Smart Diplomacy

I have made many posts about how poor our foreign policy has been under Obama, but I have to give him and the administration credit for this. This is actually smart diplomacy. [Link]

The cascade of statements, deployments, agreements and announcements from the United States and its regional associates in the last week has to be one of the most unpleasant shocks for China’s leadership — ever.  The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China’s column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn’t enough, a critical mass of the region’s countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers.

Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted.  Rarely have so many red lines been crossed.  Rarely has so much face been lost, so fast.  It was a surprise diplomatic attack, aimed at reversing a decade of chit chat about American decline and disinterest in Asia, aimed also at nipping the myth of “China’s inexorable rise” in the bud.

The timing turned out to be brilliant.  China is in the midst of a leadership transition, when it is harder for important decisions to be taken quickly.  The economy is looking shaky, with house prices falling across much of the country.  The diplomatic blitzkrieg moved so fast and on so many fronts, with the strokes falling so hard and in such rapid succession, that China was unable to develop an organized and coherent response.  And because Wen Jiabao’s appearance at the East Asia Summit, planned long before China had any inkling of the firestorm about to be unleashed, could not be canceled or changed, premier Wen Jiabao was trapped: he had to respond in public to all this while China was off balance and before the consultation, reflection and discussion that might have created an effective response.

Credit where credit is due.

Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team.  The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy.  They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power.  In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.

It will not change the fundamental dynamics of a re-election race shaped so far by voter concern about poor economic performance, but the effects of the President’s re-assertion of American primacy in the Pacific will reinforce the public perception that he has grown into the foreign policy side of his job.  He looked very presidential in Asia; those things count.

But a successful opening is not the same thing as a final win.  The opening American gambit in the new great game was brilliant, but China also gets a move.  On the one hand, the sweep, the scope and the success of the American moves make it hard for China to respond in kind; on the other hand, the humiliation and frustration (and, in some quarters, the fear) both inside the government and in society at large over these setbacks will compel some kind of response.

China, mindless conventional “decline” wisdom to the contrary, is much weaker and poorer than the United States, yet it is Chinese power rather than American supremacy that China’s neighbors most fear.  China’s diplomacy faces an infuriating paradox: If it accepts the renewal of a US-based order in Asia it looks weak and is forced into an inferior political position; if it openly fights that order it alarms its neighbors into clinging more closely to Uncle Sam.