China and the Rhineland Moment
America
and its allies must not simply accept Beijing’s aggression.
Opinion Columnist
·
May 29, 2020
Great
struggles between great powers tend to have a tipping point. It’s the moment
when the irreconcilability of differences becomes obvious to nearly everyone.
In
1911 Germany sparked an international crisis when it sent a gunboat into the
Moroccan port of Agadir and, as Winston Churchill wrote in his history of the
First World War, “all the alarm bells throughout Europe began immediately to
quiver.” In 1936 Germany provoked another crisis when it marched troops into
the Rhineland, in flagrant breach of its treaty obligations. In 1946, the
Soviet Union made it obvious it had no intention of honoring democratic
principles in Central Europe, and Churchill was left to warn that “an iron
curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Analogies
between these past episodes and China’s decision this week draft a new national
security law on Hong Kong aren’t perfect. Hong Kong is a Chinese port, not a
faraway foreign one. Hong Kong’s people have ferociously resisted Beijing’s
efforts to impose control, unlike the Rhineland Germans who welcomed Berlin’s.
And the curtailment of freedom that awaits Hong Kong is nothing like the
totalitarian tyranny that Joseph Stalin imposed on Warsaw, Budapest and other
cities.
But
the analogies aren’t inapt, either. Beijing has spent the better part of 20
years subverting its promises to preserve Hong Kong’s democratic institutions.
Now it is moving to quash what remains of the city’s civic freedoms through a
forthcoming law that allows the government to punish speech as subversion and
protest as sedition. The concept of “one country, two systems,” was supposed to
last at least until 2047 under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint
Declaration. Now China’s rulers have been openly violating that treaty, much as
Germany openly violated the treaties of Locarno and Versailles.
And again, alarm bells quiver.
For
years, Donald Trump’s comments on China have swung between the truculent and
the obsequious. But
beneath the president’s mental foam, the administration has undertaken a sober
rethink of the U.S. strategic approach to China, the outlines of which are
described in a new interagency document quietly
released by the White House last week.
Gone
from this new vision are the platitudes about encouraging China’s “peaceful
rise” as a “responsible stakeholder” in a “rules-based order.” Instead, Beijing
is described, accurately, as a habitual and aggressive violator of that order —
a domestic tyrant, international bully and economic bandit that systematically
robs companies of their intellectual property, countries of their sovereign
authorities, and its own people of their natural rights.
“Beijing
has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not offer compromises in response to
American displays of goodwill, and that its actions are not constrained by its
prior commitments,” the report reads. “We acknowledge and respond in kind to
Beijing’s transactional approach with timely incentives and costs, or credible
threats thereof.”
A
critic might note that this description of China’s behavior sounds a lot like
Trump’s. Sort of, except that the comparison trivializes the scale of China’s
abuses and neglects the breadth and longevity of its challenge. A Biden administration
will be confronted with the same unpleasant facts about a geopolitical
adversary that seeks not only to dominate its region but also dethrone liberal
democracy as the dominant political model of the 21st century.
All
of which makes the Hong Kong crisis so consequential. Beijing almost certainly
chose this moment to strike because it calculated that a world straining under
the weight of a pandemic and a depression lacked the will and attention to
react. On Friday, Trump said he would strip Hong Kong of its privileged
commercial and legal ties to the U.S. But that punishes the people of Hong Kong
at least as much as it does their rulers in Beijing.
What’s a better course for the U.S.? A
few ideas:
Sanction
Chinese officials engaged in human-rights abuses in Hong Kong under the Global Magnitsky Act.
Upgrade relations with Taiwan and increase arms sales, including top-shelf
weapons’ systems such as the F-35 and the Navy’s future frigate. Re-enter the
Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement as a counter to China’s economic influence.
(This won’t happen in a Trump administration, but should in a Biden one.)
Publicly press all G-7 countries to stop doing business with telecom-giant
Huawei as a meaningful response to the Hong Kong law.
One
other idea is now being explored by Britain, the former colonial power. Give
every Hong Kong person an opportunity to easily obtain a U.K. residency card,
even a passport. As Tom Tugendhat, the chair of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs
Committee and founder of its China Research Group, told me on Thursday, doing
so would “right a wrong done when the U.K. removed the status in the 1980s.
After a century of rule, Britain has obligations.” A future American president
who believes in the value of immigration could join that effort, in the same
way we helped Hungarian refugees and Vietnamese boat people.
If
all this and more were announced now, it might persuade Beijing to pull back
from the brink. In the meantime, think of this as our Rhineland moment with
China — and remember what happened the last time the free world looked
aggression in the eye, and blinked.
No comments:
Post a Comment