中国法律博客
ChinaLegalBlog.com
Obama on China: Stay the Course
媒体来源: 中国法律博客

From a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria (wearing his CNN hat):

ZAKARIA: You talked about the other threats we face. In dealing with these threats, how should we approach other nations?

John McCain has talked about a new G-8, the group of the richest countries in the world, which would exclude Russia, expel Russia, and not include China. So, it would be an attempt to draw a line in the sand and cast out, as it were, the non-democracies.

Do you think that's a good idea?

OBAMA: It would be a mistake.

Look. If we're going to do something about nuclear proliferation — just to take one issue that I think is as important as any on the list — we've got to have Russia involved. The amount of loose nuclear material that's floating around in the former Soviet Union, the amount of technical know-how that is in countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain — without Russia's cooperation, our efforts on that front will be greatly weakened.

China is going to be one of the dominant economies — already is — and will continue to grow at an extraordinary pace. The notion that we don't want to be engaged in a serious way with China, or that we would want to exclude them from the process of creating international rules of the road that are able to maintain order in the financial markets, that are able to address critical issues like terrorism, that are able to focus our attention on disparities of wealth between countries — that does not make sense.

Now, I think that we have to have a clear sense of what our values are and what our ideals are. I don't think that we should shy away from being straight with the Russians about human rights violations. We should not shy away from talking to the Chinese about those same subjects.

I think that we have to be tough negotiators with them when it comes to critical issues. For example, if China is not working cooperatively with us on trade issues, I think that there's nothing wrong with us being tough bargainers.

But we have to engage and get them involved and brought into dealing with some of these transnational problems. And that kind of tough, thoughtful, realistic diplomacy used to be a bipartisan hallmark of U.S. foreign policy.

And one of the things that I want to do, if I have the honor of being president, is to try to bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan.

But also characterized to a large degree — the first President Bush — with people like Scowcroft and Powell and Baker, who I think had a fairly clear-eyed view of how the world works, and recognized that it is always in our interests to engage, to listen, to build alliances — to understand what our interests are, and to be fierce in protecting those interests, but to make sure that we understand it's very difficult for us to, as powerful as we are, to deal all these issues by ourselves.

Fairly standard U.S. policy rhetoric on China – realist underpinnings, general engagement with criticism where appropriate. Pretty much what we've had since Nixon. Good stuff.

Before we leave this interview, one side comment. Note in the exchange below on Israel policy that when criticized, Obama starts using the royal "we". In the discussion on China policy, he used the first person a couple of times when talking about his specific goals. I'm really tired of the use of the royal "we" by candidates. Yes, we understand that you have a whole team supporting you, but it really sounds stupid, and in this instance, it looks like he is trying to distance himself from a mistake – not cool.

ZAKARIA: One area where you're outside the international consensus — and certainly, perhaps, some others — is the statement you made in a recent speech supporting Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.

Now, why not support the Clinton plan, which envisions a divided Jerusalem, the Arab half being the capital of a Palestinian state, the Jewish half being the capital of the Jewish state?

OBAMA: You know, the truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech. And we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given.

The point we were simply making was, is that we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the '67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent.