America and its allies must not simply accept
Beijing’s aggression.
Great struggles between great powers tend to have a tipping point.
It’s the moment when the irreconcilability of differences becomes obvious to
nearly everyone.
In 1911 Germany sparked an international crisis when it sent a gunboat
into the Moroccan port of Agadir and, as Winston Churchill wrote in his history
of the First World War, “all the alarm bells throughout Europe began
immediately to quiver.” In 1936 Germany provoked another crisis when it marched
troops into the Rhineland, in flagrant breach of its treaty obligations. In
1946, the Soviet Union made it obvious it had no intention of honoring
democratic principles in Central Europe, and Churchill was left to warn that
“an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Analogies between these past episodes and China’s
decision this week draft a new national security law on Hong Kong aren’t
perfect. Hong Kong is a Chinese port, not a faraway foreign one. Hong Kong’s
people have ferociously resisted Beijing’s efforts to impose control, unlike
the Rhineland Germans who welcomed Berlin’s. And the curtailment of freedom
that awaits Hong Kong is nothing like the totalitarian tyranny that Joseph
Stalin imposed on Warsaw, Budapest and other cities.
But
the analogies aren’t inapt, either. Beijing has spent the better part of 20
years subverting its promises to preserve Hong Kong’s democratic institutions.
Now it is moving to quash what remains of the city’s civic freedoms through a
forthcoming law that allows the government to punish speech as subversion and protest
as sedition. The concept of “one country, two systems,” was supposed to last at
least until 2047 under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration.
Now China’s rulers have been openly violating that treaty, much as Germany
openly violated the treaties of Locarno and Versailles.
And
again, alarm bells quiver.
For
years, Donald Trump’s comments on China have swung between the truculent and the obsequious. But beneath the president’s mental foam,
the administration has undertaken a sober rethink of the U.S. strategic
approach to China, the outlines of which are described in a new interagency document quietly released by the White
House last week.
Gone
from this new vision are the platitudes about encouraging China’s “peaceful
rise” as a “responsible stakeholder” in a “rules-based order.” Instead, Beijing
is described, accurately, as a habitual and aggressive violator of that order —
a domestic tyrant, international bully and economic bandit that systematically
robs companies of their intellectual property, countries of their sovereign
authorities, and its own people of their natural rights.
“Beijing
has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not offer compromises in response to
American displays of goodwill, and that its actions are not constrained by its
prior commitments,” the report reads. “We acknowledge and respond in kind to
Beijing’s transactional approach with timely incentives and costs, or credible
threats thereof.”
A
critic might note that this description of China’s behavior sounds a lot like
Trump’s. Sort of, except that the comparison trivializes the scale of China’s
abuses and neglects the breadth and longevity of its challenge. A Biden
administration will be confronted with the same unpleasant facts about a
geopolitical adversary that seeks not only to dominate its region but also
dethrone liberal democracy as the dominant political model of the 21st century.
All
of which makes the Hong Kong crisis so consequential. Beijing almost certainly
chose this moment to strike because it calculated that a world straining under
the weight of a pandemic and a depression lacked the will and attention to
react. On Friday, Trump said he would strip Hong Kong of its privileged
commercial and legal ties to the U.S. But that punishes the people of Hong Kong
at least as much as it does their rulers in Beijing.
What’s
a better course for the U.S.? A few ideas:
Sanction
Chinese officials engaged in human-rights abuses in Hong Kong under the Global Magnitsky Act. Upgrade relations with Taiwan and
increase arms sales, including top-shelf weapons’ systems such as the F-35 and
the Navy’s future frigate. Re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement as
a counter to China’s economic influence. (This won’t happen in a Trump
administration, but should in a Biden one.) Publicly press all G-7 countries to
stop doing business with telecom-giant Huawei as a meaningful response to the
Hong Kong law.
One
other idea is now being explored by Britain, the former colonial power. Give
every Hong Kong person an opportunity to easily obtain a U.K. residency card,
even a passport. As Tom Tugendhat, the chair of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs
Committee and founder of its China Research Group, told me on Thursday, doing
so would “right a wrong done when the U.K. removed the status in the 1980s.
After a century of rule, Britain has obligations.” A future American president
who believes in the value of immigration could join that effort, in the same
way we helped Hungarian refugees and Vietnamese boat people.
If
all this and more were announced now, it might persuade Beijing to pull back
from the brink. In the meantime, think of this as our Rhineland moment with
China — and remember what happened the last time the free world looked
aggression in the eye, and blinked.
