For some reason, in today's offering Tom Friedman decided to write a totally coherent argument and then just tack one of his signature baffling mixed metaphors on at the end, rather than weaving it through the whole story. Friedman's main point is charmingly correct -- a lot of the problems we're grappling with would suddenly become much easier to solve if we were getting whole-hearted cooperation from China and Russia rather than extremely grudging semi-cooperation. Unfortunately, Friedman doesn't provide much of a solution except for exhortation. He wants "China and Russia [to] get their act together and understand that [widespread nuclear proliferation] is a much bigger threat to their prosperity than a post-cold-war world in which U.S. power is pre-eminent" and for "Russia and China [to] get over their ambivalence about U.S. power." Clearly, though, this isn't going to happen merely from us asking them impolitely. After all, ambivalence about US power is a natural thing for Russia and China to feel.
We're very powerful. And our basic story about why other countries shouldn't worry that our massive power will imperil their interests is "trust us -- we're the good guys." But the things we do don't always seem good to other governments. And, indeed, "being good" is sometimes bad for other governments. If you were in charge of the Chinese Communist Party, you probably wouldn't find talk about the United States spreading freedom and democracy around the world especially reassuring.
The upshot is that we're bound to be more concerned about proliferation than the Russians or the Chinese are. For us, it's an unambiguous bad. For them, it has its upsides and its downsides. But we could really use their cooperation. The question becomes what, in practice, would it take for us to get that cooperation and then are we willing to offer it? Importantly, it means we're going to need to set priorities. How much do we care about Taiwan? How committed are we to keeping the door open to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. If giving up on those kind of things could genuinely secure Sino-Russian cooperation on Iran, North Korea, and al-Qaeda is that a good deal, or a bad one?
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Heads in the Sand
Thomas Friedman is a bright man (even if his centrism is cringingly middlebrow). But what does he know about Russia or China, and especially their internal politics.
Cooperation is possible with both countries, but most of it needs to be under the table, and Washington must allow a healthy dose of un-cooperative rhetoric in public. Russia's problem is a humiliated and underemployed ethnic Russian populace on the one hand, and a restive, angry but quite large Muslim minority. Moscow cannot afford to be seen as coddling this administration, or any administration to follow. Chaos in the south of a country with more nuclear weapons than almost any other country on earth is in no one's interest.
China's troubles are similiar but different. Per usual, the neoconservative elites misunderstand the so-called China threat. At this point it is less that China might become a regional or global hegemon, but that it may fracture internally. China has spent almost half her history as a divided kingdom, and class, ethnic, religious, and environmental tensions are a genuine threat to the country's unity and stability. Protests - often violent, and largely unreported - are taking place daily across the country (and have been for the last decade). And despite China's nationalist pretensions the nouveau riche east end is coming to have more in common with the East Asian prosperity belt (included China's historic foe Japan) than the poor, struggling interior. Like Russia, we do not want a nuclear-powered giant to descend into chaos.
Posted by Linus | October 11, 2006 3:07 PM