WASHINGTON: Despite President George W. Bush’s efforts to embrace Taiwan ever tighter, Vice President Dick Cheney and influential right-wingers close to key policymakers at the Pentagon complain that the administration has become too complacent about what they call a growing threat from China.
Citing what they say is a major military build-up by Beijing, they want the administration to provide more sophisticated weapons to Taiwan, bolster the US military presence in East Asia, and follow through on proposals to create a new security framework that could act as a prototype alliance among what they deem the region’s democratic states.
The latest proposals have been voiced in this week’s Weekly Standard magazine, an influential right-wing publication, by Gary Schmitt, the executive director for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an organization whose founding members included both Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and whose recent calls for dramatic shifts in Middle East policy and regime change in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the administration has largely followed.
“The truth is that the United States can put off competition with China only so long,” according to Schmitt, a former Republican Congressional staff member. “At the end of the day, China’s ambitions make a contest inevitable. For that reason, the United States should be taking advantage of China’s current preoccupation with its internal affairs to strengthen our hand in the region.”
Schmitt’s article comes amid modest signs of improvement in Sino-US ties since one year ago, when Schmitt’s colleagues at the PNAC and the Weekly Standard were still fuming over Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deft diplomatic footwork in defusing the crisis over the forced landing and subsequent detention of a US reconnaissance plane and its crew.
At Rumsfeld’s insistence, however, Washington suspended military-to-military ties with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that have still not been entirely restored despite the visit late last month of a senior Pentagon official, Peter Rodman, to Beijing, where he met Defence Minister Gen Chi Haotian.
The most important boost in ties came after the Sept 11 attacks, when Beijing pledged to provide intelligence on Al Qaeda and muted its own very serious misgivings about Washington’s aggressive and successful pursuit of military basing agreements with China’s Central Asian neighbours.
China’s silence, however, should not be understood in any way as support or even acquiescence in Washington’s recent moves, according to Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Particularly alarming to Beijing have been Washington’s withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty; its beginning construction on a national missile defence (NMD) system; its growing military ties with India; and Bush’s own promise to help Taiwan defend itself, including by selling it top-of-the line weapons and surveillance systems and increasing military exchanges symbolized by an unprecedented meeting this spring between Taiwan’s defence minister and Deputy Pentagon Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Long ambivalent about Washington’s post-Cold War role as the global hegemon, Chinese attitudes began turning more fearful already in 1999 as a result of the Clinton administration’s air campaign in Kosovo, according to Pei.
Beijing’s fears are focused in particular on the political appointees in the Pentagon, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. The Pentagon, for example, reportedly refused to deal directly with the PLA in exchanging intelligence during the ‘anti-terrorism’ war, leaving that job to the CIA instead.
Rumsfeld also reportedly barred the interpreter provided by the State Department from attending the meeting he held with visiting Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao in May at the Pentagon in what was widely seen as both a rebuke to Powell’s far more conciliatory approach toward Beijing and an intent to keep what in diplomatese is called a “frank exchange of views” as closed as possible.—Dawn/The InterPress News Services.