Abstract
Without China on board, the Proliferation Security Initiative may struggle to stay afloat.
Taiwan's flamboyant vice president, Annette Lu, says her constituents suffer from a deficit in “oceanic thinking,” despite their island's nautical geography. That's unfortunate because the two dominant players in East Asia, the United States and China, are accustomed to oceanic thinking–although they think about the sea quite differently.
In this globalized age, Americans tend to assume that economic interdependence has rendered great-power politics moot. No longer do nation-states vie with one another to plunder far-flung territories and rule the waves. Many Chinese strategists, meanwhile, hew to an older, zero-sum view predicated on mastery of the sea lanes and critical points on the map. They routinely talk of “absolute control” of the seas adjacent to China's coasts, underscoring the primacy of Beijing's commercial and military interests there.
Nowhere is this disparity in maritime thinking more evident than in how the two nations view the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Founded in 2003 as an adjunct to the Bush administration's “global war on terror,” the PSI is a consortium of seafaring nations that have pledged–in the words of the Statement of Interdiction Principles, the initiative's founding document–to take “effective measures, either alone or in concert with other states, for interdicting the transfer or transport of [weapons of mass destruction], their delivery systems, and related materials to and from states and nonstate actors of proliferation concern.” They do so on their territory, in their territorial seas and airspace, and, most controversially, on the high seas.
It's a loose arrangement–and deliberately so. PSI spokesmen never tire of stating that it is “an activity, not an organization.” Governments join the initiative not by formally applying but by publicly endorsing and acting on the interdiction principles. It has no set structure or decision-making mechanism. Participating states act at their discretion.
But what the U.S. administration regards as a virtue–the PSI's freedom from the bureaucratic deadlock too often found in formal institutions such as the United Nations–raises hackles in Beijing. Disregarding U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's outspoken advocacy of the PSI, Chinese spokesmen have lodged vehement objections against the initiative, dashing U.S. hopes for a partnership. Unless China takes the lead, few if any Asian nations aside from Japan, a founding member of the PSI, will join in. Deprived of China's support, the initiative could lack the ships, intelligence, and muscle it needs to prosecute operations effectively in Asian waters.
China has couched its concerns about the PSI in legal terms. No one questions the right of sovereign governments to undertake interdiction operations on their territory or in their waters and airspace. But operations in international waters and airspace–the “common” in which international law generally forbids interference with the free passage of ships and aircraft–are another matter entirely. Chinese spokesmen imply that the PSI will command Beijing's support only if it is enfolded within the U.N. system, where China's veto on the Security Council can safeguard its interests. But Beijing could have assuaged its concerns about the legal niceties last year, when the Bush administration was pushing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540, an effort to rally the world against proliferation. Instead, Wang Guangya, China's U.N. ambassador, boasted that his team had crafted language that had interdiction “kicked out” of the resolution.
Clearly, more is at work here than legal qualms. For Beijing, the PSI is not simply an instrument to combat proliferation (an endeavor that Chinese leaders genuinely endorse), but is also seen as a pretext for Washington realpolitik. Nowadays, the Chinese press is abuzz with talk of a latter-day U.S. “containment” strategy. Chinese commentators allege that the PSI reinforces U.S. claims to regional leadership and thus perpetuates U.S. geopolitical dominance. Why, one researcher from Taiwan's National Defense University asked me, would China ever consent to an initiative designed to hem it in?
China's leadership is increasingly edgy over U.S. naval preeminence because Beijing has rightly come to believe that its economic development depends on the secure seaborne passage of shipments of oil and gas from the Middle East. As such, China is reluctant to entrust a vital interest to America's uncertain goodwill. Hostile forces operating from Taiwan could threaten the seagoing traffic on which China's communist regime thinks its survival hinges. Beijing recalls uneasily that U.S. forces used the island as a forward base until the 1970s, shaping events along China's periphery. Beijing probably fears that, by assenting to the PSI, it would appear to ratify U.S. naval primacy, undercutting China's own regional aspirations.
Taiwanese scholars joke that if Washington hopes to secure Beijing's participation in the PSI, it should enlist Taipei. China, they say, would welcome a new international forum from which to exclude–and in which to browbeat–Taiwan. But this humor masks a genuine concern that the United States will set its interests in squelching proliferation and promoting Sino-U.S. amity above support for Taiwan's democracy. “Why not just go with China?” asks one marine colonel, voicing a typically skeptical view of U.S. steadfastness.
U.S. diplomats, therefore, must strike a delicate balance, at once convincing China to throw its support behind the PSI and making clear that Washington will not barter Taiwan's security for Chinese support. How should Washington frame its appeal? Persuading Beijing that maritime security isn't a zero-sum game would help. So would showing China that it can burnish its reputation as a responsible world power through PSI operations. Negotiating a compact under which the U.S., Chinese, and other participating navies jointly police East Asian waters for weapons-related cargoes should be Washington's chief aim. Acknowledging Chinese leadership–and putting that leadership to work for mutual gain–would pay dividends for regional security.
The Chinese pictogram representing “crisis” is an apt metaphor for maritime counterproliferation, conveying the dual meanings of “opportunity” and “danger.” Properly managed, the PSI offers East Asian nations an opportunity to quash proliferation while easing tensions between the United States–the current naval hegemon–and its prospective Chinese competitor.