Wanna Tighten the Screws on China? Focus on Coalition Building Posted by Jacob Stokes

Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Washington this week amid much hang-wringing about continued obstinacy from China on a range of issues. So the question of the day is: What’s the best way to get China to play ball and become a more responsible power? One school of thought suggests the U.S. continue to ratchet up its responses to Chinese actions. But as Les Gelb points out, too much ratcheting on either side will empower the hawks in each country, leading to recriminations and a souring of relations between the two nations. That dynamic serves the interests of neither country.

In order to avoid that fate, and to more effectively pressure China, the U.S should avoid the G-2 framework which frames problems as bilateral. Instead, the U.S. should focus on doing the diplomatic spadework to build coalitions to lobby the Middle Kingdom to change its behavior. There are three reasons why this approach makes sense.

First, almost every issue cited in discussions of a U.S.-China rift affects countries beside the U.S. And those countries largely want to see the same policy solutions as the U.S. Talking currency? Engage other developing countries whose export sectors suffer from the artificially low value of the renminbi. Worried about the protection of intellectual property and indigenous innovation? Enlist our European and other Asian allies to push China to pay for licensing of software and remove regulations that force companies to release proprietary technology in order to enter the Chinese market. Feeling hot in here? Engage the Global South and other developing countries – those who will feel the effects of climate change most dramatically – to pressure China to continue to improve its environmental policies. Oceans feeling a little tense? Follow Secretary Clinton’s lead and pick up the pieces via ASEAN and other Asian regional fora when Chinese aggression spooks its neighbors; that would create a united international front, backed but not necessarily led by the U.S., against sprawling Chinese territorial claims. I could go on. But the point is: When possible, encourage others to lead the way.

Which leads to the second point. By standing firmly behind others, the U.S. can change the optics, and by doing so the debate in China.  As chroniclers of Chinese domestic foreign policy discussions such as David Shambaugh and SIPRI have noted, there’s a vibrant and often shill debate going on inside China about its relations with the rest of the world. In that debate, a number of competing schools of thought working through a plethora of institutions and interest groups are engaged in a continual knife fight to influence policy. One thing is for sure though --  and this applies to any group or institution -- appearing to kowtow to America is political and policy suicide. (Sound familiar?) Given that reality, it makes sense to firmly – even sternly – encourage others to lead the way. Cobbling together coalitions undermines the argument that global responsibility means doing what America wants. In a China paranoid that America seeks to prevents its rise, that’s a game-changer.

Finally, and I alluded to this above, coalition-building when taking on China allows America to hold free-riding countries accountable. There’s no reason America should be the only nation risking diplomatic fallout with Beijing when lobbying for policy changes that would benefit other countries as well. Smart global leadership means create force-multiplying and fallout-minimizing coalitions. By sharing the load, America will be more effective at pressuring China to do what the U.S. wants, not less effective.

Update: Matt Yglesias piles on in his latest Prospect column:

Embracing "the summit" may seem appealing in the short term, but Sino-American bilateralism is a poor strategy for a world in which China will all but inevitably amass an economy larger than the United States' in the near future. Our long-term interests are much better served by almost any conceivable decision-making process other than so-called G2 summits with China. The short-term frustrations of pursuing a policy of robust multilateralism should not distract attention from the urgent need to do the hard work.

The core issue, to be a bit flip, is that the United States of America has a posse.

Or at least we do potentially. If the world were to fundamentally divide into a China-led half and an America-led half, we would end up with the bigger half by far. Essentially, all of Europe would be with us. So would Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. So would India, Brazil, and Mexico. The vast majority of the world's populous and influential countries these days are liberal democracies with values more in common with America than with China. What's more, geography favors us with regard to many autocracies -- such as Vietnam, Thailand, and probably even Russia -- that are much closer to China and thus have much more to fear from it than they do from us. China's allies in such a scenario would be a motley band led by North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and smatterings of Africa and Central Asia.

Advantage: USA.

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The United States really needs to form closer ties with India, who has a democracy, in order to pressure and perhaps contain China. But the only impediment to closer Indian-American relations seems to be the issue of the Iranian nuclear program. India has a close military and economic relationship with Iran, because the Indians believe that Iran can contain Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. So any American diplomatic and military involvement against Iran will be met with extreme Indian disapproval and hence in any chance to form an Indian-American partnership will be lost. Once again it seems that the obsessive attention to Iran's nuclear program is detrimental to American goals in Asia.

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