China Uses the Playbook That We Threw out
By James T. Moore (08/04/07)
China is using the foreign policy playbook we carelessly tossed aside, and is doing a better job with it than we did. By foreign policy playbook I mean the rules for running a "republican" government which our founding fathers gave us, and which we are now systematically ash-canning.
This was forcefully brought to my attention in an article by Trudy Rubin, a columnist for the Philadelphia Enquirer, titled: “China hones a skill once used by the U.S.”; and if ever a writer zeroed in on a nail and hit it, she did.
Rubin tells us that “while the White House has been focusing its foreign policy attention on Iraq, China has been using a new approach to expand its influence and global appeal. This approach is one at which the United States once excelled but is now doing badly.” Correction, we are doing horribly. I say this seriously because failure to follow our “foreign policy playbook” can cost us more than a victory; it may cost us our nation!
Regarding this “playbook” that we have dismally cast aside, Harvard professor Joseph Nye calls it “Soft Power.” This is his name for a government’s foreign policy of leading by example and getting other countries to follow because they like what they see; instead of fomenting wars around the globe to flex our muscle (for whatever reason) and forcing other nations to “do it our way or else.”
Specific examples of “soft power”, which China is becoming adept at are: diplomacy, trade incentives, cultural and educational exchanges, learning local languages, pouring aid into foreign countries that have usable resources, and other techniques that reflect the intentions of a benign global leader. And odd roll, one might say, for communist China to be playing. But playing it they are. And doing well, too.
Tragically, Rubin informs us, America didn’t first turn its nose up at other countries only yesterday. Today this administration is doing everything backwards---backwards, that is, in our hegemonic march into the New World Order. While Chinese diplomats now attend every regional organization meeting throughout Asia, we are telling the rest of the world we don’t give a hoot; we’re too busy in Iraq and our “war against terrorism” to worry about our image on the world scene and what other countries think about us.
And that couldn’t-care-less attitude and aggressive action on our part has opened the door for China to grab our playbook and take over as a the “benign” world leader and example-setter that our Founders envisioned in 1776; and, as it turned out, was America’s glory years for the first century of its existence.
What that vision the Founders saw is reflected in our founding documents; and most vividly expressed by these great men themselves who had this to say about American’s foreign policy “playbook.”
On Non-Aggression, WASHINGTON said: “Observe good faith and justice to all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. A nation which indulges in habitual hatred or habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. And on Foreign Alliances, he said: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” On International Friendship, THOMAS JEFFERSON said, “Equal and exact justice for all men of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” On Charity, John Quincy Adams said: “In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill-will to any human being.” And on Foreign Relationships, Benjamin Franklin said: “No nation was ever ruined by trade.”
These words on foreign policy, voiced by American patriots who created this nation, are all but forgotten in America’s drive for power, world dominance, and global empire, glaringly evident in this administration. Proof of this can hardly be ignored. Contrary to our Founders’ warning to mind our own business, the extent of today’s U.S. global empire is almost unimaginable---the number of countries that the U.S. has a presence in is staggering.
Latest Defense Department’s “Base Structure Report” states that the U.S. has more than 600,000 structures and buildings, at more than 6,000 locations, on more than 30 million acres. The department list of Independent States in the World shows 192 countries, and the United States has troops in 135 of them. This means, that of a million and a half military personnel, nearly 20-percent of them are deployed on foreign soil.
Some experts describe this as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history And this is supposed to be minding our own business and staying out of foreign entanglements?
This sad, but lethal situation, is exactly what our founding fathers warned us about; and exactly what is preventing America from solving our domestic problems at home, and exactly what China needed to launch it’s campaign to use America’s discarded foreign policy playbook and become---if only by illusion-- the role of “benign” global leader.
Ben Franklin said: “He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face.”
More than that. By blowing the coals in quarrels that we had nothing to do with, we have set fire to our own house.
James T. Moore
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