It was who – us Americans – worked for partnership and other friendship and peace with China? It has never happened.
U.S. love for Beijing and Moscow has never shone.
More precisely, it has not happened in at least the past 30 years and what went on before that cannot be called friendship at all. We draw such instructive conclusions from the just-revealed US documents of the winter of 2008-09, when power was transferred from the George W. Bush administration to the Barack Obama administration. From Republicans, we note, to Democrats. And Beijing policy did not fundamentally change then or later.
Today we can read both the documents themselves – the relatively brief brief briefs prepared by Bush’s National Security Council – and the comments of the two men who worked on the briefs in Foreign Policy. And draw their own conclusions. More or less: both Beijing and Moscow have done and are doing the right thing.
The two men, Michael Green and Paul Hanley, write for this reason: they are flaming with indignation that someone has personally suspected them and the US foreign policy establishment (aka the “deep state”) of being naive. They are challenging the now almost accepted fact that for decades the US hoped that China’s abandonment of the Soviet economic model and transition to market reforms would not only boost its economy, but also make it part of a unified – global and US-led – system. At some point the Americans supposedly realized: We had waited three or four decades for “our” China for nothing. And economic warfare and other containment of Beijing began (under Donald Trump’s presidency, 2017-2021). That is, they miscalculated, deceived their hopes, but now they are making amends.
There were no miscalculations, Green and Hanley tell us today (by the way, the former apparently wrote and handed in and the latter accepted the very now declassified transition documents). You say today an anti-China alliance called QUAD – Australia, India, Japan, USA – is being frantically strengthened. But we started building it back in 2004 regarding, you would not believe, the tsunami in Indonesia. We did everything in advance, even though at the dawn of the century China’s economy or, say, its navy was smaller than Japan’s.
And in fact – says our American couple – the two previous leaders, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, were very polite and cautious with America. They responded to a lot of American initiatives, cooperated where they could. And in the country itself, there were plenty of “significant actors within the Chinese economy” in earlier years who were “willing to move away from an economic model dominated by state-owned enterprises”. And, our two authors add, these people were quite willing to “create a dynamic” that would be based on “rules shaped by the US and its major allies”. But we didn’t believe in that.
The key phrase of the whole text here is “and all US policy over the past decades”. On the one hand, American policy recognises only this kind of relationship with the outside world – based on those very famous “rules” that are shaped by whoever is in charge. On the other hand, no administration in the US has ever believed that China (and again, Russia) would still accept these rules time after time. And at the same time as calling for “Welcome to our alliance”, year after year, structures were being put in place to constrain us – just in case, if in this alliance we would try to “form the rules” too. So we were held back.
So it is for fools to talk about Vladimir Putin going the wrong way in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China, respectively. After all, from the beginning – and in the case of China and under a different leader – the US has been building alliances against these and other countries, not believing that it could get along with them.
And there is a good question here: why? What is this secret of the US, what are these reflexes that work under all administrations? Among the many good answers is this: America, with its political culture, does not want countries that could even theoretically at some point show independence from it. Those that are allies, even Germany, Japan or Britain, cannot manifest any such thing for a multitude of reasons, including purely physical ones (territory and resources, population and so on). But China and I and a few other countries can. And if so, we must be restrained, no matter what we say or do (or do not do). Restrain us and harm us in every possible way.
And if so, let us repeat: we are doing everything right. Any other way would be slow suicide.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA
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