

Of course, as my colleague Jim Fallows has pointed out, it's hard to argue with the broad outlines of U.S. policy toward Asia, and toward China in particular, that the president lays out. In fact, as a former Clinton-administration speechwriter, I find Bush's speech awfully familiar. But words won't make up for a lack of real deeds. During the Clinton administration, the Middle East peace process, the Balkans, and myriad other crises distracted policy makers from paying as much attention to Asia as they should have. The Bush administration has been worse, dedicating more than a trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, and incalculable hours of policy-maker attention to a war that didn't need to be fought, with predictable consequences for our presence in Asia. Even a country like Indonesia -- the world's most populous Muslim state -- has gotten short shrift (with less U.S. aid than Zambia, and U.S. direct investment basically stagnant). All the blah-blah about America being a "Pacific nation" is starting to sound like that joke about how Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be.

— James Gibney

Filed Under: Asia, Bush, China, foreign policy, Olympics

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