Power Games I

A great interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the "Kissinger of the orient," in which he offers some suggestions for the U.S. and Europe:

In an exclusive interview with United Press International, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, long known as the Kissinger of the orient, took the Europeans to task for balking at casualties in Afghanistan. He blamed "short memories" that have forgotten that "America came to rescue them in two world wars," which has rekindled the "appeasement" of the 1930s.

The United States, said this key player in every major Asian event for almost half a century, "should realize Afghanistan cannot succeed as a democracy. You attempted too much. Let the warlords sort it out in such a way you don't try to build a new state. The British tried and failed. Just make clear if they commit aggression again and offer safe haven to Taliban, they will be punished."

Now known as the "minister mentor" of Singapore, who turned a malarial island into a city of skyscrapers that thinks like a great power and is more important to the global economy than most big countries, Lee fears failure in Afghanistan will alter the world balance of power in favor of China and Russia. These two powers "would be faced with a much weakened West in the ongoing global contest."

And his take on China is just as interesting:

If the Chinese leaders stay on their present course, Lee answered, "The peaceful rise of China's power will prevail. They are determined not to challenge any existing power, meaning America, EU, Russia, but just make friends with everybody. Given the rules of the game now that China is in WTO, they can only grow stronger year by year, and within three or four decades, China's GDP will equal America's, their technology will be equal to what was long regarded as the world's only superpower, and their GDP will be larger than America's.

"And all that stems from what they have long studied in details in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. … They are sending 250,000 students abroad every year, and even though they may lose 60 percent to 70 percent of them to other countries, they don't care because they know many of them will come back eventually. … They want to avoid building a pre-World War II Japan or Germany. Territorial conquest is not necessary as it once was.

"You don't have to be a genius to know that they are producing five times as many engineers and scientists as the Americans. … They are everywhere (in the world) today. Can you be everywhere while focused on Iraq? In the Caribbean you have one Embassy in Barbados that serves six other tiny island countries. The Chinese have an embassy in each place. And that's what you call your front yard."

Taiwan?

"They won't invade," Lee responded, "and try to take over militarily. That would be far too costly for them all over the world. … Can the Chinese land troops in Taiwan and establish and hold and widen a beachhead? The answer is no. Can they conquer Taiwan militarily? Again, no. They can only inflict damage." Today, Lee added, "Taiwan goes to America to get its technology, which then transits to China. If they take back Taiwan, it becomes Chinese without the same freedom of access to U.S. technology and research labs. So why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?"

N. Korea Abandons Its Nuke Program

So sayeth the Grey Lady:

The top American negotiator with North Korea said today that the country had agreed to disable its main nuclear fuel production facility by the end of the year and to account to international monitors for all of its nuclear programs, including what American intelligence agencies believe was a second, secret program purchased from Pakistan.

At the end of a two-day meeting in Geneva — exactly the kind of one-on-one session that the Bush administration had refused to hold in recent years — Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said that the two sides had agreed on what would be a speedy next step, following action by the North this summer to turn off its main nuclear reactor.

“One thing that we agreed on is that the D.P.R.K. will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007,” Mr. Hill told reporters in Geneva, according to the Associated Press. He was using the initials for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s formal name.

But in a separate news conference, his counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, who heads the North Korean negotiating team, made no mention of an end of the year deadline. He spoke instead of an accord to disable North Korea’s equipment and provide an accounting of its facilities, fuel and weapons in return for what he called “political and economic compensation.”

A few things here. First, the Bush admin. should get credit here. In fact, this continues a series of foreign policy successes since 2001. The Iraq disaster and Iran war-mongering get all the headlines, but Bush convinced Libya to give up its nuclear program, forced the removal and arrest of A.Q. Khan (who had sold weaponry, including nuclear devices, off the shelf to Iran, Libya, N. Korea, and was trying to sell to Saddam) in Pakistan, rallied the international community to put strong pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear program, and has now bribed the D.P.R.K. into abandoning its nuclear ambitions. These are subtle victories, but substantial ones, all of which eluded Pres. Clinton. Some credit is due here.

Obama Wants to Ease Cuban Embargo

About time. The utter ridiculousness of the Cuban embargo is apparent to anyone without an axe to grind.

Even better, the U.S. must improve its relations with S. America. We'll have opportunities as Chavez and Morales run their economies into the ground and consolidate more and more political authority, as Brazil straightens itself out and rises as an important international economy, and as the Cuban regime collapses or reforms. We need to start extending olive branches now; not to the leaders of these countries, who don't suffer much from embargoes anyway, but to the citizenry. Cuban-Americans who travel back to Cuba and/or repatriate some of their incomes can be the best P.R. tool we could imagine. It's a resource which should not be neglected.

Update: Thomas Barnett concurs.