What Hillary Didn’t Do In Asia

It's hard to find signs that the United States is pursuing a similarly coherent, long-term strategy toward China; instead there is a hodgepodge of policies, some wise, some not. Wisely, the United States has decided to help integrate China into the world economy. This policy has worked, leading Chinese society to open up considerably as a result. The hundreds of thousands of Chinese students who have studied in U.S. universities have become major agents of change at home. World Bank president Robert Zoellick's vision of China as a "responsible stakeholder" is slowly coming true.

Yet Washington has demonstrated far less strategic thinking on a range of other issues, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Sudan—each of which it has treated in separate silos. The Chinese, by contrast, view such issues as parts of a whole, and constantly look for trade-offs. Hence they were happy to cooperate on North Korea and Iraq, for which they were rewarded when President Bush put significant pressure on Taiwan not to push for independence. This was a major victory for China. Any objective balance sheet would show more gains for China than the United States. By cooperating selectively, China has thwarted the emergence of any U.S. strategy to contain or prevent its rise.

So what should America's long-term strategy toward China look like? To start, Washington should revisit its assumptions. What should U.S.-China relations look like in 20 years? The Chinese Communist Party is not going to disappear like the Soviet Union, as many U.S. policymakers privately hope. Thus Washington should focus on integrating China even more into the international system and abandon policies China perceives as destabilizing, like support for the Dalai Lama or criticism of China's human-rights violations. What Clinton still needs to work out, in other words, is a big-picture view of the world's largest nation. If she fails to think strategically, the result will be an even stronger China. If she succeeds, China may turn out just as strong—but become a much more cooperative and restrained partner.

Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore) and author, most recently, of “The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.”

© 2009