August 11, 2010 Wednesday

Polish daily hails USA's policy towards China

Text of report by Polish leading privately-owned centre-left newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza website, on 6 August

Commentary by Bartosz Weglarczyk: "Careful, China Is Coming!"

It is in Poland's interest to build an international coalition that can stand up to Beijing's expansion. And without America, we will not build a strong coalition.

Conflict between China and the West is inevitable and will determine our world in the forthcoming decades. That of course does not mean war, but an intense political, economic, intellectual dispute. As part of the West, we are already a party to this dispute.

China has already become the world's largest energy consumer. In 2009, the Chinese economy consumed 2.25 billion tons of oil, 80 million tons more than the Americans.

The Chinese power is already knocking at our door; suffice it to read the recent series of articles by Gazeta Wyborcza reporters on the Chinese in Poland. Yesterday the Middle Kingdom was dealing with Vietnam and was fearful of the power of Japan. Today Chinese strategic interests stretch to Africa and the Middle East, tomorrow the Chinese will be dealing with an equally strong Europe and South America.

In Africa, the Chinese are today pushing out the Americans and Europeans as investors. "Companies from the EU are not eager to invest in the difficult African market, while companies from China with state backing do so with ease," experts from Belgium's Free University recently wrote.

Oil From Sudan, Copper From Near Kabul

The Chinese do not bother themselves with human rights, they are not interested in what portion of the proceeds from their joint ventures gets sent by the local dictator to his account in Switzerland. The Chinese media do not ask their government problematic questions. Chinese businessmen, unlike American ones for instance, do not have to face a prohibition set out in their country's penal code against corrupting foreign officials.

Without any legal limitations, without ethical barriers, doing business is child's play. It is therefore not surprising that over the past five years the Chinese investments in Africa increased tenfold and are now drawing close to $2 billion per year. One year ago, during a large conference in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, Chinese banks gave credit guarantees for Chinese investments in Africa worth a total of $10 billion.

The signing of trade agreements goes hand-in-hand with agreements on military and intelligence cooperation. Sudan nowadays supplies 7 percent of China's demand for oil, and in exchange the Chinese train Sudanese military and police officers. In Gabon, the Chinese are the largest investor in open-sea oil platforms, and at the same time the country's intelligence officers are being trained at Chinese centers.

The Chinese are investing with abandon in Central Asia -- today, for instance, they are building a railway line in Kazakhstan to transport precious metals from mines they have bought there. In Afghanistan, the Chinese state-owned metallurgical company purchased a copper mine outside of Kabul for $3.2 billion. Now it is modernizing it -- extraction is meant to begin next year. In exchange for the Afghan Government's consent to sell the country's largest copper mine, Beijing promised to build the first modern railway line in Afghan history, which will link the mine to China.

Chinese investments in Afghanistan do suffer on account of Taliban attacks. But the attacks are not as brutal as they are against Western targets. The Chinese have for years been playing a complicated game in this portion of the world. They cooperate with the Americans, because they themselves face problems with Islamic terrorism in western China. At the same time, they make their own deals with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Western media regularly report, for instance, about modern Chinese-manufactured weaponry discovered in the hands of the Taliban.

Satrap, a Perfect Partner

In a book recently published in the United States about Chinese expansion in South America, the well-known analyst Joshua Kurlantzick describes the capital idea of Chinese diplomacy: they are signing trade agreements with countries of the poor South, presenting them as the beginnings of a common front of developing countries against the wealthy North.

In exchange for economic agreements extraordinarily favorable to Africa and South America, Beijing is assuring itself these countries' support in multilateral organizations, where as a global power it has many interests. According to Kurlantzick, precisely such multi-level diplomacy is what enabled the Chinese to build a Latin-African coalition on the International Olympic Committee, which voted to award the hosting of the 2008 games to the Chinese.

British Analyst Christ Alden goes as far as to describe a "Beijing model" of diplomacy. It involves efforts to secure new markets of energy sources as well as markets for selling their own products, combined with non-interference in the domestic affairs of their trading partner while supporting its national independence on the international arena.

In their international trade, the EU and the United States demand transparent accounting and respect for basic workplace standards and workers' rights. The Western public is prepared to condemn governments and companies for doing business with satraps and dictators.

The "Beijing model" is ideal for both sides: the Chinese conquer successive markets, the dictators earn a fortune while gaining a powerful ally that keeps its nose out of what is not its business.

However, that model has to raise the objections of the West, which has long ago concluded that certain things simply should not be done regardless of the money. Of course, many Western corporations may not be overly concerned about this but they will be exposing themselves to the wrath of the public, which under exceptional circumstances could coerce the authorities to intervene.

America Does It

China's global expansion is nothing surprising. Any company that does not develop and does not conquer new markets starts to wane.

However, this kind of Chinese expansion is not favorable for us. We need to be friendly with China and to earn money there. But with the awareness that it is China's long-term interest to weaken the European Union as a manufacturer and exporter of goods and services, including as an institution that promotes democratic principles alien and inconvenient for the officials in Beijing.

There is just one force capable of halting China's expansion, or at least delaying it. This is the United States. The only country in the world whose strategic interests stretch to every corner of the globe. The only one with military strength comparable to the strength of the Chinese army. And the only country in the world whose economy has a vitality and capacity for modernization that equals that of the Chinese.

That is why Poland should be anxious to see a strong America. The EU, with its common foreign policy wading around in the kiddie-pool and with its completely nonexistent common defense policy, is not capable of halting China on its own. Only the United States is capable of promoting effectively, or at least in a way that can be noticed in Beijing, the free market and democracy within China itself and in its environs.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' whole recently concluded tour of Asia was intended to show China's neighbors that they will not be left alone in the face of Chinese expansion. Among other things, Gates lifted the embargo on US Army cooperation with the Indonesian army. Clinton said that the Americans have a vital interest in maintaining free sea traffic in southeast Asia, where the Chinese are openly demanding exclusive control over key sea routes.

Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, and the Philippines -- each of these countries has political, commercial, and territorial disputes with China, on a lesser or larger scale. Beijing tries to keep each of those disputes on a bilater al level, because then it is always the stronger side. Clinton and Gates are trying to build an anti-Chinese coalition. The protests by the Chinese Foreign Ministry against Clinton's statements about the freedom of sea traffic show that Beijing is afraid of such a coalition.

For years, the Pentagon has developed excellent cooperation with the army of South Korea, a country whose security is guaranteed by the presence of US soldiers. The government of Japan, given all its anti-American rhetoric, does not do anything that might jeopardize its alliance with Washington. The project of building a missile defense shield, so controversial in Poland and the Czech Republic, would have been accepted in Japan without the batting of an eyelid.

Japan is afraid of North Korea, against whose missiles it is protected by a US shield. The North Korean regime is economically dependent on China, which treats its own regular pressure on Pyongyang as one more instrument in its great game against the West over influence throughout Asia. However, they will never press the North Koreans up against the wall, so as not to lose that instrument.

History Doing Fine

As Vaclav Havel once said, America has thousands of faces. It can sometimes be elegant, stuck-up, forgetful. It can sometimes behave like a bull in a china shop. But there is no other world power with which we share all our political and ethical values.

After the period in which the end of history was being prematurely announced, nowadays we know that history is doing fine. Fundamentalist terrorism, fanatics with nuclear weapons in their hands, and lastly the world expansion of China and its economic-political model -- these are the dangers that Europe will have to face in the 21st century. Alone it stands no chance.

Polish opponents to an alliance with the United States accuse all of our ruling camps to date of blind pro-Americanism and demand that foreign policy should be pursued without emotions, as a game of real interests. They maintain that such a view of the world forces us to cool down our ties with the United States. However, things are precisely the reverse: if one looks at the world that way, it is evident that US domination is favorable to us. Not complete domination, because any monopoly has a corrupt influence. But right now we do not face a danger of America having a monopoly in world politics. It will never again be the world's sole superpower. Now the point is for it to remain the strongest superpower, or at least one equal to the Chinese superpower.

I was astonished by the level of the anti-American statements in Bronislaw Komorowski's presidential campaign. He several times permitted himself, for instance, to talk about "sending Polish soldiers off on foreign missions in exchange for getting patted on the back." This was evidently a taunt addressed to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, although probably also to those who were "patted" as well -- previous prime ministers and presidents, especially the pro-American Kaczynski brothers.

I was astonished during the television debates when the future president did not find any place for the alliance with the United States when listing the priorities of his foreign policy. And when he visited the Foreign Ministry already as president-elect. [Foreign] Minister Sikorski, when speaking about the president's upcoming travel plans, then listed Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow. About Washington he only said that preparing this visit would "take a bit longer." In the language of diplomacy that means: "A visit to the United States is not a priority for us."

Perhaps this campaign-time anti-Americanism was just a bow to certain leftwing voters and a taunt against Jaroslaw Kaczynski. But I remember the brusque statements by the prime minister and foreign minister during the debate about the missile defense shield. Two years ago the prime minister's closest associate Slawomir Nowak said on television without a m oment's hesitation that the Polish Government's duty was to be concerned for the security of Poland, not America.

Seemingly an obvious point, because the disproportion between the two countries is huge. But membership in NATO imposes a duty upon the prime minister to be concerned for the security of all its members, including America. Most Polish commentators and politicians would rightfully tear America to shreds with criticism if the White House announced that Poland's security was not its concern.

Alliance for Years

I hope that these statements do not fit together into a pattern, representing a new line of Polish foreign policy, anti-American for the first time since 1989. And that every time this was just a consequence of fatigue, frustration, ignorance, or campaigning.

However, Poland lacks a long-range view of the priorities of its security policy -- and it lacks specialists on US policy. A considerable proportion of the diplomats and experts working on building transatlantic ties in the 1990s have either already left state service or are working on something else. New faces are not to be seen.

I expect from Polish politicians that they will know how to look at Poland's security in a somewhat longer-term perspective than the current television news program. In a long-term perspective, preserving a tight alliance between Europe and America lies in our own best-understood interests. And in the interests of the Americans, who in the face of the Chinese threats and problems in the Middle East are no longer offended at Europe, but are trying to repair the damage to the alliance.

Poland should be a promoter of maintaining such an alliance, irrespective of various blunders along the way. Without emotions, without showy slogans, without invoking history and common heroes. Quite simply, Realpolitik.

Source: Gazeta Wyborcza website, Warsaw, in Polish 6 Aug 10