中国正在美国擅长的游戏中战胜美国？
中美聚焦 2023-04-07 15:16:17 来源: 海外网
在美国首都华盛顿拍摄的白宫。（新华社）
美国“治国方略”网站3月13日发表题为《在大国外交中，中国是否正在美国擅长的游戏中战胜美国？》的文章，作者是美国国家情报委员会前副主席格雷厄姆·富勒。全文摘编如下：
通过促成伊朗和沙特阿拉伯这两个强大但存在严重敌意国家的外交和解，中国刚刚完成了一种范式转移。时间将会证明，这一事件不仅会改变中东地区的大国关系，也预示着中国不断加强的外交角色的新阶段。
或许更为重要的是，它可能引发对于美国战略思维中冲突“不可避免性”或“永久性”的新思考。
这实际上引出了历史上最古老的问题之一：国家到底为什么要进行战争？战争是不可避免的吗？英国和法国曾经互为死敌，从13世纪一直到19世纪两国进行了数场战争，然后它们突然停止了争斗。法国和德国从16世纪一直到二战结束成为地缘政治死敌。今天，我们发现法国和德国正在密切合作。
换言之，上述所有冲突都不存在任何“不可避免性”。时势可能并且确实会发生改变，和解的机遇会出现——或者可以被创造出来。在某种程度上这就是中国在伊朗和沙特阿拉伯关系方面所做的事情。
现在，中国宣布愿意在可以实现互惠互利的领域中与所有国家做生意。与华盛顿形成鲜明反差的是，北京有能力与形形色色的交战国打交道。中国可以与伊朗、以色列和巴勒斯坦的领导人交谈，也可以与沙特阿拉伯和也门交谈。
相比之下，美国无法与之真正接触的国家的数目却变得越来越多。我们的高级外交官们似乎不了解外交的意义或目的是什么。他们可能认为，拒绝与他人交谈或威胁他人将能表达力量，但这也将剥夺我们的影响力。
在摈弃华盛顿用来观察世界的那种意识形态有色眼镜的情况下，中国凭借其行动能力获得了机会，而这就是中国现在似乎在推动伊朗和沙特恢复外交关系方面所取得的成就。然而，华盛顿非但没有欢迎这种地区冲突的化解，反而似乎对这一和解表现出明显的失望，美国有什么地方出了问题？
中国把经济发展和减少冲突作为其重要的优先考虑事项——这些信号将非常有效地在全球南方产生共鸣。
这些都曾经是美国的理想，直到苏联解体为止——那时华盛顿被“世界唯一超级大国”所陶醉。而从那时起，华盛顿一直沉迷于竭尽所能维持这一地位——即便在世界发生变化的同时。于是它采取了一种只能被形容为根本上负面的地缘政治愿景：为了孤注一掷地证明我们仍然能够发号施令，不惜一切阻止中国和俄罗斯在世界上的影响力。相比之下，中国现在似乎正在找到扮演更为务实的、非意识形态的全球外交官角色的沃土。
这不应该引起华盛顿的深刻反思吗？
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a meeting in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia July 9, 2022. Stefani Reynolds/Pool via REUTERS
It makes only a modest story in the U.S. news media. Yet China has just pulled off a paradigm shift by facilitating a diplomatic rapprochement between the two powerful but bitterly hostile states of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Time will tell, but the event not only shifts power relations in the Middle East but also signals a new phase in the growing diplomatic role of China.
Perhaps even more important, it might hopefully spark new thinking on the “inevitabilty” or “permanency” of conflict in U.S. strategic thinking, especially at a time when Washington has steeply downgraded diplomacy in favor of exerting influence through military power and punitive sanctions, as well as a readiness to declare other states “out of line” with U.S. ambitions and its notion of a “rules-based international order.”
This really raises one of the oldest questions of history: why do countries actually fight? Scholars offer a range of answers: Desire to expand power and seek domination, struggle over resources, out of insecurity and fear, or conflicting ideologies, faiths, and worldviews. Or maybe countries wage war just to fulfill the dangerous ambitions of monomaniacal leaders. Perhaps it’s all just written into the human DNA — to covet, compete, fight, destroy, and kill.
But of course these “deeper” interpretations of the origins of conflict can also be dangerous. It can lead to acceptance. Yet there is rarely anything predestined or predetermined about conflict or war. Human beings always have choice; leaders have agency.
Is war inevitable? It was once “well known” that the English and the French were simply sworn enemies, fighting 23 wars from the 13th century and into the 19th. Then suddenly they stopped fighting. Then it became “well known” that France and Germany, from the 16th century to the end of World War II, were bitter geopolitical enemies. Today we find France and Germany working in close cooperation.
“History teaches us” that Russia and China are in inevitable competition over power and influence in eastern Siberia — “natural enemies.” But times change and suddenly today we find Russia and China in a state of close strategic cooperation.
In other words, there is nothing “inevitable” about any of these conflicts. Times can and do change. Leaders change. Opportunities for settlement arise — or can be created. That is partly what China has done with Iran and Saudi Arabia.
So how easily can states and leaders transform long-term hostile relations? An interesting case in point is the dramatic change in foreign policy in Turkey roughly from 2000 to 2016. Under the intellectual guidance of President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s erstwhile theoretician and foreign minister, Ahmet Davuto?lu, Turkey declared a turning point in its foreign policy. After some 50 years of bad relations with regional countries, Davuto?lu declared a new foreign policy vision of “zero enemies.” Almost overnight, Ankara began to address long-standing frictions with nearly all its neighbors. It was a policy choice. Of course, it cannot be a panacea. And unfortunately Turkey partly abandoned some of these policies in the Syrian civil war.
It would be naïve to assume that war comes to an end if human beings simply decide to go to war no more. Some degree of friction and competition is written into all human relationships at the personal, national, and international level. The question is, how do you act on friction? When and for whom does war become desirable?
Unsurprisingly, U.S. policymakers were uncomfortable with Davuto?lu’s foreign policy vision. They wanted him to adhere to the America-driven NATO game plan to compel all other countries to acknowledge and support America’s perception of enemies.
Now, however, comes China declaring its willingness to do business with all countries where mutual benefits are to be gained. (Taiwan is a conundrum in progress.) In stark contrast to Washington, Beijing finds itself able to deal with all kinds of warring countries. China talks to Iran and Israel and Palestinian leaders, as well as with warring Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
In contrast, the number of countries with which the U.S. cannot seriously engage grows ever larger: it will not talk with Cuba, Iran, or the important Palestinian political party Hamas. Nor will it engage the governments of Venezuela or Syria. This would appear to be a self-inflicted diplomatic wound that effectively limits our own diplomatic maneuverability. At a time when our relations with both Russia and China border on crisis, our secretary of state maintains virtually no personal contact with his counterparts in either country over long periods of time. Our top diplomats seem not to understand what the meaning or purpose of diplomacy is. They may believe that refusing to talk to others or threatening others projects strength. But it also deprives us of leverage.
China gains access through its ability to act without the ideological blinders with which Washington sees the world. And that is what China has now appeared to achieve in overseeing the restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yet, rather than welcoming this offramp from a major and dangerous regional conflict, Washington seems palpably dismayed at the rapprochement. (Watch to see what China will do in Africa next.) Is there something wrong here?
One might argue that China seeks only to cynically capitalize on Washington’s weaknesses, that China has no concern for values of human rights and democracy that Washington claims to champion — the same Washington, one might note, that is notorious for its hypocrisy in its selective support for democracy and human rights and uses these values as weapons against its enemies, never as a gift bestowed upon friends.
What would happen if the United States suddenly decided to adopt a policy similar to Turkey’s of the past decade that also included the idea of the indivisibility of security; that is, that there can be no true regional security unless all players in the region feel secure? (Think Ukraine.) Or adopt China’s pragmatic policies of today? Would we not gain a great deal more flexibility instead of slapping endless ineffective sanctions on those we do not like — and even, for that matter, on friendly countries that fail to enforce our sanctions abroad?
This is not to say that the foreign policy of Turkey or China is the ideal. There are many grounds on which to be critical of some of China’s more heavy-handed policies in the South China Sea, for example. Overall, however, China places its major priorities on economic development and the reduction of conflict — messages that resonate very effectively in the Global South.
These were once American ideals until the fall of the Soviet Union at which point Washington became inebriated with the idea of being the “world’s sole superpower.” Since then, Washington has been obsessed with doing everything it can to maintain that status — even as the world changes. It has thus adopted what can only be described as a fundamentally negative geopolitical vision: do what it takes to block Chinese and Russian influence in the world in a desperate attempt to prove that we can still call the shots. By contrast, China, for all its faults, now seems to be finding fertile ground to play as a more pragmatic, non-ideological global diplomat.
Should this not elicit a deep rethink in Washington?
Global Disorder- What Are the Options?
https://grahamefuller.com/global-disorder-what-are-the-options/
August 22, 2017 by Graham E. Fuller (grahamefuller.com)
Global disorder is on the rise. What can the US do about it? There are two fundamentally different approaches one can take—it all depends on your philosophy of how the world works.
The first school thinks primarily in terms of law, order and authority: it accepts the need for a global policeman. The second school is more willing to let regional nations take the initiative to eventually work things out among themselves. Both schools possess advantages and disadvantages. Something called Balance of Power politics lies halfway between the two.
Global policemen nominates themselves from among the ranks of the most powerful—and ambitious— states of the world. Over the last half century the US has assumed this role—but a significant shift is already under way. In Washington this school argues that growing American disinclination to assert order is a key reason for a more chaotic world. From the end of World War II to the fall of the USSR in 1991 Washington had shared, reluctantly, that role with the Soviet Union—rivals but both unwilling to let the world spin out of control into chaos and nuclear war. Then, after the fall of the USSR, the US triumphantly assumed the role of “the world’s sole superpower.” In an earlier century the British Empire played the same role, although contested by Germany, France and others.
In Washington right now neoconservatives and liberal interventionists (export democracy, by gunpoint if necessary) lead the charge against what they see as US abandonment of its moral duty, leaving the world in the lurch. Their list of American failed duties is long: if only we had moved earlier to remove the Kim dynasty in North Korea, or Asad in Syria, or blocked the referendum that reincorporated Crimea into Russia, or brought about regime change in Iran, or backed Saudi Arabia against Qatar to keep the Gulf from splitting, or employed sufficient force to put an end to civil conflict in Afghanistan, or backed Ukraine to the hilt against Russia, pressed more vigorously in Venezuela, established firmer lines in the China Sea, warned Philippine leader Dutarte off from his murderous anti-drug policies, and intervened to prevent looming Ethiopian-Somali-Eritrean war in the strategic Horn of Africa, etc. The list of US duties, neglected in the eyes of this school of “benign” intervention, is endless.
Yet this perspective raises troubling questions:
-Is the US willing to perpetually expend its blood and treasure around the world in military and covert interventions to remove undemocratic leaders—or simply leaders we don’t like? Simply to maintain US pre-eminence? What is the overall gain in a cost-benefit analysis?
-How acceptable are the opportunity costs of such interventions—as opposed to better use of US taxpayer money domestically?
-How much can the US really prevent the rise of other powers with their increasing sense of their own interests and entitlements? Small powers are willing to sacrifice quite a lot when it involves interests on their doorstep—compared to limited American enthusiasm for intervention across an ocean for dubious gain.
-How do we respond to rising weapons technology abroad which increasingly circumscribes US freedom of action? Nuclear weapons employ technology from the mid-20th century. And by now many powers are developing a meaningful cyber capability against rivals and opponents. To a cyber-warrior the world is a candy store of targets. Ditto for drones— simple technology spreading fast, capable of inflicting potentially great damage.
The counter-perspective to the global policeman accepts the reality of new powers arising all around us. There is little we can do to prevent them. We increasingly face major alternative power centers out there. China, a non-player for the last hundred years or more (unlike in much earlier centuries), is formidably back on the scene and asserting political, economic and cultural power. China even assumes an new degree of global leadership functions, some of which contain positive features. Europe, after over a century of murderous and suicidal wars, is finally back on its feet representing perhaps the most progressive political grouping in the world. With a lot of soft and hard power Europe feels increasingly independent. Russia has a global vision stemming from centuries of exercising power widely across Eurasia, and in the Cold War, as a “global super-power.” Its diplomatic and military power far overshadow its poor economy, but it is willing to pay the cost to be part of the global game. As with China, Russia is not entirely a negative factor on the world scene either, except to those US hawks reluctant to compromise with any alternative power.
Additionally the world is witnessing more and more medium powers asserting their interests in their own regions than the US or the Soviet Union would ever have “permitted” during the Cold War. Today that list includes states like India, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Iran, Canada, and South Korea with strong perceptions of their own interests.
Any world policeman today faces a growing number of flash-points beyond its capabilities. Many are ugly and may cost lives of millions of people. Humanitarian crises will continue to abound (like Palestine, Yemen, South Sudan, the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Afghanistan, global refugees.) Global warming and environmental degradation create powerful refugee mills that produce millions of hungry and angry have-nots. US intervention is not designed to cope with these issues.
And then routine intervention by a world policeman also creates another major negative: the continued political infantilization of so many countries in the world. Routine US intervention invariably leads to warring parties who prefer in the end to deal with Washington rather than with their own rivals for power. We see this repeatedly, most recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere where factions prefer to manipulate Washington to get what they want rather than face local realities. The Gulf States today are similarly playing Washington against Iran rather than communicating.
So a difficult and deeper issue arises: should most countries and peoples be “allowed” to stew in their own juices? To settle their own issues? Should they not take local responsibility? Doesn’t political maturity arise from being compelled to deal with rivals within a country, or a region? Remember, everybody in the world is eager to enlist the US to fight on its side. Didn’t it take two hideous World Wars (preceded by many uglier centuries before then) before war-like Europeans finally figured out that enough was enough, and created alternative mechanisms for dealing with each other? Yet now it is an article of faith in European politics that war in Europe must be unthinkable. Do problems have to “ripen” (to use that ugly political science term) before warring factions decide it is simply too damaging, dangerous, costly — even immoral—to press the conflict forward?
In a thoughtful and skillfully-argued recent essay, long time journalist and conservative geopolitical observer and thinker Robert Kaplan shows himself to be in the first camp: the indispensable need for imposed law and order. http://nationalinterest.org/print/feature/americas-darwinian-nationalism-21889
He argues that only continuing American commitment to its deepest international ideals is what makes the US what it is; that if we fail to uphold our ideals we are left with no organizing national principle—and thus no national purpose. (Never mind that these “ideals” are upheld on a highly selective, transient, cherry-picked basis.)
But do we really believe that the US will atrophy as a society in the absence of “maintaining global values?” It would be sad to think that US greatness depends on constant intervention and war in the name of the global order.
How long can the US go on “generously,” supplying international order? Perhaps we are indeed doomed to watch an increasingly Darwinian world out there, operating without Big Brother. But the handwriting is on the wall: few in the world still support American policing of the world—or perhaps policing by any single state.
If policing is required (and there may be an occasional role for it) it will ever more likely involve a consortium of major international players—at a bare minimum EU, China, and Russia. The UN Security Council, when it can agree, also plays an important role. Indeed, these three powers are determined to deny the US any further monopoly of international power. And that was true before Trump.
In the end, how do we think about history? A process of gradual advancement? Or anarchy kept at bay only by great powers? Does history have any “meaning,” any trajectory? Or, as an earlier British statesman debunked the whole notion: “history is just one damn thing after another.”
If we believe that permanent conflict is simply a fundamental element of the human condition, then the argument for a policeman gains weight. But from now on international policing is going to be shared—like it or not. And however “inefficient” it may be.
After all, there aren’t many “benign” hegemons around any more to do the job—if they ever existed.
Graham E. Fuller is a former senior CIA official, author of numerous books on the Muslim World; his latest book is “Breaking Faith: A novel of espionage and an American’s crisis of conscience in Pakistan.” (Amazon, Kindle) grahamefuller.com
