"I'm pleased to be the most right-wing person in Hong Kong," said William Kristol to an audience of Asia Society members last week. Kristol is well known in the United States as a commentator and the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. He has also served as chief of staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle and to former Secretary of Education William Bennett. He is a useful proxy for understanding the current administration's foreign policy, and the message he brought to Hong Kong was to expect more changes in America's approach to the region.
To understand the dramatic changes in US policy, Kristol finds a useful analogy in the origins of the Cold War. At the close of World War II, the conventional wisdom held that President Harry Truman would focus on domestic issues such as reintegrating returning soldiers into society. No one could have foreseen Truman's legacy of fostering US policy of containment against Communism, the stationing of hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe and Japan, the Berlin airlift, fighting a war to defend South Korea, and the creation of military/political alliances such as Nato.
For Kristol, we are now in a timeframe similar to late 1946 or early 1947, when Truman was already making a break with conventional wisdom, but before the most dramatic events of the early Cold War could be conceived. The lesson: "Things change more than we think," he says.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 forced a singular break with five decades of US foreign policy built around the Cold War. As in the late 1940s, the process of transition is messy, and the impact still unknown. For example, who would have imagined in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that America would fight and win two wars, or the schism this would create with Europe - or within Europe? Kristol believes the new order being created is going to mean even more changes that are difficult to predict.
The reaction of President George W. Bush has emphasized projecting strength, and promoting democracy abroad. The United States was seen as weak in the 1990s, unwilling to use its power because of debacles such as its venture into Somalia, refusing to intervene in Rwanda's genocide and only very lately against Serbian ethnic cleansing. Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were irritants but the US was unwilling to devote real resources to fighting them.
Today of course the US is hardly viewed as meek; many people around the world and in the US itself see it as aggressive and imperialist. Kristol rejects this view, but says he prefers the US be seen as too strong rather than hear complaints about American timidity.
Second, and just as important, Bush believes America's many sins during the Cold War of befriending anti-Communist dictators has come back to haunt it. It will no longer do to give only lip service to democracy, even among allies. Bush has embarked on an ambitious project to democratise and modernize the Middle East, to make it more stable, prosperous and inhospitable to the likes of Osama bin Laden.
Kristol also rejects the notion that the United States is very unilateralist. It works with partners in many fields, not just in wars against Saddam and the Taliban, but in areas such as stopping proliferation of weapons. The difference is that the Bushies are sceptical that big institutions such as the United Nations are enough. If the 1990s was characterized by a reliance on multilateral organizations, Washington now prefers to work with select partners in ways that back up words with force. It wants to make alliances from a position of strength, and be seen as a reliable partner.
Now, with regard to Asia, although the US has adopted this new strategy in some respects, it has mainly left the region alone. Compared to the drive for democracy in the Arab and Muslim world, America has preserved the status quo here: perhaps it has too much on its plate, or it finds cooperation with China useful.
Whatever the reason, Kristol believes this status quo is untenable. He argues that American foreign policy is not sustainable if it preaches democracy in the Middle East, but not in Asia.
The current issue is Taiwan and President Chen Shui-bian's call for a referendum on security issues, a move seen by Beijing as a step toward independence. From Kristol's point of view, the United States has erred by publicly reassuring China that it opposes this referendum, and by repeating the 'three noes'. These agreements recognizing only one China date from the late 1970s and, in Kristol's opinion, are ridiculously out of date. He thinks the entire referendum issue is grandstanding and not a serious matter; it's not going to have any real impact on the situation, which is characterized by de-facto Taiwanese independence. American obsequiousness sends the wrong message to hawks in the People's Republic, who will argue that aggressive behaviour wins concessions; and sends the wrong message to allies such as Japan, who rely on America's security guarantee.
The Bush doctrine will at some point highlight the contradiction in America's policy. Kristol did not explicitly say this means the US will ditch the 'three noes', but that is implied in his argument. He believes the tide of history is on the side of Taiwanese democracy and universal suffrage in Hong Kong, and that the ultimate source of friction is not Chen Shui-bian or Hong Kong Democrats, but dictatorship in Beijing that views these things as threats to Communist Party rule. Eventually events will drive the US to change its policy in North Asia.
One may argue about the path the Bush administration has taken, and how honestly it keeps to its views. The US continues to cosy up to dictators in Central Asia, for example, and the lack of nuclear weapons in Iraq throws into doubt the reliability of American decisions behind the use of force.
But Kristol's observation that "things change more than we think" is interesting, and a warning for businesspeople and politicians in Asia who hope the world will settle back to its pre-9/11 patterns.
