The debate over China has been heating up most recently with finger-pointing over lax food safety provisions, accusations of currency manipulation, and a growing concern—evidenced by their tiptoeing around the Sudanese government and Darfur—that China will not become a responsible stakeholder in the global order. And while some have taken that as a cue to swap engagement for confrontation (see the Baucus-Graham-Grassley-Schumer currency legislation) an article in The National Interest penned by professor Steve Weber and two of his graduate students contends that the binary choice of engaging or confronting China entirely misses what is actually taking place: rather than join our liberal internationalist order—one created and framed by the US post-WWII—China is seeking to build its own international order, a “A World Without the West”.

China has been rather successful at courting a good portion of the world that we have neglected or forgotten about (namely central and southeast Asia, Africa, and the GCC states), primarily due to our all-consuming fixation with the Middle East, and Iraq in particular. Nevertheless, once we have recognized that the US needs to diversify its foreign policy portfolio beyond Iraq, we are still forgetting the lessons of the Cold War about how to forge and retain alliances as well as maintain a soft power that is essential to our national security. Two areas of recent controversy and inquiry illustrate this point.

The first dwells within the realm of trade. Though Congressional Democrats have largely recognized the strategic consequences of the Iraq war, the lesson of trade as a geopolitical tool seems to be lost on them. Economist David Hale writes in Wednesday’s Financial Times that scuttling the South Korea Free Trade Agreement would cede regional leadership to China:

The loss of the South Korean FTA will also undermine the ability of the US to play a leadership role elsewhere in Asia. China is now busily promoting regional free-trade agreements with other Asian countries, regarding trade as an important diplomatic tool for projecting its soft power. South Korea had $134.3bn of trade with China last year. Korean economists are projecting it could grow to $200bn by 2012. The rapid growth of trade can only bolster China’s political influence throughout east Asia, at the expense of the US.

The Democrats have turned protectionist because they regard trade as an opportunity to exploit domestic concerns about issues such as income inequality and manufacturing job losses. Their strategy is extremely risky, because trade policy has long been one of the most important pillars of US foreign policy. It played an important role in cementing alliances during the cold war. The US will find it difficult to compete with China for influence in east Asia if it cannot use trade as an instrument of foreign policy.

How strange that the final legacy of the east Asian financial crisis should be a protectionist America protesting against a current account deficit made possible by the ease of US access to the region’s surplus liquidity. South Korea was once a protectionist country closed to many imports, but it is using the pending FTA to accelerate its transition to an open free-market economy. The US should be encouraging this development rather than letting two sick auto companies in Detroit derail it. The price of defeating the South Korean FTA will be a significant erosion of US influence in east Asia.

Scuttling the South Korea FTA will only feed China’s ascendance and development of a more robust “world without the west.” In recent years, domestic concerns have been allowed to trump national geopolitical interests because trade has somehow been decoupled from strategic concerns and politicians have forgotten how to sell it as a part of our global leadership. We’ve forgotten that economic instruments, namely aid and trade, were once strategic tools we leveraged during the Cold War to pursue our interests and cement critical alliances. My colleague Anatol Lieven recently elaborates:

…Why, even after Iraq, do so many US analysts instinctively reach for military means? And why are they so indifferent to using economic aid to help prevent crises in the first place? During the cold war, Democratic and Republican administrations alike recognised that economic development was at least as important as military spending in resisting the spread of communism.

Generous US development aid from the 1950s to the 1970s, and openness to exports from key states, helped transform economies across east and southeast Asia. Indeed, it continues to pay dividends in the resistance of populations in Malaysia and Indonesia to Islamist extremism…

Today, US aid even to such a vital state as Pakistan remains pitiful by comparison to cold war figures; in Afghanistan, meanwhile, US spending on the war there from 2001-2006 was nine times the level of spending on economic development.

The pattern is not restricted to the Muslim world and the “war on terror." In other important parts of the world, US geopolitical ambitions are running far ahead of its willingness to aid regional allies. Last year, Chinese aid to the Philippines -- a former US colony -- exceeded that of the US four times over…

The same narrow vision is true of trade policy. In the cold war, the US deliberately kept its markets open to South Korean, Taiwanese and Thai imports even when these markets were largely closed to US goods, so as to strengthen these countries against the communist threat. Today, US trade officials negotiating with Muslim allies insist on full free trade and often on US advantages. There are of course real US economic interests to defend -- but this approach does not help countries such as Pakistan to develop their economies and resist Islamist unrest.

A second reason for China outmaneuvering us in “the great game” is our own failure to accord sufficient attention to soft power, an essential ingredient in harmonizing other countries’ national interests with our own international order, best orchestrated through civilian instruments like the state department/embassies and USAID. Our imbalanced priorities—exemplified by the fact that that we out-fund our military over civilian capacities by a factor of 12:1—have exposed a soft-power deficit that not only creates missed-opportunities for our national security interests but has also opened up space for China to step in.

A report commissioned by former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN) that was published in December of 2006 details an emerging mission creep, or more precisely “scope creep,” where DOD and military personnel are increasingly tasked to non-combat areas overseas to take on perceived gaps in our soft-power architecture as a result of under-funded civilian sectors (like the State Dept. and USAID).

The report details a number of problems with this trend. Among them are:
(1) The blurring and overlap of responsibilities, which can lead to interagency tensions and turf wars that ultimately undermine the effectiveness of our mission.
(2) The redirection of resources away from non-coercive civilian instruments, which are the only tools to win the “hearts and minds” and ensure long-term security.
(3) The perceived militarization of all US interaction with the world, which not only arouses suspicion of coercion in host countries, but bolsters hardliners and weakening our allies

Simply put, the political baggage the military carries after campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan makes them unsuited to effectively play the agents of soft power such as aid distribution, reconstruction, civil society development, etc. (Certainly the most recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey substantiates this as it details the decline of our esteem around the world in tandem with the military’s “scope creep”). For this reason as the report suggests, we need to return back to the State Dept. and USAID with local ambassadors as the primary agents spearheading these efforts.

In the face of China’s nascent world order, Weber et al describe some coping options ranging from disruption to accommodation. The most advisable and plausible scenario is for the US to “compete for the allegiance of states that are ‘in play’”. This means remaking our liberal international order more appealing and, and perhaps accommodating, to states who have not fully integrated into our global order over the last half century. (The US-India nuclear deal, regardless of its failings, appears to be such an effort to make global non-proliferation architecture more malleable in order to bring such “swing states” in). But without revitalizing and effectively deploying our soft-power—by bringing the concept of trade back into the strategic fold and boosting our civilian role in global outreach—the odds against us mount considerably.