The Truman Doctrine and the Obama Doctrine

In February 1947, President Truman announced a new and radical approach to U.S. foreign policy: the Truman Doctrine, which essentially took one of the first steps toward making Europe the main stage for the Cold War, lasting with ups and downs until the extinction of the USSR in 1989 – 91. Last December, President Obama made another announcement with similar international reach: that he will refocus Washington’s basic interests on the Asia-Pacific [region]. But there — as was the case with Moscow in the ’40s — an interested incumbent remains: Peking.

The relationship between China and the United States has historically been complex. North American political scientist Immanuel Wallerstein asks if we must consider the present and dramatic ascent of what was once the Middle Kingdom as a novelty or a continuity. If you understand the dominance of the West, which began with the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th Century, as a patrimonial right, it would be the first; and if you think that Peking has hardly gone away in 200 years of great power geopolitics, the second. American middle-class Protestants have sent more missionaries to China than to any other country, especially in the 19th Century; and the American with enlightened opinions has always felt a great respect for Chinese civilization, which can reach the point of extravagance, as can be seen in Henry Kissinger’s “On China,” where in every grimace on Mao’s sick face you could see a millenarian plan.

All of that explains the controversy in the United States in the ’50s over who lost China, with Washington as the major shareholder in the Chiang Kai-shek regime, which was defeated by the communist leader in 1949. At the time, above all in the interwar period when the great powers pulled the strings through so-called concessions, the United States, even though it never physically colonized the country, exercised a vaguely moderating influence that could have left a positive memory. In this case, perhaps Peking might have never vetoed any resolution that the United States introduced in the United Nations. But it is impossible that Obama’s declaration has been well received in the Forbidden City, which aspires to make that part of the world its backyard.

China’s economic ties with the West become more and more intense each day, as we can deduce from the number of opportunities and risks. The comeback empire hoards reserves valued at €2,500 billion — “billion” not “million” — and has created a fund at the request of the IMF of some €150 million for investments in Europe and the United States. That very fund calculates that, by 2016, China’s GDP will be the greatest in the world in purchasing power, even through the country settles in as 101st in the U.N. Human Development Index. Disagreements with the United States arise as quickly as Peking’s technological appetite, as is now occurring over the use of renewable energy or the eternal Western desire to re-evaluate the Yuan — especially now that China and Japan have agreed to conduct bilateral trade in their respective currencies, without touching either the dollar or the euro.

But Washington needs Peking in order to attract Pyongyang — even more so today with the third Kim, whom the United States doesn’t know and has ignored due to his youth — while it hopes that Japan and China will never forget the rape of Nanking or the atrocious Japanese repression during the conquest of Shanghai, which happened a little before the outbreak of World War II.

There isn’t any motive for Obama to want to reissue the anti-Soviet containment policy that George F. Kennan intellectually hatched (and for which he later repented). The U.S. president is exiting the war in Iraq (nobody knows who won, but, yes, it is certain that the United States lost) and, shortly, an Afghanistan where the prognosis can’t compete with the reiterated announcement of military successes on the ground. He knows well his mandate: He is called to reduce external commitments and concentrate instead on internal reconstruction in response to the [economic] crisis. For all that, he will require a second term, which the Republicans seem committed to concede to him with their search for a candidate who is beyond eccentric. But an element of containment is inevitable in any exercise of U.S. power, so that reading — although Obama will never do it — Josep Fontana’s work, “Por el bien del Imperio [For the Good of the Empire],” an anthology of the error of freezing a peace in order to call it war, would undoubtedly be of benefit.