As America Strengthens in Eastern Europe, China Moves on Latin America

 

Russia and China have always been wary of US/NATO at or near their borders. Both regimes are brutal and repressive, with no concern for human rights, run by dictators seeking to eliminate perceived threats in their spheres of influence. Except for a very few years of experimental democracy in the early 1990s, Russia’s autocratic efforts against its own people have included execution (assassination abroad), torture, interminable prison sentences in cruel venues, drugged detention and confiscation of anything of value. Russia has carried that legacy to its “allies,” for example recently propping up the iron-fisted Assad regime in Syria which, with Russian help (including Russian planes and pilots), included using barrel bombs and poisonous gasses on her own civilians. Today, Putin proudly points to Syrian “volunteers” joyfully joining his “special military operation” against Ukraine.

While Russia’s footholds have been global, until very recently, China’s military efforts have been focused on Asia: Wars with India (1962), massive military support for North Korea as it repelled a United Nations counterattack after it invaded South Korea (1950), military aid to North Vietnam (in the 1960s/70s) against the US, plus the invasion and annexation of Tibet (1961) which China labeled “The Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.” China’s latest Belt and Road initiative has used financial incentives (usually loans with big strings attached) for nations to upgrade their port and associated infrastructure to enable favorable trade agreements for the People’s Republic. 

China has upped its game, both regionally and in more distant locales. In Asia, China has effectively built a large, manmade island (once a very small outcropping) in the Spratly Island chain in the South China sea, building a very military airfield and claiming all the natural resources in the surrounding area as extensions of that island. She abrogated the handover treaty that transferred Hong Kong from UK sovereignty to China in 1997, an agreement to continue British law and rights for HK citizens for 50 years, most prominently under jackboot repression by China’s latest leader, Xi Jinping.  

In an effort to crush any non-Chinese culture, language and foreign religion (here Islam), Xi also implemented the arrest, “re-education” by forced detention, torture and killing offending Uighurs in the PRC’s western provinces, banning their culture, language and traditions. Xi has also increased military taunting and saber-rattling as Xi magnified the PRC’s longstanding claim that democratic and independent Taiwan is a breakaway province that always belonged to her. Any dissent within China has been crushed as well. But unlike Russia, with a very small economy most based on exports of agricultural goods and fossil fuels, China’s manufacturing sector has made it the second largest economy on earth, destined to take the top spot at current growth rates. And very dependent on international trade, significantly with Europe and the US.

Although Soviet Russia had supported left-leaning despots in Central and South America for decades, her efforts to replicate US/NATO military strength in neighboring Europe, her most important foray into a communist island nation 90 miles from Florida almost started a nuclear war. As Russia delivered ballistic missiles to be based in Cuba, the Cold War almost became hot, in a contest of wills between US President John Kennedy and Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 “featured calculations and miscalculations as well as direct and secret communications and miscommunications between the two sides. The dramatic crisis was also characterized by the fact that it was primarily played out at the White House and the Kremlin level with relatively little input from the respective bureaucracies typically involved in the foreign policy process.” From the Office of the Historian of the United States. One of the four Soviet submarines guarding Cuba carried nuclear weapons, which a courageous Russian captain refused to launch. Eventually, the missiles were withdrawn. Today, Putin’s Russia is defined by his paranoia and megalomania.

John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, writing for the March 11th Economist, reminds us of the first serious suggestion that Russia would fight NATO at or near Russia’s border, focusing on Ukraine. “The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members’. Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin ‘flew into a rage’ and warned that ‘if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.’ America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the EU and making it a pro-American democracy.

“These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, after an uprising (which was supported by America) caused Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country. In response, Russia took Crimea from Ukraine and helped fuel a civil war that broke out in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.” As the United States began supplying Ukraine with “defensive weapons” shortly thereafter, Putin began his plans to attack that sovereign nation. Russian overseas efforts have become more direct, more confrontational over the years, but now China seems to want to expand her sphere of influence closer to the US border.  Both nations see the United States as failing state, torn apart by severe political polarization, a fact that clearly weighed on Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

But global revulsion at Putin’s attack may have tempered China’s desire to take neighboring Taiwan (which has a mutual defense treaty with the United States) and blindly support Russia, with whom the PRC recently reached a mutual cooperation accord. However, because China’s economy is so global, so massive, she knows that should she face the same kind of economic sanctions and opprobrium that defines Russia’s effort in Ukraine, the damage could be far worse than Russia’s fate. For more on China’s “Russia” conundrum, see my March 6th China’s Watching Putin, But What Does She See? blog. That has not, however, stopped China from seizing an opportunity in our backyard, now in the Central American gang-driven narco-state of El Salvador. 

Los Angeles Times journalist, Kath Linthicum, made these observations in her March 7th contribution: “El Salvador’s president and the Chinese ambassador traded flatteries recently as they broke ground on a new national library, one of a slew of gifts China has promised this small, mountainous nation as part of its vigorous quest to gain influence across Central America.

“As they smiled for photos, [PRC] Ambassador Ou Jianhong expressed her ‘greatest respect’ for President Nayib Bukele, a polarizing leader who has assailed El Salvador’s democratic institutions and clashed repeatedly with U.S. officials. Bukele, in turn, praised Chinese President Xi Jinping, an authoritarian who has engineered China’s rise at the expense of civil liberties.

“When the seven-story library is finished, it will loom above San Salvador’s central square, a symbol of China’s growing presence in the region and a reminder that as the relationship between the U.S. and El Salvador has chilled, the Latin nation has found refuge in China’s deep pockets and warm embrace…

“Until recently, China’s activities had largely been focused on South America — buying up soybeans in Brazil, lithium in Bolivia and selling billions in Chinese goods and technology… But it has increasingly trained its sights on Central America, a region less rich in natural resources and with relatively little buying power, but one that sends a clear message to the U.S.

“China sees a foothold in Central America as a strategic counterbalance to U.S. encroachments in Asia, notably Washington’s condemnation of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong and China’s territorial claims over the self-governing democratic island of Taiwan… Of the 14 countries that still have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, most are in Latin America and the Caribbean. China has already convinced Costa Rica, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador to drop their recognition of Taiwan and forge ties with Beijing...

“In Central America, a region beset by crime and corruption and a long history of autocrats, there are growing fears that China’s billions of dollars and influence will help strengthen anti-democratic regimes. Some 8,000 miles away, China doesn’t have to worry about the potential consequences of a destabilized region, such as the caravans of migrants that head toward the U.S. border.” The autocratic world is smiling at our internal dissension, thinking perhaps that we might even become a fellow autocracy. Only our unity, our democratic bond, can counter that belief. We united NATO beyond Putin’s expectations. But can we unite ourselves?

I’m Peter Dekom, and our enemies are feasting on our own self-inflicted wounds, but we can become the democracy our forefathers envisioned… if we care.