Can America Get China’s respect by appeasing it? Steve Clemons, writing on The Diplomat while on a trip to Beijing, notes “Beijing’s Fragile Swagger” – and American policy makers might want to take note of Clemons’ piece. Here’s the beginning:
Confucius said ‘The superior man is firm in the right way, and not merely firm.’ From a Chinese perspective, the same can probably be said about other nations.
When Hillary Clinton was running for the US presidency, she encouraged then President George W. Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics to signal US frustration over China’s treatment of Tibet and lack of cooperation on Sudan.
Her posture, reversed since she became Secretary of State, was remarkably un-presidential as any serious geopolitical analyst would have noted that the United States needed China’s support on virtually every one of its major international objectives—from redirecting Iran’s nuclear aspirations to climate change to stabilizing a global financial system near meltdown.
Indeed, gratuitous gut punches simply raise the cost of China’s support, underscoring the fact that Clinton’s approach in the summer of 2008 was simply the wrong way to be ‘firm.’
But there’s also another side to China, and it’s one that doesn’t respect ‘desperate’ friendship, grovelling or appeasement. It’s this element to Chinese foreign policymaking that means the United States can’t simply acquiesce to all of China’s demands and expect China to respond in kind.
Go to the link and read it in its entirety to find out why.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.