Retired U.S. diplomat calls for expertise, changes in policies toward China

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 (Xinhua) -- Retired U.S. career diplomat Chas W. Freeman Jr. has called for expertise in U.S. policies toward China and changes in Washington's approach to managing bilateral relations.

The former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense made the remarks at the "China Chat" discussions held in early December at Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs.

In his remarks, Freeman, also the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, believes the United States has failed to gain a correct understanding of China's rise economically and politically in the world, and that of its own decline as well.

"China does not seek to conquer or abridge the sovereignty of its neighbors. It is not engaged in a search for Lebensraum or foreign colonies. It has no theory of 'manifest destiny,'" Freeman said.

However, "The United States has chosen to treat China's rise as a national-security threat rather than as an opportunity to benefit from global economic and technological advance," and has therefore launched economic warfare against China, he said.

Meanwhile, Freeman urges U.S. policymakers to realize that "the world economy no longer revolves around the volatile, contracting, and increasingly inaccessible American market," and that the United States "also no longer leads most fields of science and technology."

In his opinion, the United States is now well along in its "withdrawal from the world order" it once championed and helped establish, and "is becoming an ever-smaller participant in global decision-making, supply chains, trade, value-added investment, and a world economy no longer dominated by the West."

Without learning from a series of its defeats, disappointments, and political and economic crises in the past more than two decades, the retired career diplomat said, the United States has instead adopted "an approach to international relations that combines the belief that the right combination of pressures can bring foreign nations to heel ... and that military action should precede diplomacy rather than back it."

He noted the wrong U.S. methodology toward China as well as an absence of expertise in U.S. policies toward China.

"Tragically, whatever the source of our current approach to managing relations with China, it is not expertise," he said. "We are now led by 'China hawks' who have never been to China or studied it but who are convinced they know everything they need to know about it."

"In any event, there is no coherent policy process in today's Washington in which their expertise might play a role," he said.

Freeman called for changes in U.S. policies toward China.

"We had better come up with a way to coexist with the Chinese, leverage their rising prosperity and technological competence to our own, and reducing the danger of pointless confrontation with them," he said.