Narendra Modi succeeded Singh as prime minister after a landslide victory for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the spring of 2014. Modi embraced a more confident role for India on the world stage, committed to making it a great power and its partnership with the United States far more strategic. He had bold ideas to propel India’s economy and bureaucracy into the twenty-first century. The BJP, however, had harbored for years some worrying sectarian, Hindu nationalist tendencies. During Modi’s tenure as chief minister of Gujarat, anti-Muslim violence had claimed more than a thousand lives, denting his image and complicating his relationship with the United States, which denied him a visa for more than a decade. The Indian electorate, however, was thirsty for a strong man to deal with domestic drift, and Modi’s energy and vision offered a sense of possibility, both for India and for our partnership.
I was the first senior U.S. official to visit Modi in New Delhi, a week after his inauguration. I found him full of ambition, with a dry sense of humor and no evident hard feelings about the visa issue. He made clear his determination to invest in U.S.-Indian relations, and emphasized that he saw our partnership as one of the keys to his own domestic and regional ambitions. Modi was curious about American politics and how the next presidential contest was shaping up, and what could be done in the meantime to cement cooperation between Washington and New Delhi. He immediately accepted the invitation I conveyed from President Obama to visit Washington in September.
Obama and Modi developed a close rapport, and the September visit went well. Obama was the honored foreign guest on India’s Republic Day in January 2015, a further sign of the strength of the relationship. While it was always going to be impossible to duplicate the drama of the civilian nuclear breakthrough, and while we would continue to have our differences on important questions of geopolitics and trade, the Obama administration deepened the roots of a partnership whose consequence for international order was growing, and whose utility in the administration’s rebalance toward Asia was increasingly apparent.
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A LITTLE BEFORE 10 P.M. on a Wednesday evening in April 2012, I got a call at home from the State Department Operations Center asking me to join a secure call with Secretary Clinton. I climbed up the stairs to my tiny attic office, ducking to avoid hitting my head on the beams. I had had my secure phone installed up there to avoid bothering Lisa and our daughters with the late-night calls that they had so often endured over the years. Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, Policy Planning Director Jake Sullivan, and Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell were already on the line.
When the secretary joined, with her usual even-keeled “now what?” tone, Campbell explained the dilemma before us: A blind, self-taught, forty-year-old Chinese human rights activist named Chen Guangcheng had escaped house arrest in Shandong Province. Despite having broken his ankle, he had made his way to the Beijing suburbs, with the assistance of friends along the way. On the run from the state security services, he had telephoned a U.S. embassy contact, who drove out along with another embassy officer to meet with him a few hours later. Chen asked for refuge inside the U.S. embassy. The officers relayed this to the chargé, Bob Wang, who immediately sought guidance from Kurt. Wang said he thought the chances were slim that Chen could get into the embassy on his own, given his condition and the layers of Chinese security, but judged that the odds were high that American diplomats could drive him in if they went out and brought him back in their embassy vehicle. Wang added one more thing: His guess was that Chen had less than an hour before state security caught up with him.
It was not your average late-night phone call, but it was all too typical of the imperfect choices that secretaries of state often faced. The moral argument for bringing Chen in was powerful; this was yet another test of how much the United States was prepared to risk in defense of its values. On the other side was the obvious political problem: The Chinese government would be outraged. There was no clear pathway to negotiating an acceptable way out for Chen once he came in. To make matters even more complicated, Secretary Clinton was scheduled to fly to Beijing five days later for the next round of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED)—the Obama administration’s flagship cabinet-level meeting with the Chinese. The timing could not have been worse.
Clinton was matter of fact: no hand-wringing, no lamentation about lousy choices, no second-guessing of the embassy. She asked a few more questions about Chen and his background, and asked each of us what we thought. We all acknowledged the downsides, but recommended bringing Chen in. Clinton didn’t hesitate. She knew there’d be a political storm with the Chinese, but suspected it was navigable, and she couldn’t in any case justify saying no. She didn’t try to pass the buck to the White House, recognizing the time pressures. She simply asked Jake to inform the NSC staff, in case they wanted to object, and authorized Kurt to give the green light to Bob Wang. I joined Jake for a secure call to Tom Donilon, who was not thrilled by the news and channeled Baker in reminding us that the dead cat would be on our doorstep if we messed this up.
At about 3 A.M. Washington time, Wang confirmed that Chen had made it into the embassy. Then we strapped ourselves in for the roller coaster. Kurt flew out to Beijing to begin discussions with an extremely unhappy Cui Tiankai, the vice foreign minister responsible for relations with the United States. Cui emphasized that the only solution was to turn Chen over to the Chinese authorities immediately, and left hanging the risk of blowing up the S&ED. I arrived a day later, on the evening of April 30, to lead another round of the Strategic Security Dialogue, a semiannual meeting aimed at some of the trickiest problems on the bilateral agenda—including cybersecurity, maritime security, and the future of nuclear arms and missile defense. Kurt and I had a long, hard two-hour conversation with Cui that night. I made the case as calmly as I could that the least messy of the options before us was to let Chen go to a Beijing hospital for treatment, let his family come from Shandong to join him there, and then let him do what he wanted—which was study law at a Chinese university. Cui initially balked. But as the night wore on, the political temperature lowered and he began to seem more amenable. It was obvious that neither he nor his superiors were eager to see the upcoming ministerial meeting sunk by the Chen affair. By the next morning, the Chinese had agreed to the approach we outlined.
But that didn’t stop the roller coaster. In the hospital, Chen suddenly changed his mind. He now wanted to go to the United States immediately with his wife, and signaled the same thing in cellphone interviews with Western journalists. Cui was livid. “You can’t do this,” he said. “You have no idea how badly this will affect our relations.” Eventually, with Clinton’s direct intervention with her Chinese counterpart, Chen was allowed to go directly to New York as he had hoped. We breathed a huge sigh of relief—and so did the White House.5
This affair was far from the most significant crisis with the Chinese during the Obama administration, but it left a few lasting impressions. One was about Clinton’s equanimity and leadership style in the face of the inevitable trade-offs and smothering time pressures of many policy choices. Another was about China’s increasingly assertive direction. And still another was about the growing maturity of U.S.-China relations, whose resilience in the face of unavoidable difficulties required constant attention and investment. As I neared the end of a long diplomatic career, it was clearer than ever that nothing mattered more in American foreign policy than management of that relationship.
By now, China was no longer a great power on the rise, but one whose moment had come. The Iraq War and the financial crisis five years later had exposed American vulnerabilities. An increasingly feisty Chinese leadership saw an opening and began to question the wisdom of Deng Xiaoping’s “hide your strengths and bide your time” philosophy, and it accelerated its ambitions not only to establish itself as a global economic peer of the United States, but to supplant it as the l
eading power in Asia. That did not mean that conflict was foreordained; the mutually beneficial entangling of the American and Chinese economies was a powerful incentive to avoid it. It did mean that the most critical test of American statecraft for President Obama and Secretary Clinton was managing competition with China, and cushioning it with bilateral cooperation and regional alliances and institutions. This was surely not a novel challenge—ever since Nixon and Kissinger, U.S. strategy had paid careful attention to China’s emergence, and the Bush 43 administration had put considerable effort into encouraging China to be a “responsible stakeholder” in a changing international system. 9/11 and the Middle East sucked up high-level attention and resources, however, and Obama and Clinton were determined to rebalance American strategy back to Asia.
Clinton became the first secretary since Dean Rusk a half century earlier to take her first overseas trip to Asia, and returned often during her tenure. Obama surpassed every American president by making more than a dozen visits during his two terms. Beyond just showing up, they invested heavily in relationships across the region, with India as a western bookend, expanding ties to the fast-growing economies of Southeast Asia, and reaffirming crucial alliances with Australia, South Korea, and Japan. They began to expand the U.S. military and diplomatic presence in the region, explore a new trading arrangement that eventually emerged as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and cultivate new, region-wide institutions like the East Asia Summit. Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell was the leading sub-cabinet architect of the rebalance and its tireless champion. Once Tom Donilon became national security advisor partway through Obama’s first term, he immersed himself in relations with China, traveling regularly to Beijing and building strong personal ties. So did Susan Rice after she succeeded Donilon.
Roaming across other issues and places, however, I was struck by the quality and increasing self-confidence of Chinese diplomacy. Leading the American delegation to the African Union summit in Addis Ababa one year, I found the Chinese presence nearly overwhelming, with President Hu Jintao at the head of a delegation many times the size of ours, and a gleaming new Chinese-constructed and -financed African Union headquarters building as the backdrop. I traveled to Beijing often to consult on Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia, among many other issues. I enjoyed long discussions with Dai Bingguo, Hu’s principal foreign affairs advisor. Trained as a Soviet specialist, Dai had a clever, orderly mind, and a sure feel for how other leaderships operated. When I described to him at one point the progress that Obama and Medvedev were making in repairing relations, Dai smiled blandly and interjected, “You realize, of course, that nothing happens in Moscow without Putin’s assent.” His tone was polite, his expression amused, and his implication unmistakable—he really wasn’t sure that we knew how things worked.
I spent a fair amount of time during the Obama years traveling in both Southeast and Northeast Asia. China had begun to throw its weight around in the South China Sea, intent upon—quite literally—shoring up its territorial claims through the creation of artificial islands, and staking out its commercial and resource interests. Irritated by Secretary Clinton’s forthright statement at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Hanoi in the summer of 2010 that the United States had national interests in the South China Sea too, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi basically warned the assembled ministers that China was the biggest player in the neighborhood, and they had better get used to it. Clinton astutely took advantage of Chinese overreach to strengthen our own ties in Southeast Asia. I tried to help with several visits to Vietnam and Indonesia, and stops in Australia and each of the other ASEAN capitals over the course of the next few years.
My father had fought in Vietnam in 1966–67, but there were few traces of war or resentment decades later in the boomtown cacophony of Ho Chi Minh City. In Cambodia, a survivor of Pol Pot’s genocide guided me through the moving Tuol Seng Genocide Museum in central Phnom Penh, formerly the prison where he had once suffered. “Cambodia,” I wrote Secretary Clinton afterward, “offers hope in the fundamental resilience of human beings, even after a whole society self-destructs amidst unspeakable horrors.” Meeting Cambodia’s current leader helped keep my expectations in check. “Having spent most of his adult life waking up every morning wondering who was going to try to kill him that day, Hun Sen remains a cunning, tough survivor, for whom political openness is not necessarily a natural condition.” I went to Burma too, supporting the opening that Obama and Clinton had worked hard to create. After a lengthy conversation with the formidable Aung San Suu Kyi in 2012, I reported back to the secretary that it was already clear that “the mix within her of global human rights icon and steely Burmese politician is bound to be uneasy.”6
After becoming deputy secretary in the summer of 2011, I became a more regular visitor to Tokyo and Seoul, and joined in trilateral meetings with both crucial allies, whose historical differences sometimes got in the way of common concerns about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and China’s rise. I wasn’t directly engaged in our fitful diplomacy on North Korea, but I shared my colleagues’ frustration over the fruitlessness of the Six Party Talks, our inability to get a serious back channel with the North Koreans going, and our similar lack of success in beginning a quiet strategic conversation with the Chinese about the future of the Korean Peninsula. “Strategic patience” had a deceptively reassuring ring to it, but only seemed to narrow our strategic choices and fuel long-term impatience on all sides—especially after Kim Jong-un succeeded his father in 2012.
My involvement in U.S.-China relations became much more active and direct after 2011. Succeeding Steinberg, I led the American side in the semiannual Strategic Security Dialogue with the Chinese. These meetings brought together diplomats and senior military and intelligence officials. That sometimes made for an uneasy combination on the Chinese side, where my Foreign Ministry counterpart, Zhang Yesui, took the lead, with a number of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) generals and senior security services representatives sitting alongside, most looking as if they’d like nothing better than to beam themselves out of the room.
The exchanges were rarely fun. We spent seven hours in one stretch laying out and debating specific information that we had about cyber-enabled commercial espionage by Chinese state organs, including the PLA. The Chinese summarily rejected our evidence. But there was a broader kind of cognitive dissonance at work too—for the Chinese, at least at that stage, the distinction we were drawing between espionage for national security purposes and cyber-spying for commercial advantage seemed artificial. In their view, governments used whatever means they could to build advantage, whether political or economic. We emphasized that we were determined to uphold that distinction, and we showed some teeth too. When our long presentation of concrete evidence got nowhere, and when the president’s concerns were rebuffed or ignored, we announced indictments against several Chinese security officials. While the chances that they’d ever be offered up to the American judicial system were nil, our point was made, and the Chinese eventually reached a general understanding with us, significantly reducing cyber-enabled commercial thefts.
John Kerry’s tireless efforts on climate change, and the Chinese leadership’s belated realization that poisoning their population was a recipe for inconvenient domestic disturbances, led to the diplomatic breakthrough of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Unfortunately, there were few other breakthroughs to celebrate. The gulf between us was growing, as were the risks of collision. Diplomacy played a critical role in keeping the temperature down and finding ways to get business done where there was obvious benefit to both of us. Obama believed that the Pacific Century could accommodate a risen China and a resilient and adaptable United States, and he worked hard to demonstrate American commitment to that idea. But as Chinese self-confidence grew and their sense of American drift deepened, it was inevitable that we’d test one another on whose version of regional order was ascendant. Nothing would ma
tter more in American foreign policy than how that new great game played out.
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AS PRESIDENT OBAMA attempted to rebalance American foreign policy for the long term, with new emphasis on Asia, he knew we needed to continue to invest in our closest allies in Europe. Obama and Clinton sought to strengthen transatlantic ties, especially with Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The president built a particularly effective relationship over time with German chancellor Angela Merkel, whose cool intellect and no-nonsense style he greatly valued. While our core European allies would occasionally suffer from “pivot envy” as the Obama administration focused more and more visible attention on Asia, nothing remained more critical to our global interests than the transatlantic alliance. Strong ties to our European partners were essential to another long-game priority, a renewed effort at managing relations with Russia.
Obama’s approach to Russia began cautiously. He told a television interviewer during the transition that he thought it made sense to explore a “reset” in relations. Differences over Russian aggression in Georgia remained serious, and there were plenty of other problems, but there was also common ground that could be plowed more effectively. Obama had talked during the 2008 campaign about his determination to reduce the dangers of nuclear war, his willingness to directly engage the Iranian regime, and his interest in a more successful approach to the war in Afghanistan. All of those priorities would benefit from a healthier U.S.-Russian relationship.
The Back Channel Page 29