One should be wary of the word "partnership" as used on both sides of the US-China rift. The reality is that this expression is a substitute for the word alliance. The US has to say the Quad is a partnership, especially when it is trying to disguise or at least dilute the anti-China objectives it wishes to achieve through the Quad. This is part of a bait and switch strategy when the Quad is pitched prospectively to other so called "partners." Once you sign up, then you are moved to act by the US as if you are in the anti-China alliance.
By the same token, the "partnership" between Russia and China which may be more significant, complementary, and meaningful from a geo-strategic standpoint than the Quad, could also potentially be subject to fissures. But the US seems incapable of creating those fissures. One doesn't need to be an international relations expert to observe that the relatively recent US alienation of Russia and China simultaneously is an extraordinary strategic blunder. The former US president, with a marked anti-China policy bias, tried to take a different approach toward Russia but was essentially unable to do so.
It is a US policy choice, poorly considered, to ever increase the hostility toward both "peer rivals," which provoked this potentially disastrous international situation in east Asia. The US appears incapable of resisting the interminable and inexhaustible "national security" demands from both the eastern and western halves of the US world wide military empire. Despite the so called "Asian pivot," it cannot establish reasonable priorities in any theater, and must pursue the internal institutional impulses for more military resources on both fronts simultaneously. This is true not only militarily but diplomatically. The frontiers of the various disputes with Russia and China, respectively, are ever expanding. Across a broad range of issues and areas with each great power, the US assumes a consistently hostile approach, ideologically, economicaly, politically, and militarily. The US does not hesitate to interfere in the internal affairs of either state. Nor does it refrain from creating new military threats on their borders. In a sense, there is no strategy, just indiscriminate hostility. The US repertoire consists almost exclusively of accusations, sanctions, threats, recriminations, and military displays.
Only a few critics have observed that Japan's influence on US Asian policy appears to be playing a strong, if not dominant role, in the defective foreign policy formulation by the US in Asia.* For all practical purposes the so called Indo-Pacific policy is formulated primarily by the Indo-Pacific Command, after consultation with their Japanese intermediaries in Asia. Neither the US nor Japan understand how the world has changed nor their current role in it. The traditional western allies, the UK and France, lend token support to the "values based" Indo-Pacific strategy of the US when, in effect, their contributions are marginal. Britain itself recently displayed a hypocritical intent to violate the NPT and an UNCLOS tribunal judgement against it with respect to the Chagos Islands. So much for the democratic allies' "rules based order." The fact is the US is guilty of overreach when it comes to an almost exclusively confrontational approach to China. This sort of approach toward China lacks depth and sophistication, and can hardly be characterized as diplomatic. Japan, England and France, as old imperialist legacy states, support the anti-China approach.
*See the blog's three part South China Sea Dispute series:
Part I: Taiwan's Claim to a South China Sea EEZ, August 11 2020
Part II: Forbes: "Strangle China's Economy," August 24, 2020
Part III: US-Japanese plans to "strangle China, August 30, 2020
What is the end goal, Chinese submission? Hardly likely. The US is no more likely to affect change in Hong Kong, or Xinjiang than it was in Tibet. US expressed concerns for human rights in China are hypocritical, pretextual excuses for interference in Chinese internal affairs. In essence they represent thinly disguised regime change efforts and a "divide and conquer" strategy. The sources on reports on human rights abuses in China are almost invariably linked to sponsors in western alliance governments and defense industries. No one has a more oppressive treatment of minorities than the US. To assume that the US government treats its citizens better than China is a cultural affectation that is used to support the cassus belli. In a phrase, the drift is, "we're better than you." A military solution to the Taiwan problem is non-existent. Confrontation in the South China Sea could end in a war.
Over-commitment of US national resources to the military industrial complex and the national security apparatchiks creates the weakness in the US economy and other soft power indices that leave the US less competitive with China. Further it results in a compulsion to engage in threats, sanctions, and other confrontations to compensate for those very deficiencies. It won't work. It's a vicious cycle that leads to domestic instability, less international US credibility and legitimacy, and greater risk of military conflict.
Finally, it must be emphasized, that the inability to negotiate with China is a product of two deep seated deleterious trends in the US. The first is relentless militarism, arising from the aforementioned constituency of the military industrial state, traditional media, and other civil institutions in its service. The second is a deep seated intolerant ethnocentrism, often characterized as American exceptionalism, but now propagated as American "values," to bolster the public relations' appeal of US policies. The renamed exceptionalism is, in large part, a manifestation of a powerful historical tradition of imperialism, racism, and condescension toward Asian peoples in particular. These historical impulses effectively overwhelm the necessary consideration, restraint, flexibility and tolerance that is required in any foreign policy that is in the long term strategic interests of the US and its allies.
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