In 1950, a few months after Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong’s brilliant guerrilla campaign had defeated the U.S. supported Nationalist Chinese forces and established the People’s Republic of China, Americans became consumed trying to find out who “lost” China.
Pushed by the firebrand Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the search was on to uncover the moles who supposedly had embedded themselves in the U.S. State Department to engineer the defeat of China’s Nationalist General Chiang Kai-shek and helped turn China over to the Communists.
So, might who “lost” North Korea become the refrain heard in China after the historic Singapore summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un?
C. Raja Mohan, the long-time columnist for the Indian Express, one of India’s leading daily newspapers, raised this provocative question in a conversation we had in Singapore earlier this month. Mohan, who has just been appointed director of the National University of Singapore’s Center for South Asian Studies, is considered a shrewd observer of Asian geopolitics.
Improved relations between the former foes, he pointed out, are bound to alter the region’s power balance and have the distinct possibility of leaving China sidelined. The more I have thought about it, the more intriguing the idea gets.
Here’s why:
If the question of who “lost” North Korea surfaces within China’s Communist Party, it would mean the Trump-Kim meeting was of far more strategic significance than has so far been recognized in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. In fact, Mohan’s question raises the intriguing possibility that the Trump-Kim meeting might be the centerpiece of an unfolding U.S. grand strategy for China.
Consider the array of shots that the Trump administration has recently fired across China’s bow, including:
Import tariffs.
Tightening rules for technology transfer agreements and the freedom for Chinese companies to buy American high-technology firms.
A more aggressive U.S. posture on China’s claim to virtually the entire South China Sea.
The U.S. administration’s intensifying support for treating Taiwan as an independent country.
The change by the U.S. to refer now to the “Indo-Pacific” region, rather than “Asia-Pacific,” to inject the Indian Ocean (India’s maritime territory) into the equation against China’s hegemonic claims in Asia. And just in case China missed the signal, the Pentagon also recently renamed its powerful Pacific Command. It will henceforth be called the Indo-Pacific Command.
The larger point here is that, contrary to popular belief, there is indeed a strategy and substance to the Trump administration’s unfolding policy to counter China’s rising power in Asia. For if the Trump-Kim meeting does result in a growing relationship between the United States and North Korea, it will also diminish the North Korean leader’s reliance on China’s President Xi Jinping and change the geopolitical landscape on the Korean peninsula. A rapprochement between North and South Korea, under U.S. guidance, would mean a strengthened American presence on China’s doorstep.
The Trump-Kim meeting was hugely consequential for the vast geopolitical changes that it could potentially unleash. Mohan’s thought-provoking question opens a window into scenarios that are being discussed among Asian policymakers, scenarios that are very different from the current thinking within the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Stay tuned.
Sarwar A. Kashmeri, of West Lebanon, is adjunct professor of political science at Norwich University, a Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association, and host of the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s China Focus podcast series. His next book, China’s Grand Strategy; Weaving a New Silk Road to Global Primacy, is slated to be published by Praeger in 2019.