By Martin Walker, UPI Chief International Correspondent.
Virtual New York. Tuesday, 10 April 2001
19:54 (ET)
WASHINGTON, April 11 (UPI) -- It is time to draft some rules of the road
for the U.S.-China relationship. Just as the Cuban missile crisis of October
1962 brought the U.S. and Soviet Union so close to nuclear war that they began
looking for ways to avoid such crises in the future, the spy plane crisis with
China could provide the opportunity now to establish similar mechanisms to
defuse problems before they get out of hand.
There were two swift results of the Cuban missile crisis. The first was
public, the proposal by President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent agreement
in the treaty which outlawed nuclear tests in outer space.
The second was secret, the behind-the-scenes deal offered by Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrinin that the U.S.
would quietly withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey after the Soviet
missiles were withdrawn from Cuba.
Those deals paved the way for a series of understandings between Moscow and
Washington that led to the arms control treaties, the agreement not to develop
anti-missile systems, and the acceptance by both sides that their mutual
interests were best served by an acceptance of strategic parity. The network of
military and diplomatic agreements steadily stabilized the unpredictability that
had so frightened both sides during the Cuba crisis.
Something rather similar now needs to be negotiated and established with
China, a country whose breakneck economic growth sets it on track to match
America's gross domestic product within the next 20 years. China is a nuclear
power with a small but potent nuclear arsenal and a battery of some 20
inter-continental ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland, and it
looks to be the only potentially hostile rival superpower.
Some of the rules of the road are fairly basic, but their relevance has
been emphasized by the spy plane confrontation. The United States will continue
to send warships and warplanes close to China's airspace and to the Chinese
coast. Chinese warplanes will continue to shadow them. This took place
constantly during the Cold War, and Soviet and NATO pilots and seamen were
carefully briefed on the minimum distances and safety precautions to be
observed.
These informal rules were often flouted. Hotshot pilots and naval skippers
on both sides pushed the rules to the limit. But both sides knew the rules were
there, and knew that there was a broad political understanding in Moscow and
Washington that minor collisions were not to become the occasion for a crisis.
Just as a gentleman may be defined as someone who is never inadvertently
rude, a responsible superpower is one that never gets into a crisis by
accident.
The second obvious rule that emerges from the spy plane row is that top
officials like Colin Powell need to be able to contact their Chinese equivalents
at all times. The Chinese dithering, or deliberate rudeness, or inability to
agree a policy that had Powell failing to make meaningful contact with Beijing
in the first hours after the incident, should not be repeated. Hotlines have to
work if they are to be useful.
The third obvious rule is that both sides have to agree, however
informally, what international law actually says. Full sovereignty stretches 12
miles offshore. Beyond that, the International law of the Sea convention (which
the U.S. has not ratified) says that there should be an exclusive economic
exploitation zone that stretches 200 miles offshore. Even if neither Washington
nor Beijing can agree publicly to abide by those rules (which would mean the
EP-3 spy plane was operating wholly legally at the time of the collision with
the Chinese fighter) they had better agree to something privately. The U.S. and
Soviet Union had a discreet agreement, even though the Soviet Black Sea Fleet
used to grit its teeth as U.S. warships made their regular token forays into
what was legally an international seaway, but in reality was a private Soviet
lake.
All this makes so much sense and is so obvious that the question arises,
why have these rules not been quietly agreed to already? The answer is that they
have. There are joint U.S.-Chinese maritime incident commissions, hotlines, and
even more discreet military-to-military contacts than the U.S. ever had with the
Soviet Union, at least until the days of Glasnost. The Soviet Union, for
example, never hosted a secret American electronic listening post on its soil,
as China has done for more than 20 years.
The real difference here is that China is not the Soviet Union. It is not
yet a superpower, although it would like to be treated as one. It is not seeking
to export its ideology across the world, nor using the international network of
Communist parties to further its strategic goals. Above all, China and the
United States have not yet gone through the traumatic and sobering experience
like the near-war over Cuba that re-defined the U.S.-Soviet relationship.
And the purpose of the rules of the road is to ensure that they never do.
Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights
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