On Saturday, the New York Times published an editorial, "A Cold War China Policy," criticizing the president's approach to Beijing. Dan Blumenthal, former senior director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the Secretary of Defense's Office of International Security Affairs and current AEI fellow, responds:
The New York Times gets the order of events in Asia exactly backwards: the Bush Administration is generally continuing the policy of the Clinton Administration in its response to China's destabilizing military build-up -- an expansion characterized by annual double-digit increases in defense spending for over a decade. China now has the military capability to coerce and intimidate Taiwan into submission and make any U.S. intervention on Taiwan's behalf costly in lives and treasure. The Bush Administration is seeking to transform the US-Japan alliance to make it more effective in countering China's military power. The same holds with US-India relations. Despite what the Times' editors may believe, there is a US government consensus that China's military build-up is serious and changing the balance of power in the region. Both conclusions are reflected in recent Pentagon reports, as well as the latest report of the bi-partisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission. Too call the Japanese government "nationalistic," as the Times does, is simplistic and facile. After years of North Korean provocations and, in the last year, frequent Chinese naval incursions into its territorial waters, Japan has now taken small steps to strentghen its defense. The fact that Tokyo is a liberal democracy with a post-War pacifist tradition means that the public debate about such a defense reorientation has been slow, deliberate and responsible. If anything, the Bush Administration has been overly cautious about countering Chinese power. It is quick to emphasize areas of shared cooperation but downplays areas of disagreement, such as China's support of regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran. A brief review of China's activities in the last year alone would have helped the editors of the New York Times convey what's really going on in East Asia to its readers.