Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

China has protested vigorously any intrusion by the United States and its Japanese client into Taiwanese affairs, but to no avail. The United States continues to sell arms to Taiwan in violation of agreements the Reagan administration signed with China during the 1980s (in the communiqué of August 17, 1982, the U.S. government promised gradually to reduce the quantity and not improve the quality of arms sold to Taiwan). These sales include 150 F-16 advanced fighter aircraft, which President Bush agreed to sell during the 1992 presidential election campaign in order to appeal to voters of Texas, where the airplanes are manufactured. Combined with 60 Mirage fighters from France and sophisticated fighter aircraft that it manufactures itself, Taiwan has an aviation capability superior to anything possessed by the mainland. Taiwan’s ability to threaten Chinese coastal cities, including Shanghai, is an effective deterrent against any mainland attempt to invade the island. This is one reason why mainland China’s leadership seeks to intimidate Taiwan through the threat of a missile attack rather than an invasion and why the U.S. proposal to develop and station antimissile missiles on Taiwan is so alarming to them.

Slightly more than a week after Clinton had reassured his Chinese audience that the United States had no designs on their country, Secretary of Defense Cohen, at a joint news conference with his South Korean counterpart, outlined a military role in East Asia as dangerous as the one the USSR planned in Cuba in 1962—which almost led to nuclear war. Cohen indicated the United States intended to maintain combat troops on the Korean peninsula indefinitely, offering no reason why American troops should remain in a potentially unified Korea or who exactly they were meant to defend against. He also spoke of how any pullout of forces from Japan would create a dangerous power “vacuum” that “might be filled in a way that would not enhance stability but detract from it.” This was interpreted at the time in the Japanese and Korean media as a barely veiled reference to China as a future enemy and as a warning against the possibility that Japan might undertake a foreign policy independent of the United States.

The friendly relations the United States enjoyed with China during the last eighteen years of the Cold War era, following the historic Nixon-Kissinger realignment, were based on a common opposition to the USSR. The collapse of the Soviet Union therefore ended China’s main usefulness to the United States as an ally, while enhancing its new status as a possible long-term rival to American hegemony. In the wake of the Cold War, with the Pentagon intent on maintaining near Cold War levels of military spending, enemies on the global horizon were much needed. With the Soviet army increasingly seen as a disintegrating “paper tiger,” China’s economic emergence as a major power in the Pacific offered one possible fit with the Pentagon’s need for a major enemy. Moreover, China’s continuing disputes with Taiwan, its claims to islands in the South China Sea, its friendly relations with North Korea, its occasional armed disputes with Vietnam, and its modest ICBM forces armed with nuclear weapons all seemed to give evidence—in American eyes at least—of its aggressive intentions; all seemed to indicate that it might someday menace American imperial interests in the region.

In the years from the end of the Cold War to the present there has clearly been disagreement, even bitter acrimony, within the highest levels of the American government, from the White House to Congress to the Pentagon, over policy toward China. The question largely has been whether, like President Clinton, to espouse a policy of “engagement” with the People’s Republic—that is, to emphasize trade as a tool of bringing the country into a regional system still dominated by the United States—or, like Republican congressman Christopher Cox, to espouse a policy of “containment”—that is, to make China the enemy around which an American regional system is to be organized—or even some at present inconceivable combination of the two. In pursuing various aspects of these policies and fighting out internecine, intragovernmental, intrabureaucratic struggles over them, various factions in American officialdom have highlighted issues ranging from human rights abuses to trade policy to potential atomic spying, leaking material to the media, holding inflammatory hearings, and making subtle military gestures.