When a much richer, swaggering, narcissistic neighbor moves into the neighborhood, his neighbors have only a few options. One is to roll their eyes and try to avoid contact as much as possible. One is to behave as psychophants, trying to gain incremental advantages over other neighbors by milking the relationship for all it is worth. One is to challenge the new neighbor along lines of his weaknesses, knowing that each time a nasty neighbor loses a challenge his hatefullness is magnified in the minds of those predisposed to dislike him and his advantageous position is degraded in the minds of those who use him to their own benefit.
We are reminded of this sort of situation by a recent international spat over space. Several years ago the Bush administration asserted "Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power." ( The Week, Feb 2, 2007. p 16). It was a sort of shot heard 'round the world. News organizations proclaimed that Bush had just claimed all of space in the name of the United States of America.
To sane people with a sense of proportion and a long view of history it was the sort of claim that could only be made by the delusional.* Except in this case that long view of history needs only be two years or so in duration before the long view begins to overturn the short view. And in the study of history that is barely the blink of an eye.
For the Bush proclamation that the USA owned space was really a rather exaggerated gesture by the Bush administration of turning down talks with the Chinese on testing of missiles that destroy satellites. Evidently it was a failure of imagination on the Bush administration that kept them from anticipating that the Chinese could be as adept at it as Americans.
In January the Chinese put the shoe on the other foot. They launched a missile from the ground that destroyed one of their own space satellites. The reaction in the west was a caucophony of fury and consternation. Some parties blustered that in was a sort of act of war.
The Economist fretted that the fragments of the exploded satellite will haunt space for many decades, possibly endangering future space missions - possibly even Chinese ones. This, it turns out, was among the most level-headed reactions I saw. But why is it that the same worry was not circulated when Americans and Russians did the same sorts of tests decades ago? There is no reason to believe that the fragments from the Chinese tests would be materially more hazardous than would be the fragments from American and Russian tests. No, even for the level headed-writers at the Economist, the point of view on this event strikes one as being tinged with jingoism.
Newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan interpret the test as a kind of saber-rattling gesture to keep Taiwan cowed into not asserting independence. It would be silly to imagine that there are no elements within China, especially within its military, who do have such a goal in mind. Taiwan is an important issue to the Chinese. But this is much too narrow an interpretation.
China does have regional ambitions. But China clearly has global ambitions, too. And it is time that Americans realize this as a fact. It is time that Americans also realize that under the Bush regime, America has become that pushy neighbor that everyone loves to hate. And that this hatred is pushing countries that Americans have blithely assumed to be comfortably within its sphere of interest into the arms of the Chinese.
In the mid ninteen sixties, right after Zambia gained independence from Britain, the Chinese began investing in Zambia. They built a rail line connecting its copper mining region to the port City of Dar Es Salaam on the East Coast of Africa. Today, I am told, the Chinese are among the most ubiquitous expatriate community in that nation's capital of Lusaka. The Chinese have spent four or five decades building a durable relationship with the Zambians in order that they might avail themselves of a steady supply of copper. That relationship is beginning to pay off.
Recently we heard stories that Hugo Chavez had penned agreements in principle with the Chinese to supply them with vast amounts of the heavy Orinoco tar-like crude, oil that American and French companies had assumed to be theirs for the taking. These are but two of the more prominent examples of places in which the Chinese by investing in long term durable relationships are gaining access to vital streams of natural resources and raw materials that Americans stand to lose access to by taking those same relationships for granted. Or by abusing them. By being the bad neighbor.
What does shooting down their own space satellite have to do with oil and copper? At one level there is no connection. But at another level they are expressions of what China has become. The shot is an announcement that China has become a global power with first world capabilities in manufacturing and technology. It has become adept in the means of creating material wealth for peaceful purposes and for the purposes of exercise of force. It is proof that China long ago and permanently abandoned its age-old conception of isolation and that it has become increasingly adept at the
European model of commerce: import raw materials, transform them using advanced manufacturing methods - or at least clever applications of cheap labor - and export the goods at a profit. Manufacturing is the heart and soul of wealth creation. It is, in fact, all the internal organs. Capital flows to areas of manufacturing excellence. And they quickly become the centers of power. Eighteenth century Europeans knew this. Twentieth century laisez affaire capitalists should have known it, too.
We stand at risk of learning it over, the hard way. When China shoots down its own space statellite, it sends the west a message that we would do well to hear. We are not dealing with the China of the eighteenth century - one all but impotent at the exertion of military might against the West, even within its own territory. We are not dealing with the China of the ninteen fifties, an isolated an inward looking nation with resolve and technical know-how but without the power of industry and commerce.
We are dealing with the most populous nation in the world, one that is now comparable to European nations in its technical sophistication, in its commercial success, and in its ability to extend influence to far-flung regions of the earth - even to space.
The neocon myth of the "end of history" or " American Empire" is not just proven wrong with this shot. It is proven not just dangerously wrong. It is proven pathologically delusional. China has the same needs for raw materials and energy as European and North American countries. And in the near future it will be on a much larger scale. China has the capacities to form relationships to gain these by peaceful means. And China is asserting the capacity to gain these same materials by other means, should the need arise.
If America persists in failing to take China seriously on all of these counts, the only rational behavior for China would be to increase efforts to be taken seriously. And if resource shortages threaten both Chinese and Western commercial interests, there is no doubt that the West will underestimate Chinese military capacities. Probably, the Chinese will be tempted to overestimate their own. And that has all then necessary conditions of a very ugly resource war. All that is avoidable if American administrations only quit playing the bad neighbor game and started, instead, to talk with other interested parties, treating them with respect. No hope of that happening with the current crowd in control in Washington. Let's hope we don't learn the harm of it the hard way.
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved
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*Sadly, neither of us asked to comment .