Negotiating China's Rise - like it or not

THE CHINA CHOICE:
Why America should Share Power,
by Hugh White, Black Inc,190pp. 

Reviewed: 11 August 2012

It's one thing to understand the strategic challenge, another thing to put forward a sensible win-win solution, but much harder to set out a way to get there from here.  Hugh White scores well on the first two, but doesn't really address the third.  Diplomats and strategists might call the missing link "the modalities".

The choices White identifies are to be made in Washington.  Australia, we infer, will be swept along whatever course the USA adopts.

The key word in White's analysis is “primacy”, which I take to mean unchallengeable military superiority. He warns that America and its allies tend to overestimate America's ability to translate military superiority into political outcomes.   White doubts that America, even now, has the real power to prevent a determined Chinese takeover of Taiwan.  China's ability to sink American aircraft carriers with land-based missiles could not be neutralized without escalating attacks upon Chinese mainland facilities.  Mutual retaliation could reach nuclear level. Few if any American allies would support such a venture.

On the other hand, China's ability to assert power beyond its borders is also limited by the major Asian regional powers that have historical reasons to be suspicious of Chinese power - Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and others.

In my view White under-states the depth of anxiety among China's neighbours over growing Chinese power. For neighbouring nations, many of which already host significant Chinese racial minorities, have historical reasons to fear economic colonization, and increasing long-term immigration from China.  For such nations, a remote, over-fed hegemon (such as America) is preferable to a nearby, hungry hegemon, because they are less likely to move permanently into your house.

The rivalry between US and China is focussed in the Western Pacific, where China would like to establish primacy and America wants to keep it. White proposes that America and China must learn, somehow, to share power and leadership, at least within that region.

Any proposals for strategic dialogue with China must be read in the context of Sun Tzu's Art of War, whose precepts on tactics, negotiation, strategy and psychology still shape Chinese strategy. They are supremely pragmatic, whereas White argues for adoption of common principles for common benefit.

A basic rule of negotiation is that you do not give away your final position at the beginning. White goes so far as to offer, as his final chapter, a proposed text for an Address to the Nation by an American President, setting out the reasons why the United States has decided to share power with China in the Western Pacific.  It looks to me like an invitation for China to raise its demands and keep right on pushing.  What does China gain by conceding anything in that context?

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites is a former ABC correspondent in China and later participated in Asia-Pacific and multilateral negotiations for the Australian government.

Farm Subsidies make fraud of US Free Trade demands

THE BIG HANDOUT

How U.S. subsidies and corporate welfare corrupt the world we live in and wreak havoc on our food bills 

by Thomas Kostigen, Scribe, 288pp.  

Reviewed: 21 July 2012

In the West we have been led to believe that "Free Trade" is an essential expression of the economic principles of free market economics.  We have also been told that electoral democracy is the political equivalent of the free market -  it aggregates  free choice of individuals into the political decisions of national-scale societies.

When I worked on international trade negotiations for some years, I learned that political democracy can often be the enemy of free trade.  The ability to compete against the cheapest producers in the world is not the only value that governments must consider when they are deciding how to regulate imports and exports.  Free trade forces structural adjustment, and structural adjustment means disruptions to local industry.   You may argue about the long-term national interest, but in a democracy you can be sure than economic pain will cost votes and can change governments.

Nobody spruiks the principles of Free Trade more strenuously than the United States, but Thomas Kostigen's book tells us that the home of free market economics does not practice what it preaches.  Kostigen describes an economy characterized by production subsidies and discriminatory tax breaks that make nonsense of free market principles, and that make US arguments for global Free Trade seem hypocritical.

He asserts that American exports of subsidized wheat, cotton and rice are destroying the domestic economies of developing countries, thus contributing to anti-American sentiment and even terrorism.

With congressional elections every two years, the USA is never out of election mode.  The few politicians who dare to resist the loud, ruthless and well-funded industry lobbyists are outvoted by those who dare not resist them.

Free markets, national or international, do not offer easy solutions to the "creative destruction" that economists see as a necessary outcome of unregulated competition.  

Should the cost pressures of ruthless competition be allowed to force agricultural communities to destroy their own soils and ecologies, as humans have done repeatedly through history?

Can a democratic electorate ever be sufficiently far-sighted to support long-term protection of common resources, and to accept the short-term pain of economic adjustment?  

Kostigen can't address these issues, but he shines an uncomfortably bright light on the failures of the American system to deliver the results its people deserve and the world needs.

Read the full review 

Richard Thwaites has participated in Australia’s international trade liberalization negotiations.

Intelligence crippled by ideology

INTEL WARS: The secret history of the fight against terror.

By Matthew M Aid,

Bloomsbury Press, 262pp.  

America spends $75billion per year on intelligence functions. It sounds a lot, but that is only about $250 per citizen.  The question for outsiders, and for questioning Americans, is why such a vast investment in intelligence seems to produce such patchy results.  We hear of the occasional coup such as the discovery of Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan, but then we must ask why did it take ten years, given the resources put to it?

It's not as if the value of intelligence is a new idea. People who fight with sticks and stones rely on knowing where the enemy is and what he (or it) is likely to do next.  Arguably, modern technology gives governments greater capacity than they have ever had to keep tabs on people at home and abroad.

This book describes the disconnect between America’s vast and pervasive intelligence resources and its failure to translate that investment into effective strategic decision-making.

It turns out the problems are, as usual, the human factors.  Agencies compete with and sabotage each other.  The flow of information overwhelms the ability to analyze it.

Matthew Aid is a Washington-based writer and commentator on the US intelligence establishment, with many first-hand sources ready to inform him on the weaknesses of their present or former employers, but especially on the weaknesses of agencies that are rivals to their own. 

He is most critical of the political messes bequeathed by the Bush administration, but is also disappointed that the Obama administration has fallen into similar bad habits of suppressing unwelcome intelligence that does not suit the public management of short-term politics.

This book should interest not only intelligence and strategy buffs, but anyone hoping to understand a bit more about why global affairs do not turn out as we had been led to expect.

Read the full review here..

Is political hatred the product or the tool?

THE NEW HATE:
A history of fear and loathing on the populist right.  

By Arthur Goldwag, Scribe, 368pp.

It's disturbing to watch the American democratic process so suffused with rage and hatred, from both left and right.  Free speech and open debate is to be cherished, but the cynical peddling of lies and conspiracies to influence frightened voters is the great weakness of democracy.

Plato warned about it in ancient Athens - at some point the Greek republic had laws that exiled demagogues from the city.  In modern western democracies, the challenge is to retain fundamental freedom of speech without turning over democracy to those with the greatest power to lie most loudly.

Thinking people of all persuasions share a broad discomfort about the political mobilisation of hatred . Some blame whichever party or interest group they don’t support, and many blame our news media for fostering political violence (real or synthetic) for the sake of cheap ratings points or journalistic one-upmanship.

Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate looks at a wide range of current Obama-haters, from Tea Party to rabid broadcasters to Islamophobes and bizarre conspiracy-cult websites. He places them in a context of hate-farming that traces right back to the earliest Puritan colonists.  It seems there never was a time when American politics was not infected with conspiracy theories about unseen, powerful groups bent on subverting the Bible, the Constitution, or the apotheosis of the white race in American Exceptionalism.

Religious identity has often been the target, echoing the politico-religious purges that drove Puritans and many other waves of immigrants to America from their European homes.  Freemasons, Roman Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, Communists, homosexuals, witches and innumerable real or imagined secret societies have been the object of hate campaigns embraced by high-level politicians as well as rabble-rousers and entrepreneurs.  Goldwag is a declared liberal Democrat, but provides balanced accounts of many hate-merchants and their innocent or questionable targets across the centuries.

So why are human societies so susceptible to falsehood, prejudice, and paranoid fantasy?  Goldwag suggests that the common visceral element is a human yearning for a secure identity.  Any perceived threat to that identity, whether religious, cultural, race, or economic, induces a natural fear that is easily fanned into rage and hate.  The more that a relatively successful society has fostered a sense of entitlement and “rights” among its citizens, the easier it is to promote outrage and hatred whenever such entitlements may seem challenged.

Charitably, Goldwag accepts that some hate-peddlers at least believe what they are saying.  He concludes that the majority of those who claim to believe Obama is a foreign Muslim are less concerned about Obama’s identity than about America’s identity not being what it used to be, at home or abroad.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites, when a broadcast current affairs producer and editorial executive, has struggled to balance coverage of punch-ups with coverage of policy.

Afghanistan - the West's Tar Baby?

Most Americans and many Australians (of a certain age) know the folksy tales of Brer Rabbit, read to us as children from the popular books by "Uncle Remus", in the style of African-American story-telling.

Most memorable to me was the tale of the Tar Baby, wherein one of Brer Rabbit's many enemies made a doll out of sticky tar and sat it in the road where Brer Rabbit was to pass by. The irascible Brer Rabbit, as expected, picked a fight with this mute, inanimate Tar Baby, and began strike it in anger, because the Tar Baby would not reply to his impertinent questions.  Brer Rabbit hit the Tar Baby with his right fist, and it stuck in the tar. Then he hit it with his left fist, which also stuck. Then he kicked it with left and right feet, becoming firmly stuck and helpless.  I forget how he lived to embarass himself another day.

The story came strongly to mind in reading Karen Middleton's new chronicle of how Australia, seeing its strategic advantages as bound tightly to the US government, has become further and further enmeshed in the conflict in Afghanistan, from which no exit is visible even when no credible good outcome can be predicted.

I've read and reviewed several books dealing generally with this conflict, but Middleton's is unique. She is a long-serving bureau chief in the political Press Gallery of the Australian Parliament in Canberra.  She was visiting Washington DC with Australia's then Prime Minister, the conservative John Howard, on 9 September 2001, and has followed every twist and turn of Australian policy and political debate on Australia's strategic engagements since then.

Sadly, Australia seems to be trapped in the same colonial mentality we have suffered since the first British colonies were established in 1788.  Governments of quite different political colours have rushed to answer the call for token support from whichever hegemon we were dependent upon, lest we be considered ungrateful for the supposed umbrella of protection we might, in future, wish to call upon.

Earlier colonial leaders used to get royal favours and knighthoods for their public loyalty to the British crown. Now the most they can expect is the occasional stroll in the White House rose garden,  a brief photo-opportunity on a White House portico for the Australian evening TV news, and a patronising affirmation that the USA "has no closer or more trusted ally" than Australia.  If invited to a White House karoke night, I recommend any Australian politician to rehearse that great American cultural export, Carole King's splendidly honest song "Will you still love me tomorrow?"

Karen Middleton's book is:

An Unwinnable War: Australia in Aghanistan
published by Melbourne University Press, September 2011.

Read my published review of Karen's book here...