Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (33 page)

But Stilwell didn’t have his way. After the Japanese surrender, the civil war between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists broke out with renewed fury. Despite billions of dollars of U.S. aid and tons of U.S.-sup-plied equipment and weapons, it was no contest. The communists marched through Chiang’s forces like a hot knife through butter, capturing and turning on the Nationalists all the U.S.-supplied weapons. It was as if the Americans were supplying the Communists with the Nationalists acting as deliverymen. White described the decaying system and regime to which America was bound as combining ‘the worst features of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition.’
 37 
But Luce wouldn’t print the bad news because ‘it destroyed his philosophy of the world.’

Luce wasn’t the only one who couldn’t face the truth. While White was sending copy that
Time
wouldn’t print, a group of China specialists in the U.S. Foreign Service, including John Service, were sending to Washington similar messages that officials wouldn’t read. In the end, White quit
Time
, the communists took mainland China, Chiang fled with China’s gold bullion to the island of Taiwan where he and Madame remained Luce’s darlings, and John Service was fired as Senator Joe McCarthy and the conservative right wing blamed him and other China experts for ‘losing China.’

Once on Taiwan, Chiang ordered the execution of several thousand opponents and established a Nationalist dictatorship that imposed martial law for nearly forty years. He maintained that his government remained the legitimate government of all of China and that he would return to recapture the mainland. Most countries quickly recognized that, like it or not, Mao’s communist regime controlled all of China except Taiwan, and established formal diplomatic relations with Beijing. Not, however, the United States. It maintained the fiction of the Chiang regime on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China for twenty-three years, until Nixon finally began to bring the country back to reality with his opening to China in 1972.

What lay behind this exercise in fantasy was the China lobby in conjunction with the Korean War. Immediately after Chiangs flight to Taiwan in 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Formosa (i.e. Taiwan) was outside the U.S. defense perimeter. Had it remained so, the communists would undoubtedly have ended the civil war by taking the island fairly quickly. But with the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. Seventh Fleet was sent to patrol the Straits of Taiwan; and for the next generation,
Time
, religious organizations, and political leaders like Senator Walter George, John Foster Dulles, and Dean Rusk convinced the American public that Chiang’s corrupt dictatorship on Taiwan was a champion of freedom and democracy.

The trick for Nixon in achieving a rapprochement with Beijing was how to dump Chiang without making the United States look as if it were backing out on a generation of support. This was accomplished through ‘creative ambivalence’ and rhetorical sleight of hand. In the Shanghai Communique issued at the end of the 1972 Nixon visit, the United States took advantage of the fact that Chiang still nursed the fiction that his was the legitimate government of China and would soon return to take control of the mainland. In the statement, China identified the Taiwan question as the crucial issue obstructing normalization of relations and emphasized its opposition to any status for Taiwan other than as an integral part of China. Since Chiang’s view was the same, albeit for different reasons, the United States declared that it ‘acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.’ That was clever though disingenuous, but what followed actually put an obligation on the United States. The Communique affirmed ‘the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan.’ Still, ‘ultimate’ could mean a long time hence, especially since U.S. weapons sales and military relations with Taiwan continued unabated, as did the maintenance of America’s ambassador to China in Taipei.

Not until 1979 and the issuance of the Second Joint Communique did the United States and China agree to establish normal relations. In doing so, the United States reaffirmed the one-China principle and agreed to sever formal relations with Taiwan, establish its embassy in Beijing, end its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, and withdraw all U.S. forces from the Island. The issue of arms sales was left unresolved. This looked as if it might make Chiang’s son Ching-kuo, now the head of the Nationalist regime, no more than the governor of a Chinese province. But Madame and her stepson still had fans in the U.S. press who portrayed them as champions in the struggle for freedom despite thirty years of press censorship and martial law in Taiwan.

They also had friends in Congress. The Carter Administration had drafted a bill to handle the myriad legal details of the shift of U.S. diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. This initially bland legal document was transformed into the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 by a bipartisan group of pro-Taiwan congressmen led by our old friend Senator Jesse Helms along with Senator Ted Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. At the heart of the act was a provision for sale to Taiwan of arms sufficient for self-defense (whatever that meant) and a commitment from the United States to resist any resort to force or coercion against Taiwan. The act also created a quasi-official embassy in Taipei, the American Institute in Taiwan, a private organization incorporated in Washington, D.C., and funded by the U.S. government with a board of trustees appointed by the secretary of state.

If you were Chinese, you would probably see this act as undermining the promises the United States had just made in the Second Communique. That, in fact, is just how the Chinese saw it. They demanded clarification, and that resulted in the Third Communique of August 1982. Of course, the Chinese were not without blemish in all this. They built up a missile force opposite Taiwan, demonstrated some missile shoots in 1996, and warned of war if Taiwan were to declare independence. They were frustrated because U.S. guarantees enabled the regime on Taiwan to resist serious discussions regarding any kind of Hong Kong-style reunification. Their actions were thus sometimes unpleasant and even frightening, but then they thought it was their country. An analogy like my Maui fantasy is one often cited by Chinese debaters: How would the United States have felt if China had sent forces to support the Confederacy during the American Civil War?

With luck, however, we won’t have to answer that question. With the end of the Cold War, China’s usefulness as a semi-ally of the United States against the Soviet Union disappeared. That, together with development at long last of a democratic regime on Taiwan, led to a movement among American conservatives to back a Declaration of Independence for Taiwan, something that despite much discussion has not gained majority support there. But as China’s economy has developed rapidly over the past ten years, businessmen from Taiwan have flocked to move their factories to the mainland. At first, the Taiwan regime tried desperately to limit the investment and the flow of sophisticated technology, but it was like telling the tide not to go out. Businesses from Taiwan are now the biggest investors in China, and about half a million former residents of Taiwan are now living in Shanghai with more joining them every day. Bush may thus find himself ‘doing whatever it takes’ to defend Taiwan just as the last resident of Taiwan turns out the lights and ships out to the mainland. In fact, as I write, the first commercial flight between Taiwan and mainland China since 1949 took place this week (January 26, 2003). So that last resident won’t have to ship out, but can fly first class.

MORAL OF THE STORIES

I
n its policies toward Israel and Taiwan, America continues to do itself enormous damage and create intense, needless enmity toward itself by allowing its view of reality to be distorted by intensely self-interested groups and by willfully averting its eyes from contrary evidence. Our system of government, with its separation of powers, facilitates capture of key positions by dedicated minorities that are sometimes heavily influenced by foreign elements whose interests are directly at odds with those of the United States. A senator from a state with fewer than a million citizens can capture U.S. foreign policy if he or she holds the right chairmanship at the right time. Our great power enables us, as I have indicated, to avoid facing reality for long stretches of time and can result in our doing great damage not only to others but also to ourselves.

In this regard, our press has much to answer for. It took a long time before the press reported the actuality of Vietnam. It still does not fully report the actuality of Israel, Palestine, Taiwan, and many other critical regions because it is too often blinded by its own preconceived ideology or afraid to challenge the prejudices of its audience. Ultimately, however, the problem lies with that audience, which too often cares about countries selectively, temporarily, or as an expression of its own ethnic, religious, or political biases. Americans tend to think of other countries not as real places with real people but as vehicles for their ideas either of how the world should work or for the redress of their historical grievances. Don’t even get me started on Cuba.

9

Friends and Foes

O
n November 9, 1989, like millions of others around the world, I watched CNN with joy and disbelief as Germans from East and West Berlin popped champagne corks from atop the Berlin Wall. Long a symbol of tyranny and division, it was now suddenly an emblem of the triumph of freedom and hope. The forty-year Cold War, the sinister backdrop of my generation’s whole life, had ended not in Armageddon but in the laughter and singing of free people. It was a great moment, for me, for my generation, for the United States that had led the struggle, and for Western ideas and values.

Things got better. On March 2, 1991, Iraq accepted the terms of the U.S.-led coalition for an end to the Gulf War that seemingly ended for all time the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s threat to his neighbors. In July 1991, the Warsaw Pact disbanded. And on Christmas Day, 1991, the immense and indestructible Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire,’ collapsed. The ideological struggles between fascism, communism, and democratic capitalism, which had defined the twentieth century, were ended, with democratic capitalism the sole survivor. Francis Fukuyama famously called it ‘The End of History’ and it quickly seemed that he was right. Democracy sprouted in the once barren soil of Latin America, while China adopted something called a socialist market economy, its peculiar term for capitalism. Even the Israelis and Palestinians seemed to get in the mood as they launched what came to be called the Oslo peace process. To top it all, world economic growth took off, powered by the greatest boom in American history. The peculiarly American model of capitalism, unleashed at last, emerged as the norm toward which the world would inevitably converge.

The United States seemed to have no enemies. The president was welcome anywhere, be it London, Paris, Riyadh, Moscow, Beijing, Seoul, Jakarta, Cairo, Mexico City, or Buenos Aires. It was a moment of opportunity and hope much like 1946-1948, when America had also towered over the world and begun to lay the foundations for a new order of multilateral cooperation, only to have its work rudely interrupted by the outbreak of the Cold War. Indeed, this moment was even better. The institutions and concepts established in the earlier period had won, and now there was no possible contender to even threaten a new conflict.

There was another important difference as well. Whereas Acheson and the leaders of that earlier postwar era thought consciously about being ‘present at the creation’ of a new world order and of playing a direct role in shaping it, the leaders of the 1990
s
thought they would achieve nirvana automatically. They just had to follow Ronald Reagan’s advice and ‘stay the course.’ Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy represents a political end state because it ‘accords the individual the self-worth he has been seeking throughout history.’
 1 
A world of like-minded liberal democracies would have little incentive for war because as everyone knew, democracies don’t go to war with each other. They’d rather trade and get rich. A world of such democracies would constitute a stable, peaceful order. The top U.S. priority should thus be to promote the expansion of the realm of democracy, and the question of how to do this was answered with the single intoxicating word ‘globalization.’ This seductive tune was considered so catchy that countries would be willing to adopt quite demanding common rules (Tom Friedman’s ‘golden straight-jacket’
 2 
) in order to get rich. Globalization would automatically make countries become more democratic; and in becoming both richer and more democratic, they would become more modern and thereby more dedicated to peace, stability, and the innocent pursuit of happiness. It was a beautiful dream, the best part being that it required no one to be ‘present’ at any kind of ‘creation.’

No sooner had U.S. leaders won the war than they began mismanaging the peace. They continued acting as if the Cold War and the twentieth century had not ended. While U.S. defense expenditures did fall, at least briefly, they actually rose in relative terms because those of the old Soviet Union and other countries melted away. The old alliance structures were maintained under the old conditions, with Korea, Japan, and to some extent Europe remaining American protectorates and client states. Overseas commitments and bases were even expanded, particularly in the Persian Gulf with the establishment of the large aforementioned air base in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, non-military foreign operations continued to be neglected. The amount of unpaid American UN dues continued to mount, while U.S. aid and overseas diplomatic post budgets fell. The United States continued aggressively to negotiate international trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Uruguay Round that created the World Trade Organization out of the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. But no thought was given to the underlying infrastructures and conditions of the newly participating and newly opened markets. The Washington Consensus taught that free trade would automatically take care of all that.

Other important developments were also neglected. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the United States did little to help the successor states make the shift from communism and central planning to democracy and free markets, and little to secure loosely guarded stocks of dangerous materials. Lulled by the belief that the nuclear club could be kept limited, America and its allies were caught completely by surprise when India and Pakistan announced their new membership with loud bangs. While globalization spurred economic growth in some areas, its tendency to do so unequally and to generate greater gaps between rich and poor was conveniently overlooked. Also overlooked was the fact that globalization made those gaps more visible and forced peoples with very different beliefs and values into intimate contact in ways that threatened their identity. The end of the Cold War and the development of the EU and its new currency, the euro, had dramatically changed the dynamics of the U.S.-European relationship, but this development was not recognized either, any more than was the corrosive impact on Latin America of U.S. drug use and policies; or the implications of Islam’s sense of lost respect; or the significance of Japan’s broken politics, Korea’s new democracy, and China’s resurgence. The rapid spread of the AIDS epidemic, along with even more widespread epidemics of malaria and tuberculosis, was seen as a far away problem, as were the forecasts that by 2025 one-third of the world’s population would lack clean drinking water, and that rising sea levels and flooding would cut wheat production in places like Egypt and Pakistan by 20 to 50 percent.
 3 
To mention such things was uncouth, and a distraction from the far more important news coming out of Wall Street.

The result was that while the twentieth century may have ended on Christmas Day, 1991, the twenty-first century didn’t begin until September 11, 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon made it clear that history was still on track and that globalization was not necessarily a magic elixir. These attacks triggered far-reaching shifts of global relationships, with some old American friends looking more like antagonists and old opponents looking more like allies.

EUROPE

N
owhere are these shifts sharper than in Europe, where America has long had its most important international ties. Although the United States was born in revolt against Britain and much that was European, the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were all derived from European thought. It was the NATO alliance, founded on common values of democracy, human rights, and resistance to oppression, that won the Cold War. The U.S.-European alliance shaped such key global economic institutions as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO; it was the interaction of the U.S. and European economies that initially drove globalization. U.S. investment in Europe amounts to $80 billion,
 4 
far more than its investment in Asia and Latin America combined, and the output of U.S. firms operating in Europe accounts for about a quarter of European GDP. Europe’s investments in the United States are of similar magnitude. With GDPs of $10 trillion and $9 trillion, respectively, the United States and Europe together account for nearly 60 percent of the global economy. As the former WTO chief, now chairman of British Petroleum Peter Sutherland told me, ‘The success of our alliance is fundamental to the working of the global system.’

Sutherland is precisely right, and it is just that fact that makes the increasingly troubled state of the alliance so worrisome. While the Pew Opinion Polls still show majorities in Europe expressing positive attitudes toward the United States, the percentages are smaller than in much of the rest of the world, and falling.
 5 
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2003, at the spring 2002 Bilderberg meeting, and at the spring 2002 meeting of the Trans-Atlantic Policy Network, top business, government, media, and academic leaders from both sides of the Atlantic noted that the gap between the United States and Europe has never been wider. After asking for and getting NATO’s equivalent of a declaration of war, U.S. rejection of allied help in Afghanistan after September 11, on grounds that the Europeans would only slow things down, not only wounded European pride but raised questions of the alliance’s purpose. While the United States pressed for a quick military solution to the problem of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Europe insisted on UN resolutions and verifications of promised Iraqi weapons destruction. Indeed, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder vowed that Germany would not support military action in Iraq under any circumstances. The new U.S. doctrine of preventive and pre-emptive war rang alarm bells in a Europe with far more intimate experience of war than we have had. When the United States rejected the Kyoto accord, the International Criminal Court, and other treaties, Europe moved ahead to assure their coming into force even without U.S. ratification. On top of this, trade disputes over emotional issues like genetically modified foods mushroomed.

Moreover, the tone in which these issues were debated became harsher than at any time in the past. Old European friends of America expressed betrayal along with disappointment. The former EU Commissioner Eti-enne Davignon told me that ‘America is blowing up NATO in favor of coalitions of the willing.’ And the
Financial Times
columnist Martin Wolf said that ‘The United States had such a fantastic asset in the world’s identity of its interest with U.S. interests, but that is now all being thrown away. The United States today is frightening because it won’t be constrained. The left has always thought of the United States as a rogue state, but now the center is thinking the same way.’

For many Europeans, it seems the United States has turned its back on the values underpinning the global system and opted, in Wolfs words, for ‘might makes right.’ On the American side, Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith has referred to U.S. NATO policy as ‘keeping the myth alive,’ while a White House official called the Europeans ‘fair weather friends.’
 6 
In his much-discussed 2002 book
Of Paradise and Power
, Robert Kagan claims that ‘Europe is from Venus while the United States is from Mars,’ and argues that Europe’s military weakness creates a tendency both to appease and to tie down America.
 7 
Europe is increasingly portrayed in America not only as appeasing but also as anti-democratic, antimarket, inward looking, free riding, and unwilling to spend money on defense while being envious and resentful of U.S. power and success.

Beneath these specific issues and frustrations lie deeper matters of values, motivations, and models. The French columnist Dominque Moisi commented in
Foreign Affairs
that ‘ 1970
s
anti-Americanism was a reaction to what America did, but today’s anti-Americanism is in response to what America is.’
 8 
U.S. commentators like
The National Reviews
John O’Sullivan have warned that the EU is drifting toward becoming a power hostile to the United States.
 9 
And Martin Wolf responds by saying that the EU, China, and India may have to align in order to balance the United States.

This is not just the spat of an old married couple. Large tectonic plates are in motion that could dramatically change, if not destroy, the global system Sutherland described. The ‘end of history’ argument assumes that triumphant democratic capitalism is unitary, but in fact there are different strains. If history were to go forward as a contest between those strains, it would have to consist of a fight between the United States and Europe, because of all the world’s powers only Europe has the size, resources, institutions, and technology to challenge the United States. Indeed, some observers, including Fukuyama, are already asking if the term ‘the West’ still has meaning.
 10 
Given Americas declared policy of preventing the rise of challengers, this line of thinking suddenly makes the joke about a U.S. invasion of The Hague, coined as a result of U.S. opposition to the International Criminal Court, much less funny. Of course, actual invasion is not going to happen, but some kind of U.S.European Cold War is a distinct possibility.

Few Americans recognize the magnitude of Europe’s economic achievement. Instead, we tend to be impatient with Europe because of its difficulty in reaching a unified position, its endless committees, and its preoccupation with the eighty thousand mind-numbing pages of the
acquis communitaire
, the complete rules and regulations of the EU. But as President Kennedy noted in a 1962 speech in support of the effort, the task of building a United Europe is far more daunting than that of building the United States. I got a personal taste of this truth while working in Brussels in the 1970
s
, as head of Scott Paper Company’s European marketing operations. We had affiliate companies in most of the major European countries and were trying to standardize our operations so that they could be run on a Europe-wide, rather than a national, basis.