Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Brazen U.S. Corporate Collusion with China

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aerospace, Belt and Road, China, globalization, Honeywell, human rights, manufacturing, multinational companies, multinationals, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, steel, tech, tech transfer, The Wall Street Journal, Uighurs, Xinjiang

Usually, it’s not a terrific idea to begin a piece of writing with a phrase like, “If you want to see something that’ll make you sick to your stomach….” But I think you’ll agree that this recent article from The Wall Street Journal justifies an exception. For its portrayal of the China operations of U.S.-owned multinational manufacturer Honeywell depicts a big company actively helping the dangerous thug dictatorship in Beijing endanger often-intertwined American security and economic interests, and evidently doing so without even a peep of protest from Washington – including during the Trump years.

Journal reporter Trefor Moss’ piece dealt with the question, “How can an American company thrive in China at a time when tensions between the two countries are running high?” His answer: Under Honeywell’s long-time head of China operations, it pursued a strategy of fully immersing “the company in Chinese business and culture—and [not shying] away from helping Chinese companies achieve strategic goals set by Beijing.”

This approach was worrisome enough when this executive, Shane Tedjarati, launched Honeywell China down this path in 2004. By that time, Beijing was not only gutting America’s domestic manufacturing base with a wide range of predatory trade and broader economic practices. But it had also compiled a record of challenging American national security interests through policies like supplying countries like Iran and North Korea with technologies vital to developing weapons of mass destruction and the missiles needed to deliver them.

Now that the People’s Republic has since at least early 2018 been seen as a threat to critical American interests in the Indo-Pacific region requiring a “whole-of-government” response, and that President Biden has declared that “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century. We’re at a great inflection point in history” and that “we’ll maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific…not to start a conflict, but to prevent one,” activities like Honeywell’s in China look alarmingly like colluding with an enemy.

What else can be made of Tedjarati’s position as “a visiting professor at Shanghai’s China Executive Leadership Academy, an elite school that provides leadership training to the Communist Party’s rising stars.”

Or of Honeywell’s sale of industrial automation equipment to one of the state-owned Chinese steel companies that for years been glutting global markets with dumped and artificially cheap product that’s hammered America’s own sector?

Or of its “open” support for the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese global infrastructure plan widely seen as a way for Beijing to expand its worldwide influence, and that’s got the Biden administration concerned enough to be mounting a U.S. response?

Or of these Honeywell actions (which didn’t make the Journal piece) “[T]he company repeatedly, between 2011 and 2018, sent drawings of parts of US military aircraft to suppliers in foreign countries, including China, asking for price quotes, according to a Department of State charging letter. The manufacturer voluntarily disclosed the violations.

“The engineering prints showed layouts, dimensions and geometries for manufacturing castings and finished parts for military aircraft and engines, as well as other hardware and weaponry. Drawings for parts within the Lockheed Martin F-35 and F-22 stealth fighters, Boeing B-1B supersonic bomber and Pratt & Whitney F135 turboshaft engine were included.”

For good measure, Honeywell has also supplied protective equipment to Chinese security forces operating in western Xinjiang province, where Beijing has been harshly persecuting the Muslim Uighur minority group.

Honeywell did pay a (tiny) fine for its seven years of sharing those drawings. But overall, according to Moss, Tedjarati told him that “No U.S. or Chinese officials have ever told him the company should do, or should avoid doing, specific things in China.”

Honeywell has by no means been the only U.S. multinational to enrich China and strengthen it militarily and technologically for decades. (See, e.g., here and here.) But it may have just won the award for the most brazen. And until these kinds of operations are halted completely, it’ll be hard to describe America’s China policy with the word “serious.”

Full disclosure:  I have no financial positions whatever in Honeywell, other than possibly through index funds or exchange-traded funds, and other such vehicles, and have no plans to acquire any.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! So Much for Nike’s China Suck-Up Strategy

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apparel, China, cotton, footwear, Glad I Didn't Say That!, human rights, Nike, sportswear, Uighurs, Xinjiang

“CEO: ‘Nike is a brand that is of China and for China’”

– The Hill, June 26, 2021

 

“Nike Shares Lose Out to Chinese Sneaker Rivals After Xinjiang

Cotton Boycott”

– Bloomberg.com, July 6, 2021

 

(Sources: “CEO: ‘Nike is a brand that is of China and for China,’” by Caroline Vakil, TheHill.com, June 26, 2021, CEO: ‘Nike is a brand that is of China and for China’ | TheHill and “Nike Shares Lose Out to Chinese Sneaker Rivals After Xinjiang Cotton Boycott,” by Olivia Tam, Bloomberg.com, July 6, 2021, Nike Loses to China Sneaker Rivals After Xinjiang Cotton Controversy – Bloomberg)

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Neglected Lesson of Afghanistan

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Afghanistan, Biden, border security, China, Donald Trump, forever wars, globalism, Immigration, jihadism, Muslims, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, special forces, Tajikistan, Taliban, terrorism, Uighurs, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, women's rights, Xinjiang

Let’s get one matter straight right away: When it comes to the (always important) optics, and to humanitarian considerations, there is no good way for the United States to end its military involvement in Afghanistan that would meet any sensible or decent person’s definition of “good.”

Indeed, much of the news that’s come out of that war-torn country (and I use that term advisedly) is sickeningly reminiscent of the final U.S. pullout from Vietnam in April, 1975 – complete with the almost certain abandonment of many locals who had cast their lot with the Americans in various ways, and therefore face many forms of retaliation if the jihadist Taliban do indeed triumph.

Further, the U.S. departure could produce an Afghan aftermath far worse than that suffered in Vietnam, as the social and economic strides made by many Afghan women of all ages under the umbrella of the American presence seem to be doomed if the country is taken over by a movement wed to Islam’s most misogynistic version.

In fact, a couple of years ago, by which time the American mission’s failure looked inevitable, I came up with the idea of offering all Afghan females asylum in the United States – complete with transportation expenses. I never published it, but wouldn’t it have served the women-haters right to leave them as women-free as possible?

That chance looks to be gone – though I’m still hoping that somehow the interpreters and other U.S. employees can be saved. Otherwise, the best that Americans can hope for now is figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid such fiascoes going forward. There’s been no shortage of post-mortems, and especially encouraging has been the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy establishment’s (belated) agreement that nation-building where no true nation exists is folly. (See, e.g., here.)

Another big lesson, however, remains largely unlearned – even by long-time opponents of the Afghan War like former President Trump: As I’ve written repeatedly, since the only self-interested (and therefore sensible) reason for direct American involvement in the first place was preventing the country’s re-emergence as an officially sponsored and protected base for September 11-like terrorism, Washington should have focused on seriously securing U.S. borders rather than on fighting the jihadis “over there.”

Trump tried in his own characteristically ragged way to beef up border protection, and achieved some impressive progress. But as made clear here, he never seemed to make the connection fully. And now President Biden appears determined to create the worst of all possible worlds from the U.S. standpoint – an Afghanistan policy unlikely to enable the Tailban’s containment through special forces guerilla-type operations until the U.S. border was strengthened adequately, and an immigration policy that actually opens the border still wider.

Meanwhile, a third big lesson hasn’t evidently even made it onto official or unofficial U.S. policy screens (including mine), but it was suggested in this Bloomberg news item on Monday: A Taliban-run Afghanistan could well have been kept off balance – and frustrated in its efforts undertake the major initiatives needed to foster September 11-scale terrorism – by the nearby countries its extremism would surely have alarmed and antagonized. And these regional concerns seem compelling enough to keep the lid on in Afghanistan by hook or by crook from this point on in the American military’s absence.

As the piece makes clear, in the near term, smallish Afghanistan neighbors like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are anxious to prevent chaos on their borders – including no doubt massive refugee flows. And both countries have long been cooperating with Washington for many years to bolster “overall regional security” – which won’t be helped by a jihadist regime in their midst. (See here and here.)

And don’t forget Russia – whose help those two central Asian countries are seeking. Its own disastrous 1979 invasion and decade-long occupation of much of the country was triggered largely by fears that the rise of Islamic extremism in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East would infect the Muslim populations of adjacent Soviet “republics” (like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Moscow can’t be anxious to repeat that mistake, but the fear of jihadis persists, and like it or not, Russia’s deep reinvolvement in Afghanistan consequently seems inevitable – and bound to cause big problems for the Taliban.

China’s bound to be pulled in, too. All indications are that Beijing hopes to keep post-U.S.-withdrawal Afghanistan stable in a softer way – with big economic development projects that ironically look a lot like nation-building (though apparently lacking its political dimension). More power to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping if he succeeds. But mainly because it’s had its own huge problems (many surely self-created) with its own Muslim population in Xinjiang province (which also shares a short border with Afghanistan) China’s bottom line clearly is maintaining stability and making sure that Afghanistan doesn’t become “a haven or transit corridor” for the Uyghur militants who have aroused its ire. (See the above-linked Economist piece for the quote.)

As a result, it’s more than a little interesting that a Chinese academic recently felt free to tell a Financial Times reporter that “Even though China has for a long time been extremely cautious about sending military forces overseas, if it is supported by a United Nations resolution, China might join an international peacekeeping team to enter Afghanistan.”

Alternatively, the Chinese bet that they can cultivate the Taliban’s pragmatic instincts by financing massive road-building and mining operations could pay off – in which case, the terror-base scenario feared in the United State may not materialize.

But the crucial strategic insight for Americans is that China and all of Afghanistan’s neighbors have compelling stakes in curbing Taliban jihadism and related terrorism, and that these stakes exist precisely because Afghanistan’s in their own neighborhood – and always has been. In other words, however important Afghanistan’s stability, moderation, etc has been for Americans thousands of miles away, it’s always been and remains far more important for the folks right next door. Even better, because some big powers are involved, a strong case can be made not only for their persistence in addressing the problem but their success.

If they fail, however, or get bogged down in their own forever war, that’s OK from the U.S. perspective as well – because they’ll keep the Taliban too busy to concentrate on attacking America. That’s not to say that the United States can therefore forget about sealing the border. After all, Afghanistan is hardly the world’s only concentration of jihadis.

But it does mean that the strategic case for the United States carrying the burden of intervening in Afghanistan specifically is weakening; that the case may have been weak all along – or at least once the Taliban was ousted from power and significantly weakened right after September 11 – and that as long as the neighbors can be relied on to act in their own self-interest (surely a long time), and especially if Washington tends to its border knitting, this case won’t emerge again.

Making News: On National Radio Again – on Nike, China, and Slave Labor

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boycotts, China, forced labor, Gordon G. Chang, human rights, Making News, Nike, The John Batchelor Show, Uighurs, Xinjiang

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of my interview last night on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show. Click here to listen to a timely segment with John and co-host Gordon G. Chang on Nike, Inc.’s recent brown-nosing statement – amid the controvery over its alleged use of products made by concentration camp labor in China – that the company is “a brand that is of China and for China.”

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.