Over at Bloggingheads, Robert Kagan outlines his ideal approach to China:
There are a number of things wrong here, not least of which is his casual support for a containment strategy against China (new Cold War, no big deal). But I want to take a second to highlight the rank absurdity of Kagan's proposal for a Helsinki-like deal with China, wherein Beijing agrees to a set of human rights parameters that would then inspire new Chinese Sakharovs and eventually lead the government to liberalize.
Obviously, the Helsinki Accords were a major factor in the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the introduction of glasnost and perestroika, but Brezhnev didn't sign onto them out of the goodness of his heart. He signed on because the accords constituted American and European recognition of the Soviet sphere of influence, and of the territorial legitimacy of the USSR and its Eastern European satellites. Indeed, the accords were initially seen as a betrayal of human rights. Take this passage from John Lewis Gaddis' The Cold War (p. 189):
Within the United States, liberals and conservatives alike denounced Ford and Kissinger for having abandoned the cause of human rights. Brezhnev's motives in wanting the Helsinki agreement, they argued, were all too transparent: pursuing détente was hardly worth it if it meant pereptuating injustice by recognizing Soviet control in Eastern Europe.So my question to Kagan is this: if we're serious about wanting a Helsinki-like agreement with China, what are we prepared to offer Hu Jintao in return? We've acknowledged for decades the PRC's legal sovereignty over Taiwan, not to mention Tibet. What do we have left to trade? Indeed, what do we have left to trade that China hawks like Kagan would be willing to trade?
