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Military hammer makes everything look like a nail
By Peter Lee
Both the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) are
displaying a disturbing predisposition toward militarizing their
national security strategies. It is understandable. An external
military threat is easier to sell and explain than a complex national
challenge of economic, social, and political competitiveness, and
there is a large and influential coterie of officers, natsec types,
and defense contractors that welcomes a military framing.
But the devil is in the details - the actual implementation of a
successful policy - something that both the US and the PRC are, one can
only hope, considering.
But the publicly available data is not encouraging. It describes the
primary dynamic of the PRC's maritime strategy: designing its
program of regional assertiveness/encroachments in a
way that prevents militarization of frictions and, in particular,
avoids direct military confrontation with the United States.
On the one hand, the PRC throws its weight around
with oil rigs, maritime surveillance vessels, and coast guard ships;
on the other hand, the PLA Navy is a virtually invisible player when it
comes to PRC moves in the East and South China Seas.
At the same time, the PRC conducts a discrete bromance with the US Navy.
Recently, the PRC participated in a US-organized
naval get-together, RIMPAC, in Hawaii, and made the seemingly
provocative decision to send a spy ship to shadow the exercise within
the US Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Not a provocation, I opined, but a
concession.
Previously, the PRC argued that military surveillance within its own EEZ by US Navy vessels such as the USS Impeccable was illegal and, in 2009, made a point of harassing the Impeccable as it sailed back and forth inside the PRC EEZ off Hainan Island.
This gambit backfired spectacularly as Hillary
Clinton used it as the justification for declaring the US interest in
"freedom of navigation" at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
meeting in 2010, and a fulcrum upon which to hang the US pivot to Asia.
Since then, the PRC has for the most part backpedaled
in order to provide no pretext for the US to accuse it of impeding
freedom of navigation of US military vessels, and thereby remove
"freedom of navigation" from the State Department's menu of actionable
PRC transgressions in the South China Sea.
At the same time, the US Navy argued that a close
reading of the the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(UNCLOS) - the US hasn't signed it but the US Navy uses it as a guide
for its multifarious activities in other peoples' EEZs and territorial
waters - did not preclude passage of US military vessels within the
Chinese EEZ even if their activities were detrimental to the PRC's
security. [1]
To strengthen its case, the US Navy also went the
extra mile of confirming that it was actually tracking PLAN submarines
and not just mapping the ocean floor, an activity that could be
construed as having dual military/economic significance and therefore
falling within UNCLOS jurisdiction.
So, I concluded, when the PRC sent a spy ship to RIMPAC
inside the US EEZ it was tacitly acknowledging the US Navy's
interpretation. And, given the PRC's current unwillingness to
aggravate the US military unnecessarily, that interpretation makes
pretty good sense.
Admiral Locklear, while less than thrilled about the presence of the spy ship, agrees:
"The
good news about this is it's a recognition, I think, or acceptance by
the Chinese that what we've been saying to them for some time is that
military operations and survey operations in another country's
[maritime zones] are within international law and are acceptable, and
this is a fundamental right that nations have," Adm Samuel Locklear
III, the commander of US Pacific Command, told reporters at the
Pentagon on Tuesday. [2]
So far so good.
However, diplomats and security brainiacs in the US, Japan,
Philippines, and, potentially, Vietnam, are trying to find ways to
counter Chinese non-military tactics by finding ways to redefine
situations in military terms so that the overwhelming US military
superiority (and its availability to Japan and the Philippines as
treaty allies) can be brought to bear against the PRC.
The
term of art for this repackaging is "gray zone conflicts". This
formulation has become a standard feature of Japanese defense
planning; as US frustration with PRC non-military moves in the South
China Sea has grown, it has also crept into discussions of what the
United States can do to up its game on behalf of the Philippines and,
potentially, Vietnam.
In
the Japanese context, the scenarios involve deploying military force
to deal with an ostensibly non-military PRC seizure of the Senkakus,
or forcing a worrisome PLAN submarine to surface near Japan. In the
South China Sea, the scenarios haven't been fleshed out in the public
sphere, but I suspect they involve things like interposing US Navy
vessels between Philippine fishing vessels or oil exploration vessels
and PRC ships at points of contention like Scarborough Shoal or Reed
Bank.
I am
pretty skeptical of the idea that PRC non-military moves should be
countered with a military response and I have a suspicion that some
within the US uniformed defense establishment feel the same way.
Japanese military boffins and the Pentagon are continually hashing
over "gray zone" definitions and rules of engagement and, in my
opinion, the Japanese government has been leveraging its willingness to
support a US priority - Japanese "collective self defense" - in order
to obtain US support in "gray zone" scenarios.
I
consider the US push for "collective self defense" a strategic
boondoggle even more flawed than the "pivot to Asia", which is really
saying something.
I
find the US obsession with "CSD" - the idea that Japanese military
forces must engage in war stuff not directly related to defense of the
Japanese homeland - somewhat mystifying. Apparently, Pentagon
planners are getting extremely nervous about the arms buildup in Asia -
which tracks GDP growth and, therefore, is getting pretty darn big -
and its implications for US military hegemony.
The
idea is to combine US and Japanese muscle and field a bigger, more
deterrent-credible force (in fact, I wonder if AirSea Battle - the total
war with the PRC from the Malacca Straits up to Hokkaido scenario -
was cooked up simply to demonstrate the impossibility of the US
funding and implementing a completely dominant force in Asia by
itself).
Japan is supposed to contribute its local strengths in minesweeping,
anti-submarine warfare, and aerial surveillance, at least in the
initial stage.
I
guess the idea was "Japan can't be a free-rider anymore and needs to
have some skin in the Asia-Pacific security game".
Well, as far as I can tell, Japan under so-called "pacifist"
constitution already had plenty of skin in the game - because it seems
most credible US-PRC World War III scenarios involve US bases on
Honshu and, in particular, long-suffering Okinawa getting nuked.
That's an agency problem - people on the same team but bringing
divergent objectives - a problem the US avoided when it ran the military
show unilaterally. Now, by trying to integrate Japanese forces into
the US command, we're giving an operational voice to people who face
an immediate threat of getting blown up during the implementation of
our grand strategy. Collective self-defense, to my mind, complicates
and compromises the US deterrent posture.
In
my opinion, if we feel we need to field more minesweepers,
anti-submarine warfare and Orions to deter the "Chicom" menace, we
should pay for them ourselves instead of hoping for a perfect
understanding with our Japanese allies if and when World War III rolls
around.
The
agency problem has already revealed itself with Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to re-establish Japan as a "normal"
nation, ie not constrained by the pacifist constitution imposed by the
US after Japan's defeat in World War II and able to
necessary/useful/useless/and/or catastrophically stupid things in the
realm of security affairs, just like any other regional power.
CSD -
since it permitted the Japanese military to abandon a pure
territorial-defense posture - was embraced by the Abe administration.
The
Abe administration swung behind CSD and sold it, rather
unsuccessfully, to an extremely skeptical Japanese public - with
fanciful justifications like "without CSD Japan couldn't shoot down a
North Korean ballistic missile headed for the United States".
Actually, the genuine attraction of CSD is that it allows Japan to
pursue military relationships with neighboring countries; to implement a
full-feature foreign policy including defense and security elements
as well as the economic and other soft power carrots that sustained
Japan's regional presence over the last half-century.
And
these foreign policy tools also allow Abe to pursue his preferred
regional strategy - exacerbating tensions with the PRC just enough to
push the Pacific democracies plus Vietnam away from the PRC and onto
the Japanese security and, most importantly, economic side of a
zero-sum equation.
Abe,
it should be noted, is no America-firster. [3] Like many Japanese
conservatives, he rejects the World War II victor's narrative and,
like Russian President Vladimir Putin, considers his nation's diminished
international clout as a tragedy and not a matter of geopolitical
justice. In his US preferences, Abe is politically and emotionally
inclined toward the Dick Cheney end of the ideological spectrum and
does not consider it his main obligation and mission to smooth the way
for Barack Obama in Asia. He's looking out for Number 1 - Japan - and
caters to, and exploits, US preoccupations accordingly.
For
those who pay attention, the CSD shoe dropped in July, as Japan's
ambassador to the Philippines addressed the significance of the
cabinet decision that "reinterpreted" the constitution to allow CSD:
Japan's
ambassador to the Philippines, Toshinao Urabe, says the proposed
"reinterpretation" of Japan's pacifist constitution would allow it to
help if a country it has a "close relationship" with is attacked.
This means it would help defend the US, which is its only mutual
defense treaty ally. Urabe said under the treaty, Japan is not
obligated to use force in helping. The reinterpretation would enable
it to do so.
But Urabe told reporters at a forum in Manila Thursday that in the
case of other countries like the Philippines, which he said Japan also
has a close relationship with, it would "depend on the situation." He
said Japan is most concerned with protecting its nationals if they
are in vulnerable security situations.
"But basically this is a policy to defend ourselves in various
situations which were not conceived before. And I think it's important
to make necessary preparation to various security situations," Urabe
stated. ...
Richard Heydarian is a Manila-based Asia geopolitical analyst. He said
the proposal is widely seen as a way to keep China in check. "On one
hand this will make it easier for Mr Abe to have much more robust
countermeasures against China's territorial provocations in the
Senkaku-Diaoyu," he explained.
Heydarian said it is also a way for Japan to gain a foothold as a
major security player in the region. He points out that Japan is
bolstering its image as a security counterbalance to China that the
10-member ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] can depend on.
[4]
There you have it. Instead of a unitary hub and spoke arrangement by
which the United States, as the big kahuna, manages its South Korea,
Japan, and Philippines alliances bilaterally and monopolizes the Asian
security space, CSD lays the foundation for a dual-hub system by which
Japan constructs its own security arrangements with the Philippines,
Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, and India in order to advance its own
diplomatic, security, and economic agenda in Asia ... which may
involve working with Japan's local interlocutors to accentuate the
polarity between the PRC and its neighbors even when the United States
for reasons of its own might be trying to wind down tensions.
CSD,
in other words, accelerates the marginalization of the United States,
rather than assuring its ascendancy. So, I don't think the US foreign
policy establishment should be slapping itself on the back for its
great job in finally getting CSD on the books.
By
the Peter Lee Law of Foreign Policy Verbiage - the amount of
government and think-tank output is directly proportionate to the
bankruptcy of the policy it is meant to explain, justify, defend,
repair, and/or obfuscate - I expect CSD to generate thousands upon
thousands of pages of analysis and recommendations, as well as steady
paychecks for hundreds upon hundreds of experts in the United States
and Japan.
I
also expect the new arrangement to contribute to a clutch of ugly
regional crises in the years to come, especially if Hillary Clinton
wins the presidency and accelerates the pivot dynamic of confrontation
and polarization that enlarged the diplomatic space for the US in its
role as the dominant military force in Asia.
A
prominent US China policy insider, Robert Sutter, made the case for
putting Hong Kong democracy and Taiwan independence in play in order
to generate additional pressure points on the PRC. [5] Actually, Sutter
carefully deployed the passive voice in characterizing China's
vulnerabilities and, essentially, advocated threatening to put them in
play; an important distinction since, once the US has signaled its
support, local activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan will seize control of
events, Japan will be tempted to stir the pot, and the United States
will find itself as little more than a passenger on the freedom train.
I
expect Hillary Clinton will feel compelled to demonstrate the
muscularity of her own presidency in contrast to the "leading from
behind" drift displayed by President Obama in his second term. The
possibility exists that the Taiwan presidential elections will produce
deadlock and an atmosphere of national crisis - abetted by a
Maidanesque group of "Sunflower" student activists whose
anti-Kuomintang inclination is ripe for amplification by the
pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) opposition - that
Clinton and Abe might find irresistible.
Ex-president and independence avatar Lee Teng-hui recently voiced the
opinion that the Senkakus belong to Japan (Taiwan's right to the
Senkakus - a claim that, I might add, is very persuasive to anyone who
looks at a map or, for that matter, knows that president Richard
Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also had strong
feelings about the legitimacy of Taiwan's position- is a central plank
of President Ma Ying-jyeou's policy). [6]
If
the DPP decides to cement its already strong ties to the conservative
wing of Japanese politics by repudiating Taiwan's claims to the
Senkakus, or even taking the next step of agitating for independence
under the assumption that the US and Japan will decide that respect
for the One China policy (and for that matter, for a certain degree of
stability and control over events in East Asia) must take a back seat
to Taiwanese self-determination, things could get very interesting for
the PRC's Xi Jinping.
Of course, the PRC president has not been sitting idly by.
Xi
has acted forcefully and pre-emptively to insulate the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) against the kind of shenanigans the US has
deployed against the Russian Federation during the Ukraine imbroglio:
delegitimization in the Western media, encouragement of democratic
dissent, and sanctions keyed to US dominance of the global financial
system.
A
Taiwan crisis, therefore, may not compel the CCP to roll the dice in
an existential war to sustain its claims to sovereignty in the Han
homeland.
The
western borders, however, offer challenges to control that the CCP has
not yet demonstrably mastered.
I
believe the most interesting and disturbing developments have taken
place in Xinjiang, home to almost 9 million Uyghurs who might interpret a
crisis over the sovereignty of Taiwan and Hong Kong as an opportunity
to advance their own claims to self-determination.
Conditions have already become extremely fraught. In recent weeks
there have been multiple bloody incidents, including one involving
nearly 100 fatalities (the World Uyghur Congress, an emigre group
under the leadership of Rebiya Kadeer, has claimed actual fatalities
number 2,000, an assertion that under other circumstances might be
open to dismissal but now merits some more serious consideration) and
can be spun as the massacre of Uyghur demonstrators by Han security
forces, an attack fomented by a group of aggrieved Islamists, or
something in between.
US
incitement is currently not on the table, even though the World Uyghur
Congress, which sedulously tends its relations with the US government,
has taken to calling Xinjiang "East Turkestan", thereby throwing its
hat in the ring on behalf of independence. Therefore, Western news
outlets are bedeviled by the issue of whether the Chinese
characterization of terrorists should be adopted, or whether the
verbose formulation of "aggrieved Uyghurs spontaneously venting their
anger against an unjust and oppressive regime" should be employed
instead. For the time being, some outlets have compromised by using
the Chinese label, but using quotation marks "terrorists" as a
distancing mechanism.
The
assassination of the imam of the PRC's largest mosque, in Kashgar, may
eventually convince some fence-sitters in the media of the existence
of an organized movement employing terror as a political instrument.
The
PRC government, of course, has already announced its conclusions.
It
has poured military and security forces into Xinjiang, and also
employed some measures that have attracted a certain amount of
bewilderment and mockery.
The
PRC government seemed to go over-the-top in rewarding locals - 30,000
locals by its count!- who supposedly assisted in rounding up the alleged
perpetrators of the recent massacre:
Authorities
in far west China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have announced
that more than 300 million yuan (about US$48 million) would be offered
in cash rewards to those who helped hunt suspected terrorists.
More than 10,000 officials and local residents attended an award
ceremony held in Hotan Prefecture Sunday, the first batch of the
rewards. Altogether 4.23 million yuan were offered at the ceremony to
local residents for their bravery in hunting a group of 10 suspected
terrorists.
Six people who offered key tip-offs leading to the location of the
suspected terrorists were given 100,000 yuan each. More individuals
and government agencies received cash rewards. [7]
The
Los Angeles Times' Barbara Demick described harassment against
students and government employees trying to honor the Ramadan fast,
and a campaign against forbidden head coverings for women:
At
one checkpoint near Kashgar's main mosque, three Uyghur women in
colorful, sequined calf-length dresses and a man in sunglasses sat under
a large blue umbrella the weekend before last watching people
shopping for the coming Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marked the end of
Ramadan.
When a motorcycle drove by with two women and a toddler, they flagged
it down and told the woman in back to dismount. The woman, who looked
to be in her 40s, was wearing a long black-and-white striped dress, a
patterned red scarf and a white veil that covered her mouth and nose.
Within minutes, a white van pulled up at the checkpoint with a large
red sign on the side reading "Strictly Attack Terrorism and Protect
the Stability of Society." The woman climbed in the van without
protest and was driven off, presumably to a Project Beauty headquarters
to be given a lecture on appropriate dress. [8]
In
the city of Karamay (an isolated oil outpost in the heart of the
desert and, perhaps, the easiest place to test drive this kind of
policy), per Reuters:
Authorities
will prohibit five types of passengers - those who wear veils, head
scarves, a loose-fitting garment called a jilbab, clothing with the
crescent moon and star, and those with long beards - from boarding buses
in the northwestern city of Karamay, state media said. ... "Those who
do not comply, especially those five types of passengers, will be
reported to the police," the paper said. [9]
By
the traditional calculus of "hearts and minds" (or its Chinese
variant, "hearts and minds and remorseless Han economic, cultural, and
demographic infiltration"), these measures would be seen as
ridiculously counter-productive.
Maybe the CCP is looking at the recent trendlines in Uyghur-related
mayhem and has come to the conclusion that "hearts and minds" isn't
going to cut it.
Or
maybe the PRC has decided that China, as a rising world power, has to
learn to play the militarized counter-insurgency game the same way the
grand master, the United States, does.
I
look at what the PRC security forces are doing in Xinjiang, and it
reminds me of what the United States did in Iraq's Anbar Province.
Those people determinedly engaged in Islamic practice - Ramadan,
beards, headscarves - probably are self-identifying as potential
security threats and end up in a database for surveillance, relational
mapping, etc. Maybe it doesn't yet resemble the massive database of
social and biometric data the US acquired in Iraq, especially in hot
spots like Fallujah (Centcom still holds on to a biometric database
including retinal scans and thumbprints for 3 million Iraqis, 10% of
the population of Iraq, [10] but it's a start.
The
ridiculously over-compensated local anti-terrorist practitioners:
they're also in the system, as assets, like the Anbar tribespeople
who, as a matter of principle and interest, provided tips and intel or
at least passive acquiescence to the US in the war against al-Qaeda.
At the height of the Anbar Awakening, in 2008, the US military was
paying $300 a month salaries to 91,000 Iraqis, a bill of $16 million
per month. [11]
The
only thing missing from this equation: the death squads (in Iraq, the
Joint Special Operations Command) and drones (AfPak) that close the
circle. I'm assuming the PRC has something similar.
I
hope the PRC doesn't believe it can crack the counter-insurgency puzzle
better than the US effort that, despite multiple iterations and the
outlay of tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars has
failed to produce lasting gains in Iraq or Afghanistan.
I
also hope the PRC is not looking at an example much closer to home,
which might qualify as the only truly successful
counter-insurgency/anti-separatist action in recent decades: Sri Lanka's
war of annihilation against the Tamil rebels that culminated with the
obliteration of the Tamil forces and tens of thousands of civilian
victims on a narrow spit of land in 2009, a humanitarian horror show
made possible largely by the PRC's steadfast, multi-year financial,
material, and diplomatic support. (See Clouds on the Sri Lankan horizon for China, Asia Times Online, March 31, 2012).
And
the PRC must also look at the danger of alienating the Taliban of
Afghanistan and other regional Islamist actors, who have heretofore
cracked down on Xinjiang-oriented activity in response to Chinese
economic and diplomatic blandishments.
Militarization of disputes simplify the statement of a problem, in my
opinion, but makes resolution ever more difficult and remote. It is a
temptation that, I hope, the PRC and the US can both resist.
Notes:
1. Close Encounters at Sea: The USS Impeccable Incident, pdf.
2. PACOM chief: China spying on RIMPAC brings 'good news', Stars and Stripes, July 29, 2014.
3. Yasukuni Blues: Understanding Shinzo Abe's Historical Revisionism, China Matters, December 26, 2013.
4. Japan Outlines Constitution Change Impact, Voice of America, July 17, 2014.
5. How to Deal with America's China Problem: Target Beijing's Vulnerabilities, The National Interest, July 22, 2014.
6. See here (in Chinese).
7. Xinjiang offers cash rewards for those hunting terrorists, China.org.cn, August 4, 2014.
8. China imposes intrusive rules on Uighurs in Xinjiang, August 5, 2014.
9. China bans beards, veils from Xinjiang city's buses in security bid, Reuters, August 6, 2014.
10. U.S. Holds On to Biometrics Database of 3 Million Iraqis, Wired, December 21, 2011.
11. Finding a Place for the 'Sons of Iraq, Council on Foreign Relations, January 9, 2009.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.
(Copyright 2014 Peter Lee)
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