My town is the new Cold War's Berlin: Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong

Joshua Wong spoke to Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on protests situation, free election and democracy in Hong Kong

By Thomas Escritt

Joshua Wong spoke to Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas

BERLIN --  Comparing the struggle of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters to the role of Berlin during the Cold War, activist Joshua Wong told an audience in the German capital that his city was now a bulwark between the free world and the “dictatorship of China”.

Hong Kong's pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong attends the summer party "Bild 100" of German publisher Axel Springer at the Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany, September 9, 2019. 

The 22-year-old activist, who was in Berlin for a newspaper-sponsored event at the German parliament celebrating human rights activists around the world, pledged that protests would not be lulled into complacency by the decision of the city’s government to drop a contested new extradition law.
“If we are in a new Cold War, Hong Kong is the new Berlin,” he said in a reception space a stone’s throw from the Berlin Wall on the roof of the Reichstag building, which for decades occupied the no-man’s land between Communist East Berlin and the city’s capitalist western half.
Hong Kong has been convulsed by months of unrest since its government announced attempts to make it easier to extradite suspects to China, a move seen as a prelude to bringing the pluralistic autonomous region more in line with the mainland.
Wong, leader of the Demosisto pro-democracy movement, has become a prominent face of the protests.
“We urge the free world to stand together with us in resisting the Chinese autocratic regime,” he added, describing Chinese leader Xi Jinping as “not a president but an emperor.”
The city’s leader, Carrie Lam, announced concessions this week to try to end the protests, including formally scrapping the bill, but Wong said protesters would not be lulled into complacency.
He said they would try to hold the city’s government responsible for human rights violations committed against protesters, adding that Lim’s climb-down was a ruse to buy calm ahead of China’s Oct. 1 national day.
He had briefly been detained by Hong Kong authorities before his departure earlier in the day for breaching bail conditions following his arrest in August when he was charged along with other prominent activists with inciting and participating in an unauthorized assembly.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just returned from a trip to China, during which she faced criticism from Germany for not engaging more directly with the Hong Kong protesters, whose cause is popular in Germany, though she did call for a peaceful solution to the Hong Kong unrest.

Yesterday’s Cold War Shows How to Beat China Today

The Trump administration has been ignoring the playbook that produced the downfall of the Soviet Union.
BY STEPHEN M. WALT
U.S. President Ronald Reagan, commemorating the 750th anniversary of Berlin, reviews honor guard of Royal Regiment of Scotland (wearing kilts) on June 12, 1987 after his landing at Berlin Tempelhof Airport. 

Commentators of many stripes increasingly refer to the deteriorating relationship between the United States and China as a new “cold war.” 

As some readers may recall, I think analogies to the earlier rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union should be viewed with some skepticism, as there are important differences between the two situations. 

But analytic caution doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to draw useful lessons from the past and use them to inform policy decisions today. 

Why did the United States ultimately triumph over its Soviet rival? 

What advantages made victory more likely, and how did U.S. leaders exploit them? 

How might that earlier experience help Americans retain the upper hand over China in the decades ahead?
Here are five important lessons from the Cold War, lessons that should be guiding contemporary U.S. foreign policy. 

Spoiler alert: Donald Trump has been ignoring or violating every one of them.

Lesson #1: Make sure you have the right allies.
The United States won the Cold War in part because its market-based economy was larger, more diverse, and more efficient than Soviet-style central planning. 

But it helped that America’s principal allies were also a lot wealthier and more powerful than most Soviet client states were. 

As the U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s original formulation of containment emphasized, the key to victory over the long term was to keep the “key centers of industrial power” (i.e., Western Europe and Japan) aligned with the West and out of Soviet hands. 

That’s what containment was really all about.
This objective led directly to the formation of NATO and the construction of the hub-and-spoke alliance system in Asia, and the result was an overwhelming preponderance of power in favor of the West. 

Although the Soviet Union was the world’s second-largest economy and a formidable military power, its allies were much weaker than America’s. 

Taken together, the United States and its allies had roughly 25 percent more people than the Soviet alliance network, nearly three times the combined GNP, and a slight edge in total military manpower—and they outspent the Soviet bloc by roughly 25 percent every year.
As I explained way back in 1987, this imbalance of power in America’s favor resulted from four key advantages. 

First, the United States had a powerful economy in its own right. 

Second, the United States was far from the other key centers of world power, while the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were right next door. 

The proximate threat of Soviet power made most of Europe and many states in Asia eager to ally with the United States. 

Third, Soviet military doctrine emphasized offensive conquest, further increasing others’ perceptions of threat, and Moscow never abandoned its formal commitment to spreading world revolution, which made noncommunist states even more nervous. 

And the more the USSR tried to compensate for its weaker position by building up military power, the more other states wanted to align with the United States.
Relatedly, the United States also benefited by adopting a policy of “divide and rule” toward its communist rivals. 

The early Cold War fixation with the so-called communist monolith eventually gave way to a more realistic policy, most notably in U.S. President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972. 

This move left Moscow increasingly isolated and added to its strategic burdens.
What about now? 

Thus far, Trump’s presidency has been a textbook case in how not to manage America’s various international partnerships. 

He abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his fourth day as president, undercutting the U.S. strategic position in Asia and handing China an easy victory. 

He compounded that error by launching trade wars with nearly everyone, including America’s Asian allies, and by engaging in an impulsive, poorly executed outreach to North Korea.
Trump’s desire to get Europe to take greater responsibility for its own defense has considerable merit, but insulting European leaders, threatening trade wars, attacking the European Union, and jacking up U.S. defense spending is the wrong way to do it. 

Europeans regard Trump’s decision to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran as an ill-considered blunder, doing further damage to America’s reputation for acumen and reliability. 

Similarly, Trump’s decision to give carte blanche to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt has empowered these governments’ worst tendencies, yet produced no tangible strategic benefits for the United States.
The result: Washington is still subsidizing Europe’s defense, tied to increasingly problematic clients in the Middle East, and in a weaker position vis-à-vis China. 

Moreover, whatever Trump’s initial instincts might have been, he has continued his predecessors’ ineffectual approach to Russia, thereby cementing a growing strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing. 

Instead of playing divide-and-rule, he has been pushing the two Asian giants closer together, while Moscow plays divide-and-rule against NATO and the EU. 

The United States seems to have forgotten this critical Cold War lesson, but its rivals haven’t.

Lesson #2: Investing in science, technology, and education pays off.

Having the world’s most sophisticated and technologically advanced economy was an enormous asset for the United States. 

Not only did it fuel impressive economic growth, but it also gave the U.S. military important advantages over its Soviet rival. 

When the Sputnik 1 launch in 1957 raised fears that the United States might be losing its scientific and technological edge, initiatives like the National Defense Education Act of 1958 produced a new renaissance of scientific and engineering development and ensured that the USSR would trail the United States in most areas of scientific endeavor.
Side note: In addition to encouraging the study of science and mathematics, this same initiative also sought to encourage study of foreign languages and cultures. 

By providing experts who could help devise appropriate policies for dealing with different regions, support for area studies was also important in helping win the Cold War.
By contrast, the Trump administration seems to have little respect for scientific expertise and has twice attempted to gut federal support for scientific research. 

Fortunately, Congress has twice stepped in to restore, and in some cases, increase, research funding. Nor does Trump seem to think area expertise is needed to conduct an intelligent foreign policy. 

If he did, he wouldn’t have given his son-in-law critical responsibilities in the Middle East and might have listened to the many experts who warned that his approaches to North Korea and Iran were doomed to fail.
And how is the United States faring regarding China? 

China’s scientific achievements have risen steadily, even if it still trails the United States in many areas. 

Equally important, China has been training a large cadre of regional experts to conduct its diplomacy, while the United States has been gutting the State Department and relying on untrained amateurs (aka campaign donors) for decades. 

As William Burns makes clear in his recent book The Back Channel, America’s disregard of diplomacy (and regional expertise) is a massive self-inflicted wound. 

But not according to Donald Trump, who said he’s “the only one that matters” and thought he could charm or bluster his way into a nuclear deal with North Korea.

Lesson #3: Greater openness, transparency, and accountability gave the United States an important advantage.
No political system is perfect, and even dedicated public servants sometimes make big mistakes. 

But democracies with a tradition of free speech and a vigorous, vigilant media are more likely to recognize errors and (eventually) correct them. (As the economist Amartya Sen argued in a famous study, that’s a big reason why no well-established democracy has ever suffered a massive famine.) The United States clearly blundered when it plunged deeply into the Vietnam War, for example, but it began to cut its losses with Vietnamization and eventually got out completely, if not as soon as it should have.
By contrast, the sclerotic Soviet system—where free speech was fully suppressed—was both economically inefficient and prone to more catastrophic failures, whether in its own Afghan campaign, the brutal Soviet gulag, the disaster at Chernobyl, or the environmental harms inflicted over communism’s long reign. 

Maoist China suffered from similar disasters, most notably in the millions who died from famine during Mao Zedong’s ill-conceived Great Leap Forward.
To be fair, openness, transparency, and accountability have been under siege in the United States for some time, and the Trump administration isn’t the first to play fast and loose with facts or to attempt to shield itself from outside scrutiny. 

That said, the 45th president has taken this aversion to accountability to a new level: attacking the media as the “enemy of the people,” lying without restraint, and going to enormous lengths to prevent legitimate scrutiny of his own conduct as a candidate and as president. 

Like would-be authoritarians everywhere, his goal is to become the sole arbiter of truth in the public mind, so that it ignores his mistakes and continues to embrace his agenda.

Lesson #4: Playing rope-a-dope (i.e., letting the Soviet Union squander resources in strategically marginal areas) was a smart strategy.
Back in 1974, Muhammad Ali defeated a younger, bigger, and stronger George Foreman in heavyweight boxing match in Zaire. 

The bout was fought on a hot and humid night, and Ali’s strategy—which he called the “rope-a-dope”—consisted of leaning back on the ropes and covering up while Foreman punched himself into exhaustion with ineffective body blows. 

The fight ended when Ali came off the ropes in the eighth round and knocked Foreman out.
There’s a valuable strategic lesson here. 

As discussed above, by the mid-1950s the United States was allied with most of the world’s major industrial powers. 

The coalition it put together vastly outstripped the Soviet Union and its various clients in productive capacity, military power, wealth, public legitimacy, and overall well-being. 

Moscow did bring together a number of quasi-Marxist or socialist regimes in the developing world, but these relatively weak states did not make its global alliance significantly stronger, especially when compared with the U.S.-led counterpart.
Although the United States did try to undermine these arrangements (and sometimes succeeded), it generally did less to undermine them than Moscow did to prop them up. 

The final straw was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which sped up its collapse. 

Like Ali, the United States let the Soviet Union punch backing burdensome client states and fighting costly wars.
Make no mistake: The United States also wasted considerable money and lives fighting peripheral wars like Vietnam, but its economy was significantly stronger, and most of its allies were assets, not burdens. 

Playing rope-a-dope was a smart strategy from a U.S. perspective, contributing to its Cold War victory. 

The lesson: Letting opponents squander significant resources for small gains is a smart strategy. 

A corollary: Make sure your opponents don’t lure you into the same error, and don’t confuse a big military budget with success.

 Spending more is not better if less is more than enough, and especially if doing so undermines your economic well-being over the long haul.
Sadly, Trump seems to understand none of this. 

He believes throwing more money at the bloated and inefficient Pentagon (and ordering aerial flybys and parades) will “Make America Great Again,” but it is more likely to sap its economic strength. Trump also promised to get “out of the nation-building business”; instead, he imitated former President Barack Obama and sent more troops to Afghanistan. 

He’s ramped up global anti-terrorism efforts, backed the futile Saudi war in Yemen, and nearly went to war against Iran a few weeks ago. 

To be sure, he inherited most of these policies.
If the United States is facing a new cold war with China, the proper course is to stop wasting time, money, and lives on peripheral matters and to focus laserlike on managing that critical bilateral relationship. 

Obama tried to do this with the so-called pivot to Asia, but he didn’t quite pull it off. 

Thus far, Trump has failed to grasp that doing more to confront China requires doing less elsewhere—and getting other states to aid U.S. efforts instead of picking fights with them, too.
Lesson #5: Nice countries finish first.
The United States is not as virtuous as Americans like to pretend, but during the Cold War, it benefited from standing for freedom, human rights, and other popular political values. 

U.S. leaders also recognized that making progress on civil rights would be important in the context of the Cold War, as greater racial equality would make the country look better in the eyes of nonwhite societies around the world.
To be sure, the United States backed authoritarians when it thought it had to and sometimes acted with callous disregard for foreign populations. 

But on balance—and especially when compared to its Soviet rival—the United States was seen as standing for something more than just the naked exercise of power.
Equally important, U.S. leaders consistently treated their foreign counterparts with respect, even when they were privately angered by others’ actions or when they had to play hardball with them within the broader alliance context. 

French President Charles de Gaulle irritated several U.S. presidents on more than one occasion, but you rarely heard U.S. officials denouncing him in public. 

U.S. officials understood that denigrating or humiliating one’s partners would generate resentment and undermine Western unity, so they kept the mailed fist inside a velvet glove. 

Because the United States was so much stronger than others, it usually got its way. 

But its leaders were wise enough not to boast about it, lest this trigger resentment and impair cooperation.
By contrast, the communist world was a seething cauldron of resentment and fratricidal animosity. Yugoslavia’s Tito and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin fell out quickly after World War II, and so did Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong in the 1950s. 

Soviet and Chinese troops clashed along the Ussuri River in 1969, and Moscow even contemplated a preventive nuclear strike against Beijing’s nascent nuclear arsenal. 

Relations inside the Warsaw Pact were also less than harmonious, and the USSR had to intervene in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) to keep these satellites in the fold. Communist Vietnam went to war against the Marxist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which eventually led to a short but intense border war between Vietnam and China. 

Despite sometimes serious policy disagreements, America’s Cold War alliance system was a model of harmony when compared to its communist counterpart.
Needless to say, Trump flunks here as well.

Even as he heaps praise on autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, and thuggish blusterers like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump calls Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “weak,” says President Emmanuel Macron of France is exhibiting “foolishness,” and tweets out demeaning jibes at German Chancellor Angela Merkel and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. 

He’s acted boorishly at international conferences and alarmed experienced foreign diplomats with his insecurity, ignorance, and incompetence.
Not surprisingly, America’s image in most countries has plummeted since Trump took office. 

This decline in part reflects concerns about Trump’s erratic decision-making, but some of it clearly reflects global disdain for his personal conduct. 

Khrushchev undermined Soviet foreign policy when he banged his shoe in the U.N. General Assembly; Trump does something similar nearly every time he tweets.
Being powerful matters a lot in world politics, but being popular or at least respected isn’t irrelevant. The United States won the Cold War in part because it was stronger and more resilient than the Soviet Union, but also because Washington’s values and actions—for all of its shortcomings and hypocrisy—proved more popular with most of the world than Moscow’s did. 

This is an advantage the United States probably still retains as its competition with China heats up, unless Trump and his minions manage to squander it too.

The US-China Cold War is now playing out in Pakistan

By Johann Chacko

I’m watching you.

On Sept. 01, days before US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, were due to arrive in Islamabad, a Pentagon spokesman announced that the department of defense intended to permanently cut $300 million from funds allocated to support Pakistan in the fight against America’s enemies in Afghanistan.

So does this mean America and Pakistan are finally breaking up?
The short answer is no. 

As much as both states are fed up with each other, they remain far too co-dependent to simply walk away.
What we are seeing instead is a tough and protracted re-negotiation over the terms of the relationship. The question of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan is not necessarily the hardest issue; there might even be convergence given the greater realism in Washington, Rawalpindi, and Islamabad.
The far bigger question hanging over the Pompeo-Dunford visit is what India and Pakistan’s role will be in the emerging cold war between the US and China. 

Despite Pakistani hopes, China is not yet willing or able to spend what it takes to completely replace America as Pakistan’s primary strategic partner. 

US economic and financial cards remain hard to match, and the result, for the time being, is likely to be a series of compromises that are uncomfortable and dissatisfying for all parties.
The US government began paying Pakistan what it calls “Coalition Support Funds” (CSF) back in 2002, shortly after it began military operations against the Taliban. 

In theory, the CSF compensates Pakistan for specific costs incurred in deploying tens of thousands of additional troops to the Afghan border, and for the use of Pakistani airfields, ports, and roads to resupply American forces in Afghanistan.
In reality, the Americans treated the funds as a reward to cement a long-term commitment to its cause from the Pakistan Army in the face of deep and wide popular opposition over the violations of Pakistani national sovereignty and significant civilian casualties.
The Pakistani government became highly reliant on this funding—a congressional research service report in 2015 estimated that the $13 billion in disbursed CSF funds had paid for 20% of Pakistan’s military spending (especially food and ammunition). 

The Americans were willing to overlook what they suspected was creative accounting of the bills as long as Pakistan delivered results.
Over the last decade, the metric for results has shifted as trust in the Pakistan army within the Pentagon, Congress, and three successive White House administrations has plummeted. 

This shift accelerated after the “drawdown” of US forces in Afghanistan in 2014, which led to repeated bloody Taliban and Haqqani offensives, vexing and embarrassing Republicans, Democrats, and non-partisan professionals alike.
The Pentagon, with the support of Congress, retaliated with steep decreases in allocated military aid (at least 73%), as well as the conditional withholding of budgeted CSF “reimbursements” under Obama in 2016. 

In July 2017, under Trump, all CSF payments were frozen, and in January 2018 the allocation was cut by $700 million.
Put another way, the longer Pakistan resists American criticism, not only has it become harder to get those carrots, but the carrots have become much, much smaller.
Pakistan has not yet retaliated by squeezing US supply lines to Afghanistan, but it has not scaled back its covert support to the Haqqanis or the Afghan Taliban either.

However, this cycle of denial and punishment may have an end in sight. 

Caught between converging US and Chinese interest in a peaceful and stable Afghan endgame, the Pakistani military appears to be more open to a settlement that Washington DC could live with.
For that matter, the US has begun quietly negotiating with the Taliban without any of the preconditions it previously held. 

All of this is likely to form a major element of Pompeo’s meetings with the new government of Imran Khan and general Dunford’s discussions with army chief general Qamar Javed Bajwa.
There is no doubt that many in New Delhi are concerned the result might be a settlement that allows the Taliban to retain arms and gain a share of the national government, while still remaining tethered to Rawalpindi. 

This draws attention to the larger truth that US-Pakistan relations (and even US-India relations) are more inextricably impacted by the state of US-China relations than ever before.
Pakistan’s urgent need for up to $12 billion in relief from its looming balance-of-payments crisis dwarfs the question of military aid and constitutes the strongest source of American leverage. 

Given the Trump administration’s determination to use all available means of persuasion, it is particularly significant that the US has not linked the bailout to questions of Afghanistan or terrorism, but instead to China’s role in Pakistan.
Just over a month ago, secretary Pompeo called for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to reject Pakistan’s bailout request on the grounds that there was no need for American taxpayers to repay Beijing’s predatory lending underwriting the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
Pompeo’s statements must be understood in the context of the US National Security Survey that last year labeled China a “strategic competitor” engaged in “economic aggression.” 

One result has been the rapidly escalating multi-billion trade war that could damage both countries, the World Trade Organization, and the global economy.
Another result is the pressure on CPEC, the largest single component so far in Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) intended to plug Eurasia into the Chinese economy, ensuring it an agenda-setting global role.

Pakistan hopes that China and Saudi Arabia might offer the financial relief that would provide an alternative to the IMF and American pressure. 

Although this is not the kind of role that China wants, an IMF bailout would lead to a disclosure of the highly secretive terms of CPEC deals, leading to renegotiation or even cancellation and undermining Beijing’s geo-economic goals.
This is an important moment for Chinese leadership as it decides what its BRI plans are worth, and what Pakistan is worth to those plans. 

Compromise between the two options is also possible; a limited form of additional Chinese assistance would reduce what was needed from the Saudis and the IMF, reducing American leverage on a range of issues. 

The status quo would limp on, but the result will be even greater Chinese influence in Pakistan.
As the battling winds from both Washington and Beijing pick up in intensity, and observers wonder who will win out, Pakistan’s historical role as the region’s weather-vane seems set to continue.