NEWSWEEK: Where is the biggest challenge for American foreign policy: the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa? Anne-Marie Slaughter: I think the biggest overall challenge is managing the rise of Asia in a way that harnesses the benefits and avoids potential conflicts and major disruptions—to global institutions, global financial stability and/or local conflicts that could drag others down. Taiwan, obviously, is one big example, but also Tibet, where the combination of domestic political pressures and external events can suddenly present leaders with situations that could get out of hand if they’re not very carefully handled. This is a very complicated, very big part of the world. There’s a tremendous amount happening, and right now our bandwidth is taken up almost entirely by Iraq, with a little left over for the Middle East generally and a bit for North Korea. There’s a lot of untended garden over here.
Do you think Asia ought to take precedence over the Middle East? Given the nature of 21st-century security interests and challenges, you really do have to be able to do a number of things at one time. I wouldn’t say the Middle East is not very important and we don’t have to pay a lot of attention to it, but I think we’ve got to redress the balance so that things are manageable enough in the Middle East, so that we can simultaneously be paying much more attention to Asia. When people look back a few years from now—certainly a hundred years from now—the Middle East will look very bad, but it’s been looking bad for a long time. The dramatic sea change in world politics is the rise of Asia, in terms of the demography, the political landscape, the economic landscape, and the security landscape.
Is that what compelled you to spend your current sabbatical in China? In many ways, yes. My view is that my generation—certainly our children’s generation—of people who consider themselves internationalists or just in general well-educated, have to feel as comfortable getting off the plane in Beijing, Singapore, Tokyo or Seoul as they do in Rome, Paris, London or Warsaw. I don’t think that everything is shifting to Asia and leaving Europe behind—I actually think Europe remains extremely important—but I don’t think knowing Asia is optional anymore. It’s not just for specialists; it’s for generalists as well.
Has being in China changed your perspective on the controversy over Tibet? Yes, in a number of ways. It makes you much more keenly aware of the differences in the information that the vast majority of the Chinese public has access to and the information that many of the protesters of the West have access to. They’re reading out of completely different books with not a lot of overlap between them. And neither set of information is, I think, complete. That means that the potential for distortion and miscommunication and real conflict is very high. You do also get much more of a feeling, living here, of the anger of many Chinese. They are keenly aware of what they see as Western hypocrisy in terms of Western history, whether it’s imperial history or, in the case of the United States, our own history with Native Americans. And they feel picked on. It’s a very strong reaction even among Chinese educated in the West and who are very sophisticated about international affairs. The reaction that I get is not “Everything is fine in Tibet.” It’s “This is a complicated situation and we are being forced to deal with in it in the glare of global publicity, whereas when you were faced with similar situations 50, 100, 200 years ago, you were able to do exactly what you wanted and what you did was far worse in many ways than what we’re trying to do right now.” Coupled with this is tremendous pride in what China has achieved and a real feeling that they’re being singled out unfairly.
Even NEWSWEEK is split on this issue. Columnist Jonathan Alter says that boycotting the Olympics would send a necessary message, but NEWSWEEK International editor Fareed Zakaria says boycotting would be the wrong approach when this is really a question of Chinese nationalism, which is very little understood in the West. I’m totally with Fareed. Absolutely. If your aim is to enhance the likelihood that there will in fact be conversations with the Dalai Lama and a better accommodation reached in terms of autonomy within China, then a boycott is the last [thing that’s] going to achieve that.
How exactly are perceptions in the East and West at odds here? The Western press recounts the Dalai Lama’s position, which is against independence: he wants increased autonomy. So from that point of view, why is the Chinese government not negotiating with him? But the Chinese look more at what they call the Dalai clique. The younger people around [the Dalai Lama] do want independence. And that never gets played up in the West. Conversely, here [in China] you don’t hear about the Dalai Lama’s position itself, you only hear about the clique as a whole. It’s not clear that the Dalai Lama can in fact control the younger people around him that want independence. Conversely, it’s not clear that he can’t. But if Western governments thought that the Tibetans were demanding independence they would be more cautious in supporting those demands. Further, few people know very much about the Tibetan monarchy—which was pretty brutal—nor about Chinese-Tibetan history over a period of a thousand years. Finally, we don’t have trustworthy information about what a majority of Tibetans who actually live in Tibet want.
In general, do the Chinese have a different approach to foreign policy and the global community? The thing you realize most living here is just how complicated Chinese development is. You’re very aware of the accomplishments, of the speed—the Chinese seem to have telescoped everything that the United States did in 100 or 150 years into 10 or 15 years. Everything’s happening 10 times as fast. At the same time, the scope of the job left to do is staggering. When you travel and you see just how many cities still need to be built, how much infrastructure still needs to be built—yes, they’ve lifted 400 million people out of poverty, but there’s another 800 million left to go. So foreign policy is much less important to the Chinese government than domestic policy. What China really wants is to avoid conflict abroad so that it can concentrate on developing at home and—to state it more positively—securing a benign international environment in which to develop. [This] makes absolute sense. This is not a country that wants foreign adventures at the moment. It also does mean, though, that the desire to avoid conflict can bring the government into conflict over issues like how you treat regimes in Africa that have natural resources China needs for development but who are abusing their own people. There, I think, China’s still very much learning what it means not just to be a great power but a responsible great power.
