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分析美國領導下的「國際秩序」 ---- W. Wohlforth
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US Leadership and The Limits of International Institutional Change
William Wohlforth, 08/23/12
When Obama campaigned for the presidency, he pledged to repair and strengthen international relationships sidelined or undermined by the Bush Administration. Part of this repair process was to involve the reform of international security institutions such as the United Nations Security Council. As Obama’s first term draws to a close, and the presidential teams fine-tune their foreign policy platforms, we should step back and consider what Obama’s campaign rhetoric meant in practice. In his article, ‘US Leadership and the Limits of International Institutional Change’, William Wolhforth explores the argument that that subtle reform has been taking place throughout Obama’s time in office, and the implications of US institutional leadership (or lack thereof) for the international community. Wolhforth’s argument should be kept front and center if (as is too often the case) simplistic depictions of the US’ real and ideal role in international security institutions are presented during this fall’s presidential debates. -OpenCanada.org
It has become commonplace to bemoan the gap between today’s institutional order and the nature and scope of the global problems that fall under its purview. For the order to change, however, one of two things must occur. Either the current powerful backers of the current institutional order need to reform it, or they need to stand aside and let the others do the job. For either of those things to occur, the system’s still most-powerful actor would need to conceive an interest in institutional change. Below I outline the core propositions of US grand strategy as it relates to international security institutions. I argue that the current institutional architecture is well suited to US interests, at least as Washington currently understands them. The US has and will likely continue to seek to adapt institutions and rules to suit its interests, but generally does so indirectly in ways that are hard to observe and assess. Still, the case can be made that the United States has met with more success than many analysts are willing to grant.
This success comes with costs, however, some already evident, others still only incipient. One evident cost is the weakness of the current institutional order. Optimality for the US does not equal optimality for the world or for the health and robustness of the institutions themselves. Far from it. Hegemons like the US thrive on institutional ambiguity and hypocrisy, which may present problems for allies like Canada that place value on the integrity and legitimacy of global rules. Another evident cost is lost opportunity: by banking on key security institutions (notably NATO), the United States forecloses a concert of powers, including Russia, China, and other increasingly assertive states. The potential incipient cost is that using institutions as a key plank in its grand strategy of global leadership may make it especially hard for the United States to retrench if its relative power continues to decline.
US GRAND STRATEGY AND INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
Woven through the speeches of President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top US officials is a robust restatement of the traditional US commitment to multilateral institutions as a key plank in a grand strategy of global leadership. With some oversimplification, this approach can be summarized in a few core propositions.
First, US leadership is a necessary condition of institutionalized cooperation to address classical and new security challenges, which is, in turn, a necessary condition of US security.
Second, the maintenance of US security commitments to partners and allies in Europe and Asia is a necessary condition of US leadership. Without the commitments, US leverage for leadership declines.
Third, the leverage the US obtains by being a security provider for scores of countries spills over into other functional areas, notably economics.
Fourth, embedding US leadership in formal institutions often has major benefits for Washington and its partners: the classical functional benefits—focal point, reduced transaction costs, monitoring, etc.—as well as political and legitimacy benefits, which mitigate the politically awkward aspects of hegemony. Because the US is not meaningfully constrained by its institutional commitments, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Fifth and finally, embedding US leadership in less formal institutions—e.g., international law and other rules—also often pays in more diffuse ways. It is easier to pursue a national interest when it can be expressed as a rule or principle to which others have formally subscribed. Again, because the US itself is not meaningfully constrained by rules, the benefits outweigh the costs.
Coupled with this reaffirmation of longstanding US strategic principles is a new insistence on the need for—and confidence in America’s ability to spearhead—change in the institutional architecture to address new security challenges.
PRAGMATIC ADAPTATION, NOT REFORM
The Obama administration’s commitment to institutional change strikes many analysts as chimerical. Scholarship from many social sciences leads to the expectation that institutions will be “sticky” and resistant to reform. Many international relations scholars agree that institutions can “lock in” a given power distribution or political equilibrium. If institutions have this lock-in feature, it follows that they must be hard to adapt to new circumstances or constellations of power and interest. And if institutions really lock in equilibria that reflect existing power relations, states that expect their relative power to rise will not buy into reforms. You can have lock-in or reformability, not both.
On the surface, the record would seem to vindicate the skeptics. The poster child for lock-in is the UN. The founders wanted to lock in their leadership roles in the security council, and so they have. They built in a high bar for any change that would diminish their privileges, which has proved resistant to decades of reform attempts. The result is a composition of the world’s preeminent law-giving body in the international security realm that is embarrassingly out of sync with the global distribution of capabilities and influence.
Beyond the UN system, skeptics note a general lack of evidence for US-led institutional reform. As Jeffrey Legro argues, since the end of the Cold War the United States has not done a whole lot to reshape the dominant international institutions that structure global politics and largely failed when it has tried to do so.… This under-ambition and underachievement, moreover, has come at a time when there seems to be demand for change given that many international institutions today appear outdated. Scholars such as John Ikenberry, Stephen Brooks, and William Wohlforth and policymakers like Douglas Hurd (former foreign secretary of Great Britain from 1989-1995) argue that the United States after 1991 had an ideal opportunity to ‘remake the world, update everything, the UN, everything.’ We are still waiting.[1]
US policymakers would respond that this misses the real action. As strategic actors, they are well aware that some institutions do indeed have lock-in effects and so are costly to reform. They know that many rules do work against hegemonic leadership by formally empowering weak actors. They naturally avoid institutional settings and mechanisms that work to their disadvantage. In the UN, for example, formal, deep reform must go through the general assembly, a body that generations of officials have understood is poorly suited to the exercise of US power.
Legro and other skeptics thus are looking for leadership in all the wrong places: formal, big, one-state-one-vote conventions that rewrite rules. The US prefers a subtler approach. It presses its interests behind the scenes within the institution, working in sub-organizations or secretariats to block things it doesn’t like and push things it does. It seizes on opportunities such as the 9/11 attacks, to push its agenda, as it did when it virtually dictated security council resolution 1373, authorizing a raft of new UN counterterrorism strategies and capacities Washington had long favoured. A combination of behind-the-scenes diplomacy and the threat or reality of unilateral action outside of existing institutions has arguably shaped the UN’s whole agenda in ways favourable to US interests. If you examine Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s March 2005 report “In larger freedom: Towards development, security and human rights for all,” you will see a whole reform agenda for tackling new security challenges that is remarkably consistent with official US perceptions of sound thinking. And, as expected, the top end reforms died. But that was likely no surprise to seasoned, pragmatic US officials, who invested little capital in that part of the report. Less noticed were lower-level subtler changes to rules, practices, and norms concerning terrorist finances, states’ rights to respond, information and intelligence-sharing and monitoring—all welcome in Washington.
In fact, US officials would say, there has been a huge amount of US-led institutional change since the Cold War’s end. Multilateral institutions the US dominates, such as NATO, have been thoroughly revamped. NATO’s “partnership for peace” program has been used to institutionalize security cooperation in a flexible way with many non-NATO states. Bilateral security arrangements have been revised. And entirely new, flexible institutions have been created out of whole cloth to deal with new problems, such as the proliferation security initiative. Summing these and adding them to the subtler changes the US has helped engineer in harder-to-control institutions like the UN arguably yields a far different balance sheet than the skeptics suggest.
In sum, US officials are arguably more satisfied with the current institutional set than many scholars, including Steve Brooks and me, suggest.[2] By ignoring or marginalizing parts of the order it doesn’t like or can’t change and focusing strategic efforts on those parts it likes and/or can change, the US gets the best of both worlds—efficiency and legitimacy gains with only marginal constraints.
THE COSTS, EXISTING AND POTENTIAL
So far I’ve argued that US policymakers reject neoconservative, institutionalist, and constructivist arguments about the costs of embedding their leadership grand strategy in institutions and rules. To neoconservatives, US officials reply that institutions do not sap US sovereignty and do provide net efficiency and legitimacy gains. To institutionalists and constructivists, US officials would say (off the record) that Washington does not actually have to bind itself via rules to reap some of their benefits. American leaders repeatedly promise their people that they will never allow foreigners a veto on any action they deem necessary for US interests, and I think they mean it. As far as I can tell, the US ignores any rules that get in its way.
But that does not mean that there are no costs. For the purposes of discussion, let me put three on the table. As it happens, all three would seem to emerge from a broadly realist way of thinking about politics.
First is the evident opportunity cost of compromised institutions. The United States’ commitment to protecting its sovereign prerogatives as a leading great power saps international security institutions of many of the potential powers institutionalist scholars ascribe to them. Even if every single argument about the causal power of institutions is right, they will not come into full force if the US cannot or will not bind itself to rules.
Second is the opportunity cost of exclusion. Foundational elements of the US grand strategy of leadership are exclusionary by nature. As noted, US officials believe that the maintenance of US security commitments to partners and allies in Europe and Asia is a necessary condition of US leadership. And those commitments are exclusionary by definition. As long as those commitments remain the bedrock of the US global position, states against which those commitments are directed—especially China and Russia—can never be wholly integrated into the order. The result is to foreclose an alternative grand strategy of great power concert. Securing the gains of institutionalized cooperation today may come at the price of having alienated potential partners tomorrow.
Third, there is at least a potential cost associated with the central role of institutions in current US grand strategy. Even if they are right that the near-term costs of institutional constraints are marginal, US policymakers may confront another set of costs in the longer term. Key here is the article of faith among US policymakers that all the parts of the US grand strategy are interdependent: US security commitments are necessary for leadership that is necessary for cooperation that is necessary for security and for US leadership in other important realms. The result is to create apparently potent disincentives to disengaging from any single commitment. Pulling back from US security guarantees to South Korea or Taiwan or NATO may make sense when each of these cases is considered individually. But if scaling back anywhere saps US leadership capacity everywhere, any individual step toward retrenchment will be extremely hard to take. When US officials are confronted with arguments for retrenchment, these concerns frequently come to the fore.
CONCLUSION
The US response to global security challenges is filtered through its grand strategy of global leadership. That strategy sees institutions as useful tools in the pursuit of its interest—as arguably more flexible, less constraining, and overall less consequential than many scholars presume. Officials from the current and previous administrations would likely argue that there has been more institutional adaptation than many critics allege. While their arguments are complex—imbibing hard-to-test bits of realist, institutionalist, and constructivist scholarship—I think they are stronger than many critics allow.
If this analysis is right, it means that the international system’s most powerful state actor is very unlikely to undertake large-scale bottom-up institutional reform, and renders highly unlikely US acquiescence in any efforts to strengthen institutions that would come at the expense of America’s hegemonic prerogatives. In addition, it sets the stage for challenges if capabilities continue to shift away from the US and its closest allies. I see little evidence that the US grand strategy of global leadership is going to change, or that it is compatible with sharing leadership with rising powers. In addition, it has at least the potential to make it particularly hard for the US to disengage from its multitudinous security commitments.
Reference：
[1] Jeffrey W. Legro, “Sell unipolarity? The future of an overvalued concept,” in G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C. Wohlforth, International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 351-52.
[2] Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Reshaping the world order: How Washington should reform international institutions,” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 2 (March-April 2009): 49-63.
This article was originally published in International Journal, the CIC’s scholarly publication on international affairs.
Photo courtesy of Reuters
http://www.opencanada.org/features/us-leadership-and-the-limits-of-international-institutional-change/
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混亂而危險的美國對華政策 --- P. Smith
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U.S. China Policy: Incoherent and Dangerous
PATRICK SMITH, The Fiscal Times, 09/24/12
The cement is is hardly dry on America’s new policy to forge new Asia-Pacific alliances, and already the post–Iraq endeavor is coming across as a collection of incoherent contradictions. Consider:
*We say we want to build closer ties with China, but our two leading presidential candidates are making political hay out of its trade and industrial policies at just the moment Beijing is struggling to maintain economic growth. President Obama has filed two cases against China at the World Trade Organization in the last two months, one of them just last week. They are both intended as vote-getters in the auto-industry states; neither is expected to make much practical difference.
*We assure the Chinese that America’s new “pivot” to Asia and the Pacific is not aimed at a rising China, but we are forging new defense ties that are clearly intended to make a ring around the mainland. The latest efforts involve docking reciprocity with New Zealand naval vessels and training and military exchange programs with Myanmar (formerly Burma). Look at a map. Myanmar provides China’s southwestern provinces with strategically vital sea access. Would the U.S. like the People’s Liberation Army soldiers training in Mexico?
*Most immediately and explosively, we are standing at the edge of a territorial dispute between China and Japan that could involve American military action if it gets much further out of hand. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta tried to play the honest broker when he visited Tokyo and Beijing last week. The fact is the U.S. is legally bound by the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty to defend Japan in any attack on territory it holds.
RELATED: Election 2012: Do Candidates Have a Foreign Policy?
Dragging China into U.S. politics has been time-honored political fodder at election time for many campaign cycles. (Before China it was Japan. Remember?) Rarely, if ever, does such fire-breathing amount to much. But it might this time. Obama went further than blustery rhetoric when he filed a suit at the WTO last week charging China with illegally subsidizing its auto and auto-parts industries.
TRADE WAR?
It is the third WTO suit this administration has pending in Geneva, the other two involving U.S. car sales in China and China’s rare earth minerals. There seems little question that China, even as it tries to reduce its dependence on exports, makes use of hard-to-identify industrial subsidies. But do we want a trade war in this global economic environment? We are getting close to one.
China has already filed a retaliatory WTO suit against the U.S., challenging its anti-dumping rules. I agree with TFT's Josh Boak: What we want right now from China is not a string of trade rows and the ill will that goes with them, but a strong economy. The stakes this time are simply too high to allow for the penny ante politics of past campaigns.
None of this was helpful background for Defense Secretary Panetta’s tour of the region last week. While Panetta was at pains to reassure Beijing officials that Washington had no designs to “contain” China, he had a tough time of it. His arrival in Beijing from Tokyo coincided with an announcement that the U.S. and Japan had agreed to build an advanced missile defense system on Japanese territory – the second such installation the Pentagon will operate next door to the mainland.
“The purpose of this is to enhance our ability to defend Japan,” Panetta explained amid sharp criticism from Chinese officials. “Defending Japan” is an old chestnut in American military circles, used to explain just about anything Washington chooses to do at the far end of the Pacific. But Panetta, like all of his predecessors, never identified a potential aggressor. Ostensibly, the enemy is North Korea. But it does not take too much to imagine how the deployment of this level of technology looked from the Chinese side.
TERRITORIAL RIGHTS
Further complicating Panetta’s visit – you have to feel for the guy – were the protests and violence in China over territorial rights of a small string of islands that lie between Japan and China – and which are thought to sit atop large deposits of oil and gas. Panetta made a stab at urging both sides to settle the dispute peaceably. It is the kind of “balancing role” the U.S. says it wants to play in its “pivot” strategy.
But Panetta came off sounding weak and irrelevant. “By virtue of both countries understanding how important that relationship is with the United States,” Panetta reasoned, “if we can encourage both of them to move forward and not have this dispute get out of hand, we can play a positive role.” Anyone care to shave the fuzz off that remark and tell us what it might mean?
The Sino–Japanese dispute over the Senkaku Islands (the Diaoyus in Chinese) is centuries old, and the issue has periodically become a flashpoint for nationalists on either side. It is complex and tends to give rise to searing emotions rooted deeply in history, notably in China. No Westerner is going to referee a dispute of this kind, unless it goes to the U.N. Indeed, it was revealing to see how ill-equipped a top U.S. official was to weigh in on the matter. The defense secretary came off as the uninvited stranger at the party.
There are lessons in last week’s display. China’s accumulating influence has everyone’s attention now, but this does not mean it can be stopped. It is a fact of history, and it falls to us – and the Japanese, among others – to learn how best to accommodate it. Certainly we Americans have a role to play in Asia. But as Panetta discovered the hard way, we cannot expect to maintain the pre-eminence we enjoyed for the second half of the last century.
On this side of the pond, what we saw last week was a truly remarkable absence of coordination. The Pentagon has long played an oversized part in U.S. foreign policy. So the State Department talks about a pivot and “balancing,” while the Defense Department aims new defense systems at the mainland and consolidates ties with as many of China’s neighbors as are willing to get into the act. As to trade policy, it is out there on its own, paying no apparent attention to anybody.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2012/09/24/US-China-Policy-Incoherent-and-Dangerous.aspx#page1
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美國會為了釣魚台列嶼協防日本嗎? - S. Harner
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Is the U.S. Committed to Defend the Senkakus? Text of Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty
Stephen Harner, 09/23/12
On Sunday, September 23, NHK news broadcast a video of U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta seated next to and speaking with Chinese Vice Chairman and soon-to-be supreme leader Xi Jinping on September 19 in Beijing. During that meeting, reported NHK, Panetta told Xi that U.S. policy is that the Senkaku islands (claimed as Chinese territory by Beijing) are covered by the U.S.-Japan security alliance. If there is military conflict, the U.S. is obliged under the alliance to intervene.
The September 21st Yomiuri Shimbun, cited testimony of Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs Kurt Campbell to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the day before confirming that the Senkakus come under Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. Campbell said that U.S. policy on this has been clear since 1997.
Watching and listening carefully to what the Chinese side has made of the Panetta visit, my sense is very different to what may seem to be the meaning and implications of the above.
First, I have seen no mention in the state-controlled Chinese media of Panetta’s comment on the U.S. obligation under the U.S.-Japan treaty. What the media has prominently reported has been Panetta’s affirmation to Xi that U.S. policy ‘takes no sides’ on territorial disputes in Asia, including that over the Senkakus/Diaoyudao. This is also long-standing U.S. policy.
Partly owing to the almost unimaginable power of the weapons and men his department commands, but also his relative gravitas, Panetta has the most credibility in China of any U.S. government official. It was noteworthy that Chinese official media accentuated Panetta’s upbeat appraisal of U.S.-China relations and plans for stepping up exchanges and joint exercises between U.S. and Chinese military forces.
So which is it? Is U.S. policy that we are ready to go to war with China to defend the Senkakus? Didn’t we say we “take no position” on the matter? The answer–in the subtle and often paradoxical and contradictory realm of foreign relations–is both, or, more likely, neither. But we should not think that the subtlety and ambiguity of these positions leaves all sides with the same comfort, options, and risks.
What does Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty actually say though? Here it is:
Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall be immediately reported to the Security Council of the United Nations in accordance with the provisions of Article 51 of the Charter. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
I am reminded of an interview given about two years ago by Japan’s last genuinely successful prime minister, Nakasone Yasuhiro, whose tenure roughly matched Reagan’s. Advising how Japan should conduct its foreign policy, and particularly the pivotal relationship with the U.S., Nakasone was trenchantly realistic: Japan should endeavor to procure (in the legal sense of “cause to do”) U.S. power to serve Japan’s interests and objectives.
In the case of the Senkakus, this seems to have happened. Or at least, when the Noda government felt compelled to respond to the force majeure situation created by Tokyo governor Ishihara’s bid to buy the islands, and decided upon nationalization, the U.S.-Japan treaty was available as perhaps the decisive element that gave the decision makers the confidence they needed to make the decision.
If–as is implied by the NHK report–Japan thinks that Article 5 can be immediately invoked in dealing with the Senkaku crisis, and that it is thereby standing “shoulder-to-shoulder” with the U.S. against China, I think it is engaging in wishful thinking. During Panetta’s hastily arranged stopover in Tokyo on his way to Beijing, his unsubtle command to Japan was not to further escalate the crisis.
China’s silence on Article 5 is a kind of “non-recognition,” a diplomatic approach that would make it easier for the other side (i.e., the U.S.) to back down and effectively abandon implied commitments. Meanwhile, China is showing no signs that it wishes to de-escalate the confrontation, nor should we expect any lessening of pressure in the near term.
There are many risks in the Senkaku/Diaoyudao crisis. Particularly great are risks owing to miscalculation of the other side’s intentions. For Japan this means not only the intensions of China, but also the intensions of its ally, the United States.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenharner/2012/09/23/is-the-u-s-committed-to-defend-the-senkakus-text-of-article-5-of-the-u-s-japan-treaty/
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美國敘利亞政策的本質 - T. G. Carpenter
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Washington's Perilous Power Play
Ted Galen Carpenter, 08/31/12
Bitter disagreements about how to deal with the growing violence in Syria are damaging Washington's relations with China and Russia. Policy regarding the Syrian civil war has created worrisome tensions in these crucial bilateral relationships, which became evident as early as February 2012.
Following a decision by Moscow and Beijing to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the violence in Syria and calling for an immediate end to the bloodshed, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice stated that her country was "disgusted". The Chinese and Russian actions, she added, were "shameful" and "unforgivable".
Rice's boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used equally accusatory and inflammatory language later that month. "It is distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered -- women, children, brave young men," Clinton fumed. The actions by Beijing and Moscow were "just despicable, and I have to ask whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people", she said.
Not only could Rice and Clinton apparently use a refresher course in diplomatic language, Washington's response betrayed a troubling arrogance -- and that attitude has not improved in the intervening months. In early August, the White House explicitly blamed China and Russia for the failure of former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan's mediation mission to Syria.
The Obama administration seems even more frustrated and angry at China's conduct than at Russia's.
US officials concede that Moscow has long-standing economic and strategic ties with the Syrian government, not only under Bashar al-Assad but also with his father in earlier decades. Russia supplied Damascus with economic and military aid throughout the Cold War, and the "naval maintenance facility" in Tartus is the only military installation that Russia has in the Mediterranean region.
Therefore, Russia's decision to stand by Assad does not come as a great surprise. From Washington's standpoint, though, Beijing's stance is far more puzzling and frustrating. But China's policy position is not only comprehensible, it is also reasonable.
Recent comments by Wang Kejian, a deputy director at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, contained an important clue regarding Beijing's underlying worries about the US-led efforts on Syria. Wang told a news conference in early August that "some Western countries" had hindered and even sabotaged the diplomatic process by advocating regime change in Syria.
That comment was clearly directed at Washington and its NATO allies, who have repeatedly demanded that Assad step down. The solution to the Syrian crisis must be a political one, Wang argued, with the option of military intervention taken off the table.
That point underscores the core of Beijing's concerns. It is not just the probable negative effect of Washington's policies on Syria itself, although that certainly is a significant motive. China was Syria's largest trading partner in 2011, with Syrian exports to China totaling more than $2.4 billion. China is also a major stakeholder in Syria's oil industry, which before the civil war showed the promise of growth. Beijing's primary worry, though, is about the broader, negative implications of Washington's Syria strategy for the Middle East and the entire international system.
Chinese officials suspect, with good reason, that the Assad regime is not the primary target of the US and its allies. Assad's principal offense was his willingness to be a major (and, increasingly, the only significant) ally of Iran's clerical regime. That stance not only infuriated the West, but also key Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
As part of Washington's strategy to isolate Iran and make it impossible for that country to develop nuclear weapons, the Obama administration decided to back the Saudi-Turkish strategy to oust the Assad government. That strategy is part of the ongoing regional rivalry between those leading Sunni powers and Shiite Iran.
But Beijing correctly concludes that Washington's approach is very dangerous. It could easily intensify the already explosive tensions between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam and set the entire Middle East aflame. In addition, bringing down Iran does not serve Chinese economic or diplomatic interests. Iran is a major supplier of oil to China's economy, and deposing the current Iranian government would strengthen the already dominant US position in the Gulf -- increasing Washington's grip on China's oil lifeline from that region.
A still broader concern for China (as well as Russia and other countries) is that US policy regarding Syria is merely the latest manifestation of a global strategy to use forcible regime change to advance the interests and policy preferences of the US and its Western allies.
That policy was already evident in the Balkans during the 1990s, Iraq during the Bush administration, and more recently in Libya. It looks suspiciously like a power play to assert undisputed US global dominance. Even if that is not Washington's intent, the proliferation of US-sponsored regime-change wars makes China and other countries uneasy.
The Obama administration should back off from Syria and respect the concerns of China and Russia. US officials in particular need to mute the shrill rhetoric directed against their fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council. Above all, Washington needs to realize that hostile, bullying comments cause needless tensions in relations with those countries.
That outcome is especially unfortunate, since the bilateral relationship with China is perhaps the most important one of all for the US. It would be folly to let disagreements over Syrian policy do lasting damage to ties with China, but that is where the Obama administration seems to be headed.
Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/washingtons-perilous-power-play
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說的完全正確!
兩強競爭, 是永無止境的.
唯一能做的, 是自己迎頭趕上.
任何希望別人打瞌睡的計劃? 都是空想!
美國一直拿元朝可汗把歐洲打入黑暗時期自警. 中國也不應該忘記: 把元朝打敗, 派出三寶太監的強盛.
一切事在人為, 誰也不能做美夢!
 
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我在美國唸書和工作長達近26年之久。1993年回台灣以前，我對美國國情、政治人物、和一般老百姓的狀況大概有些了解。最近這20年我只能從網路和雜誌得到一些二手資料。
我是一個現實主義者，對任何國家或社會(包括中國)我都採取就事論事的立場。在我的行為或詞彙中，「憧憬」或「幻想」沒有什麼空間。我在此處也東拉西扯的談過美國的種種問題及其國力的基礎。如某網友所諷刺或指責，我對自己所掌握資訊的範圍、深度、及隨之而來的判斷力，的確有些自豪。2008年以後，再看不出美國外強中乾的人，就有點遜了。
由於你提到這個議題，我順便做些相關討論。
某些「反共」者，如民運人士、法輪功群眾、和相信「普世價值」的「理想主義」者(呆頭鵝？)一干小眾人等，把中共垮台的希望或夢想寄託在美國neocon和/或美國「帝國主義」者身上。因此，他/她們對美國實力或國力有一種憧憬或幻想，造成他/她們的無知，或使他/她們不能、不願、不敢面對現實。或許這是他/她們「自我感覺良好」的基礎，或許這是他/她們認為自己「存在」有價值、有前途的「正當性」。總之，這些人的言論和思考模式相當可笑。
另一方面，美國是個年青的國家。過去近300年所積蓄以及掠奪來的老本，尤其是其社會結構、政治制度、科研和科技實力等等，領先其他社會的距離相當大。因此，她的人民大概還能揮霍個兩、三代。
中國過去15 – 20年和目前雖然「形勢大好」，但在積弱近200年後，中國社會有先天不良的隱憂。社會結構與政治制度急需改進和改革；科研和科技實力也急需迎頭趕上和快速增加深度和廣度。由於全球經濟環境日趨惡劣或艱困，今後10年很可能是中國人奠定中國未來發展基礎的關鍵期。如果習-李體制不能大刀闊斧提出一套有效的應付方案並督導全民徹底落實，即使美國neocon們不推波助瀾，中國被打回1960年代原形的可能性還是有的。
本文於 修改第 2 次
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英法是舊列強.
很高興您也覺得: 美國頂多風光三十年!
新的列強, 很快就會出現!
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美國亞太大戰略 - S. Freuhling
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US strategy: between the ‘pivot’ and ‘Air-Sea Battle’
Stephan Frühling, ANU, 08/26/12
As the US war in Afghanistan draws to a close, the attention of US foreign policy, think tanks, pundits and analysts is turning to the US posture in Asia.
The Obama administration has spoken of a ‘pivot to Asia’, and in 2010 the US used tensions in the South China Sea and on the Korean Peninsula to increase its diplomatic and military engagement in the region. Since then, it has continued to foster closer links with Vietnam and the Philippines; announced the future permanent deployment of four littoral combat ships to Singapore; and begun to base US marines on a semi-permanent basis in Darwin, Australia.
Although the ‘pivot to Asia’ has become a phrase often used to describe increased US engagement, it is the name of a military-operational concept -- Air-Sea Battle -- that has most captured the imagination of audiences in Asia and in the US itself. Air-Sea Battle describes how US forces should operate to ‘blind’ and ‘roll back’ the dense maritime area and access denial capabilities that China has developed over the last two decades. Questions remain about the political credibility and financial feasibility of the concept, which heavily relies on submarines and a future new heavy bomber, rather than existing surface vessels.
Parallels between Air-Sea Battle and the Air-Land Battle concept of the 1980s are intended and obvious -- including those parallels found in the biographies of major proponents, bureaucratic politics and service rivalries inside the Pentagon, questionable assumptions about the role of nuclear weapons in major war, but also in the attempt to address difficult operational problems facing US forces in areas of core strategic interest.
There the parallels largely end. The Air-Land Battle concept developed for NATO’s Central Front fitted into an established and stable regional situation, and supported the existing and widely accepted NATO strategy of containment through deterrence. In light of a perceived loss of US nuclear superiority, NATO forces needed to prevent the Soviet General Staff from being able to brief the Politburo with a viable theory for conventional victory in Europe. A credible Air-Land Battle capability allowed NATO to threaten escalation in even localised armed conflict with the Soviet Union in Europe. Mutual interest in avoiding nuclear Armageddon thus prevented armed conflict, contained the physical expansion of communism, and gave US allies in Europe the political space to be the masters of their own destiny. To play their role in containment through deterrence, US forces already forward deployed in Europe (and North Asia) merely had to prepare for their wartime missions, and serve as sacrificial ‘tripwire’ forces demonstrating US commitment.
But this no longer adequately describes the political role of US forces in Asia today, because US strategy is no longer based on the containment of physical expansion through deterrence. Despite competing maritime claims, and with the notable exception of Taiwan, territorial disputes are proximate rather than ultimate causes of tension in Asia. Instead, paraphrasing Thucydides,
‘the real cause’ of tension is ‘the growth of the power of [China], and the alarm which this inspired’
in countries in the region.
Hence, US forces in Asia today are there less to deter Chinese physical expansion, or even Chinese influence in general -- which is, after all, another by-product of the Asia Pacific’s welcome and increasing economic integration. Rather, littoral combat ships, marines and other forces now or soon to be deployed in Southeast Asia support a much more nuanced US strategy, which seeks to support regional countries’ ability to withstand Chinese bullying in maritime disputes, increase interaction with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) through joint exercises and exchanges, and in general to ‘socialise’ China and the PLA in what the US and its partners consider acceptable behaviour.
Between the political concept of the ‘pivot’, which evokes the ephemeral nature of US attention rather than an enduring commitment, and the Air-Sea Battle concept, with its focus on major-power war with China, this evolving and nascent US strategy remains without a name.
‘Containment’ or ‘Air-Sea Battle’ are the often-used proxy terms that distort the US’s present-day approach and its intentions, and do not capture the nuance in the emerging US strategy and posture. But without a common and broad understanding of the basic strategy, it will be difficult to build and sustain the regional and domestic understanding and support that is necessary for that posture and strategy to be viable over the long term. The current geostrategic window of opportunity for the US may well close before it can sufficiently explain to the region what it is trying to do and how.
What is needed, in short, is a public diplomacy term that does for the US and its allies in 21st-century Asia what the term ‘containment’ did during the Cold War. Who would have thought that a US policy initiative might ever be left wanting for lack of a catchy phrase? Maybe the US strategic community should take a leaf out of China’s book and announce a US ‘strategy for harmony and order’ in Asia.
Stephan Frühling is Senior Lecturer at the College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University, and Deputy Director of Studies at the ANU Military Studies Program, the Australian Command and Staff College.
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2012/08/26/us-strategy-between-the-pivot-and-air-sea-battle/
本文於 修改第 1 次
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以目前形勢來看，美國霸權目前在式微中，大概要到本世紀30 - 40年代才會開始消失。要到70年代其國際地位才會英國化或法國化。未來歷史學家可能把本世紀稱為全球崛起或多元崛起的時代。此之謂江山代有強權起。
本文於 修改第 2 次
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美國的領導地位, 基本上是二戰建立起來的.
六十年的霸權, 正在消逝.
不須半個甲子, 就有不同.
你我可能可以目睹!
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