Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

EB is a devoted reader and he's really watching the situation in Burma closely. He called Tom out re: China's role in this post:

How, in the words of the esteemed Thomas PM Barnett, is China acting like a strategic partner? He’s a very visionary thinker, but am I the only one who feels he needs to back this up at this time.

It sure as hell appears that China (and to a lesser extent India and America) does not consider this a priority and has done little to prevent the tragedy that has taken place thus far. How does that help the situation? How does this promote harmony and prosperity for the Asia of the 21st Century?

I emailed the link and quote to Tom, and he says:

EB needs to understand that China is NOT a strategic partner of the U.S. at this time. If it were, it would have the confidence to act as it should on Burma without fearing any negative precedent being set regarding Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.

To say China is not proving itself to be a potential strategic partner at this time is like chastising your girfriend for not acting like your longtime wife. If you want that sort of commitment, you better be prepared to extend it yourself. Otherwise, your hypocrisy on the subject overwhelms any positive message you may think you're sending with such nagging.

Unlike China, the U.S. enjoys the kind of confidence to act in such situations because: 1) we're a great political system that gets things right in the end even if we often engage in hypocritical actions along the lines of "do as I say and not as I do!" (so the world trusts us over the long term to do the right thing); and 2) in the strategic short run we're simply powerful enough to blow off other nation's protests regarding our actions that they find reprehensible.

China is neither of those two things today. The question I pose is how to move them into a position of responsibility in the international security order that is to our benefit first and foremost and ultimately helps morph their regime into something we find more appealing. And yeah, as an American grand strategist, I can selfishly wait on the latter a helluva lot longer than the former.

Why China is so reticient to step up is that it feels more like a Burma than like an accepted great power who can access such tumultuous situations without being called a hypocrite and made to feel defensive about its own system at the same time.

We can all say, like a Hitchens, that China should act and still be called out at the same time about its system, but guess what? You rarely gets to have your cake and eat it too. Most of the time we're forced to sequence our desires for change, with the key choice being, "Which step moves the process best today?"

Hitchens, a professional polemicist, is more than happy to pile on, because it makes for good show. I'm less interested in that instant gratification than I am in shaping China's rise.

China's progressively showing more responsibility on a host of situations (the Darfur baby-step reactions being the most recent, with the continued steadying hand on DPRK being the least appreciated). Would it be great for China to step up here on Burma? Absolutely.

Are we doing everything to make that happen? Not even close.

You want China to paper over a bunch of its strategic fears, you better be ready to paper over a few of your own.

America as a whole is just not ready, with its current political leadership, to implement a strategic realignment vis-a-vis China. Our mil-mil cooperation with China is virtually non-existent, and yet we want them to topple regimes on our behalf?

Who's being naive on that score?

Strategic partnership gets built systematically over many years. Burma's current situation can certainly put another useful brick in that wall, but we currently lack a critical mass of leadership on our side to take advantage of these "trolley cars" coming down the track, and that's too bad.

Still, one can always hope.

Looking at the situation from a system-level angle, what Burma says to me is that, in the absence of a transparent, Core-wide agreed-upon process for dealing with politically bankrupt states inside the Gap, we collectively tend to remain frozen in the face of such opportunities. I believe the Clinton team's efforts in the Balkans revealed the basic outlines of an A-to-Z rule set, which I laid out at great length in Blueprint for Action. Unfortunately, I believe the way the Bush-Cheney team did Iraq set that model back quite a bit, meaning this administration trashed a promising rule set for encouraging Core-wide responses to situations like the one we face in Burma today.

When one contemplates that negative Iraq impact alongside America's continuing inability to see the logic of strategic alliance with China and move in that direction, it's gets a whole lot easier to see why China is very reticient to stick its neck out on Burma.

We need to move beyond a strategic mindset that seems to ignore the system-perturbing impact of our own actions while simultaneously imagining that other great powers should exhibit the confidence to act in ways similar to ourselves when they know full well that their interventions won't unfold in some strategic vacuum, but instead can easily result in significant blowback that we'd be the first to encourage.

In short, we've been the 800-pound gorilla for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to be anything else.

As for the larger notion that the concept of the Core is called into question by a lack of action re: Burma (a notion the Glittering Eye promoted last week), that's a fundamental misread of the concept. The Core and Gap are a strategic reality, not an aspirational notion. The aspiration notion is "shrink the Gap." There have been and will continue to be places in the Gap that will "burn" and no one will care about them, or they'll merely cut the deals necessary to keep the narrow, desired economic connectivity in place (much like the US relationship with Saudi Arabia for decades). In the current climate, with the U.S. largely discredited in terms of this current administration and the continuing tie-down in Iraq, there's little chance the U.S. goes anywhere. And when that's the case, there's little chance that anybody else in the Core will go any place. They might cajole a bit here and there on the sidelines, but that rarely has any real impact. They might con some local peacekeepers into action, like in Darfur, sending some token troops themselves, as the Chinese have promised, but that too rarely answers the mail. The truth is, no America, no serious Core military action possible. But what Iraq also proves is that America alone does not achieve progress on any pace recognized as a win.