China -- not the spread of democracy and not the war on terror -- will dominate US foreign policy in the foreseeable future, argues Gamil Matar* China is once again becoming a top priority for US foreign policy. The way the US is harping on about grievances, both old and new, suggests Washington is seeking to prepare the public for one of the major themes of the next presidential campaign. The Bush administration is searching for a cause -- for which read a new international pariah to fight -- behind which it can rally the US public. And what country better fits that profile than China, a nation the US deigned to acknowledge as an international power only when Nixon and Kissinger needed help over Vietnam. In the US media coverage of China is now more negative than was the case before Nixon's 1972 visit. China is blamed for unemployment in the US textile and garments industry. It is accused of keeping the yuan undervalued to undermine Western economies and of spending more money on armaments than it needs for defence purposes. And for good measure it is alleged that Beijing is not doing enough to discourage Pyongyang's nuclear endeavours. China is fuelling tensions in East Asia, say US commentators, citing Chinese protests against Japan's WWII atrocities. Beijing, US diplomats point out, has signed several agreements -- mostly economic, though some related to defence and security -- with countries that aren't particularly friendly towards Washington, including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Nepal, and Burma. These diplomatic incursions in Asia, Africa and Latin America have compounded US anger at China's refusal to include it in the East Asia Community. There is an unmistakable note of glee that accompanies stories in the US on China's domestic problems. Signs of social tension are growing in rural areas and the outskirts of cities and the gap is widening between rich and poor, crow the media, which has also accorded a great deal of space to recent reports of tensions involving Chinese minorities in South Asia, particularly in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, as well as on Chinese espionage in Australia. Of course, all of the above may be just a coincidence. It is a coincidence, however, that comes to look less fortuitous when we take into account Donald Rumsfeld's recent diatribe against China. The US secretary of defence claimed that China's military expenditure and its acquisition of sophisticated weapons are upsetting the delicate security balance in Asia, endangering Taiwan and other countries in the vicinity. Unless Beijing changes its ways, Rumsfeld warned, the US would distance itself from China and forge closer ties with India. Rumsfeld's statements, delivered at a conference on Asian security in Singapore, alarmed many in Asia and even in the US, including Henry Kissinger. It is wrong, Kissinger said, to equate Chinese ascendance with Germany's ascendance in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. China, he pointed out, has no tradition of military imperialism. Nor is China's ascendance evocative of that of the Soviets. China is unlikely to disintegrate in the same way the Soviet Union did, being far more ethnically homogeneous. Kissinger appeared to be rebuffing the views Robert Kagan offered in a study published recently by the Carnegie Endowment. Discussing how the US might respond to China's growing ascendance Kagan offered a number of options. One is for the US to drag China into a prolonged hostility that would be relaxed only when China agrees to play the international game on US terms, a tactic the US employed with the Soviet Union. Another option is for the US to forge closer ties and trade with China on the not wholly convincing assumption that trade will discourage war. According to this scenario the US and the West would provide China with enough incentives to play the international game on Western, not Chinese, terms. The third option, popular among US hawks, is to treat China as a hostile country and encircle it. This demands the US to upscale its military expenditure, improve its weaponry, build a circle of coalitions and military bases around China and cause as many problems as possible for Beijing, both at home and abroad. Another option Kagan suggests is based on the British reaction to American ascendance. Britain withdrew from North America, with the exception of Canada, and allowed the US to exercise hegemony over most of the Western hemisphere. It is unlikely, though, that the US will ever agree to pulling out of Asia and letting the Chinese dominate that continent. No country, say the pessimists, has ever attained global supremacy without a war or two. Old powers, argue the optimists, should have the wisdom to allow new powers to emerge freely. Whatever is going to happen one thing looks increasingly certain -- the issue of China will be fore-grounded in the next presidential campaign, which to all intents and purposes will begin half way through Bush's second term. When this happens the issues of democracy and the war against terror -- one of them at least, perhaps both -- will take a back seat in US politics, relegate to the place now occupied by the search for a peaceful settlement of the Middle East. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
