Us Foreign Policy and China: Bush's First Term by Guy Roberts

Author:Guy Roberts [Roberts, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317649939
Google: qkhWBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28024863
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

9/11 bolstered Bush’s authority and judgment. It introduced a new layer of priorities – focused on counterterrorism – over existing policies. However, old commitments remained nonetheless. The immediate post-attack decisions by the Bush team were supported by countries around the world, and the Chinese leadership hoped that cooperation with Washington would be beneficial. Glaser described the post-9/11 situation thus:

The terrorist attacks on the United States have injected new momentum into Sino-U.S. relations and raised the prospects for closer bilateral cooperation. … In the final analysis, however, China has only limited resources to contribute to the counter-terrorism war and will not likely be a major player. Nevertheless … It hopes that Beijing’s willingness to join with the U.S. in the war on terrorism will raise the value of Sino-U.S. relations in the minds of Bush administration officials and improve China’s image in the eyes ofthe American public.85

Just as modern US-China relations were most effective when juxtaposed against a common Soviet enemy, so the War on Terror provided a new enemy against whom the US and China could cooperate. In the opening days of the war against the Taliban, Beijing backed numerous UN resolutions on counterterrorism, and also exchanged intelligence with US officials. Chinese leaders saw that assisting the US in this campaign was in China’s interests and hoped it would put US-China relations on a more stable setting. China also hoped for greater international support for its own crackdown on Uighur separatists in the western Xinjiang region.86 Yet overall, the increase in US power and influence was a cause of concern for the CCP, who also feared the Bush administration would attempt to parlay this influence into a more permanent hegemony. Overall, however, there was a relative continuity of US-China relations after 9/11, providing further evidence to suggest that Bush’s China policy was fundamentally sustained. As Bush put it, traveling to APEC so soon after 9/11 was important for state-to-state engagement as well as fighting terrorists: “strengthening America’s relationships in the Far East was one of my top priorities, and I wanted my fellow world leaders to see firsthand my determination to battle the terrorists.”87

Thus, although the strategic interests of the US and China were affected by 9/11, they were not permanently nor fundamentally rewritten. The attacks created avenues of engagement and cooperation, which went some way in lubricating other, more difficult aspects of the relationship. For differing reasons, both nations found mutual advantage in closer cooperation and were willing to overlook former issues of contention. Their progress in various aspects of the relationship, across the whole of Bush’s first term, allow for further signs of continuity to be identified in his China policy.

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