Next week Xi Jinping, China's Vice President and the heir-apparent to President Hu Jintao, will make his much anticipated debut in Washington. The playbook for Xi's visit will be the May 2002 visit that Hu himself made when he was preparing to move up from Vice President to the top leadership positions. On that trip Hu did everything he could to demonstrate his credentials as the future steward of Sino-U.S. relations without making any compromises, missteps or news. The White House understood the drill: this was about investing in the long-term relationship with the next leader of China and not shopping for "deliverables." The White House Spokesman, Ari Fleischer, was careful to tell the press that the President raised tough issues from Tibet to trade, while lowering expectations of major breakthroughs. It generally paid off in the longer-run, as Bush and Hu developed a level of trust that helped them navigate subsequent crises in North Korea, Taiwan and later the international financial system.

Presumably both Beijing and the White House would like to repeat that success. It will not be as easy ten years later, though. In 2002 the United States was focused on the threat from terrorism and not the threat from China; the business community was united behind the President's efforts to advance U.S.-China relations; there was some modest progress on human rights issues; and Hu himself was absolutely committed to Deng Xiaoping's admonition to bide time, gather strength and not challenge the United States.

This time around the environment is clearly more difficult. Chinese cyberattacks, aggressive territorial claims, anti-satellite missile tests, and non-transparent military modernization are all impossible to ignore, for the United States and for China's neighbors. The human rights situation has deteriorated, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang and for political dissidents. The American business community is much more divided about China policy and more willing to criticize trade theft and non-tariff barriers (in particularly unfortunate timing for Xi, this week Dupont sued another Chinese scientist for industrial espionage, the second time in three years). The one issue that is quieter than 2002 is Taiwan, for which both governments are probably thankful.

And while Xi is unlikely to change the fundamental direction he is inheriting from Hu (and Hu from Jiang and Jiang from Deng), the new leader has a different style and faces considerably more domestic pressure to look forceful than his predecessor did a decade ago. Hu, for example, took extreme care to avoid any ideological collisions with the United States and the West, co-opting terms like "democracy" and "responsible stakeholder" rather than respond directly to the premise that China's value system needed to change. Xi, in contrast, gained kudos from nationalists at home for his 2009 statement on the "Three Did Nots" in Mexico City, in which he explicitly fired back at the critics of China. It is also hard to find evidence Xi is a more progressive thinker on human rights and political space. The Dalai Lama had a good relationship with Xi's father Xi Zhongxun decades ago, but Tibetan hopes for improvements under the son were dashed when the younger Xi denounced supporters of the Dalai Lama during a heavily policed visit to Lhasa last summer. Similarly, China watchers in Singapore and Southeast Asia have hoped that Xi would be more accommodating and reasonable on maritime disputes given his background as party boss in the coastal province of Fujien, yet as current Vice Chair of the Central Military Commission he has presided over Beijing's expanding military operations in contested waters around Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan.

On the other hand, Xi is a more confident and charismatic presence than Hu, knows more about the United States (next week he will revisit the Iowa town where he led an agricultural delegation in the early 1980s), and will likely announce major commercial agreements while he is here. So the jury is still out. As the U.S. Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, recently confessed, "it is going to take a while to really understand how he might move forward." Meanwhile, Xi's visit to the United States could prove a success despite the tougher environment because for both Washington and Beijing, failure is not an option.

The administration announced on Oct. 19 that talks will resume with North Korea in Geneva and that a new team will represent the U.S. side. Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, the administration's Special Envoy on North Korea and the distinguished Dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, will make Geneva his last official meeting before stepping down. He will be replaced by Glyn Davies, the current ambassador to the IAEA. Meanwhile, Ford Hart, one of the Department's top China hands, will continue to serve as U.S. representative to the Six Party Talks.

This shift demonstrates several things about the Obama administration's diplomacy. First, it signals the end of candidate Obama's promise of dramatic new engagement strategies with the world's most difficult regimes. High profile special envoys (Mitchell to the Middle East, Grayson to Sudan, Holbrooke to Af/Pak, Bosworth to North Korea) are being replaced by steady but low-profile professionals from within the foreign service. Davies is only the most recent example. It turns out, as John McCain warned in 2008, that the problem with these regimes is NOT that we lack unconditional high-level negotiations. The Obama team realized that early on, but it takes a little time to reverse signature foreign policy promises.

The other factor at play, I suspect, is the 2012 election. I recall that in 2004 the White House began imposing message discipline and tighter controls over sensitive foreign policy issues like North Korea, Taiwan, and Iraq. High profile special envoys and message discipline tend not to go together, and the Obama White House is clearing the decks for a major fight for the presidency next year.

Finally, lower key professionals make sense at a time when North Korea is unlikely to yield much ground. Big breakthroughs are hard to imagine, given the fact that Pyongyang tested a nuclear device, conducted two lethal attacks on South Korea, and revealed its uranium enrichment program since the last tentative agreement was reached on denuclearization in October 2008. Of course, they also failed to implement their side of that agreement -- provision of verification protocols -- even after we unilaterally lifted sanctions to the great dismay of our Japanese and Korean allies. The North is in a more talkative mood, but Pyongyang has also been telegraphing its intention to consummate its nuclear weapons status in 2012 for some time. The talks in Geneva will at best yield something of a time out in which the North freezes its provocations and perhaps its facilities at Yongbyon. However, we know from experience that they will only agree to easily reversible steps and that we will likely have another crisis before too long -perhaps even in 2012. It is unlikely therefore that we, Japan or Korea will pay much to rent the North Korean nuclear program for a few months all over again. On the other hand, Washington, Seoul, and Beijing all have elections or leadership changes in 2012 and might be willing to take some steps if it keeps things quiet with North Korea for a while.

Given those realities, the team running North Korea diplomacy is reassuring. They are some of the best professionals in the Foreign Service and a bit like the unflappable cops on the old black and white TV shows. I don't expect we will have a problem with any melodramatic rush for supposedly historic breakthroughs.

"Just the facts, Ma'am."

With exquisite timing, the Pentagon released its annual China military report on Wednesday just as Chinese state television broadcast a documentary trumpeting the PLA's cyberwarfare capabilities. For those following security issues in Asia, there was nothing particularly new in the Pentagon report. It noted the challenges posed by China's new doctrine of maritime power projection, plans for multiple aircraft carriers, the new J-20 stealth fighter, and PLA interest in cyberwarfare (exclamation point helpfully provided by CCTV). Nor was there any real news in the delay of the report, which is also an annual event because of the tedious but necessary bureaucratic process of ensuring the contents are credibly presented.

The fact that the PLA is aggressively pursuing cyberwarfare is also not news, though CCTV's bravado about it did catch some analysts by surprise (visitors to Beijing should make a point of watching CCTV-7, the PLA channel, which provides a steady stream of military propaganda, uniformed game shows, and gorgeous singing colonels in jackboots). Many of us in the national security or Asia fields receive repeat "visits" from Chinese-based hackers. Sometimes these come in the form of crashing Google accounts or targeted "phishing" attacks -- seemingly from other colleagues' email addresses with attached reports on "PLA modernization" or the "Hu-Obama Summit" that contain malware. I have also enjoyed démarches from Chinese officials expressing concern about travel plans to Dharamsala (seat of the exile Tibetan government) or Taiwan. My stern but courteous callers were generally better informed about my itinerary than my own travel agent and made little effort to conceal their knowledge. A Chinese academic friend confided to me a few years back that one of his former students is working with 20,000 other tech-savvy youth for the Ministry of State Security -- and that was just the unit in charge of domestic surveillance. It is hard to maintain operational security when the operation is that massive and the PLA propaganda machine is openly encouraging a culture of aggressive defense of China's "core interests."

The administration refrain is that we must have more military-to-military transparency with the PLA. This may be necessary, but it is hardly sufficient and it carries some negative consequences. For one thing, the administration seems fixated on sustaining mil-to-mil dialogue with Beijing to the point that it is distorting decision-making on arms sales to Taiwan (this because the PLA will routinely cut off military-to-military dialogue in retaliation for the sales). The other problem with a focus on mil-to-mil transparency is that it exacerbates the larger problem of PLA autonomy within the Chinese system. Yes, the Central Military Commission (CMC) ensures that the "Party controls the gun" and the chair and vice chair are Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, respectively. But every other member of the CMC is uniformed military, and Hu and Xi have no independent sources of oversight or expertise on the operational practices of the PLA (particularly the PLA Navy). By pushing for more mil-mil dialogue with the PLA, we risk reinforcing PLA autonomy and further weakening civilian control. Instead, we should put the priority on working collectively with other states to insist that China's leaders be held accountable for the actions of the PLA and that the PLA be held accountable to the leadership. This burden will have to be carried by the president and other leaders since the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is too weak to make a difference on its own.

The China military report and the CCTV cyberattack documentary should also cause U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to begin making the case for reversing the administration's planned cuts in defense spending. Mil-to-mil dialogue is no substitute for necessary recapitalization of our air and naval forces in the Pacific.

This week Secretary of State Clinton announced in Asia that the United States will invite North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Gye-Gwan to New York for exploratory talks about further talks leading perhaps to a resumption of the long-stalled Six Party Talks.  The administration is struggling to maintain sang froid and avoid the breathless rush for breakthroughs that led to an embarrassing bait-and-switch by the North Koreans after the Bush administration preemptively lifted sanctions in October 2008.  Nobody in the current (or former) administration now thinks North Korea has any intention of abandoning their missile and nuclear weapons programs.  After two nuclear tests, outward proliferation attempts to Syria and probably Burma, boastful revelations about their clandestine uranium enrichment program, and vows to become a full nuclear weapons state by 2012, Pyongyang has left little ammunition for its apologists (though some still hold out in isolated pockets in Berkeley, Seoul, and -of course-- Beijing). 

Why then is the administration resuming dialogue with Pyongyang?  The main reason is to convince the North not to engage in further nuclear tests or provocations in 2012.  Aside from being the 100^th birthday of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, 2012 is also an election year in the United States and South Korea and therefore highly auspicious for new North Korean demonstrations of nuclear and missile capability.  Senator John Kerry echoed the administration's concerns when he warned recently that "given North Korea's recent irresponsible conduct, staying in a diplomatic holding pattern invites a dangerous situation to get even worse."  And so the administration, which had shown solidarity with Seoul in the wake of North Korea's sinking of the ROKS Corvette Cheonan and fatal shelling of Yeongpyong Island last year by declaring it would not engage the North until the South did, began pressuring Seoul this year to relax its demands for an apology from the North.  In Bali last week the South Korean Foreign Minister met symbolically with his North Korean counterpart (sans apology), opening the way for the administration to make its own move.

Will this modest gambit prevent further provocations?  There are two things that recommend the approach.  First, the North needs food aid -- not so much for starving people as for the celebration of the elder Kim's birthday and the youngest Kim's (Kim Jong Eun's) succession to replace Kim Jong Il. Second, the administration appears to have convinced Seoul that engagement with the North now will put more pressure on Beijing to punish the North if there are provocations next year.

Still, these are thin reeds with which to dissuade Pyongyang from keeping on schedule with its propaganda and weapons development schedules.  Hopefully, the administration has no intention of backing away from implementation of sanctions under UN Security Council Resolutions 1619 and 1874, which will do much more to constrain proliferation and focus the mind of the Dear Leader than the forthcoming dialogue.  Moreover, rather than worrying primarily about appearing reasonable to Beijing in advance of North Korean testing, Seoul and Washington would do well to demonstrate the consequences of North Korean provocations in terms of tighter U.S.-Japan-ROK trilateral security cooperation (to her credit, Secretary Clinton held a trilateral with her ROK and Japanese counterparts while in Asia this time).  The greatest utility of dialogue at this juncture may be to convince Pyongyang and Beijing that there will be no relaxation of pressure without concrete and verifiable steps at denuclearization, but that there is still a notional prospect for improved relations if the North is forthcoming.  That will also require the administration to stand firm even if the North threatens to walk out and exact retribution for America's "hostile policy" because we have not made concessions.  The administration swears it will not pay for talks, but given that the purpose of the talks is to prevent further North Korean provocations, we have already handed early leverage to Pyongyang.

In his May 25th Washington Post column, George Will slammed Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty for "sounding like a dime-store Teddy Roosevelt" when the former Minnesota governor called for a tough stand towards Muammar al-Qaddafi.  Will clearly likes Pawlenty, but hates the 26th president, complaining that "the real TR was bad enough" without Republicans emulating him with "chest-thumping" today. 

Will is only the latest in a series of political commentators and historical writers on the left and the right who have been piling on the Rough Rider. On the right Glenn Beck has had an ongoing investigation into the supposed excesses of TR's activist policies abroad and progressive reformism at home -- the same themes that seem to irk Will to no end. On the left, Evan Thomas of Newsweek portrays TR as a childish belligerent in his book The War Lovers (2010) and James Bradley seeks to expose how TR's racism and imperialism laid the seeds for the Pacific War in The Imperial Cruise (2009).

Teddy hasn't been President for 102 years, so what is going on here? First of all, TR makes a great proxy for attacking George W. Bush and John McCain for their reformist domestic agenda and their activist and value-driven foreign policies. Will has been after McCain on campaign finance reform for years and lost heart on Iraq after initially supporting the war. Beck sees Roosevelt as an example of what happens when elite Republicans conspire to let the federal government do too much. For the left meanwhile, tales of TR's saber-rattling, racism and imperialism are the perfect allegories for going after Republicans on Iraq.

There is also something deeper in the life cycle of American power and America's role in the world that have brought TR back from the grave. Roosevelt presided over the emergence of the United States as a world power and represented more than any other president in history a boundless self-confidence and optimism about American ascent. In polls taken last year by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, only 33 percent of Americans thought that their country would still be the world's leading power in 50 years and a meager 8 percent thought the United States should try to remain the preeminent leader in solving global problems. The White House clearly thinks it can ride this seeming wave of defeatism by applauding itself for a prudent strategy of "leading from behind" in response to the Arab Spring. For "realist" intellectuals on both the left and the right, TR was representative of our youthful folly; now we must find ways to retrench and accommodate to other powers and ideals in the world as we approach the dusk of Pax Americana. When Jon Huntsman described his opposition to the Libyan intervention as being "an affordability issue," it seemed that even he was testing this reductionist view of American power (please say it ain't so, Jon).

Liberals will always be suspicious of TR, but Republicans should think twice before going after him. To begin with, it is poor historiography. While TR pushed for war with Spain, he also skillfully managed American power in the Pacific after victory through a combination of careful restraint, active balance of power diplomacy, and robust naval-based deterrence. And while he reflected some of the racial attitudes of his era, he was more progressive than some current foreign policy luminaries in arguing that all peoples of the globe are inherently capable of democratic self-government (he also famously made waves by inviting Booker T. Washington to visit with him in the White House).

An anti-TR reductionist foreign policy vision is also a loser for Republican candidates. While the Chicago Council polling found growing self-doubt about American power among the public, it was striking that 80 percent of Americans still said it is desirable for the United States to exert strong leadership in the world. Declinism does not resonate quite as deeply as some intellectual elites might assume. Moreover, a reductionist or "realist" foreign policy vision would offer no contrast with the Obama administration's muddled lead-from-behind strategy on the Middle East or inconsistency on human rights and democracy in the Western Hemisphere and Asia.

Americans have turned against a robust moral foreign policy before -particularly after nasty counterinsurgency experiences like the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq, or in the wake of financial crises like the Great Depression or the Lehman Shock. Yet within years of losing its moorings, American foreign policy has always reconstituted around a combination of security, trade and values. The smart bet is that Americans will once again support a well crafted vision of a foreign policy based on moral leadership in the world. As TR himself once explained to a reporter who asked him how he keeps the "pulse" of the American people, leadership is about explaining where the nation should go, not where it is.

After campaigning on the untenable promise that he would meet with leaders like Kim Jong Il without preconditions, President Obama has actually approached North Korea with a firmness that sometimes eluded the Bush administration in its last year. The Obama administration has strengthened trilateral security coordination with Japan and South Korea; implemented tough U.N. Security Council sanctions against the North after its nuclear tests; and rebuffed Chinese pressure for emergency six-party talks in the wake of Pyongyang's unprovoked attacks on South Korea. Given the North's escalating provocations and nuclear cheating and Beijing's dangerous complacency, this is the only strategy that has a prospect of deterring further belligerency and reversing the incentives the North sees in proliferation on the peninsula and beyond.

This past week, however, senior Japanese and South Korean officials are reporting that the administration has begun signaling to them that the United States is ready to "shift back to dialogue" with the North. The Blue House in Seoul now feels under pressure to accelerate its own resumption of North-South dialogue so that U.S.-DPRK talks can get under way (since the administration has rightly stated that it would not get ahead of its ally South Korea's own diplomacy toward Pyongyang). In Tokyo there is an eerie sense of déjà vu at yet another potential swing in the pendulum of U.S. North Korea policy. Both Tokyo and Seoul want some dialogue with the North, and the administration deserves credit for how closely it has coordinated strategy with both capitals. But since the Hu Jintao visit to Washington, the dynamic seems to have shifted from U.S.-Japan-ROK trilateral pressure on China to rein in the North to a new pattern of U.S.-China pressure on Seoul to pick up the pace of engagement (that, at least, is how one senior ROK official put it to me). Given our inconsistent history on North Korea to date, one can understand why our allies would be a bit nervous about where all this might go.   

Read on

Anybody who spends time in Singapore, Delhi or Seoul will appreciate how much anxiety China's aggressive new stance on territorial disputes is causing in Asia. Japan is the most recent recipient of Beijing's growing chutzpah. For several years now, the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has been surging its operations around the Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Japan but claimed by China and Taiwan (the islands are called the Diaoyutai in Chinese). PLAN submarines have circumnavigated Japan and PLAN destroyers have trained their deck guns at unarmed Japanese patrol planes. Over the past few months, Chinese fishing vessels have been swarming around the Senkakus in what Japanese authorities suspect is a coordinated operation. When a Chinese fishing boat collided with a Japanese Coast Guard cutter on September 7, the Japanese ship arrested the Chinese captain on charges of obstructing law enforcement activities. China immediately responded by severing all high level diplomatic interactions with Japan and staging a series of predictable anti-Japanese protests.

The stand-off ended on September 24 when local Japanese prosecutors in Naha (Okinawa) announced that they would return the Chinese captain without pressing charges. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley welcomed Japan's decision, commenting that this is how "mature states resolve these things -- through diplomacy."

The Obama administration deserves credit for sending a strong signal of solidarity with Japan publicly throughout the confrontation with Beijing. Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and others came out early and often to restate the U.S. commitment to the alliance with Japan and to reconfirm that U.S. obligations under Article V of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty extend to the security of the Senkaku Islands, since they are administered by Japan. However, the administration should be deeply worried about the way this stand-off ended. Japan may have acted as a "mature state" and used diplomacy in search of a quick resolution, but Beijing unleashed a mercantilist assault on Japan that went far beyond the pale of international norms, including the arrest of four Japanese workers in Northern China on charges of "espionage" and threats to embargo critical rare earth metal exports to Japan (Chinese officials later denied the embargo threat after other advanced industrial economies howled, but markets gave that denial little credence).

In all likelihood, the Japanese government counted on Washington's strong support to provide adequate cover for an exit strategy from the showdown and did not anticipate the seventh hour escalation by China. Now the Japanese media have universally declared the outcome a diplomatic defeat for Japan (even the Communist Party's Akahata newspaper has demanded the government give an explanation). Prime Minister Naoto Kan will probably take a major hit in public support in the next round of public opinion polls. Worse, Beijing has come away from the crisis triumphant over Japan's apparent capitulation in the face of overwhelming countermeasures. China's hyper-nationalistic netizens and PLA officers will now expect the government to continue using blunt economic and military tools to put Japan in its place.

The administration can feel satisfied that it provided effective reassurance to Tokyo during this crisis, but the dissuasion message to Beijing has been inadequate. China's neighbors are looking to the United States for leadership -- this includes now even the ruling Democratic Party of Japan which not too long ago campaigned on the promise to distance its foreign policy from Washington. The administration should take full advantage of this opening by enhancing joint military exercises with allies and like-minded maritime states and by using Asia's normally sleepy multilateral institutions to spotlight regional concerns about China's more aggressive stance on territorial disputes. Secretary Clinton won kudos and diplomatic support across the region when she openly addressed China's push for control over the South China Sea during her appearance at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi in July. Now it would be useful to find ways to demonstrate U.S. and regional concern about Beijing's disproportionate escalation against Japan in the most recent dispute. This case is not closed. As one influential Indian politician put it to me on Friday, "this time it is Japan, but next time it could be us."