Friday, October 07, 2005,
By Alan Tonelson
Presumably,
Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s main aim was to reassure
Americans when he delivered a much-hyped speech on U.S. China policy in
New York on September 21. He clearly hoped to reassure the political
and business mandarins assembled by the National Committee on United
States-China relations that recent tensions over currency manipulation
and apparel wouldn’t spin out of control. Zoellick also undoubtedly
hoped to reassure Washington’s China realists and the American people
that the Bush administration understood why China’s growing power and
global influence cannot be permitted to undermine American security and
prosperity.
Only the mandarins can know whether Zoellick
succeeded with them. But anyone with an ounce of China realism could
tell from Zoellick’s remarks that America’s China policy remains asleep
at the wheel on all critical fronts. Ironically, much of the strongest
evidence comes from a recent Chinese statement to which Zoellick was
explicitly responding: an equally hyped article in the journal Foreign
Affairs on “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ to Great Power Status” by Zheng
Bijian, a close associate of Chinese President Hu Jintao.
… it would be tempting
to describe the United States and China as two ships in the night. But
there’s a crucial difference. China has set ambitious but concrete
goals and has mapped out a strategy for achieving them that has already
produced great progress. The United States, by contrast, seems content
to drift strategically, and to confuse pipe dreams with policy. …