By Jerome A. Cohen
I recently read Ambassador Chas Freeman’s remarks to the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Toronto. It is a brilliant, well-written overview that Biden and his aides should surely benefit from. I think his “post-colonial hangover” analysis is a wonderfully helpful lens with which to view the world. Yet the refinement of general principles does not eliminate the need to deal with concrete cases.
What are the implications of the Freeman overview for confronting the specific issues before us? Chas is surely right about what war would mean for Taiwan, the US, and the PRC (and many other nations), and implicit in his view is the need for extreme caution in dealing with this challenge. But what about other issues to which at least some other important countries look to the USG for a response?
Many mention the Xinjiang obscenity when discussing China, an example of the PRC’s gross violations of international human rights. Should we give it and Tibet a pass as well as the takeover of Hong Kong since warlords, kings, dictators, and other despots have always dominated in most countries? What about the repression of basic freedoms for the rest of the Chinese people? Should nothing be said or done about the practice of arbitrary detention on which Communist control is based? Western colonialism had many vices, but it did leave in many of its victims, by negative as well as positive example, an abiding residue of appreciation for the importance of erecting protections against arbitrary detention. But, as Lenin famously asked, what is to be done?
Of course, the premise for effective American response is the ending of dysfunctional democracy at home. In the meantime, however, should the USG withdraw from the South China Sea? If not, how do we achieve a modus vivendi with China’s expanding power, even while Xi Jinping “struggles” to cope with increasingly serious internal problems of his own country?
We need to improve our general principles. We need to pull up our own socks. But nothing stands still for long. We also need to deal with the complex concrete cases that daily confront us, if only by well-considered inaction.