Former State Department official Evan Feigenbaum was recently part of an oral history project on the George W. Bush presidency. I found his comments on that administration's initial focus on China in foreign policy but subsequent shift to the Middle East after 9/11 very interesting. I have been wondering for a while now how the U.S.-China relationship would have evolved if the U.S. government didn't react the way it did to 9/11. Instead of the Bush administration trying to convince China to work with the United States on terrorism and related issues, perhaps the U.S.-China relationship would have been front and center in U.S. foreign policy, and would have been more confrontational as well. China was in the process of completing its accession to the WTO, and that was bound to (and did) have a significant impact on the U.S.-China economic relationship, but confronting China about those sorts of issues, and other ones, quickly became less of a priority. The whole transcript is a good read, but I'll quote some key portions here:
Evan Feigenbaum:
... when the Bush administration came in, there were people in the administration at senior levels for whom China was just front and center. It wasn't an organizing principle of American foreign policy, but it had a role that was analogous to the role that China plays in that today. There were people who already saw it as an increasingly central strategic challenge to the United States, to American foreign policy.
But terrorism was always in the background. I remember sometime in the spring being at a Council on Foreign Relations event in New York with Steve Hadley. Steve was Condi Rice's Deputy National Security Advisor. There was a cocktail hour either before or after he spoke. I wandered over to Steve, and we started yakking, and I said, "So how's it going?" And he said in passing something like, "You'd be amazed how much terrorism stuff comes across my desk." This was well before 9/11, but already, when they were back after eight years of the [William J.] Clinton administration, and I remember thinking, Wow, that's interesting. Steve was already struck by that intensity of focus on counterterrorism.
The EP-3 incident was pretty central in not just hardening views on China but in defining battle lines that became relevant later on among seniors in the administration. You remember the way the U.S. got out of that, and China got out of that, was through a tortured diplomatic process. I wasn't in the government at this point, but it's kind of a tortured diplomatic process, where the Chinese wouldn't even answer the phone initially, and then Colin Powell and his team found a way to express "regret" but without making any sort of apology for something for which, frankly, the U.S. didn't think it had any reason to apologize.
It was handled diplomatically, but there were clearly people in the administration who wanted to take a much sharper-edged approach, both to the resolution of that and to China more generally. Coming out of EP-3 it was pretty clear to people, both inside and on the outside, to anybody who was paying attention, that there was going to be a big fight on China in terms of how big a challenge China was, and how to organize the American response to it. I wouldn't say the lines of debate were clean, but, broadly speaking, there was a perception that there was a more diplomatic approach to China associated with Powell, and then there was a harder-edged approach associated with [Donald H.] Rumsfeld and Vice President [Richard B.] Cheney. That was the context into which I was hired.
I don't remember who it was that said this to me. It may have been Larry Wilkerson, who at that point was sitting on the Policy Planning Staff but later became Powell's chief of staff and had a lot of Army history with Powell from when he had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It was somebody that was close to Secretary Powell. And this person basically said to me something like, "Just remember why we hired you—you're going to help punch out Rumsfeld's guys on China."
But by October, when I was finally in the State Department, American foreign policy had moved away from all that, to terrorism and dealing with al-Qaeda in the first instance, but then Afghanistan in the second, because of course the response was President Bush's decision to deal with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
I came at the very end of September or early October, and at that point—First, the whole orientation of American foreign policy had changed. But two other things are relevant. The first was that my boss, Richard Haass, was dual-hatted. He was Director of Policy Planning, but he also had another hat as the coordinator for American policy on Afghanistan.
Richard was coordinating Afghanistan policy, but he was short-staffed because he was director of the planning staff, and the planning staff couldn't have had more than 12 to 15 people on it. So literally everybody on the planning staff was drafted into Afghanistan duty, so the Latin America guy was doing Afghanistan, and the Africa person was doing Afghanistan, and I was doing Afghanistan. But I was doing Afghanistan differently than the Latin America person, because China at least shared a border with Afghanistan. [laughs]
The second thing that was relevant was that China was a member of something called the Six Plus Two [Six Plus Two Group on Afghanistan], which was a contact group that included the six neighboring countries of Afghanistan. China, Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan were the six neighbors, so there was a process going called the Six Plus Two, which meant that China was intrinsically part of the Afghan discussion.
What I'm saying is, people began to start thinking about how to work with China on the Afghanistan issue against a backdrop where American foreign policy had shifted to focusing on something other than China.
And this was something that really redefined the lines of debate. Instead of having a classic Cold War-like balance-of-power debate about how to deal with China as a challenge to American power, the orientation in foreign policy shifted to terrorism-The War on Terrorism and Afghanistan in the first instance, but in the second, the potential to coordinate with China because it had an intrinsic role in that as a neighboring country.
People began trying to figure out how to work with China in that context: First, could China be worked with in that context? Second, if so, how? And third, how much did we want to get in their face and challenge the Chinese to step up to the plate? I was not just drafted onto Afghan duty; I had the ability, sitting on the planning staff, to try to push for leveraging the Afghanistan issue as a way to try to challenge the Chinese to step up on an issue that was not a classic one in the U.S.-China relationship, and was also not just one of those classic balance-of-power, "Chinese versus American power," issues in East Asia either, like Taiwan or the South China Sea.
That was the beginning of what I would characterize as a much more globally oriented approach to Chinese power. And that's important, because people now, in 2020, think of China as a global player, and everybody's talking about things like China's infrastructure initiatives, or China in Africa. Nobody thought of China that way in the early 2000s. But by default, because of 9/11 and what happened around terrorism and Afghanistan, you could already see the Bush administration not just foreshadowing the debate about China in the world that came later but, even before people perceived that China had stepped up to a global role, China was already being pushed into a global role.
If you want, we can talk about what happened on Afghanistan with China specifically, but 9/11 was important, because it didn't just shift the orientation of American foreign policy and make China more peripheral and less central to those debates in Washington; it also created the opportunity, and a set of issues, that the United States could leverage to try to push China differently through a very nontraditional set of issues.
The U.S. hadn't worked with China on continental Eurasia or on Afghanistan, really, since the Soviet invasion, so it was a shift in American foreign policy, but one that also created a lever to look at China very differently.
And I would argue to you that the Policy Planning Staff was ground zero for that, not least because Richard had that Afghan hat, and because Powell and Rich Armitage were interested in it.
...
Riley
Evan, I want to go back and ask you a question about the state of play within the administration. You had indicated, particularly after the airplane incident, that there was a sort of division there between the more military approach as opposed to the more diplomatic approach, which mainly follows the Defense/State divide, but you didn't mention Condi Rice in that particular point that you were making. What I'm trying to do is hear from you, as somebody who was on the inside, about your perception of what Condi perceived her job to be at this time. Then does that have particular implications for waiting on this divide and how the President is seeing things as he's developing the administration's policy toward China.
Feigenbaum
My impression is that, again, 9/11 and Afghanistan, and then later Iraq, were the central issues in American foreign policy. China began to become more peripheral, even by the fall of 2001. So it was neither an organizing principle nor the central foreign policy challenge the U.S. was facing, whereas in the spring of 2001, before I got there, it was much more front and center, and there were lines of orientation that were a little bit different. My impression by the time I got in was that the main differences of view around how to deal with China, and what kind of challenge China was, largely followed the Powell/Rumsfeld divide.
But to be candid, I think the President was the key force there, because the President, at least on China—His instincts always struck me, both anecdotally and as an outside observer—"outside" in the sense that I wasn't in meetings with the President on China at the top level—as much closer to Powell's on what China meant to the United States, on how China could be challenged or not.
There were probably three reasons for that. One was that President Bush had direct experience with China from when his mom and dad had been in Beijing. George Herbert Walker Bush had been the Director of the Liaison Office in Beijing back in the [Gerald R.] Ford administration, and I think President George W. Bush had visited there. So it was one of the places in the world that he'd been to, and had some firsthand experience with. If you'd seen China in the 1970s, and then you saw China in the early 2000s, it was a transformed place.
China, just by accident, happened to be the host of the APEC meeting, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, in the fall of 2001. It was in Shanghai, the APEC summit, and President Bush went to APEC. I always thought to myself, if you'd been to China in the 1970s and you hadn't been back until the fall of 2001, and then you suddenly landed there and saw what China had become, it would have to strike you that China was a different kind of place. That firsthand experience that the President had was probably relevant.
Second, not knowing how he and his father might have talked about China—His father, of course, had a longtime interest in China, was wise about it, had deep experience and a lot of strongly held views about it. It's unknowable how much of an influence that may have been, but I have to believe that he and his dad talked a lot about China, so that presumably shaped his views in some ways, whereas on other issues many people have argued that the Bush 43 administration was very different, strategically or ideologically, from the 41 administration. On China, I think you can make the case for more consistency with the classic American approach to China.
Then third, because it wasn't the central issue in American foreign policy at that point, and people were looking at China differently than they are today, it was less of a food fight than you saw on other issues, like Iraq, for example. And Condi was running that process.
The most telling thing, I think, on the NSC in that period was that the National Security Strategy that the Bush administration issued in its first term had a very interesting chapter on great power competition. The Policy Planning Staff, as I recall, had done the first draft of the National Security Strategy, and when it went over to the NSC, as I recall, Condi didn't like it and she just tossed it. She had Phil Zelikow essentially rewrite it. [laughter] Philip tossed out our handiwork, rewrote the whole thing, and what came out, if you look at the first of the Bush National Security Strategies, was a chapter on relations among the great powers that essentially said, we're at a disruptive moment in global history in which, for the first time, the great powers have the opportunity to compete in peace rather than just prepare for war.
I think it was the penultimate chapter of that National Security Strategy. It postulated a possibility of greater convergence among the great powers than had existed historically. It was not a naive chapter; it didn't say that great power competition was going to go away. It talked about competition. But it said, "Compete in peace rather than prepare for war." And of course that was Condi's document, because the planning staff one was tossed, and Condi and Philip—It was their vision.
That was broadly consistent with the orientation that we had at State when I talked about challenging China to step up to a more global role. But Condi did have a kind of edgy view on China, I think, on some things.
...
Perry
This is coming from my position as a complete layperson in this field. Someone who would've been doing something similar to what you were doing as a policy planner in China, up to the highest levels in China, at this time when things were changing about how the United States policy was looking at China as this global player, and wanting them to be a global player, What does China want at this point? Not just some of these smaller strategic things about their domestic terrorism, or as they see it, opposition to the regime, but what do they want the big picture to be like for them in the world?
Feigenbaum
To be honest, when the U.S. started pushing them on the global thing, I don't think they got it, and they didn't get it until—It gets much more interesting in the second term, for reasons that we can get into later, but we're still in the first term.
At that point in the first term the Chinese, in the first instance, were slow to appreciate, in my view, the opportunities they had as a result of the shift in American focus away from them and onto something else. That's interesting, because we tend to think of the Chinese as these Sun Zi-reading, Go-playing strategic masters, but I thought they were very slow to realize the opportunities they had as a result of the U.S. focusing on something else.
Perry
And why was that?
Feigenbaum
They didn't really get it. First of all—This is true even today, when China's much more globally oriented and is much more assertive globally, but particularly 20 years ago—their priorities—first, second, third, fourth, and fifth—have been largely domestic.
If you're the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the first five things you think about when you wake up in the morning are largely domestic: first, how to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power; second, how to grow the economy at a requisite percentage to keep the country stable and keep yourself in power, because that's the basic social contract between the Party and the public—you stay out of organized politics and we'll give you opportunities to get rich; third, how to create the ten to eleven million new jobs a year that they need to keep the public satisfied; fourth, how to deal with a demographic time bomb, where the country's getting old before it's getting rich; and, fifth, how to deal with a growth model that's energy-intensive but energy-inefficient and extremely environmentally unfriendly. The last one matters to the Party politically because the number one source of social protest in China, other than land seizures for real estate deals by local officials, is environmental protest.
So their priority agenda has largely been domestic, and it's focused on the Party keeping a lid on protests and threats to their power at home. Because of that, they were not assertive globally at that point in time, except in their Asian neighborhood and on the issues that had been their core security interests. Those were the things where they had irredentist or revisionist territorial claims: Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea. Then, there was their growing economic role in the world, and then their traditional great power relationships with the United States, Japan, India, and so on.
So that's interesting because, number one, the U.S. is pushing them in this first Bush term on this global stuff, but it's really not part of their worldview at that point.
Plus they don't get it initially, which is also interesting, because they got it earlier. For example, if you go back to the [Henry A.] Kissinger conversations with the Chinese and the Nixon administration, Kissinger had a much more global conversation with China than the United States was having with them in the Clinton and in the Bush 43 first term, simply because China was thought of in the context of U.S.-Soviet competition and the Cold War, which was a global competition. So at that point in the 1970s, the U.S. and the Chinese were talking about things like Cubans in Angola, and [Jonas M.] Savimbi in Southwest Africa. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, there was a U.S.-China angle to that.
That was a much more global conversation. But by the time Clinton and Bush 43 roll around—Remember, it's post-Tiananmen Square also, so there'd been a big disruption in U.S.-China relations—the conversation is really much narrower.
One of the reasons I was pushing Powell so hard through the speeches and through leveraging the Afghan issue to say the word "global" every time he said the word "China" was that the U.S. and China didn't see eye to eye on any of those neighborhood issues, like Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea. So if you wanted to put U.S.-China relations onto a more stable footing, where you were challenging China and getting in their face to move the relationship in a more salutary direction, you needed China to step up and do things that would be productive on a different set of issues, on global and functional issues that might be less difficult for the U.S.-China relationship.
There wasn't much positive in China's posture around its periphery in East Asia. The U.S. and China didn't have anything positive around Taiwan. They didn't see eye to eye. The Chinese hated American policy. We hated their policy. The U.S. had made a big arms sale to Taiwan in the first year of the Bush 43 administration, had ripped off the Band-Aid and made a big arms sale. The Chinese didn't like that, obviously.
So the more global conversation was the only way to challenge them—and make this thing more positive, potentially—but it didn't get a lot of traction with China until the second Bush term, because the Chinese didn't see the world that way.
So, like I said, look at Afghanistan: First, they made the contribution bilaterally, and then it was only when we pushed them that they stepped up more multilaterally. But it was still much more modest, the contribution they made.
After the U.S. invaded Iraq, quite apart from the UN Security Council piece, which had been about getting the Chinese on board with Resolution 1441, former Secretary [James Addison] Jim Baker was brought back as Special Envoy on Iraqi debt relief. Among the places he coordinated with was China, and he pushed the Chinese to forgive the Iraqi debt that the new government in Baghdad inherited from Saddam Hussein. It was somewhere north of $1 billion and Baker had some good meetings with the top leader, Hu Jintao, and the premier, Wen Jiabao, who told him they'd maybe do it on "humanitarian" grounds, but also said they'd look seriously at some reconstruction funding. Those were the kinds of issues where the Chinese were being pushed on a much more global agenda.
To your point: Our counterparts in China—the policy planners in the Foreign Ministry, and then, presumably, the policy planners elsewhere in the system, including in the security services—were disproportionately focused either on the foreign policy elements of their domestic agenda or on the classic set of U.S.-China and East Asia security issues.
I do think American pressure had some role in getting them to think about how to match their framework a bit better to where their power and capacity were already headed at that point. I'll give you another example from later on—from very early in the second term, but with momentum from the first term. The U.S. and China set up a bilateral Global Issues Forum, where Paula Dobriansky, the Under Secretary for Global Affairs, would pull in a big interagency group to do public health, and especially clean energy coordination, with her counterpart, Shen Guofang, an Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, who would convene Chinese functional agencies all together on their side. The discussion involved challenging China frontally to step up on global problems where they actually had some real capacity to contribute to a solution. One example was malaria, because China had most of the global supply of a plant called artemisinin that was a critical ingredient in antimalarial drugs, so there was a big push on them to deal with supply bottlenecks and step up on antimalarials in a way that tried to push them into being more of a joint problem solver on a global challenge where results could then be measured. Does that make sense?
