Why Oh Why Can't We Have Better Think Tanks (AEI Defense Policy Is a Real Embarrassment Edition)

The world would be much better off if the American Enterprise Institute's funders would simply pull the plug on defense studies. What do they produce that isn't a pure waste of photons?

Here we have the intelligent Justin Logan critiquing AEI on defense:

JustinLogan.com: How Do We Expect Rising Great Powers to Act?: Dan Blumenthal... at AEI. [He and his coauthors] present a long list of Chinese grievances that should lead us to see a strategic threat from China... such egregious and threatening postures as:

• China's noncompliance with its pledges to the World Trade Organization;
• Its failure to use its leverage with North Korea to end Pyongyang's game of nuclear Russian roulette;
• Its continuing refusal to abide by human rights and refugee conventions it has signed; and
• Its obstructionist policies on Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Burma.

They did take the liberty of including issues that actually matter.... But... I'm simply confounded at the utter lack of not just realism but simple reality in this assessment. It's as though they absolutely expect a rising second-tier great power to simply prostrate itself at the feet of American "benevolent hegemony.".... We can argue about what we should do, but by convincing ourselves that China should do nothing in the face of its own growing might and our reluctance to give it an inch of respect is incredibly absurd....

Tom Donnelly rattled on (and on) about grand strategy regarding China, and ended up embracing what sounded a whole like Zalmay Khalilzad's old "congagement" schtick... a program of economic engagement, building up China's political and economic power, but military containment: not letting it close the gap in military capabilities in any significant way. But that's ridiculous: a great power whose economic and political might is growing is necessarily going to seek a larger security role, at the very least in its own region....

As Gene recently noted, "Having recently crapped the bed on the Iraq issue, one would think that Boot, Gaffney, Woolsey, Kristol, et al. would have the decency to maintain a studied silence on national security issues for a time." Maybe that the Axis of Hawkery would clam up for a bit...

And Matthew Yglesias adds:

TAPPED: August 2005 Archives: From where I sit the most frustrating thing is that, as is so often the case, our neocon friends are not being very clear.... China is getting richer and trying to tilt the balance of power in the region more in its favor. So why might China not succeed in accomplishing this? Well, they might just decide not to try.... They also might not succeed because we decide to fight a preventative war with them before they get more powerful. That, it seems to me, would "work," although the costs would be enormous. If that's what this crowd is after, they ought to say so. Last, they might not succeed because their economic growth might come to an end. Again, if the neocons want the United States to embark on an effort to cripple the Chinese economy, they ought to say so....

The reasonable alternative is to conclude that if all goes well -- if we don't fight a destructive war with China, if China's population doesn't remain trapped in dire poverty -- then it will eventually become unsustainable for the United States to be the dominant military force in the immediate vicinity of China. The thing to be afraid of, it seems to me, is not that China will become more powerful (it's bound to happen anyway) but that this more powerful China will have poor relations with the United States. Whether or not that happens is in large part outside our control. But it's certainly within our power not to ensure that it does happen by engaging in a futile arms race or a lunatic effort to keep China poor...

Comments

[Joe S.]

I remember, not too long ago, when AEI was a right-wing mirror to Brookings: always professional and sometimes even slightly pink. Back in the 1980's, you had to look to Heritage for the hackery and whoring. How hath the mighty fallen!
Is Cato the only honest think tank on the right?

[Auros]

Joe, It's tough to call Cato honest, when they've flushed all of their "privatization" documents down the memory hole (in favor of "personalization").

[Auros]

Gah, correction -- it was "choice" that they shifted to; "personalization" of course is an administration term.

[Zathras]

Are neoconservatives really arguing that we make a lunatic effort to keep China poor?

OK, that's a silly question. Here's a better one: are the critics of neoconservatives interested in China at all? Compared, say, to scoring debating points against neoconservatives? It seems clear enough that the answer to the first question in light of the second is NO. But let's assume that's not right for a moment.

Let's look at a sample issue, human rights. Now it may be that my assumption -- that egregious human rights situations like the one in North Korea or Zimbabwe are not just bad in themselves but because they are likely to increase the risk of regional instability the longer they persist -- is further than most liberals are willing to go. But I don't think liberals would argue that the Chinese position to human rights violations on a large scale is one of, to be most charitable, benign indifference. Why is that, and what implications might it have for China's future?

Is it because the Chinese mind simply accords human life, or at least non-Chinese human life, a lower value than the Western mind does? Is it instead because the mind of the senior Communist Chinese official does? This explanation would be consistent with the unusually bloody history of Chinese Communism. Might it be because to the Chinese human rights violations, though regrettable in the abstract, are by definition not China's problem? Or do at least some Chinese leaders actively approve of Pyongyang's starving large numbers of North Koreans and the Mugabe regime's forced relocations? Really dedicated counterrevolutionaries in China, assuming there were any, could not likely expect any better after all.

Now, I'm asking this just out of curiosity: do liberals have an opinion on any of this that applies to China only, as opposed to neoconservatives and what they think about China?

[Wh]

I was listening to Gaffney on radio this weekend on the Ron Insana show. Gaffney was going off on long rants about how China might actually be interested in releasing an EMP to disable the US. Its clear to to the meanest intellect that China cannot possibly match the US in nukes, so Gaffney has to come up with bogus threats like this.

You would think these people would be embarassed by how mistaken they were about Iraq, but that doesn't seem to tbe case

[Michael Cain]

"Is Cato the only honest think tank on the right?"

Six years ago, Cato was praising San Diego, both city and county, to the skies. These were the future of pension systems in America, clear demonstrations that it was possible to both yield more and cost less than Social Security. Now that both stand on the verge of bankruptcy because they are each a billion dollars short of having enough money in the accounts to honor their promises, I have waited in vain for the folks at Cato to explain to me what happened.

[anne]

Michael Cain

Thank you for reminding us of San Diego, not that we should have been surprised, for why take advantage of one of the great long term bond markets of the last 60 years, not to mention a fine market for just the sought of stocks a cautious pension fund manager could have chosen. Real estate? Oh why ask?

[J Thomas]

Zathras, I'm not a liberal but I'll answer you on china.

China is a nuclear power, and they have a whole lot of people, a lot of whom have technical skills and work for low rates. They have a lot of resources, a lot of coal (as do we, if the alternate energy that winds up working turns out to be coal-based then we and they will be the superpowers).

They've given us no leverage to do economic warfare on them. If anything it's gone the other way around. What they buy from us is food, and raw materials like wood, sometimes processed into plywood etc, and companies that have important patents. They don't let us sell them critical components, they make those themselves and they arrange to own the patents. It's almost like they're paranoid or something.

So if we don't like the way they live in their own country, or the way they let their client states live, what do you think we should do about it? Should we have a nuclear war over it? Should we tell them we don't like them and stop selling them wood products? If we were the world's only superpower and china was a little pipsqueak nation that was oppressing its own people and that was sitting on a lot of strategic resources, then it would make sense to just roll over them. But in a war china could hurt us very badly. They aren't somebody we can just dictate terms to.

So one strategy would be to try to be reasonably nice to them and hope they loosen up. It was working with the USSR before they collapsed. Various reasons. They used to have something like 30% of the population who believed Stalin was Jesus and could do no wrong, and that was enough to give him a blank check for awhile. And when those died off the nomenklatura wanted to be nice guys and just didn't want to put a lot of people in prison camps. Etc. China might liberalise some as they get richer, and it might leave them collapsed. The chance they soften up might be worth waiting for whether they collapse or not. And that's what I'd try.

If we *were* going to fight them, we should do it as soon as possible. Their military is getting stronger faster than ours is. So the longer we wait the worse it gets. But we just aren't ready now. We've put off a lot of maintenance on our warships and used the money for the iraq war. It would take us time to get ready for a real fight. But if we're going to fight them we should do it as soon as the navy is ready, and as soon as the army and mareines are recovered from iraq. Maybe 2 years?

[kharris]

Slightly off topic...the Washington Post has a story on intelligence estimates that suggest the White House is relying on something other than US intelligence estimates to claim that Iran is closing in on the capacity to build nukes.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/01/AR2005080101453.html

The article also recalls an 2002 intelligence assessment which found that Iran was slowly democratizing and would best be left alone to do so. Oh, well.

We return you now to the regularly scheduled discussion.

[No Preference]

Zathras-

Speaking as a liberal, if we're sincerely concerned about human rights in the world we should care equally about all human rights violations, including our own. With Guantanamo and other past and ongoing problems we have very little leverage to demand human rights reform anywhere, let alone in China. It's not that we're as bad as them. It's that we're not good enough to lecture others.

The best thing the US could do to promote human rights in China would be to join that sizable block of countries that respects international law and rejects the unilateral use of violence to achieve one's aims. We would then be in a stronger position to apply pressure to China, both morally and tactically.

BTW, I wasn't aware that it was liberals who advised that we ignore human rights violations when considering trade policy for China.

[anne]

Simply pay attention to the arts and the realization should come readily that the Chinese are admiringly both borrowing from us and lending to us. There is so much for us to share, I am quite enthusiastic about our relations.

[wkwillis]

China should not worry about us, they should worry about Tibet and Sinkiang. WMDs are getting way to cheap and will continue to get way to cheap. Assuming that America is the only threat is very shortsighted.
Of course, damned if I can think what they should do about Tibet and Sinkiang. Just pulling out is going to be a problem and might even accelerate the problem. Maybe apologise and give them lots of foreign aid or reparations while building up intelligence networks to spy on them and try to disrupt the eventual vengeance conspiracies?
Or just hide their heads in a hole in the ground and hope?

[Joe S.]

Michael Cain and Auros both make good points, but I'll stick by mine with a modification. Cato is reasonably honest, by think tank standards. As Michael Cain pointed out, Cato does not like to revisit its mistakes. But who does? As Auros points out, Cato does participate in the degradation of the English language. But that is good old-fashioned spin; not lying.

Unlike the other wing jobs, Cato does allow dissent from Dear Leader's latest line, especially in the direction of libertarianism. Cato-ites are generally for legalizing drugs, and are allowed to be antiwar and anti-American Taliban. It is not difficult to be libertarian and honest--libertarianism's main virtue is internal consistency. (Its main vice is unworldliness.)

[DOR]

Oh, dear.

I’m going to pretend that no one would seriously believe “the Chinese mind” is any different from that of any other human being. And, that no one really thinks Chinese place a lower value on human life. And, that no one who has ever had a look at US nuclear weapons policy would think that a comment by a military academic in China on a hypothetical reaction to an attack on his country would be worth losing sleep over.

I’m not going to compare China’s “unusually bloody history” in the last half-century to the first half of the 20th century in Europe.

I will, however, point out to J Thomas that while China’s military may be improving faster than America’s, one could also say that a baby grows faster than a teenager, and that both grow faster than a mature adult. That doesn’t mean the kids will ever catch up with the adult (OK, I’m stretching this too far).

Fight China as soon as possible? Why, oh why would anyone in their right mind wish for a major war?

I like No Preference’s take on the subject.

Certainly Iraq and Guantanamo Bay should make us pause in pointing the finger at China over Tibet and human rights abuse, respectively.
.

[J Thomas]

DOR, when you say there is no special "chinese mind" would you also say there is no special "american mind"? Would you consider the peculiar american attitudes of the last few years to be just like everybody else?

I could imagine some chinese still place a lower value on human life than usual, because value goes somewhat with supply-and-demand, and there have been times in living memory when they had more people than food and the value went negative. Not to mention their problems in WWII and such. But it would be an experience thing, not a racial thing.

A war with china would cost us. It might easily cost us whole cities, and we could lose a lot of cropland for a long time, and it wouldn't just be west coast, we could lose whole red states. It looks to me like a very bad idea, unless we had precise reason to think that the alternatives were even worse. BUT if we did have reason to fight our best chance comes from doing it as soon as reasonably possible. Whatever military advantage we have is slipping away. Anatol Rapoport claimed this was why Hitler attacked russia when he did. There was an arms race going on, and the russians were winning. The longer he waited the worse his chances.

If we're going to fight a land war in asia we don't want to wait and see what the chinese army is like once it's all grown up.

I agree that starting another land war in asia against a nuclear power looks like a spectacularly insane idea. But if we were going to do that insanity, the sooner we started the less they'd have to pound us with. And the sooner the war, the sooner we could start rebuilding. Assuming we didn't lose too bad to rebuild.