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The perils of irresponsibility
EU Referendum posting about the China arms deal:It won't be Iraq, or Iran, or even the Middle East. It won't even be the broader issue of unilateralism versus multilateralism. The next crunch point in relations between the EU and the United States is going to be China. So says Richard Bernstein, the veteran journalist who served as Time magazine's first Beijing bureau chief, writing in the International Herald Tribune today. And, as long as EU is seeking to recruit China as a "strategic partner," ignoring growing Chinese-American rivalry, the outcome does not look good. Bernstein selects two events from the past few days to illustrate the European-American divide on this question. The first, he says, was the decision of China's government to make a non-event of the death of Zhao Ziyang, the former party chief and prime minister, who fell out of favour in 1989 when he opposed the use of military force to quell the student-led democracy protests of that year, and remained under house arrest until his death this week. His second was a recent decision by the United States to penalise eight Chinese companies, including some of the country's biggest military contractors, for supplying missile technology to Iran. According to Bernstein, the relegation of Zhao to non-personhood shows that China is still very much a Communist dictatorship, a factor which tends to have considerably more weight in US policy-making on China than it has in Europe. As to arms transfers to Iran, this related to the biggest area of trans-Atlantic disagreement, the avowed intention of EU member states (or most of them) to lift the arms embargo on China. European diplomats claim that any lifting of the arms embargo would not be followed by actual arms sales to China, but what Bernstein picks up is a series of revealing comments made by Cristina Gallach, spokeswoman for the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. Gallach refers to China's participation in Galileo, the EU's proposed rival to the US GPS system, "This does not match with an arms embargo," Gallach says. "There is a total incongruity, and the Chinese in particular are keen to remove this incongruity." Read into that what you will but the most obvious inference is that there is no point in making available a satellite guidance system to the Chinese if you then do not allow her to purchase the weapons which can exploit the sophisticated guidance afforded by that system Bernstein poses the question: Could that lead to conflict with the United States, the country that would face China militarily if it ever came to war with Taiwan? "We look at the Chinese as a strategic partner," Gallach says. "Some Americans might have the temptation to look at China as a strategic competitor in the long term, so we have to start by analysing the situation in a sober manner, and to try to work together with the Americans." The next source Bernstein enlists is David Shambaugh, a China specialist at George Washington University. Writing in a recent issue of Current History, he observes that China and the EU constitute "an emerging axis in world affairs," one of whose common points is "a convergence of views about the United States, its foreign policy and its global behaviour."... There's more there and the link to the IHT article. Posted by: anonymous2u 2005-01-21 |
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