229. From First Grade to Weapons Grade

 

"Don't be a Just Me" was a motto on the wall of my first grade classroom.  In seventh grade, where we learned to debate, this had become, "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view."  I thought of this when I read Geoff Dyer's explanation (Financial Times, 12-4-13) of China's declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea: China is "attempting what aspiring great powers often do to prevent another country from dominating its own region."

All right, grown-up youngster, be fair.  Look at it from China's point of view.  There's the U.S. with its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) covering all the waters around its borders, there's Japan with its ADIZ, there's Russia with its.  An ADIZ is not a legal or treaty thing; it's just declared.  Great, and sometimes not-so-great, powers have such things. 

Say you're Chinese.  For such a long time your country was far from being a great power.  Just the opposite.  Great powers took from China what they wanted.  In 1895 Japan took, among bigger things (like Taiwan), the Diaoyu Islands.  A small thing  but still a great power thing.  Do you want to be a great power?  Get an Air Defense Identification Zone.  And if it overlaps Japan's ADIZ  at the Diaoyu Islands, so much the better.  Here's mud in your eye, Shinzo Abe.

Not so fast, says Joe Biden, you're "unilaterally trying to change the status quo" (NYT, 12-3-13).

"Whose status quo?" the fair-minded seventh-grader sees himself, Chinese, asking the U.S.  "The established situation in the Pacific has you running things right up to our coastal waters.  Just the way you ran things in 1961 (this 12-year-old does well in history) when Khrushchev sent his boatload of missiles to Cuba.  Remember?  The U.S. had missiles in Turkey, right on the Soviet Union's border.  And was ready to press the button if the Soviets put some on its borders.  "We can do it but you can't," that was the status-quo motto in 1961.

That's the way established powers talk to rising powers.  Most of it is probably arrogance and habit but, you know, I think a lot of it is just plain fear.  Like what Spartans felt when they saw the power of Athens rising.  "What will they do to us when they are fully powerful?"  Martin Wolf, writing in last Tuesday's Financial Times ("China must not copy the Kaiser's errors," 12-3-13) makes the comparison to Germany, and gives us a telling reminder of the fear in the hearts of the established powers, Britain and France, as Germany rose, and moved to stand alongside them in the 20th century.  Wolf shows how that move was mishandled, and we come away certain that established powers can mishandle their establishment as badly as rising powers can mishandle their rising.  His reminder, that "seemingly minor events can quickly escalate to catastrophic proportions," needs no elaboration to give us a shudder.

Keeping an established power happy without making a rising power unhappy is pretty difficult but smart statesmen can do it.  The Kennedy team handling the missiles the Soviet Union (in the position of a rising power) was sending to Cuba did it.  They made a deal: the Soviets would turn their boat around and we would remove the missiles we had stationed in Turkey.  But there would be no public announcement of the removal, or even admission of the deal.  That left Americans, the mass of them, believing that they were as great as they ever were.  Since the turnaround was public they could claim victory.  But their leaders would make no such claims.  "No crowing" was Kennedy's final instruction to the team.  That would let the Soviets think they were as good as anybody. 

The seventh-grader has no seat at the realpoliticians' table but is his voice unheard?  I think not.  No graduate of an American elementary school can entirely silence the voice that speaks for fairness to the other fellow and in this case, inside those tough, anti-communist counselors, I think there must have been a voice asking why the U.S. could put missiles on its adversary's borders and the adversary could not do the same.  I'll go further.  I'll bet some were asking, "What would I be feeling about my borders if countries along them had not leaped across them so many times to savage us, as the Germans did so devastatingly to the Russians just a few years ago?"  Americans, with their 3000 miles of ocean on each side, have a hard time imagining the feelings of exposed countries, but if they're not going to be haunted by their seventh-grade teachers they have to.

Smart seventh-graders read "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view" as a sub-motto of "Use your imagination," and when they grow into realpoliticians the blackboard motto will become "get inside the other fellow's head, look at the world the way he looks at it, and the way he looks at you."  The results could be as different as what's inside a Chinese head and what's inside an Iranian head.

Say a grown-up seventh-grader gets inside an Iranian mullah's head and looks out at us.  What does he see?  Pure Evil.  The Great Satan.  When he looks, as that mullah, at his own people what does he see?  Potential martyrs for Good, caring little about their own lives in the fight against Evil.  If the seventh grader is at all an Error Philosopher (Posts #224 and 226) he'll see tolerance of nuclear weapons in the hands of such a mullah directing a nation as The Big Mistake, to avoid which his country has to Go Big (here meaning "do anything necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of such hands").  So people who adhere to seventh-grade ideals aren't necessarily going to be doves.  They could be bigger hawks than John McCain.  With controlled sympathies.  It won't matter that in the past Iranians have been victims, our victims (in 1953).  Decisions have to be made for, and sympathies directed to, the living and their descendants only.  There's no point, at a bargaining table, in sympathizing with the dead.

That in Iran is a million miles from what we have in the East China Sea, beginning with what's primary inside the Chinese head: material, or commercial, interests — all that trade with the U. S., all that need for the natural resources missing in their own country.  The trouble with the Fighter Against Evil is that in his head there are no material interests you can work with.  In the Fighter Against Foreign Devils there are God's plenty.  What Marx (dialectical materialism) didn't put there Confucius did. Confucius, that god (yes, you can call Confucianism the "Chinese religion") of realism and worldliness.

There, in the Far East, is the hope we can't have in the Near East.  Mutual material interests push China and the U. S., represented by skilled diplomats at the table, to a peaceful settlement that lets each side go home speaking like big-power winners.  "See, we got them to accept our defense zone."  "See, we got them to bring their defense zone down to match that of reasonable nations" (the Chinese ADIZ required — perhaps for future bargaining — more of entering planes than the others' did).  They come out with the Chinese feeling as good as anybody and the Americans feeling as great as they ever were. Rising power happy, established power happy.  Fairness that makes the seventh grader happy.  Achieved by diplomacy that makes the realpolitician happy.

 
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