Alternative U.S. strategies with respect to china and the implications for vietnam

Contemporary Southeast Asia

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 154-170

  Van Ness, Peter ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DENVER   (United States)

^b AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84937188977     PISSN: 0129797X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1355/CS20-2C     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Much of this section and the next is drawn from Peter Van Ness, “The Impasse in US Policy toward China”, China Journal, no. 38 (July 1997): 139–50.
2. Robert S. Ross, Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969–1989 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
3. Texts of these documents appear as appendices in ibid.
4. For the official U.S. view, see Department of Defence, Office of International Security Affairs, United States Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region (Washington, D.C., February 1995).
5. As Cui Tiankai, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman has put it: “We consider that the foundation of Sino-US relations are the three joint communiques.” Beijing Review, 2–8 December 1996, p. 10.
6. For a critical perspective on the U.S. hegemonic role, see Benjamin Schwarz, “Why America Thinks It Has to Run the World,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1996, pp. 92–102.
7. Francis Fukuyama, “End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. See also, his End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
8. Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth (New York: Random House, 1996).
9. Samuel P. Huntington, et al., The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993).
10. “But now that the Soviet Union is no more, there is no equilibrium at all. There is only a multidimensional U.S. supremacy, quite unprecedented in all of human history.” Edward N. Luttwak, “Why We Need an Incoherent Foreign Policy”, Washington Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 29.
11. Jonathan D. Pollack, “Designing a New American Security Strategy for Asia,” in Weaving the Net: Conditional Engagement with China, edited by James Shinn (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), p. 99.
12. Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, Press Conference of the President and Prime Minister Howard of Australia, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, 20 November 1996.
13. Dao Huy Ngoc presentation to the Vietnam-U.S. Workshop, hosted by the Institute for International Relations, Hanoi, Vietnam, 21–22 March 1998.
14. For two different views about how these ideas drawn from two different paradigms are combined in the strategy of Realist Engagement, see Christopher Layne, “A House of Cards: American Strategy toward China,” World Policy Journal (Fall 1997), pp. 77–95; and Michael Mastanduno, “Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and US Grand Strategy after the Cold War,” in America’s Strategic Choices, edited by Michael E. Brown et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 123– 62. In a provocative commentary on the benefits of incoherence in U.S. foreign policy, Edward Luttwak concludes: “Upon examining both alternatives for a truly coherent and consistent policy towards China, one can only conclude that there is much to be said for incoherence and inconsistency.” Luttwak, “Why We Need an Incoherent Foreign Policy,” p. 27. The pragmatic, problem-by-problem style is typical of Samuel Berger, President Clinton’s national security adviser, and the way he has defined his foreign policy role. Elaine Sciolino, “No Geostrategic Chess: From Trade Lawyer to National Security Adviser,” International Herald Tribune, 19 May 1998, p. 2.
15. For a comprehensive statement of official Clinton Administration global policy, see “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement,” in America’s Strategic Choices, edited by Brown et al., pp. 283–332.
16. Lester L. Wolff and David L. Simon, ed., Legislative History of the Taiwan Relations Act (Jamaica, NY: American Association for Chinese Studies, 1982).
17. Nicholas R. Lardy, China in the World Economy (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, April 1994).
18. It is important to note that U.S. containment of China did not include trying to prevent military attack by the PRC against its communist neighbours, like the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979. On the contrary, Washington probably concluded at the time that wars among communist-party states (for example, Vietnam and Cambodia from 1978, and China and Vietnam in 1979) were on balance a positive factor as long as they remained limited, both geographically and in intensity.
19. Johnson and Keehn, “The Pentagon’s Ossified Strategy”, pp. 103–14. For the Department of Defense’s reply, see Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The Case for Deep Engagement,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 4 (July/August 1995): 90–102.
20. For one Chinese description of the long-term strategy, see John Garver’s review essay on Zhongguo da zhanlue: the lingdao shijie de lantu [China’s Grand Strategy: A Blueprint for World Leadership], edited by Cai Jianwei, China Journal, no. 39 (January 1988): 61–66.
21. Shinn, ed., Weaving the Net: Conditional Engagement with China.
22. Gerald Segal, “East Asia and the ‘Constrainment’ of China,” International Security 20, no. 4 (Spring 1996): 108–12.
23. Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Knopf, 1997). See also, Warren I. Cohen, “China’s Strategic Culture”, Atlantic Monthly (March 1997), who argues: “The powerful China we have every reason to expect in the twenty-first century is likely to be as aggressive and expansionist as China has been whenever it has been the dominant power in Asia — except when its leaders have reason to believe that potential adversaries have both the power and the determination to stop them” (p. 105).
24. Michael D. Swaine, “Don’t Demonize China: Rhetoric About Its Military Might Doesn’t Reflect Reality,” Washington Post, 18 May 1997, pp. C1 and C4.
25. Pollack, “Designing a New American Security Strategy for Asia,” in Weaving the Net, edited by Shinn, pp. 109 and 111.
26. John W. Garver, Face Off: China, the United States, and Taiwan’s Democratization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).
27. “In the past the emergence of all the great powers was accompanied by wars, as with Germany and Japan, or intense conflict, as in the case of the Soviet Union and the cold war.” Lucian W. Pye, “China: Not Your Typical Superpower,” Problems of Post-Communism 43, no. 4 (July–August 1996): 11. See also, Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), especially chapter 5.
28. For several variations on the theme of Offshore Balancing, see Christopher Layne, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy,” (pp. 244–82); and Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Press, and Harvey M. Sapolsky, “Come Home, America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation,” in America’s Strategic Choices, pp. 200–43; Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” International Security 18, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 44–79; and Samuel Huntington, “The West: Unique, Not Universal,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 6 (November/December 1996): 28–46. Chalmers Johnson articulates a somewhat different but parallel argument for an offshore strategy in Nationalism and the Market: China as a Superpower, Working Paper No. 22 (Cardiff, CA: Japan Policy Research Institute, July 1996); and Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, “The Pentagon’s Ossified Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 4 (July/August 1995): 103–14.
29. Patrick J. Buchanan, “America First — and Second, and Third”, National Interest, no. 19 (Spring 1990): 77–82.
30. Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics.”
31. Layne, “A House of Cards: American Strategy toward China.”
32. The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998 have graphically reopened the global issue of nuclear proliferation. See also, Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1998).
33. Andrew Mack, Proliferation in Northeast Asia, Occasional Paper No. 28 (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center, July 1996); and Takashi Inoguchi and Grant B. Stillman, ed., North-East Asian Regional Security: The Role of Institutions (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1997), pp. 192–201.
34. Quoted in Jemileen U. Nuqui, “Philippines: Ramos Warns of Conflicts in Asia,” Sources in Southeast Asia, Business World (Philippines), 12 December 1996, p. 8.
35. Since 1993, a so-called Track 2 dialogue (an unofficial meeting of officials and academics) has taken place under the four-plus-two format, jointly sponsored by the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Japan’s National Institute for Research Advancement. The Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue or NEACD has met in La Jolla (1993), Tokyo (1994), Moscow (1995), Beijing (January 1996) and Seoul (September 1996). Another NEACD meeting was scheduled for New York in April 1997. Each country sends a foreign ministry official, a defence ministry official, a uniformed military officer, and two private participants. North Korea has not participated since 1993. (Thanks to Fukushima Akiko and Michael Stankiewicz for information about the NEACD.)
36. For evidence of changing Chinese views, see: “China: Slowly Joining the World,” Strategic Survey 1997/98 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998), pp. 172–78; and Chu Shulong, “Security Perspectives, Structures, and Strategies in the Asia-Pacific,” Xiandai Guoji Guanxi, no. 5 (1997): 2–7.
37. Interview in Beijing, September 1996.
38. David Dewitt, “Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security”, Pacific Review 7, no. 1 (1994): 1–15; and Gareth Evans, Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993).
39. Paul M. Evans, “The New Multilateralism in the Asia-Pacific and the Conditional Engagement of China,” in Shinn, ed., Weaving the Net, p. 264.
40. Garver, Face Off.
41. Quoted in Nuqui, “Philippines: Ramos Warns of Conflicts in Asia.”
42. Ichiro Ozawa, Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1994).
43. Takahiro Shinyo, “An Agenda for UN Peacekeeping and Japan’s Engagement,” in The United Nations, Japan, and Sweden: Achievements and Challenges, edited by Bert Edstrom (Stockholm: Center for Pacific Asia Studies, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Conference Papers 22, 1998), pp. 103–21.
44. Shinn, ed., Weaving the Net.
45. Thomas A. Metzger and Ramon H. Myers, eds. Greater China and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Choice between Confrontation and Mutual Respect (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1996).
46. Garver, Face Off, pp. 148–66, argues that this commitment to deter the PRC from using force against Taiwan is less ambiguous today than it was before the “missile exercises” and the Sino-U.S. confrontation of 1995–96.