Source: www.worldpoliticsreview.com


It is hard to think of a period in the past five decades in which this country was more painfully bereft of national leadership than it currently finds itself. On one side we have an increasingly isolated president who, as Edward Luce opined recently, “prefers to campaign than govern.” On the other is a House-controlling GOP that, in the words of Thomas Friedman, “has gone nuts.” What’s more, the highly negative campaign that 2012 is shaping up to be will secure no governing mandate for the eventual winner, meaning that things are likely to get far worse.

The result will be much more destabilizing than what Ian Bremmer accurately described as a “G-Zero world,” and nowhere is that more obvious than in U.S.-China relations. America has deep economic problems at home and a financial relationship with China that desperately needs rebalancing. But because Obama and the Republicans cannot agree on dealing with the former and lack the strategic vision and political courage to effectively recast the latter, we are left with atmospherics of the worst order -- namely, plopping down a couple thousand U.S. Marines on Australia’s northern coast and pretending that represents effective management of China’s rise. The sheer impotence of such theatricality is stunning.

But expect far more of the same, as the Pentagon, like any unsupervised child given such “home alone” conditions, will behave in its usual self-absorbed fashion, while ginning up fantastically frightening future projections of our world as justification. A recent one I sat through by the Air Force was ludicrous from start to finish, betraying a myopic misunderstanding of globalization’s dynamics matched only by the worst thinking from China’s top military brass. Wired’s Danger Room lambasted a similar global forecasting drill put together recently by the Army as “mostly doom, some idiocy.”

The problem goes beyond mere idle speculation by America’s military-industrial complex. The Pentagon just announced the establishment of an AirSea Battle office to explore the strategic challenges posed by “anti-access, area-denial” capabilities the world over. In truth, the AirSea Battle concept represents nothing more than a jobs bill for the U.S. Navy and Air Force, both of which have been shorted by the “Long War” focus on the Army, Marines and Special Forces. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates famously wondered whether or not the Chinese Communist Party has a firm grip on the People’s Liberation Army. The world should be asking the same question about America’s civil-military nexus.

In short, our national political and military leadership seems more disconnected from the real world than at any point in recent memory, proving that when America loses its economic mojo as badly as we have recently, the nation tends to go strategically insane.

The irony here could not be richer: The global system has long obsessed over a rising China effectively “losing it,” when in reality the fading sole superpower itself is beating Beijing to the punch. As a result of America’s fiscally self-destructive habits, in combination with those of the European Union, the world faces the possibility of one doozey of a second dip in its now three-year-long global economic crisis -- the “great contraction” that the West seems hell-bent on extending across the planet.

Here the self-fulfilling prophesies take on an almost comical bent: By refusing to put their own fiscal houses in order, America and Europe put the global economy’s sole powerhouse, China, at risk of serious domestic instability. Already, China’s vice premier and head of government finance, Wang Qishan, has predicted a long-term global recession that will force Beijing into economic reforms that, though much-needed, will be undertaken at a speed that greatly elevates their risk. And America does not have enough Marines to sprinkle throughout East Asia to manage things in the event of a Chinese meltdown.

Fortunately, America’s business community is not drinking the same Kool Aid that is now so popular throughout the Beltway. Their vision more closely resembles that behind the U.S.-China Grand Bargain that I and my colleagues at the Center for America-China Partnership negotiated with a bevy of China’s top think tanks and former high-ranking government officials, and which I discussed almost a year ago in this column. By the terms of that proposal, in return for China investing $1 trillion of its reserve holdings directly into the U.S. private sector, as opposed to into its debt markets, the two sides would pledge to never go to war with one another, respect each other’s sovereignty, dramatically ramp up military-to-military cooperation and split their essential differences over a host of hotspot security issues around the globe. The document also proposed making the current twice-yearly Strategic and Economic Dialogue summit between the U.S. and China into a permanent year-round commission that would focus on improving bilateral investment flows and the creation of new global joint ventures between U.S. and Chinese companies.

Though the document gained more traction in Beijing than in Washington, U.S. corporate giants General Electric and General Motors went on to form exactly the sort of global joint ventures with Chinese counterparts that we advocated for.

Fast-forward a year to a still-moribund U.S. economy, an increasingly testy U.S.-China relationship and continued political gridlock in Washington, and what does the Wall Street Journal, in its CEO Council report, list as its top four recommendations for the U.S.-China relationship?

1. New framework for building trust: Establish a strategic framework for building trust through an economic-cooperation agreement . . .

2. Build an investor-friendly approach: Establish a full-service agency to draw investment to the U.S., creating procedures to help foreign investors navigate the U.S. public and private sectors . . .

3. Set target for foreign direct investment from China: Establish a target of $250 billion annually in foreign direct investment in the U.S. from China.

4. Stress reciprocal success: The U.S. should welcome investment from China, but stress the importance of reciprocity for U.S. companies to emphasize the potential for mutual success.

The list is hardly the product of outside-the-beltway naysayers: The subject-matter expert on the “Forging a Stronger U.S.-China Relationship” panel was former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

Unfortunately, the Journal’s CEO Council report is unlikely to gain any more traction in Washington than our citizen-diplomacy “grand bargain” drill did. After all, why deal directly with the real issues when we can plan a splendid big war with China over South China Sea oil deposits?

Back when we penned the “grand bargain” draft, we assumed the only U.S. leader who could champion such a bold endeavor would be President Barack Obama himself. Today, with influential columnists like Friedman basically begging Obama to “go big” on the economy, we may actually be approaching the strategic inflection point so many of us hope Obama will finally embrace.

But 2,500 Marines in Australia represents neither hope nor change, but rather a sadly anachronistic approach. And that can’t substitute for the kind of strategic boldness that is currently needed.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst at Wikistrat and a contributing editor for Esquire magazine. His forthcoming eBook serial is "The Emily Updates: One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived" (September-December 2011). His weekly WPR column, The New Rules, appears every Monday. Reach him and his blog at thomaspmbarnett.com.