China Bob engulfed by anti-Americanism

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From “China Bob” Carr today:

The Bush administration was moving closer to Taiwan. The US was grooming China as its newest enemy. But within 48 hours of Clinton speaking al-Qaeda struck in Washington and New York. Bill Clinton was whisked back home on a US military aircraft. China was recruited as an ally in the war on terror.

And the US launched two wars: Afghanistan, in which an eventual Taliban victory is all but assured; and Iraq, which failed to locate weapons of mass destruction but unloosed Islamic State.
Right now America has two foreign policy priorities. The first is to continue to roll out the plan to retake IS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, to destroy the caliphate. The second is to block North Korea from refining nuclear-tipped missiles that will reach the US mainland within a few years.

…In suddenly elevating relations with Taiwan they are unravelling the diplomatic accommodation that has prevailed between the US and China since Richard Nixon.

…How does antagonism with China help defeat IS or contain North Korea? For the time being in the South China Sea China has stopped island-building or airfield construction. How does a new adversarial approach to China help tame its assertiveness and keep it adhering to diplomacy?

In this same spirit of going forth to find unnecessary fights the Trump transition team is examining new US sanctions against Iran unrelated to Iran’s now-halted nuclear weapons development. Trump may be accepting he cannot tear up the Iran deal on day one as he promised. The deal is not just between America and Iran. It’s between eight parties – including the European Union and Russia. “He can’t tear it up,” one American has told me. “The deal is laminated.”

…Here’s an example of Australian interests not being any more parallel with those being defined by America’s new leadership. On China – and Iran.

Peter Jennings of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute believes now is the time for Australia to further integrate its armed forces with America’s. He says, “Now we have an opportunity to modernise the alliance in ways that will meet higher US expectations”.

Most Australians would take the opposite view. Now is the time for Australia to quietly pull back from closer integration with US armed forces – given the erratic character and danger of their commander-in-chief.

We know that our Bob’s perspectives on China are questionable given his role at the dubious Australia China Relations Institute so let’s sift through these allegations to determine what are legitimate arguments:

  • The US attack on Afghanistan was pretty obviously justified post 9/11 given it harboured Al Qaeda which had just attacked it. That was not the US seeking enemies. It was the US defending itself with wholesale international approval. Yes, everyone has done a bad job of reconstruction afterwards (not just the US).
  • The war in Iraq was a war of aggression, launched by a pack of neo-conservative blood-suckers seeking to extend US imperialism but instead only delivering overreach.
  • Right now America has many more than two foreign policy priorities and one of them, certainly the major one under Obama (remember the pivot to Asia, Bob?), is to confront China’s rise to preserve its own hegemonic primacy. You can argue whether or not that is a good thing but it most certainly is NOT NEW. Indeed, with the withdrawal from the TPP and isolationist Trumpism to the fore, Republicans are so far much less confrontational than Obama was on China. China’s response to the Taiwan phone call was measured and today’s appointment of the US China ambassador suggests China is more happy with Trump than is China Bob, from Reuters:
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President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as the next U.S. ambassador to China, choosing a longstanding friend of Beijing after rattling the world’s second largest economy with tough talk on trade and a telephone call with the leader of Taiwan.

…Branstad’s established personal connection with China could help smooth a relationship defined largely by international security matters and by bilateral trade, where the massive U.S. trade deficit with the country is a source of friction.

“It means that the Trump team understands that it is important to have an ambassador who has access to Xi Jinping,” Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said of the pick.

Branstad called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “longtime friend” when Xi visited Iowa in February 2012, only nine months before he became the Chinese leader.

Before his nomination was announced, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang called Branstad an “old friend” of China when asked in Beijing about a Bloomberg report on the appointment, although he said China would work with any U.S. ambassador.

“We welcome him to play a greater role in advancing the development of China-U.S. relations,” he told a daily news briefing.

Moreover, Trump has today called an end to the global “regime change” doctrine that began with the Bush neocons and carried on with Obama, via The Guardian:

Donald Trump has laid out a US military policy that would avoid interventions in foreign conflicts and instead focus heavily on defeating Islamic State militancy.

“We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” the president-elect said on Tuesday night in Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina.

“Instead our focus must be on defeating terrorism and destroying Isis, and we will.”

Trump’s remarks came a few hours after Barack Obama delivered what was billed as the final national security address of his presidency.

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That renders China Bob’s assertions that a mad war-monger has captured the White House looking bloody ridiculous.

That is not to say that the Trump Administration is not setting up to confront China and others in other ways. The Taiwan call is clearly about leverage for something. I suspect trade concessions rather than war.

On Iran, yes, it was a good deal for the world, probably Obama’s peak achievement, and should not be undone. But so far it appears any renewed sanctions will not target oil and so long as that is the case then most of the US re-positioning is bluster.

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Basically, China Bob is digging himself a deeper and deeper China-biased hole and appears less and less able to see over the lip.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.