Service and rescue ships for oil platforms in the South China Sea at anchor off Labuan Island, Malaysia, Jan, 2011
A few days ago limpidglass diaried on Michael Klare's piece over at TomDispatch entitled Playing with fire: Obama's Risky Oil Threat to China. Unfortunately, Klare's piece is a highly misleading ideological construct whose appeal to progressives critical of American's often heinous foreign policy relies Klare's willingness to withhold reality from the reader. Come below the fold and we'll have a look at what's really going on with Klare, oil, and Obama's alleged new Cold War in Asia....
Gas flares off oil platforms in the South China Sea north of Labuan Island, Malaysia, Jan, 2011
"The deeply ingrained notion that the seas defined the natural limits of the Chinese realm underlay the reluctance to annex Taiwan. As the Kangxi emperor's advisors argued, 'Since antiquity, no oceanic islands have ever entered the imperial domain.'" --Emma Teng, Taiwan's Imagined Geography
Let's start right in....
Klare ends his introduction with:
The U.S. military buildup and the potential for a powerful Chinese counter-thrust have already been the subject of discussion in the American and Asian press. But one crucial dimension of this incipient struggle has received no attention at all: the degree to which Washington’s sudden moves have been dictated by a fresh analysis of the global energy equation, revealing (as the Obama administration sees it) increased vulnerabilities for the Chinese side and new advantages for Washington.
Clearly his case is (1) the US is engaging in a military build up; (2) China is engaging in a counter-thrust which, in Klare's equation, is triggered by the US military build up.
Klare reinforces this in discussing China's response:
As the underlying nature of the new Obama strategic blueprint becomes clearer, there can be no question that the Chinese leadership will, in response, take steps to ensure the safety of China’s energy lifelines.... A significant buildup of the Chinese navy -- still small and backward when compared to the fleets of the United States and its principal allies -- would seem all but inevitable.
...of course, China has been rapidly expanding its navy for quite a few years now, a move long predating the Obama Administration. No mention of that here. Wonder why?
In his piece about China, oil, and China's energy vulnerability, Klare scribes:
For China, all this spells potential strategic impairment. Although some of China’s imported oil will travel overland through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia, the great majority of it will still come by tanker from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America over sea lanes policed by the U.S. Navy. Indeed, almost every tanker bringing oil to China travels across the South China Sea, a body of water the Obama administration is now seeking to place under effective naval control.
By securing naval dominance of the South China Sea and adjacent waters, the Obama administration evidently aims to acquire the twenty-first century energy equivalent of twentieth-century nuclear blackmail. Push us too far, the policy implies, and we’ll bring your economy to its knees by blocking your flow of vital energy supplies. Of course, nothing like this will ever be said in public, but it is inconceivable that senior administration officials are not thinking along just these lines, and there is ample evidence that the Chinese are deeply worried about the risk -- as indicated, for example, by their frantic efforts to build staggeringly expensive pipelines across the entire expanse of Asia to the Caspian Sea basin.
This is quite a bizarre construct, not for what it says, but for what it leaves out. What's missing? This:
Above is a version of China's famous "Cow's Tongue" Map. Yes, that's right -- China currently claims the entire South China Sea. It does because, as Klare correctly notes, the South China Sea is important strategically for the shipping that passes through it, and for its rich fisheries, but most critically, for the plentiful oil and gas resources that lie beneath it. China frequently puts pressure on foreign oil firms...
In July 2008, China said it opposed a plan by Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s biggest oil company, to explore for petroleum in the South China Sea. In 2007, BP Plc abandoned planned exploration in an area known as Block 5-2 between the Spratly Islands and an existing BP-operated gas project in Vietnamese waters, because of competing ownership claims between China and Vietnam, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
but because this became counterproductive, it has switched tactics to harass and attack vessels from the states bordering the South China Sea as they go about their lawful business in their territorial and international waters.....
A Chinese fishing boat rammed the survey cables of the PetroVietnam ship yesterday morning in a “premeditated” incident, Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga told reporters. She said the ship was conducting a seismic survey in Block 136-03, an area more than 1,000 kilometers (622 miles) from China’s Hainan island.
The Cow's Tongue map was first issued in 1947 by the then Nationalist government of China. It is not the result of Obama's foreign policy and has nothing to do with any alleged Cold War. No Chinese emperor ever controlled these waters or claimed this territory.
This claim is territorial expansion, pure and simple, at the expense of China's neighbors. China claims territory belonging to all China's maritime neighbors in the region -- belonging to Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Philippines. Nor is this some formal or empty threat: China has already invaded the Paracels and tossed out the Vietnamese who had been there for more than two hundred years, back in the 1970s. At present there is a very low intensity conflict going on -- China has seized scores of Vietnamese fishing boats for fishing in "Chinese" waters, and its fishery protection vessels (gunboats) have threatened on a couple of occasions to sink vessels from local navies attempting to seize Chinese boats.
Nor is this claim well-defined -- what exactly does the famous Cow's Tongue represent -- China owns the islands and the ocean floor and its resources? China wants the whole area as local waters into which no other boats can go? Further, it is flexible and expanding -- China recently manufactured a new claim to territory 80 kms from the Philippines and more than 800 kms from the Chinese coast.
Now... ask yourself this: In an article about oil, the US presence in Asia, the South China Sea, and China, why would Klare leave out the key fact that China has threatened all of its neighbors, claims the entire South China Sea, and is acting in an increasingly belligerent manner?
The answer is patently, brutally obvious. In order to maintain a claim that Obama is fomenting a new Cold War in Asia, Klare must remove from sight the ugly reality of Chinese expansionism and the coming conflicts in Asia that it portends
Klare also removes a number of other interesting items from the reader's purview. A few score kilometers north of the island of Taiwan are the Senkaku Islands, which belong to Japan. These islands were claimed by China (which calls them the Diaoyutai) in the early 1970s after Japanese scientists announced the potential for fossil fuel resources under the continental shelf below the islands. This is another invented claim; the islands had been nabbed by Japan in 1895 as unclaimed territory. For the next 80 years both the PRC and ROC governments routinely and uncontroversially regarded the islands as Japanese.* Only after -- what was it? -- oil was found there, did Beijing and Taipei suddenly announce that they were Chinese after all. This claim is backed by the usual blustering threats from Beijing.
Of course, Klare withholds this information from the reader. It might complicate his simple narrative of US perfidy with the reality that China is inventing territorial claims over oil and then implicitly or explicitly threatening to go to war over them.
Another items somehow dropped out of Klare's narrative are the Mutual Defense treaties the US has with Philippines and Japan. The Philippines has no Navy to speak of so the US is vital to its defense. The US has obligations in Asia that are threatened by Chinese expansion.
Klare could also have mentioned Taiwan, another place historically thought of as lying outside China and never as part of it (the lowlands were a colony of the Manchu Qing Dynasty from the late 17th century until 1895) but claimed by China beginning in the late 1930s. But Taiwan, alas, won't fit Klare's narrative either. You see, during the Bush Administration Taiwan asked for 66 F-16s C/D fighters to help upgrade its obsolescent fighter fleet. The Bush Administration nixed that and the Obama administration did as well, choosing instead to upgrade Taiwan's current fleet of F-16 A/Bs. The Obama Administration chose to do that to please Beijing. A major weapons sale was made earlier in the Administration, one that had been in the pipeline for years.
Yes, probably better for Klare's argument that he didn't mention Taiwan, either.
There's a final complicating issue I'd like to address. Klare never mentions it because it would -- heh -- grossly complicate his thesis. But the fact is that US policymaking on China is strongly impacted by the large number of individuals who are doing business with China, especially in the form of ex-policymakers now doing business with their counterpart politicians in Beijing. Christopher Hitchens wrote on this years ago:
Clinton, as Tyler points out, had been to Taiwan many times as Governor of Arkansas and had learned the essential point that the business of Chinese relations is business. What the Taiwanese taught him he applied – to their ire – to relations with the mainland. His Southern Baptist predecessor Jimmy Carter had been an officer on a diesel-powered US submarine in 1949, and had watched as one by one the Chinese ports turned Red. His missionary uncle had once striven to Christianise this littoral; young Jimmy was hastily buying souvenirs in Qingdao as the campfires of Mao’s victorious People’s Liberation Army became visible on the hills above. Thirty years later, having taken office after a chapter of Nixonian crimes, he completed what Nixon and Kissinger had begun, and in 1979 broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan and recognised the People’s Republic of China. At the time, he was denounced for softness on Communism by Ronald Reagan, who arranged a campaign photo-op for himself in Taiwan, and by George Bush, who impugned Carter’s Christian credentials in a Washington Post op-ed piece. This period of rhetoric already seems prehistoric. (Henry Kissinger threatened to criticise the move as well, but was contacted by Zbigniew Brzezinski and told that Carter might reveal what he knew of some past secret dealings. ‘The threat,’ Tyler drily minutes, ‘worked.’ Ten years later, Kissinger was attacking anybody who dared criticise the Chinese leadership for the Tiananmen Square massacre, and had become the chief Sinologist for Atlantic Richfield and the Chase Manhattan Bank.) The American-Chinese special relationship is now a done deal, free at last from any danger of partisan recrimination, or accusation of treason.
Another excellent piece on this issue is Ken Silverstein's The Mandarins from Harpers in Aug of 2008 which points out that, just as with the Iraq War run-up, many of the commentators on China policy have unrevealed business links to Beijing. Of Obama's main Asia guy, Jeff Bader, Silverstein notes:
In 2005, Bader joined the Brookings Institution, and invariably this is the affiliation cited when he publishes op-eds or delivers speeches. Hence, readers and listeners must imagine that Bader is a neutral, impartial observer.....
...in fact Bader and several other Obama Administration officials revolved into their positions from consulting firms that do business with China. The influence of private capital also extends to foreign policy. These voices are powerful counterweights to the hawks who argue that China must be confronted. US policy is no more monolithic than Beijing's.
In sum, China is not engaged in a counterthrust and is not the poor victim of US policy. The US did not force China to invade and annex Tibet and East Turkestan. It did not force China to claim the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. It did not compel Beijing to issue the cow's tongue map and a claim to the entire South China Sea in 1947 in anticipation of Obama's 2009 Cold War plans. Washington did not push China to claim Taiwan. US Cold Warriors did not trick China into inventing a claim to the Senkakus. The US did not compel China to point 1,500 missiles at Taiwan and demand that the Taiwanese submit to annexation or die.
Beijing did all these things on its own.
Klare leaves all of that out.
You can argue that the US wants war with China. You can argue that the US has a heinous foreign policy. You can certainly argue that the US is a hegemonic power out to protect its hegemony in East Asia. You can argue that the US is out to encircle China and snuff out its fossil fuel lifelines. You can argue that the proper policy response is retrenchment, appeasement, abandonment, or confrontation. These are all positions that can be supported by sound argument.
But the one thing you can't argue is what Klare is clearly arguing: that the US is causing the problems in East and Southeast Asia in a desire to foment a new Cold War. It is not. The source of tensions all along the Chinese littoral is China's desire to grab the territories of its neighbors, one that long predates the current Administration.
You can discover this yourself with a simple thought experiment. Imagine that tomorrow the US and all its works vanished completely from the earth. Raise your hand if you think China would stop seizing Vietnamese fishing boats, give up its claims to the South China Sea, stop harassing Japan over its absurd claim to the Senkakus, or take down its missiles facing Taiwan.
What? No hands?
*. In Jan of 1895 Japan grabbed the Senkakus, then unoccupied and unclaimed. For all of the 20th century down to 1969, both Communist China and Nationalist China (ROC) recognized the Senkakus as Japanese. It is easy to find examples of maps and articles showing this. For example, this 1953 Renminerbao article from the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party not only describes the Senkakus as Japanese but also uses the Japanese names to refer to them. Down to 1969 PRC maps were still showing the Senkakus as Japanese. Similarly, the Nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan in 1949, also treated the Senkakus as Japanese. For example, between 1959 and 1972, maps issued by one of the defense research institutes in Taiwan showed the Senkakus as Japanese, with no disclaimers. If you can read Chinese, the fabulous Taiwan map blog has a huge collection of maps and texts that show that throughout recorded history, the Chinese never thought of the Senkakus as Chinese.