The dragon awakes

National Interest, The, Summer, 2005 by Ian Bremmer

NAPOLEON'S PREDICTION is coming to pass: China's awakening is moving the world around it. China is building its military capacity at a pace that has Washington's attention. The added muscle allows Beijing to more aggressively pursue regional territorial interests to an extent that worries the White House. The recent heightening of tensions on both sides of the Taiwan Strait has U.S. diplomats working overtime to protect the status quo there. And Washington is becoming increasingly irritated with China's inability or unwillingness to pressure North Korea to abandon its destabilizing nuclear ambitions.

But it is China's urgent need for secure, long-term access to energy supplies and raw materials that is driving Beijing to define China's national interests much more broadly--and well beyond China's traditional sphere of influence. That dynamic is bringing U.S. and Chinese interests into conflict in unprecedented ways. It is also creating the biggest change in the strategic structure of world politics since the end of the Cold War.

IN RECENT weeks, Washington has gone public with its worries that China's military power has become a threat to U.S. interests. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 17 that he was alarmed by China's growing military capacity and the role its "dictatorial system" might play in Asian affairs. Later in the week, during his first major briefing to Congress, CIA Director Porter Goss warned that China's military build-up not only tilts the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, it threatens U.S. forces elsewhere in East Asia. At the end of the week, a meeting of the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance, a cornerstone of U.S. national security interests in the region, focused on concerns in Washington and Tokyo that the regional military balance is shifting steadily toward China. In response, China accused both of provocation.

The "Taiwan lobby" in the U.S. Congress is also sounding an alarm. On February 16, Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate proposed a joint resolution to resume diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The proposal would have proven political dynamite if it had any chance of passing. It did not. While the Bush Administration resolutely opposed the move as a dangerous encouragement of Taiwan's independence movement, China treated the resolution as a grave insult.

The pressure points in the Sino-U.S. Asian security relationship are well known. On-again, off-again tensions between China and Taiwan are presently on again. Despite the lack of formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Washington has pledged to protect the island nation from attack and to arm Taiwan, via the Taiwan Relations Act. Washington has established a clear policy on the China-Taiwan conflict: It opposes any challenge from either side to the status-quo stalemate. But the White House has had only limited success in persuading Taiwanese officials to drop threats to amend Taiwan's constitution, to change the official name of the country to reflect a move toward sovereignty, or to call for a referendum on independence from the mainland. Nor was Washington able to dissuade Beijing from going ahead with a March "anti-secession law", which provides a quasi-legal basis for invasion should Taiwan declare formal independence.

And Washington has not had much success persuading Beijing to help ratchet up pressure on its notional ally, North Korea, to open itself to the Complete Verifiable Irreversible Denuclearization (CVID) the Bush Administration demands. The Bush team has little leverage with Kim Jong-il's reclusive regime. It counts on China, North Korea's major supplier of food and energy, to press Pyongyang to renounce the nuclear brinkmanship it uses to destabilize the region and gain concessions for its ruined economy. But China's near-term interests are not perfectly aligned with Washington's. More than ongoing U.S.-North Korean tensions, China fears that a North Korean collapse would flood China's already restive Jilin and Liaoning border provinces with sick and starving North Korean refugees. Some Chinese officials also worry that a premature (in Beijing's estimation) Korean reunification might take place on American terms. Finally, because Pyongyang is well aware of Beijing's fears, Chinese leaders fear North Korea might not respond to their pressures or their entreaties.

As if China's growing military capacity weren't already worrisome, the Bush Administration was alarmed earlier this year when senior European diplomats began discussing a plan to lift Europe's embargo on the sale of weapons to China, imposed following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. On a tour of Asian capitals in March, an uncharacteristically blunt Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Europe more than once not to lift the ban and reminded the European media, "It is the United States--not Europe--that has defended the Pacific."

From China's point of view, the U.S. strategic position in Asia remains strong. Washington's geostrategic response to security threats emanating from the War on Terror has American troops in forward positions in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan--just across the Chinese border. Washington removed the Taliban from power and has established a friendly regime in Afghanistan. U.S. relations with both Pakistan and India, China's traditional regional rival, are closer than at any point in decades. In March, the Bush Administration announced it was ready to sell F-16 fighter aircraft to both.