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China and The Trump Administration
This is a composite piece from articles written by Alexander Mercouris, Editor-in-Chief at The Duran and my favourite The Saker. Citations are at the end of the post.
The Undeclared War
- “….I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: “Do not go fighting with your land armies in China”. It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives, and an army fighting there would be engulfed by what is known as the Ming Bing, the people’s insurgents….”
- VISCOUNT (FIELD MARSHAL) BERNARD MONTGOMERY OF ALAMEIN
As the US Navy steams towards the Korean peninsula, North Korea threatens counter-attacks on US bases and on South Korea, and as China warns of war, the unanswered question is whether there is any real strategy behind these moves.
US carrier deployments near the Korean peninsula are hardly new whilst US threats to take unilateral action against North Korea have been made many times before. It is known that the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations all seriously considered pre-emptive strikes on North Korea, with the Clinton administration in 1994 coming closest.
All three previous administrations however – in the end – pulled back when they assessed that the possible consequences might be a war which would ravage the Korean Peninsula.
In the case of the Clinton administration, the assessment was that possible North Korean retaliation could involve massive artillery strikes against South Korea’s capital Seoul, which might cause up to a million casualties. That looks wildly exaggerated. However since then Seoul has grown in size, more suburbs have been built closer to the North Korean border (bringing them within closer range of North Korea’s artillery) and North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and (possibly) the means to use them. What may have been an exaggeration in 1994 might no longer be so now.
Beyond that there is huge uncertainty as to what exactly the US would strike at if it did attack. The North Korean nuclear programme is known to be heavily defended and widely dispersed, with many of the facilities buried deep underground. A limited cruise missile strike such as the one the US has just launched in Syria would achieve nothing that would justify provoking the probably strong North Korean reaction. By contrast a full-scale attack on North Korea – which is now a nuclear power – would risk an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula, which would be potentially devastating, and which given North Korean missile capabilities might conceivably even spread as far as Japan.
On any rational calculation a US military strike against North Korea makes no sense, and under any other administration one would be inclined to rule the possibility out, and to dismiss the latest US moves as empty bluff.
The New Face of America
The reason it is now impossible to to dismiss the latest US moves as empty bluff is not because anything in the Korean Peninsula has changed since previous administrations considered and then rejected the option of military action, but because following the US missile attack on Syria no-one any longer can be sure that the foreign policy decisions of this President and of this administration are being made in an orderly and rational way.
Instead it seems policy is being driven far too much by impulse and by concerns about ‘face’, with the President making decisions on the fly, with his advisers unwilling or unable to restrain him.
To the extent that it is possible to see any strategy behind the latest US moves, it seems to be to frighten the Chinese into abandoning North Korea by threatening them with a war in the Korean Peninsula if they don’t, with a big trade deal thrown in as a sweetener.
This is the sort of approach that might make sense in the cut-and-thrust US property industry which Donald Trump knows. However the trouble with this frankly amateur approach is that it gravely underestimates the strength of feeling in China.
Whilst it is doubtful that most Chinese think or care much about North Korea, the Chinese leadership would face a severe internal crisis if it appeared to back down in the face of US threats. An actual or pending US attack on North Korea would therefore be far more likely to strengthen Chinese support for North Korea than to weaken it.
President Trump’s hopes that by ramping up talk of war with North Korea he might force China to ramp up pressure on that country has suffered a blow in the form of a strongly critical editorial of his whole foreign policy stance in the Chinese English language daily the Global Times.
China’s Backyard
Because it is one step away from the Chinese leadership, Global Times is able to express the Chinese’s leadership’s views in a more forthright way than more ‘official’ media outlets such as the People’s Daily and Xinhua can.
There is no doubt therefore that the latest editorial about Donald Trump’s foreign policy in the Global Times reflects the opinions of China’s leadership, and both its tone and its contents are scathing.
Firstly the editorial strongly criticises the unpredictability and drift towards increasingly belligerent militarism that is become a feature of President Trump’s foreign policy
- In less than three months since Trump’s inauguration, the US military has launched at least two strikes that grabbed the world’s attention, the first being the airstrike on a Syrian airfield, and the second being the use of “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan. Trump uses military force more aggressively than Barack Obama. He has demonstrated a certain level of obsession and pride toward US military prowess.
- Even for George W. Bush, who fought two wars during his presidency, every attack had to go through lengthy procedures, and starts of war had been widely expected. However, the two recent attacks came rather abruptly. With this frequency and speed in use of force, Trump may go down in history as the “war president.”
However by far the most telling comments are those the editorial makes about US sabre rattling against North Korea. It makes crystal clear its view that this sabre rattling – which in its opinion includes the dropping of MOAB on ISIS in Afghanistan – is completely misconceived and counter-productive:
- North Korea must have felt the shock wave traveling all the way from Afghanistan. It would be nice if the bomb could frighten Pyongyang but its actual impact may just be the opposite.
- Pyongyang’s logic in the recent years has been that, without nuclear weapons, what happened to Saddam and Gaddafi would befall its own administration. The “Mother of All Bombs” may once again misguide Pyongyang, leading it to believe that it is crucial to upgrade its explosives.
- It’s been widely speculated that North Korea is preparing for its sixth nuclear test and its leader Kim Jong-un is weighing his options. The message sent by the US military is not conducive to helping Pyongyang make a reasonable decision.
In other words far from scaring North Korea into giving up its nuclear weapons programme, all President Trump’s threats are doing is persuade North Korea to pursue its nuclear weapons programme even more vigorously. This is because President Trump’s military actions are showing to the North Koreans the danger the US poses to them.
Though the editorial makes it clear that China strongly disapproves of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme – something China has repeatedly and publicly said – it also shows that the Chinese think President Trump’s entire strategy towards North Korea is completely misconceived.
Needless to say, given the tone of the editorial, whatever hopes President Trump might have had of scaring China into taking a firmer line with North Korea, have been shown up as false. On the contrary, the Chinese – as the editorial makes clear – are barely able to conceal their anger at the reckless and dangerous actions of someone they have clearly come to consider an erratic and unpredictable President.
The Syrian Gambit – Declined
The President and his advisers made the same mistake following the US missile strike on Syria. In the days following the missile strike the President and his advisers appear to have believed – and were encouraged by the British to believe – that the missile strikes would cause the Russians to reduce their support for Syria’s President Assad. As with the bribe of the big trade deal they are now offering China, they also offered the Russians the prospect of better relations with the US to sweeten the deal.
In the event the Russians were neither intimidated by the missile strike nor impressed by the bribe. Instead, rather than pulling out of Syria or reducing their support for President Assad, their response was to increase it.
China has come in for some criticism for its failure to speak out strongly against the missile strike immediately after it took place. However it is difficult to see what from a Chinese point of view doing so would have achieved.
Critics of China’s reticent stance on Syria need to remember that Syria is not of fundamental importance to China as it is to Russia. Just as the Russians are relatively reticent on issues which are of fundamental importance to China but which are of less concern to Russia – such Tibet, Taiwan, North Korea and the South China Sea – so the Chinese tend to be relatively reticent about issues which are of fundamental importance to Russia – such as Syria, Ukraine or NATO expansion – but which are of less concern to China.
As soon as Xi Jinping returned to Beijing however- the Chinese leadership made its strong disagreement with the US missile strike immediately clear in a way which was – somewhat unusually – picked up even by the New York Times in this article. On the question of the missile strike here is what it says:
- “With President Xi Jinping safely out of the United States and no longer President Trump’s guest, China’s state-run media on Saturday was free to denounce the missile strike on Syria, which the American president told Mr. Xi about while they were finishing dinner.
- Xinhua, the state news agency, on Saturday called the strike the act of a weakened politician who needed to flex his muscles. In an analysis, Xinhua also said Mr. Trump had ordered the strike to distance himself from Syria’s backers in Moscow, to overcome accusations that he was “pro-Russia.”
- That unflattering assessment reflected China’s official opposition to military interventions in the affairs of other countries. But it was also a criticism of Mr. Trump himself, who Mr. Xi had hoped was a man China could deal with…
- [Xinhua] mentioned American missile attacks on Libya in 1986 and Sudan in 1998, and scolded the United States for not achieving its “political goals” in those instances.
- “It has been a typical tactic of the U.S. to send a strong political message by attacking other countries using advanced warplanes and cruise missiles,” the article said…..
- Chinese analysts, whose advice is sometimes sought by the government on foreign policy questions, were scornful of the strike, which they viewed as a powerful country attacking a nation unable to fight back.”
The New York Times also mentioned this profoundly cynical but also realistic and typically Chinese comment made by Chinese analyst Shen Dingli
- Mr. Shen [said] that many Chinese were “thrilled” by the attack because it would probably result in the United States becoming further mired in the Middle East.
- “If the United States gets trapped in Syria, how can Trump make America great again? As a result, China will be able to achieve its peaceful rise,” Mr. Shen said, using a term Beijing employs to characterize its growing power. “Even though we say we oppose the bombing, deep in our hearts we are happy.”
This assessment may be cynical, but it touches on a profound truth. On any objective assessment by far the greatest challenge the US faces as it tries to preserve its global position comes from China. Yet instead of responding to this challenge the US has frittered away the last 16 years picking fights with countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria and of course Russia.
China Rising
In the meantime China has quietly continued becoming more powerful whilst attaching Russia with its boundless resources ever more closely to itself. Were the Trump administration to involve the US in the war in Syria it would merely reinforce this dynamic, whilst giving China even more time and space to grow even stronger. No wonder some Chinese are “thrilled” at the prospect.
The New York Times also grasped something else: in terms of concrete results the US-China summit was a failure, with the Chinese making no concessions to the US, and the US securing none of the trade deals President Trump had hoped for
- On trade, Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump agreed to a “100-day plan” that Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross said would include “way stations of accomplishment.” American business executives took that to mean there had been no deep negotiations on whether China would further open its markets to American companies.
- Business leaders had expected the Chinese to announce investments in the United States that would create jobs, as a way to offset some of Mr. Trump’s complaints about the country’s trade imbalance. But Mr. Xi made no such offers, at least publicly. According to an account in Xinhua, the Chinese invited the United States to participate in a program it calls One Belt One Road, an ambitious effort to build infrastructure projects across Asia to Europe, for which China hopes it can attract some American investment.
President Trump came to the White House selling himself as a dealmaker. His idea – taken straight from the cut-and-threat commercial world he has up to now lived in – seems to be to ‘soften up’ his potential adversary by threats and bluster in order to wring concessions from him as he aims for ‘the deal’ which is most advantageous to the US.
That approach may work in the commercial world. As the Chinese have just shown him, and as the Russians are in the process of showing him, the world of international diplomacy doesn’t work that way.
There is no reason to think the Chinese response to any US attack on North Korea would be any different to the Russian stance in Syria. On the contrary, given traditional Chinese sensitivity about questions of prestige, a hardening of China’s position in the face of US ‘aggression’ on the Asian mainland is a virtual certainty.
The trouble is that having allowed tensions to ratchet up to this level the US President may feel he cannot pull back without being humiliated, and given his own over-sensitivity about ‘face’ and the inability of his key foreign policy aides – Mattis, McMaster and Kushner – to restrain him (Tillerson – or as in political circles T. Rex. – seems to be barely in the loop) the potential consequences of that are alarming, to say the least.
It is however desperately important in this situation that the President either comes to his senses and accepts whatever face-saving proposal the Chinese put to him – however empty of content it may be – or that his advisers finally stand up to him and restrain him. A failure to do so could set the scene for catastrophe, either now or in the future
The Sino-Russian Alliance
The pace of Russian-Chinese contacts has suddenly intensified with Russian President Putin hosting this month no fewer than three senior officials of the Chinese government, each one following the other in quick succession.
The first was Zhang Gaoli, the First Vice-Chairman of China’s State Council (ie. China’s deputy prime minister). He has now been followed by Zhang Dejiang, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (China’s parliament), who met with Putin yesterday.
On 27th April 2017 Russia’s President Putin has met in the Oval Hall of the Kremlin with Li Zhanshu, Director of the General Office of the Communist Party of China, and chief of staff of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The meeting was held directly after Li Zhanshu held talks with his Russian counterpart Anton Vaino, who is the head of the Russian President’s Executive Office and who is President Putin’s chief of staff.
Li and Vaino can be described as the chiefs of the staff of their respective leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Moreover it has been clear for some time that contact between China and Russia does not take place through the foreign ministries of the two countries (their foreign ministers – Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov – rarely meet), but at some other level, and it is likely that it is conducted by Li and Vaino, who have immediate access to their chiefs, Xi and Putin.
At the most basic level it is likely that Li’s visit, like those of Zhang Gaoli and of Zhang Dejiang, is intended to prepare the way for Putin’s visit to China next month. It is clear that this visit is going to be a major visit, and is seen as such by the leaderships of the two countries. It is likely that intense discussions are underway to fine-tune arrangements for this visit, and to complete the details of whatever agreements are expected to be signed during it.
However it is difficult to avoid the impression that at least in Li’s case his visit is in part intended to coordinate with the Russians in light of the Trump administration’s ham-fisted attempts to cause trouble between Beijing and Moscow. What suggests that this is the reason for Li’s visit is that there was so little advanced notice of it, suggesting that unlike the visits by Zhang Gaoli and Zhang Dejiang it was not arranged long ago but was arranged hurriedly at short notice.
That the Trump administration is indeed trying to make trouble between Beijing and Moscow has been all but confirmed by no less a person than President Trump’s National Security Adviser, General H.R. McMaster, who in an interview with ABC television said the following
- What we do know is that, in the midst of responding to the mass murder of the Syrian regime, the president (Trump) and the first lady hosted an extraordinarily successful conference, summit, with President Xi and his team. And not only did they establish a very warm relationship, but… they worked together as well in connection with the response to the mass murder on the part of the Assad regime in connection with the U.N. vote.
- I think President Xi was courageous in distancing himself from the Russians, isolating really the Russians and the Bolivians… And I think the world saw that, and they (Xi) saw, well, what club do you want to be in? The Russian-Bolivian club? Or the — in the club with the United States, working together on our mutual interests and the interests of peace, security
This comment serves as a further illustration of the inexperience and naivety of US diplomacy in the age of Trump. It confirms that China abstained in the vote in the UN Security Council on 12th April 2017 following a personal request from Trump to Xi Jinping. However it completely misconstrues the meaning of that act.
The Chinese almost certainly cleared their decision to abstain in the UN Security Council vote ahead of the vote with Moscow. From their point of view and that of the Russians a decision by China to abstain would have meant little. There was no possibility that the draft Resolution would pass because Russia had already made known it would veto it.
What was undoubtedly intended by the Chinese as a simple diplomatic courtesy to the new US President over an issue which for China is of secondary importance, is however now being misconstrued by the Trump administration as a big step by China against Russia.
It is however fully understandable that in light of the sort of comments that have been coming out of the Trump administration the Chinese leadership should now be pulling out the stops to make clear that China’s alliance with Russia is unaffected and as strong as always.
The result is a series of articles which have appeared in the Chinese media, which have been strongly critical of the Trump administration’s actions (citations [2] and [3]), a strong statement reaffirming support for Russia’s position in Syria rushed out by the BRICS group, which is unofficially led by China and Russia, and the visits by the three important Chinese dignitaries to Moscow.
Li Zhanshu’s pending visit to Moscow is almost certainly connected to these steps.
The Kremlin’s transcript of Li Zhanshu’s words reads as follows:
- Before my departure, I went especially to see President Xi Jinping and asked him what he wanted to pass on to you. He told me to say that today, Chinese-Russian relations are going through their best period ever in our history.
- Today, our relations are deservedly called an example of relations between great powers, characterised by cooperation and mutual benefit. Today, our relations are very solid, mature, and are distinguished by strategic cooperation and a lasting nature.
- He also said that despite the serious changes in the international situation, we will continue to work with you unfailingly adhering to three constants, namely: regardless of the circumstances, we will not change our policy of deepening and developing our strategic partnership and cooperation; our policy, based on joint development and prosperity, will not change; and our joint efforts to defend peace and justice and promote cooperation in the world will not change. These were the words of President Xi Jinping.
The “serious changes in the international situation” of course refers to the change of administration in Washington, and the new administration’s attempt to make trouble between China and Russia. President Xi Jinping in his personal message to President Putin went out of his way to say that this attempt could not succeed, and that China’s strategic partnership with Russia “will not change”.
The message is of course primarily intended for the Trump administration. The Chinese and the Russians scarcely need to reassure each other about the depth of their relationship, which they are of course far more informed about than anyone else. However Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are anxious that there should be no illusions about it in Washington. Alas, given the chaos in Washington, it is doubtful whether anyone there is paying attention.
The idea that China can be sweet-talked out of an alliance with Russia it has spent 25 years creating as a result of a single meeting between the US and Chinese Presidents during which nothing of substance was agreed, is fanciful in the extreme. It is a further illustration of the lack of understanding or experience of international diplomacy within the Trump administration.
President Trump is right to believe that establishing good personal relations with foreign leaders is critically important for the successful conduct of diplomacy. The fact that he spent time meeting and talking to Xi Jinping and made a serious effort to establish a personal rapport with him promises well for the future. It contrasts with the arrogant disdain towards foreign leaders of Barack Obama, who as President barely communicated with foreign leaders on a personal level at all.
However President Trump has to be realistic about what such personal diplomacy can do. If he over-invests in it, and thinks he can change the entire foreign policy of a superpower like China by a single meeting and a few phone calls, then he is setting himself up for failure and disappointment.
The alternative, however humiliating, would at least teach this inexperienced President and his advisers that the first law of international relations is never to bluff China, because it is a bluff which is always called – sooner or later.
Citations
1. http://theduran.com/trump-miscalculating-north-korea-china-war/
2. http://theduran.com/china-criticises-us-missile-strike-syria-trump-xi/
3. http://theduran.com/china-slams-trump-north-korea/
4. http://thesaker.is/breaking-personal-message-from-xi-jinping-to-vladimir-putin-our-friendship-is-unbreakable/
5. http://theduran.com/chinese-visitors-russia-alliance/
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