The global West’s disarray only encourages Xi Jinping’s belligerent tendencies.

This article was first published in 1945 on May 25, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

By John Bolton

Last Saturday, leaders of the G-7 nations meeting in Hiroshima issued a 40-page communique addressing, most importantly, their relations with China.

The communique was touted as demonstrating G-7 unity and strength against Beijing’s economic warfare, but the China language instead reflects disarray and incoherence.

Embarrassingly weak, for example, is the Taiwan passage.

It is essentially unchanged from recent G-7 statements, ignoring China’s rapidly rising menace during the same period. Similarly, the G-7 urged China to speak directly to Ukraine, but referred only to a peace “based on territorial integrity,” not on the full restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty as well as its territorial integrity — a restoration all NATO members profess to support.

By resorting to bromides regarding both Taiwan and Ukraine, the leaders of the global West do precisely the opposite of what they intend: They reveal weakness rather than unity and strength. 

An Empty Slogan

The communique is weakest and least coherent on the G-7’s economic relationship with China, the very front where current Chinese efforts at regional and global hegemony are playing out. Instead of forthrightly confronting Beijing’s economic aggression, the Hiroshima document relies on a slogan, a sure signal of inadequate strategic substance. The communique adopts the mantra first unfurled by the European Union and quickly adopted by the Biden White House.

The slogan holds that the G-7 nations favor “derisking, not decoupling” their economies from China. This is a bumper sticker in search of a meaning, masking both the European Union’s flat unwillingness to acknowledge the Chinese threat, and significant policy disagreements and inadequacies within the G-7. It reflects not so much a failure of leadership in bringing along the lagging Europeans, but a collapse of U.S. resolve at the very outset.

The G-7 communique is quick to say, “we are not decoupling or turning inwards.” In fact, the concept of “decoupling” was always a straw man, an exaggeration implying near-cessation of business between China and the West. Deployed in America by those who overprize economic relations with Beijing — placing their importance above American national security — the term aimed to panic businesses and policymakers who were beginning to awaken to the re-emergence of significant international political risk. This “project fear” meaning of decoupling was never accurate.

Nor was “decoupling” ever seriously suggested in the sense of a government-mandated, latter-day industrial policy. Such an approach was no more likely to succeed than other industrial policies, which all rest on the assumption that politicians and government bureaucrats are better at making economic choices than markets. Existing levels of trade and investment between the global West and China are, for well or ill, too complex to believe that top-down government decision-making would lead to anything other than confusion and disorder.

Where government-directed decoupling is necessary, and should be expedited, is where it can eliminate dependency on goods and services that significantly impact U.S. national security. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have imposed significant sanctions on China in the high-tech field.

Europe trails far behind. France and Germany still see China almost exclusively through an economic prism, as repeatedly confirmed by statements from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Even the United Kingdom is torn, with significant debate between the hawkish Conservative parliamentary party and a China-friendly Ten Downing Street.

China Decouples

The hollowness of the “derisking, not decoupling” mantra is most evident at the level of individual firms, which have no practical way to derisk without decoupling. They must either reduce capital investment, or at least not increase it; withhold intellectual property (at risk from decades of Chinese piracy); reduce supply-chain reliance; find other markets; or take other defensive measures, depending on the circumstances of the particular firm. Many companies are already deeply engaged in reducing or hedging their risks, but others are not. These latter may ultimately pay the greatest economic price for their lack of diligence.

In due time, the sum of national security prudence and businesses’ political-risk decisions will determine the extent of decoupling, not the G-7’s false dichotomy. 

Tellingly, China is already far along in decoupling from the West, preparing for future military conflict by reducing its dependence. In what should have been required reading for G-7 leaders at Hiroshima, Ross Babbage’s The Next Major War demonstrates what Beijing was doing while we slept. Babbage explains four decades of China’s policy of so-called dual circulation, or “two markets, two resources.” Beijing’s “domestic market [was] a resource to protect and insulate, while foreign markets were to be penetrated and exploited.” He quotes McKinsey’s conclusion that “‘China has been reducing its exposure to the world, while the world’s exposure to China has risen.’”

Poor Signals From the G-7

However, China was far from successful in insulating itself. Its dependence on massive energy imports and other raw materials remains a critical weakness — one very difficult for China to correct in the foreseeable future, given its lack of domestic mineral and hydrocarbon resources.

The global West is only belatedly grasping the extent of China’s theft of intellectual property, massive protectionism, and governmental subsidies. As the gauzy era of globalization dissipates, political risk has re-emerged as a central factor in international business, especially with China. Political risk is not and never was confined to the world’s economic fringes. Under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “hide your capabilities and bide your time,” Beijing convinced too many Western politicians and businesses of the fantasy that China was little more than a pure economic play. This holiday from history is over, and China’s misdeeds and threats, politically, economically, and militarily, are increasingly evident.

G-7 meetings come and go, and their leaders’ statements fade quickly. The impression that will not fade after the Hiroshima summit, certainly not from the minds of policymakers in Beijing, is that the great industrial democracies are still divided and unsure about how to oppose China’s economic warfare against them. The global West’s disarray only encourages Xi Jinping’s belligerent tendencies.

This article was first published in The Hill on May 5, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

Last week’s summit between President Biden and President Yoon Suk-yeol of the Republic of Korea (“ROK”) had a full agenda, but there is little doubt that Yoon’s top priority was the omnipresent, growing North Korean nuclear threat.

Unfortunately, the celebration of the ROK-U.S. alliance’s 70th anniversary produced a joint statement, the Washington Declaration, that fell far short of what was necessary.

The Declaration’s modest measures will not slow Pyongyang’s efforts to reunite the Peninsula under its control, so tensions in Northeast Asia will almost certainly continue rising.

Reflecting a growing fear that America’s nuclear “extended deterrence” is no longer reliable, either against the North or, importantly, China, South Korean public opinion has increasingly supported an independent nuclear program.

Biden’s response to Beijing’s and Pyongyang’s growing nuclear and ballistic-missile threats, embodied in the Declaration, will do little to alleviate these ROK concerns.

The most palpable new U.S. commitment to opposing North Korean belligerence is that our nuclear ballistic-missile submarines will, for the first time in 40 years, resume docking, occasionally, in South Korea. Anonymous U.S. officials also predicted there would be a “regular cadence” of visits by aircraft carriers, bombers and more.

Did the White House really believe Pyongyang’s leadership thought America’s nuclear arsenal was imaginary? Perhaps. It’s a strange leadership, with strange ideas, so parading the cold steel from time to time might have an effect, if not on China’s Xi Jinping, perhaps on North Korea’s Kim Jung Un.

Far more likely, however, is that neither Kim nor Xi doubt Washington has massive nuclear assets. Instead, ironically but tellingly, they, like South Korea’s citizens, think very little of today’s U.S. leadership, Republican or Democratic.

China and both Koreas perceive a lack of American resolve and willpower to act decisively when ROK and U.S. national interests are threatened. If so, the Washington Declaration’s rhetoric about the U.S. commitment to extended deterrence and strengthening bilateral military ties will be seen as words, and words alone. We are kidding ourselves to believe that having “boomers” pitch up in South Korean waters sporadically will have any deterrent effect.

By contrast, redeploying U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, effectively indefinitely, is several orders of magnitude more serious. First, these weapons would remain under sole American control, and immediately available to assist in defending deployed U.S. forces, and their Republic of Korea cohorts. “We go together” (or “katchi kapshida” in Korean) becomes much more than the combined forces’ long-standing slogan when backed by battlefield nuclear capabilities. That is far more palpable than submarine port calls.

Second, tactical nuclear deployments would give heft to the Washington Declaration’s creation of the Nuclear Coordination Group (“NCG”), charged with strengthening extended deterrence, discussing nuclear planning and managing North Korea’s proliferation threat. The new NCG would be far more than just another bureaucratic prop if it had real-world questions like optimizing the deterrent and defensive value of tangible nuclear assets. Lacking concrete responsibilities, how will the new NCG differ from the existing Extended Deterrence Strategy and Consultation Group, and others, which the Declaration says will be “strengthened”?

Third, while the issue of an independent ROK nuclear capability is politically and militarily separate from returning American tactical nuclear weapons to the Peninsula, renewed deployment would nonetheless buy valuable time for Seoul and Washington to evaluate fully the implications of South Korea becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The presence of American nuclear assets on the Peninsula neither precludes nor renders inevitable a separate ROK program, which has the further advantage of keeping Beijing and Pyongyang guessing.

Moreover, the implicit message weakening the Washington Declaration is that America’s antiproliferation efforts to stop Pyongyang from becoming a nuclear power have failed. Consider the proliferation aspect of the NCG’s mandate: it is to “manage” the North Korean threat. Not “defeat” that threat, not “eliminate” or “end” that threat, but merely “manage” it.

This is the language of bureaucrats, not statesmen, and it sounds suspiciously like giving up on working to prevent North Korea from becoming able to deliver nuclear payloads.

It is therefore appropriate to emphasize that those who opposed taking decisive steps against nuclear proliferators like North Korea and Iran long argued that we had ample time for negotiations. Accordingly, they said, efforts at regime change or pre-emptive military action were over-wrought, premature and unnecessary. Now that Pyongyang has detonated six nuclear devices, and Iran continues to progress toward its first, these same people say the rogue states are already nuclear powers, and we must hereafter rely on arms control and deterrence.

In other words, first it was too soon to take decisive action, and now it is too late. One might almost conclude that for all the posturing over the years that North Korean (or Iranian) nuclear weapons were “unacceptable,” that’s not really what many U.S. politicians and policymakers actually believed. They were prepared to accept American failure, but they knew it was impolitic to say it out loud in public. We are all now at greater risk because of this hypocrisy.

In the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, where the menace of nuclear proliferation is all too real, others have refused to give up. In his first year in office, for example, Yoon has made improving ROK-Japan relations, badly damaged by his predecessor, a top priority. Better Tokyo-Seoul cooperation is critical to enhanced three-way efforts with Washington, and Yoon’s diplomacy with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is paying dividends. Kishida will visit South Korea, the first such visit in five years, just before the Hiroshima G-7 meeting, to which Yoon is invited.

It’s obviously easier for Kishida to sell U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the South than an independent ROK nuclear force, which would instantly raise in Tokyo the complex question of a comparable Japanese capability.

Biden’s half-hearted efforts to enhance U.S. national security should be a significant political vulnerability in the 2024 presidential campaign. It remains to be seen whether Republicans have the wit to make it an issue.

This article was first published in the National Review on April 21, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced hard choices on the U.S. and its allies in determining how to respond to such unprovoked and unwarranted aggression. The U.S. is doing its part, but Japan, a member of the G-7 and the third-largest economy in the world, has dragged its feet and stopped at mere rhetoric. A more robust Japanese response is necessary to support Ukraine, beginning with cutting off trade with Russia’s staunch ally, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran is one of the few countries helping the Russian military kill innocent Ukrainian civilians and continue its invasion. For months now, the Russian military has used Iranian drones, and it is also seeking to acquire Iranian missiles, according to the Biden administration. And Japan appears to recognize the importance of Iranian weaponry to Russian forces: Earlier this month, Deputy Foreign Minister Shigeo Yamada reportedly asked Tehran “to stop supplying weapons to Russia.”

This was a ridiculous request. Iran has no intention of voluntarily slowing its cooperation with Moscow; it must be compelled to do so. Unfortunately, Japan has shown no appetite for concrete steps to punish Iran. It is the only member of the G-7 that has failed to apply any sanctions whatsoever on Iranian officials or entities since September, and both money and commercial products are flowing from Tokyo to Tehran — helping to prolong the war and encourage Iran’s malign behavior.

In 2022, Japanese general trading company Sojitz was fined more than $5 million by the U.S. Treasury Department for purchasing 64,000 tons of Iranian high-density polyethylene resin, which the Biden administration said “conferred significant economic benefits to Iran and undermined broad U.S. sanctions specifically targeting Iran’s petrochemical sector, a major source of revenue generation for the Government of Iran.” Later in the year, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) published evidence that Iran-backed Hezbollah is using communications equipment manufactured by Japan’s Icom Inc., which has another firm acting as its “official representative in Iran.”

More recently, UANI uncovered evidence that Japanese defense firm Fujikura — which has contracts to support the Japanese Self-Defense Forces — is simultaneously engaged in the Iranian market as an approved vendor of several sanction-designated and state-owned entities, including some linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Japanese businesses also appear to be selling commercial products to companies in China that source components and software found in Iranian drones.

These commercial ties should be as unacceptable to the U.S. as the purchase of Iranian oil, which Japan has done without since May 2019. Japan should suspend its trade relationship with Tehran and, like the United States, force businesses worldwide to choose between doing business in Iran or Japan. After all, trade between Japan and Iran, directly and indirectly, supports Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

Suspending trade with Iran, as Japan’s allies and partners have already done, is the least that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida can do to support Ukraine given his country’s continued reliance on Russian energy.

If Japan does so, Prime Minister Kishida will demonstrate that he is taking Japan into a new era of global leadership. He has already signaled a willingness to take political risks in ways that his predecessors did not by becoming the first prime minister to attend a NATO summit, doubling Japan’s military budget, and agreeing to “take on new roles” in the Indo-Pacific, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Prime Minister Kishida will also demonstrate that Japan is unafraid of using its substantial economic leverage to further international peace and security, drawing it closer to the U.S. and Europe and creating a stark contrast with malign states like China and Russia. Japan should adopt a version of the Magnitsky Act to more easily impose economic sanctions on individuals and entities suspected of human-rights violations.

Japan must recognize that it can have a tremendous impact on the war by targeting Iran for its role in supplying weaponry to Russia, and it need not wait until it hosts the next G-7 meeting in May to do so. If Japan addresses its ties with Tehran in the right way, it will create opportunities for a more confident and assertive nation to lead on the world stage. But if it addresses them in the wrong way, it will show that for all its economic strength, it is not yet confident enough to help direct world affairs.

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article was first published in The Washington Examiner on March 20, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

The competition for “most startling photo of 2023” may already be over. The smiling photo of China’s top foreign-policy official and the Iranian and Saudi Arabian national security advisers looks hard to beat.

China scored a diplomatic win cozying up to Riyadh by exploiting President Joe Biden’s palpable disdain for the Saudis. China also helped rehabilitate Tehran, which has been brutally suppressing its most extensive domestic opposition in the Islamic Republic’s history. Whether this is ultimately more than just a Chinese public relations triumph, however, is still unclear.

Secretary of State Blinken embarrassed himself trying to put a positive spin on the debacle, thereby underlining how marginal the United States was. Equally important was the embarrassment caused to those Americans arguing that to focus adequately on China and its neighborhood, Washington can pretty much ignore everywhere else.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is the principal Senate proponent for this approach, arguing that U.S. involvement in Europe (particularly aiding Ukraine) and the Middle East distracts from our ability to contest China in Asia, especially over Taiwan. He voted against admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO, for example, the only senator to do so (Rand Paul voted “present”). Hawley’s quasi-isolationist analysis rests on the flawed assumption that America cannot muster sufficient resources to walk and chew gum at the same time. He says that narrowing our attention to East Asia and the Chinese threat necessarily means reduced US involvement in lower-priority regions.

Of course, resources may be finite at any given point, but responsible political leaders know how to increase them when the times demand, as Ronald Reagan did so successfully. If Hawley’s resource analysis were true, the U.S. is lucky it only had to fight on one front in World War II; otherwise, we surely would have lost.

The “Asia only” argument stresses Beijing’s many threats and highlights the existential menace posed to Taiwan’s continuing self-government, which is no small matter. Having first advocated full U.S. diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in 2000 to counter Beijing’s hegemonic aspirations, I have no disagreement with Hawley’s concerns about Taiwanese security.

Consider, for starters, Washington’s long-standing alliance with Taipei, whether de jure or de facto; Taiwan’s enormous economic importance as a trading partner and focal point of information-technology production and innovation; its critical geographic location in the “first island chain” standing between China and the open Pacific; and the mutual interest of close allies like Japan.

Unfortunately, however, China’s geo-strategists do not view the world through a soda straw, and neither should we. Beijing’s diplomatic coup de main with Iran and Saudi Arabia should shatter any illusions that our struggle with China is anything less than global. If the U.S. deprioritizes or abandons a geographic area, it is simply an invitation to Beijing (and Moscow) to enter and fill the vacuum we create.

In the Middle East, adding insult to injury are last week’s joint naval maneuvers by China, Russia, and Iran in the Gulf of Oman(just outside the Strait of Hormuz). These drills, so near to critical Gulf Arab hydrocarbon producers, are tangible evidence that China is vigorously contesting U.S. influence region-wide, militarily as well as politically. Inevitable future Sino-American crises will undoubtedly involve clashes over critical energy supplies.

Examples of China’s global reach and agility are all too plentiful. Reflecting years of China’s successful efforts to penetrate the Western Hemisphere, for example, Brazil’s left-wing President Lula da Silva is taking a delegation of 240 business people on a weeklong visit to Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese infiltration in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, bolstering Russia’s faltering presence, has also long been underway covertly. Both Lula’s trip and the Iran-Saudi ploy are consistent with Xi Jinping’s “Global Security Initiative,” expressly melding economic and security concerns to China’s advantage and leaving Washington again on the sidelines.

Tellingly, notwithstanding an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, Xi is now visiting Moscow to discuss their “no limits” alliance. So disdainful is Putin of the court that he made a surprise trip to occupied Ukraine, including visiting children’s care facilities. No comment from China.

Purportedly shopping a Russian-Ukraine “peace plan,” Xi is actually demonstrating that he has been and remains entirely on Putin’s side in the Ukraine war. Indeed, there are reports that China intends to or already is shipping weapons to Russia, or at a minimum, providing support fungible with lethal aid. China, for all practical purposes, is as much involved politically in Europe’s ongoing war as the U.S.

To his credit, Hawley has received harsh criticism from China because of his opposition to its threatening behavior. And if he continues his good work on China, I will surely, in due course, warmly welcome him to the honor roll of officially sanctioned Americans, he hopefully having long since discarded the “Asia only” outlook.

John Bolton was the national security adviser to former President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida comes to Washington this week for a potentially critical summit with President Joe Biden — particularly on China, which Tokyo now publicly recognizes as its principal threat. 

Just weeks ago, Kishida announced a historical “turning point” in Tokyo’s security policy, vowing to double its defense budget in the next five years to 2% of gross domestic product, NATO’s target level, making Japan’s military topped only by America’s and China’s. 

Biden has paralyzed US strategic thinking about Beijing’s menace, obsessed instead with negotiating climate-change issues. Fortunately, our allies have progressed without us. 

Before arriving here, Kishida will sign a historic agreement with Great Britain, providing for reciprocal in-country treatment of each other’s servicemembers, thus facilitating joint military exercises and training. While not as far-reaching as Tokyo’s foundational, 1951 status-of-forces agreement with Washington, this new Japan-UK deal is an important step in building Indo-Pacific collective-defense structures. 

Moreover, spurred by Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine and its implications for Asia, Japan is showing new resolve to range far from its immediate region, providing unprecedented aid to Ukraine, including non-lethal military equipment. 

These Japanese initiatives parallel British leadership in assisting Ukraine. Since Feb. 24, successive UK governments have consistently outperformed the Biden administration in both political and military support for Kyiv. And in Asia, Britain took a critical catalytic role in forging the trilateral “AUKUS” partnership with the United States to develop and build nuclear-powered submarines for Australia’s navy. 

Not all is well, however, in the global West’s reaction to Beijing’s threat, reflecting the continuing, disconcerting lack of American leadership. Germany, for example, stands in sharp contrast to Japan and Britain. Despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s declared “sea change” in German security policy just days after Moscow’s attack on Ukraine, Berlin is failing to reach key goals, including increasing defense outlays to 2% of GDP this year and expending €100 billion ($106 billion) on defense assets, such as 30 nuclear-capable F-35s. 

What should happen at the Kishida-Biden summit — but probably won’t — is a start on fashioning elements of a new grand strategy to counter China and its growing entente with Russia. Japan’s landmark budget increases, its European outreach and its understanding of the China-Russia threat all contrast dramatically with the Biden administration’s overall timidity. 

Kishida should press for considerably greater activity by the Asian “Quad” (India, Japan, Australia and the United States), which Biden to his credit supports, continuing to move its members toward concrete joint action. Mirroring AUKUS, enhancing Japan’s naval capabilities with nuclear-powered submarines, could be enormously beneficial in East Asia. 

Biden in turn should show how his defense budgets will help rejuvenate America’s military-industrial base, lest even good ideas like AUKUS impair our own defense capabilities, as both Republican and Democrats fear. 

Biden and Kishida should propose making South Korea a full Quad member (forming a “Quint”), which is entirely sensible given the threats from North Korea and China. Indeed, on New Year’s Day, Kim Jong Un ordered “an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal,” specifically including tactical nuclear weapons to use against the South, which also threaten Japan and deployed American forces. 

Even before Kim’s latest threat, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol was weighing calls to redeploy US nuclear weapons on the peninsula or develop Seoul’s own nuclear weapons. 

Japan and South Korea have a long, complicated history, which has prevented extensive trilateral cooperation with Washington. This history is impossible to ignore, but Biden should make every effort to facilitate Tokyo and Seoul coming closer together in collective-defense alignments. 

Taiwan’s security, which has enormous, bipartisan support, should also top the Kishida-Biden agenda. Beijing’s belligerence toward Taipei continues to escalate, including Chinese military aircraft’s repeated incursions into Taiwanese airspace. 

The world is increasingly, albeit slowly, realizing the need to deter Chinese aggression. Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently visited Taipei, calling to “further strengthen the bonds between Taiwan and Europe,” an important signal of growing support for the island nation. Closer planning among Japan, America, other Asian partners and NATO allies should be a high priority. 

Even Biden officials acknowledge that China’s recent behavior is ever-more belligerent. This week’s Kishida-Biden summit is exactly the right forum both to prove continued allied solidarity against China’s unacceptable conduct and to rally others in Asia and Europe against its growing threat. 

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump, 2018-19, and US ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.