The president was, at least, clear about it. He did not dither. He did not fudge the truth about Chinese recalcitrance. He – briskly – walked away from a policy (linking human-rights progress to trade privileges) that his own State Department had crafted. He swallowed the Beijing humiliation of Warren Christopher. He abandoned congressional allies – including his favorite senator, George Mitchell – and human-rights activists who took the pure ““Wilsonian’’ line: that America had a moral responsibility to punish China for its abominable treatment of its own people. And he did it for the best of reasons: his policy had failed. Getting tougher on China would only have made things worse.
Indeed, it can be argued that this embarrassing reversal – or, perhaps, detour onto the pragmatic high road – will bring China policy into conformity with a broader Clintonian doctrine. It’s a theme that may well be the central organizing principle of this administration’s foreign policy: that economic (““soft power’’) considerations are not only as important as traditional strategic (““hard power’’) issues in the postmodern world, but that ““soft power’’ is also the best way to lure former adversaries – especially Russia and China – into a collegial world order.
This may be one instance where ““pragmatic neo-Wilson-ianism’’ isn’t an oxymoron. The policy is, at once, commercial and evangelical. ““Softies’’ believe the Russians and Chinese are in a box. They can’t be powerful – in the traditional, ““hard’’ sense – unless they are prosperous (power is expensive these days, given the high-tech weapons necessary to be a credible, coercive threat). And they won’t become prosperous if they aren’t members in good standing of the global economy, a social club that demands a certain degree of civility: prosperous countries can’t afford to be bullies lest they offend potential customers (a lesson the United States might take to heart after its unsuccessful effort to coerce a large potential customer, China, into adopting a more civil human-rights policy).
““Relative military [that is, hard] power is a zero-sum game,’’ Assistant Secretary of Defense-to-be Joseph Nye wrote in 1990. ““One side’s gain is necessarily the other’s loss . . . [Soft] issues involve large elements of joint gain that can be achieved only through cooperation.’’ Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott says this notion – that economic necessity will soothe the savage breast – is ““a central premise of this administration’s policy.’’ And he has taken no small amount of grief for it. Most of the grief has come from geostrategic hardheads who see softism as an overly romantic and Wilsonian (hold the neo-!) underestimation of Russia’s inherent loutishness. Ironically, many of the hardfellas – like Kissinger (page 36) and Brzezinski – have been suspiciously soft on China, paying lip service (at least) to the notion that increased trade may encourage the growth of a civil society – mostly, one suspects, because they remain wedded to their cold-war allegiance to China as a counterbalance to the Soviet threat.
The hardfellas are beginning to sound pretty creaky. Their most convincing arguments are vestigial. Even Brzezinski now admits: ““Russia is no longer a threat, but it is a problem.’’ Which may, in itself, be an overstatement. And yet, soft doctrine still seems a bit . . . soft. It is particularly soft when it comes to predicting the internal dynamics of the newly industrializing countries. The MFN argument seems reasonable enough – capitalism may well grow a Chinese middle class that will, in turn, demand the security that only the rule of law provides. Something like that has happened in Taiwan and South Korea. But it doesn’t address the question of the moment in China, or Russia: what happens if a society lacks the order and coherence to enforce the laws it makes?
Chaos – not the organized coercive power that ““realists’’ spend their days worrying about – is the real threat to international stability now. It is a form of power neither hard nor soft, but viral. It is the threat of provincial warlordism in China, of mafia power in Russia. Once again, the metastasizing Russian variant may be more dangerous than the implosive Chinese – and so, Kissingerian ““realists’’ may take some satisfaction that the source remains the same. But the nature of the threat is quite different, and potentially more difficult to control than the old Soviet menace – especially if, as reported last week, the mafia is gaining access to the Russian nuclear arsenal. Foreign-policy ““realists’’ have little of interest to say about anarchy; they live in an ordered universe, where power is a finite commodity to be balanced. Clintonian ““softies’’ like Nye and Talbott haven’t done much thinking about postmodern mayhem either; but, if nothing else, they have a vision – middle-class prosperity; the rule of law – that may be the only plausible antidote to the chaos afoot.
