BY EVA CHENG
Chinese vice-premier Qian Qichen paid a rushed and urgent visit to Washington, DC, on April 18-24, deeply concerned that US President George W. Bush's next two major foreign policy decisions may turn out unfavourably for the People's Republic.
Bush was due to make a decision in April on whether to sell new arms to Taiwan and on whether to officially relaunch the anti-missile shield system suspended by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in September.
As it turned out, Bush didn't even wait until then. A mere three days after Qian had left the US capital, the Pentagon announced that a new test of the National Missile Defence system (NMD) will be conducted within the next few months. The revival of NMD tests seems a clear enough statement that any substantive US concession on Taiwan is unlikely.
Qian should have smelled that things weren't going his way. On March 23, before he'd even left the US, the Washington Post had published a leaked report that US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld had argued strongly in an internal strategic review on March 21 that the US's military focus should now be redirected towards China: a clear message that China has become the US's number one enemy. Bush was reported to have concurred with his defence minister.
Though the Bush administration hasn't yet officially concluded its review of the US's strategic needs, secretary of state Colin Powell seemed to know how it was going to turn out soon after his January swearing-in. He lost no time in dumping Clinton's characterisation of China as a "strategic partner", terming it a "strategic competitor" instead.
Powell elaborated his thinking in a March 23 address, "We were not looking for a single word to describe the complex relationship [with China], but to acknowledge that it is a complex relationship. We are trading partners. We will be regional competitors."
But clearly, China has more than mere regional value to the Bush administration. In fact, with a stroke of the pen, China has suddenly become the world's bogyman, a role which, in US ruling-class propaganda, used to belong to the Soviet Union.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has denied US governments much of their justification for maintaining a huge war machine.
Clinton had sought to pin such status on tiny and impoverished North Korea, amongst others, during his administration. North Korea's 1998 firing of a medium-range ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan, which North Korea said was a failed satellite launch, provided the US with new fuel to play up the North Korea "threat" — while disregarding North Korea's 1999 pledge to suspend all missile flight tests.
In contrast, clearly pleased with its escalating capitalist "reforms", Clinton actively engaged with Beijing, in an attempt to bargain for a bigger slice of the Chinese market for US capitalists. Clinton's decision to label the country a "strategic partner" was part of the same game — and was also designed to placate Chinese concerns that NMD was aimed at it.
Spoiling for a fight
Even during his campaign for the presidency, Bush was enthusiastic about extending NMD: from "protecting" the 48 continental US states to also covering US troops, friends and allies wherever they may be.
The system, however, would require amendment of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) treaty between the US and the Soviet Union — something which Russian President Vladimir Putin has opposed changing. Like China, Putin believes NMD will shift the global strategic balance dramatically in the US's favour and nullify the deterrence which he and other countries believe possession of nuclear weapons brings.
Bush has treated Russia's objections with contempt. He said in a campaign speech as long ago as September 23, 1999, "If Russia refuses the changes we propose, we will give prompt notice, under the provision of the treaty, that we can no longer be a party to it". He has been saying much the same ever since.
Donald Rumsfeld took the rhetoric up a notch during a January 26 press briefing, saying the US's partner in the ABM treaty "doesn't exist anymore".
The US Republicans, with Bush at their head, are determined to press ahead with NMD. Since Ronald Reagan first proposed the missile defence system — then called the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI or "Star Wars") — in 1983, the US has spent more than US$70 billion on the program.
The two phases of Clinton's NMD system cost at least another US$60 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Bush's expanded scheme, according to the US's Council for a Livable World, could cost US$120 billion or more.
The money has never stopped being poured into the program, even though its original ambitions have been truncated.
Designed to handle over 1000 warheads at any one time, Reagan's SDI intended to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". In 1991, President George Bush senior renamed the SDI "Global Protection Against Limited Strikes" and projected it would handle up to 200 warheads. Renamed NMD under Clinton, the scheme was scaled down to handle five to 20 warheads.
Washington's militaristic ambitions weren't waning, however; only its ability to justify them. For example, as recently as 1995, a declassified US intelligence report still concluded: "no country, other than the major declared nuclear powers, will develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile in the next 15 years that could threaten the contiguous 48 states."
But subsequent reports have adopted more alarmist conclusions. The 1998 Rumsfeld Report, for example, bases itself on worst-case, rather than likely, scenarios. A 1999 intelligence report spiced the assessment up further, saying over the next 15 years, the US "most likely will face ICBM threats from Russia, China, North Korea, probably from Iran, and possibly from Iraq".
Making up 'threats'
Many observers have refused to buy this line. Joseph Cirincione, director of the non-proliferation project at the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said last year that the 1999 report "reflect[ed] a lowering of previously established intelligence agency standards for judging threats".
But are these "threats" real when the US and allies — NATO, Japan and South Korea — possess military advantages vastly greater than any other nation or group of nations in the world?
Consider:
- At US$305.4 billion, the US military budget request for fiscal 2001 is more than five times that of Russia's, the next largest spender.
- That amount is more than 22 times the combined spending of the seven countries which the Pentagon has traditionally labelled "rogue nations" and which the NMD is supposed to protect against: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan.
- The US and its close allies spend more on arms than the rest of the world combined, accounting for 63% of all military spending, and together spend over 30 times more than the seven "rogue nations".
- The seven nations, plus Russia and China, have a total military budget of $106 billion, only 35% of the US's.
- While global military spending declined from $1.2 trillion in 1985 to $785 billion in 1998, the US's share of it rose from 30% to 36% in fiscal 1999.
Against this background, it's hardly surprising that the Son of Star Wars has attracted widespread condemnation and alarm, not only from Russia and China and the "rogue nations", but also from some US allies.
Some members of the European Union, which itself is resisting Washington's "discouragement" of its plan to establish a separate military force, are critical of the NMD threat. France is a vocal example.
China has a right to feel threatened by NMD.
Peter Brookes, principal adviser to a Republican-dominated congressional committee on East Asia, expressed at a Washington DC forum last July what many people in the new Bush administration have in mind: "Washington should stop denying that there is a link between China's nuclear modernisation, conventional military build-up and proliferation practices and the requirement for ballistic missile defence".
But China has an estimated 20 long-range missiles capable of reaching the US, compared to the US's thousands with similar capability.
Washington's aim is not defence, but to ensure its nuclear and military dominance of the Asian region. "Parity or near nuclear parity with the People's Republic of China is not in the United States' interests", argued Brookes.
Bush's determination to go ahead with NMD is sharply raising tensions. China made clear last year that it "will not sit on its hands" if the NMD went ahead, while Russia declared it might declare all arms agreements with the US void. Then in late March, Pyongyang said in an official broadcast that, given rising US pressure directed against North Korea, "we may discontinue the indefinite suspension of long-range missile launches we agreed with the previous administration".
This seems to be the very purpose of US military and foreign policy.