Not much headway was made during the last year of the Bush administration. A pall was cast over the relationship in October 2008, when Bush 43 announced his multibillion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan. Things only got worse in March 2009, when the U.S. Navy ship Impeccable, an ocean surveillance ship, was aggressively harassed by Chinese boats in the South China Sea. It was a serious incident and a potentially dangerous one, both because of the Chinese actions and because the Chinese were asserting by those actions that we had no right to be in those waters. We would later conclude that this action had been taken by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) without the knowledge of the civilian leadership in Beijing; we believed the same of their test of an antisatellite weapon some while before. Both were worrisome because of the apparent independent behavior of the PLA. Nonetheless, for the most part, lower-level military and civilian visits and exchanges continued in 2009 as planned. Our primary interlocutor was a PLA air force general, Ma Xiaotian, a deputy chief of the general staff. Or, as we referred to him, the “handler of the barbarians”—us. I would see a lot of him over the years.
During my 2007 visit, I had invited senior Chinese military officials to the United States. On October 26, 2009, General Xu Caihou, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, finally made the trip. I hosted him and his delegation for dinner at the summer cottage used by President Lincoln several miles from downtown Washington. It was a crowded room, and the seating arrangement gave me my only opportunity to talk privately with Xu. I raised the subject of North Korea. I went into some detail about the risks of instability there and the dangers of its collapse both to China and to the South Koreans, and I said we had a mutual interest in a frank dialogue about what we both would do in such circumstances—including how to ensure that the North’s nuclear weapons and materials would be kept secure. It was plain that I was way out of Xu’s comfort zone in even raising these subjects. “Thank you for your views on North Korea” was all he said to me in response. We discussed the possibility of my visiting China again in 2010, but as always, the Chinese made clear that all bets were off on our relationship if we continued arms sales to Taiwan. Still, our public statements were largely positive, if only to preserve a good atmosphere for Obama’s visit to China the following month.
On January 29, 2010, the Obama administration announced the sale of over $6 billion in arms to Taiwan, including Patriot missiles, helicopters, communications systems for their F-16 combat aircraft, mine-hunting ships, and other equipment. Everyone knew there would be a strong Chinese reaction. As with the Bush team, we were trying to find the best balance between meeting our obligations to Taiwan and preserving the critically important relationship with Beijing. As long as what we sold to Taiwan could reasonably be described as “defensive,” we thought we could minimize the damage with China, and we did. The sale, though, put the military-to-military relationship back on ice.
The most visible casualty was my visit to China. General Xu had invited me to return in 2010, but after the Taiwan arms sales announcement, in a typically Chinese manner they made clear I was unwelcome but wanted me to cancel the visit so they could avoid taking a diplomatic hit. More than a little mischievously, I said from time to time that spring that I was still planning to make the trip. Finally we received official word from China that a visit by me in June would not be convenient. Much was made of this “snub” in the press and its consequences for the broader bilateral relationship.
I went to Singapore in early June for the “Shangri-La” Asia Security Summit, hosted annually by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. The sessions were boring, but the conference attracted senior defense officials from all over Asia and provided a good opportunity to do a lot of bilateral business, and for me to make a major speech. Because my canceled visit to China was the buzz of the conference, I decided to tackle it—and the bilateral relationship more broadly—head-on in my speech. The deputy chief of the PLA general staff, General Ma, representing China, was seated in the front row. I reminded the largely Asian audience that Presidents Obama and Hu had agreed the preceding November “to advance sustained and reliable military-to-military relations” between the two countries. I went on that “the key words here are ‘sustained’ and ‘reliable’—not a relationship interrupted by and subject to the vagaries of political weather.” The Chinese breaking off interactions between our militaries because of arms sales to Taiwan, I said, made little sense: “First, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are nothing new.… Second, the United States for years has demonstrated in a very public way that we do not support independence for Taiwan.… Finally, because China’s accelerating military buildup is largely focused on Taiwan, U.S. arms sales are an important component of maintaining peace and stability in cross-strait relations and throughout the region.” I pointed out that Taiwan arms sales had not impeded closer U.S.-Chinese political and economic ties, “nor closer ties in other security areas of mutual interest.… Only in the military-to-military arena has progress on critical mutual security issues been held hostage over something that is, frankly, old news.”
In the question-and-answer session, a retired PLA general aggressively pursued the Taiwan arms-sales issue. I replied that the Chinese had known full well at the time we normalized diplomatic relations in 1979 that arms-sales to Taiwan would continue. Why, then, I asked, did China still pursue this line? The general’s response was as direct as it was revealing. China had lived with the Taiwan arms sales in 1979, he said, “because we were weak. But now we are strong.”
Perhaps my most important individual meeting in Singapore was with President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea. I really liked Lee; he was tough-minded, realistic, and very pro-American. (All in contrast to his predecessor, President Roh Moo-hyun, whom I had met with in Seoul in November 2007 and decided was anti-American and probably a little crazy. He had told me that the biggest security threats in Asia were the United States and Japan.) A little over two months earlier, on March 26, the North Koreans, in a brazen provocation, had sunk the South Korean warship Cheonan. Lee told me he had warned the Chinese premier that the North must “feel consequences.” Failure to act, I said, would encourage Kim Jong-il’s successor to show the military he is tough and can “get away with things.” Lee agreed and said the UN needed to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on the North and that we needed show-of-force exercises. I said we were already talking about further exercises, but the United States was willing to follow his lead on timing and their nature. Lee was adamant that there could be no return to the six-party talks on the North’s nuclear program “until they admit their wrongdoing and renounce it.” I concurred: “Resumption of the six-party talks would be seen as a reward—the sequence must be consequences, then talks.”
In its disputes with neighbors, China always prefers to deal with each country individually. They are easier to intimidate that way. Thus the United States looks for opportunities to encourage countries in the region to meet together, including with China, to address these disputes. The Obama administration was particularly active in pursuing this tack, including our own participation wherever possible. Secretary Clinton was very much in the lead. A major step forward in this regard was her planned official visit to Vietnam in July 2010, followed immediately by her participation in the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional forum in Cambodia (where her comments on the South China Sea disputes and the multilateral criticism of China’s aggressive behavior would surprise and anger Beijing). While I was in Singapore attending the Shangri-La conference, my Vietnamese counterpart invited me to attend a meeting in Hanoi in October of the ten ASEAN defense ministers, expanded to include the ministers from Australia, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States. Because I knew Hillary was going to Vietnam and Cambodia in July, I assumed Washington would have no objection to my going later in the year, and so I accepted the invitation on the spot. This was exactly the kind of forum we wanted to en
courage.
After the Singapore conference, I flew to Azerbaijan to try to strengthen its participation in our Afghan supply route through Central Asia—the Northern Distribution Network. I had never been to Baku before, but I knew a fair amount about its history. Its president, Ilham Aliyev, ran the oil-rich country on the Caspian Sea with as strong a hand as his father, Heydar Aliyev, had done. Heydar had run Soviet Socialist Azerbaijan for eighteen years before Mikhail Gorbachev fired him for corruption and expelled him from the Soviet Politburo in 1987. He reinvented himself after the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as president of the country from 1993 to 2003; then his son took over. For all practical purposes, Azerbaijan was a family-run enterprise. I met with Ilham in a huge palace and gave him a letter from President Obama that underscored the importance of the relationship to us and our desire to expand it. Neither the letter nor I mentioned human rights. The main Azeri complaint was that we weren’t paying enough attention to them. So just showing up accomplished the main purpose of the visit.
Baku seemed to have one principal thoroughfare, a very wide boulevard with many new and impressive buildings and tony shops. But a few blocks behind that showpiece street was an ancient, dusty, shambolic central Asian city. We ate that night at a traditional restaurant, which served all kinds of grilled meats on a long wooden plank. We were just digging in with gusto when one of my security staff told me the restaurant was on fire. Members of my group began evacuating, but since I saw neither flames nor smoke, I kept eating, along with one or two of my more intrepid comrades. A few minutes later, at about the time I heard the fire engines, my security team made clear they weren’t giving me a choice about staying or leaving. I walked out the door just as the first fire truck arrived. I really hated leaving the food behind.
My second noteworthy trip to Asia in 2010 was in mid-July, to South Korea and Indonesia. The main purpose of the visit to Korea was the annual “two plus two” meeting of Secretary Clinton and me and our two Korean counterparts. This meeting took on significant added importance because of the sinking of the Cheonan. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had been ill for some time, and speculation was that the sinking was the bright idea of his twenty-something son, Kim Jong-un, to prove to the North Korean military, as I suggested earlier, that he was tough enough to succeed his father. This line of thinking suggested that other provocations might be coming, so underscoring the strength of our alliance was very important.
Apart from the meetings, an important symbolic part of Hillary’s and my program was visiting the demilitarized zone at Panmunjom. We were driven to a hilltop observation post, where we ritually looked through binoculars toward the North’s side of the DMZ. (We avoided the embarrassment of an earlier U.S. official who had earnestly looked through the glasses for a photo op, not noticing that the lens caps were still on.) All I could see were trees. At Panmunjom, we entered the small building situated right on the DMZ line, where military representatives from the North and the UN command met. As we were briefed, a very large, menacing North Korean soldier stood outside the window glaring at Hillary and me. We worked hard to keep straight faces, and I resisted the temptation to go to the window and do something quite undiplomatic. Those kinds of offbeat ideas were always going through my head on such occasions; fortunately I mostly resisted them.
The third significant trip was to Hanoi in October for the ASEAN defense ministers-plus meeting. Apart from the unprecedented nature of the gathering itself, there were a couple of notable developments. Eight different ministers spoke up about the need to resolve disputes in the South China Sea and other international waters peacefully and through negotiations—clear criticism of China, whose defense minister, General Liang Guanglie, was in attendance. All agreed on the need for a “code of conduct” for such disputes. Normally, all this would have elicited a strong reaction from the Chinese, but Liang was clearly under instructions not to create a scene—unlike what China’s foreign minister had done in Cambodia the previous July under similar circumstances. Liang, a blustery sort, just sat and took it. It seemed obvious that the Chinese had realized their publicly aggressive approach to issues was isolating them, and therefore they tacked before the wind.
Liang and I met in Hanoi. President Hu was planning to visit Washington the following January and wanted all aspects of the relationship to appear positive. Thus the PLA, and Liang, had obviously been told to be nice to me. He began by referencing Hu’s forthcoming visit and said that the overall relationship was positive. He went on to say, “Secretary Gates, I know you place great value on military-to-military relations, and I appreciate that, but the key is to respect each other’s core interests and major concerns.” He then invited me to visit China early in 2011, making explicit the Chinese desire to have me visit in January before Hu traveled to the United States.
I accepted the invitation, put down my prepared talking points, and spoke straight from the shoulder. “I hope our military-to-military relationship can be shielded from political ups and downs, just as the intelligence relationship has been.” I said that a strategic dialogue on nuclear weapons was critical to avoid mistrust and miscalculation, and that there was no substitute for a direct government-to-government dialogue on the subject. “Let’s be honest with each other,” I continued. “Taiwan arms sales are political decisions and not made by the secretary of defense or Department of Defense, so if our political leaders continue with their relationship despite this disagreement, it seems strange to stop the military-to-military relationship.” I reminded him that we had discussed an ambitious list of areas where we could expand our relationship when I visited three years earlier and expressed the hope we could return to it. “There are a lot of opportunities,” I said. Always eager for the last word, Liang replied, “Opportunities, yes, but the U.S. should seriously consider our concerns.” Similarly interested in getting in the last word, I said, “As in all things, respect for concerns and perspectives is mutual.”
While in Hanoi, I gave a speech at the Vietnam national university. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The speech was an unremarkable review of the development of the U.S.-Vietnamese military relationship over the preceding fifteen years. But my reception was quite extraordinary. As I entered the hall, funky dance and disco music was blaring, strobe lights were flashing, and the audience—many young military officers but also a lot of young female students—was applauding, whistling, and carrying on. I knew that the only way I would ever get such a rock star’s reception would be at the order of a dictatorship.
DISASTERS
Twice during 2010, the U.S. military was called upon to provide major disaster relief. At 4:53 p.m. local time on Tuesday, January 12, a catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti. Ultimately, three million people were affected and 315,000 killed. As the scale of death and destruction became evident, President Obama placed the highest priority on getting U.S. military assets to Haiti for rescue and relief and to maintain order. While there was never any doubt in my mind that the president’s primary motivation was humanitarian, I believed he also wanted to show how fast he could mobilize the U.S. government after a disaster (in contrast to Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina) and to score as many political points as possible both at home and abroad.
The first request from the White House for disaster assistance for Haiti came to Defense early on January 13, and I was told the president wanted a “highly visible, very fast response.” He said the deployment didn’t have to be perfect, “just get them there as soon as possible.” He also wanted to keep tabs on how well we were doing and so asked for daily morning and afternoon reports on our progress. Two U.S. Coast Guard cutters were the first U.S. assistance to get to Haiti on the thirteenth, and that evening two U.S. Air Force C-130 aircraft from the Special Operations Wing landed with emergency supplies, medical units, and communications gear. A team of thirty military engineers, operations planners, and communications specialists also arrived that first day. I had immediately directe
d several Navy ships to head for Haiti, including the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. Additional Air Force personnel were deployed to reopen the international airport in Port-au-Prince, and I approved “prepare to deploy” orders for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to Haiti, about 3,000 soldiers. There were sixty-six U.S. military personnel on the island at the time of the earthquake, and they reported that the port was unusable, there was no fresh water, medical care was urgently needed, and many mortuary officers would be needed to deal with fatalities. We began moving heaven and earth to get ships, aircraft, equipment, and people there as fast as possible. I told the commander of Southern Command, General Doug Fraser, “The president considers this our highest priority. Whatever you need, we will get it to you. Don’t hesitate to ask.”
All this wasn’t good enough. When we briefed the president in the Oval Office that night on our actions and plans, he, Donilon, and others were impatient. Mullen and I tried to explain that there was chaos on the island, roads were blocked, air traffic control at the international airport was down, and the port facilities were largely destroyed. Our first priority was to get the airport operating so it could handle a volume of air traffic far beyond its previous capacity. Donilon was especially aggressive in questioning our commitment to speed and complaining about how long we were taking. Then he went too far, questioning in front of the president and a roomful of people whether General Fraser was competent to lead this effort. I’ve rarely been angrier in the Oval Office than I was at that moment; nor was I ever closer to walking out of that historic room in the middle of a meeting. My initial instinct was to storm out, telling the president on the way that he didn’t need two secretaries of defense. It took every bit of my self-discipline to stay seated on the sofa.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 54