Three Things to Watch and One Not to Worry about Anymore
Three Things to Watch and One Not to Worry about Anymore
Informal Remarks to the Pacific Pension Institute
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Del Mar, California 17 July 2006
When Marsha Vande Berg asked me to talk about three things that worry me, I felt in a bit of a quandary. After all, there are so many things to worry about.
I was tempted to talk about North Korea. What should we do about the 4th of July fireworks show there? We are too sensible to start a war over it, and South Korea might be on the other side if we did. We can’t persuade anyone else to go to take Pyongyang on for us, though – for a while – it looked as though Mr. Abe might volunteer Japan for this role. Alas, he and other Japanese proved too clever to follow through. Obviously, we can’t talk with Kim Jong-Il unless he surrenders to our viewpoint, lest we violate the politically sacred American principle of negotiating only with those with whom we have no problems to discuss.
Our resulting approach to the coiffure-challenged weirdo who leads North Korea might therefore be summarized as (1) you’re evil; (2) unless you agree with us in advance, we won’t speak with you; (3) we are determined to overthrow you and your regime; (4) if you try to develop some means of deterring us from doing this, we will probably bomb you, possibly with nuclear weapons; (5) if you fail to respond to the course of diplomacy I have just outlined, we will certainly bomb you, possibly with nuclear weapons. Somewhat surprisingly, this approach doesn’t seem to be eliciting much cooperation from North Korea. (Come to think of it, it’s not working too well with Iran either.) Nor do many abroad believe that it constitutes diplomacy. They wish we’d try some, for a change.
So, what to do about Kim Jong-Il? So far, the most promising suggestion I’ve heard is to send Pat Robertson to Pyongyang to engage in high-level madman-to-madman talks. With promising ideas like that out there, I don’t really feel there’s much need to discuss North Korea. So I won’t unless you want to take it up later in the question and answer period.
Should I talk about the downside of globalization? Years ago, a prominent Ghanaian diplomat analyzed the effects of technology on the world and remarked that “radio allows us to listen to distant places and hear all evil; television enables us to view distant places and see all evil; and the jet plane permits us to go to distant places and do all evil.” The airplane also makes it possible to get here rapidly from distant places and to infect people – say, conference attendees — with evil new bacteria and viruses before displaying any symptoms one’s self. With 6.5 billion human beings brewing up new diseases in a globalized economy, pandemics are pretty sure to happen. That makes the companies working on diagnosing and treating them a hell of an investment play, with a very high pay-off, if one can just survive to collect.
Or should I talk about the problem of competitiveness? It’s a real problem. Polls show that our high school kids believe they are in the 90th percentile internationally. Tests show they are actually in the 10th percentile. We are unlikely to meet our requirements for educated brains from our high schools. Traditionally we have made up for this by importing brains. But, after 9/11, many people who might make a contribution to our intellectual life, our technology, and our pocketbooks can’t get here anymore. The visa barriers are high and the message that most foreigners – present company excluded — are not welcome here is too strong. In 2000, we had 9% of the global tourist market; five years later, in 2005, we had only 6 percent. America is in advanced danger of losing the openness that made us the most innovative economy on the planet. But in accordance with Alfred E. Newman’s quintessentially American precept, “what? Me worry?” let’s deal with this another time.
Yesterday, Roger Kubarych talked a bit about our balance of trade and balance of payments deficits, which are fueled by consumer spending inflated by budget deficits and home equity loans drawn against inflated housing prices. As Herb Stein’s mother said about situations like this, “if something can’t go on forever, sooner or later it will stop.” Our dollar is badly in need of a significant adjustment – let’s face it, a devaluation – in relation to Asian currencies in particular. There is no convincing adjustment process being put into place. But there are several scenarios that could bring the dollar down with a crash. This worries me. I would talk about the dollar if Roger hadn’t already.
Actually, there’s some very good news to convey about the Taiwan situation. Ironically, at the very moment our generals and admirals have discovered it as a weapon of massive budget justification, it’s well on its way to peaceful resolution. But I know I have a reputation for cynicism and depressing remarks to live up to.
So I guess I will have to talk first about the Arab and Islamic worlds, where it appears we may be on the verge of concocting a perfect storm of anti-American terrorism. We were once seen throughout the world, including in the Middle East, as the global voice of reason, a country that aspired to a higher standard and that was an example to be emulated; now we are viewed as an international scofflaw that is as cruel as most countries and crueler than some, a country to be feared rather than looked up to. Our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are now almost universally viewed as part of a broad assault on Islam and its adherents. Our threats to bomb Iran add to this impression. There has been no peace process in the Middle East and for some years we have had no policy except to follow Israel’s lead on matters affecting its interests, regardless of our own. We have recently been doing our best either to crush the elected government in the Palestinian territories or to starve it to death financially. Our continued generous subsidies to the Israeli armed forces, and our silence as they administer increasingly lethal collective punishment to Palestinian — and now Lebanese – civilians, add to the sense that Americans and Israelis are equally hateful perpetrators of war crimes. Polls show that anti-Americanism in the region’s countries now runs as high as 95 – 97 percent.
Meanwhile, our soldiers and marines are training whole platoons of experts in urban warfare and terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, applying what has been called “combat Darwinism” to the task of ensuring that only the most competent will survive to carry out terrorism against Americans elsewhere. Neither Hezbollah nor Hamas have yet done this, but given the pressure the Israelis and we are putting on them, it is easy to imagine them joining al Qa`ida in globalized terrorist operations against Israelis, Americans, and the Jewish Diaspora. Such a campaign would be vastly wider in scope and more lethal than the last Palestinian response to an Israeli effort to cow them into submission – the international terrorism of Munich and the Achille Lauro. It would enlist the energies not just of millions of Palestinians but of hundreds of millions of Muslims. It would almost certainly include efforts to cripple the global energy trade as well as to drive Americans from foreign markets.
This catastrophe doesn’t have to happen. We badly need to rethink our approach to the so-called “global war on terrorism” and to the policies that fuel it. The policies we’ve been following have discredited our country, created and trained legions of new terrorists, and driven oil prices to $78 as of this morning. Staying the course just promises more of the same.
Well, by my count, I’ve managed to talk a bit about five worrisome things. That’s two more than I promised. Never say that PPI’s very own Dr. Doom failed to meet my quota of gloom.
Now for the good news!
Last year, while we were looking the other way, farsighted opposition party politicians on Taiwan managed to pull the rug out from under the island’s pro-independence president and to call off the war they – and we — had spent the previous decade preparing for. They set the question of Taiwan’s relationship with China on a course toward gradual, peaceful resolution. These leaders of the opposition in Taipei had come to realize that an island of 23 million people can’t hope to win an arms race with a continent of 1.3 billion and shouldn’t try. They saw that Taiwan would be the battlefield in any war, so that even if it – in some sense — “won,” thanks to American intervention, it would essentially be destroyed. And they concluded that, unless cross-Strait military confrontation and efforts to promote Taiwan’s separation from the mainland were replaced with political engagement and efforts to integrate the political economies of the two sides, war was in prospect.
At the end of April, beginning of May, last year, Lien Chan, the chairman of the late Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang or KMT, visited Beijing. He was followed shortly thereafter by James Soong, the charismatic leader of the other main opposition party, and then by the leader of the reactionary geezer party, the New Party, whom I have not met and whose name I can never remember. Mr. Lien did three things. The other two opposition party leaders then did the same.
First, they reached an electoral alliance with the Chinese Communist Party, which agreed to cooperate to help them defeat the ruling DPP and its independence platform. This understanding continues to be implemented.
Second, they agreed to concrete agendas to promote cross-Strait economic and cultural integration. The way these worked was perhaps best illustrated by the example of fruits and vegetables. The mainland agreed with Mr. Lien that it would open its market to Taiwan agricultural products. These are grown mainly by DPP voters who support the president. When Mr. Lien returned to Taipei, the president not surprisingly embraced the initiative and appointed a government commission to work out the details. The Chinese government ignored him and his commission only to work out the details two weeks later when Mr. Lien’s deputy led a delegation to do so to Beijing. The message was clear. If you want to get something done with the mainland, don’t try to do it through the Taiwan government. Go to the opposition parties. They can deliver. The government can’t.
Third, they set up liaison mechanisms for constituent services. Politics is about who gets what, when, and how. We all know that, as Tip O’Neill famously observed, all politics is also local. In Taiwan, if you have a problem – say – with harassment from local officials that impedes your sales of fruit in Wuhan, you can now go to your local KMT legislator and he or she can take the matter to the KMT Central Committee, which will take it to its Communist counterpart, which will send someone down to Wuhan to fix the problem for you. So, from your point of view, the Taiwan Strait might as well not exist. At their best, the political connections across it now work seamlessly.
The result is that there is now a process of political integration in place to parallel and buttress the process of economic integration that has made the mainland Taiwan’s largest destination for overseas investment while inducing a million Taiwanese to take up semi-permanent residence on the other side of the Strait. Mainland universities – which are as good but very much cheaper than their Taiwan counterparts — are now open to Taiwanese students with no “out-of-state tuition.” The hope is that the next generation will be proud to be both Taiwanese and Chinese and to pursue careers within greater China rather than on little Taiwan alone.
I think it’s both important and encouraging that Taiwan’s relationships with the rest of China are now being defined by the decisions of families and individuals, not by officially sanctioned negotiations. Some responsible officials of the departments concerned in Beijing have likened what is going on to the construction of a coral reef. Many individuals are connecting, for their own selfish reasons, without any notion of the architecture their connections are creating. Structures of cross-Strait cooperation are rising from the bottom up. No one needs to negotiate these bridging structures; it is enough to acknowledge the architecture of cross-Strait relations that the invisible hand of self-interest puts in place as it does so.
The bottom line is that, while the mainland will complete the military build-up against Taiwan that it launched a decade ago to guarantee its ability to dominate the Strait, it now sees its military’s role as to deter Taiwan independence, not to compel Taiwan to negotiate. Taiwan politics is meanwhile evolving to exclude the possibility of independence. As a result, Taiwan has a pretty good chance of emerging as a key point of entry to markets on the Chinese mainland. This makes it an even more attractive place in which to invest. And, while it will take the military establishments in Washington and Beijing a while to figure this out, there will be no war in the Taiwan Strait or over the question of Taiwan’s relationship to the rest of China.
That’s good news for everyone except our military industrial complex, which has linked its most expensive and advanced programs to the possibility of war with China. And it’s more than enough good news from me for today. So I will end here.