Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

I worry that we are fighting the wrong war.  We are fighting a war on terrorism, but neglecting the war on totalitarianism.

Traditionally, America has been seen as the fighter for freedom, as the fighter against the spread of totalitarianism.  We may not always have been consistent in our policies against state control and suppression of human rights, but we have mostly made it a center of our overall approach to the world.  And this approach to the world–of being on the side of freedom and free people–is for many of the other 6 billion people in the world our reason for being, and their reason for respecting and admiring us. 

Now we are using many of the tools of totalitarianism to fight our war on terrorism.  Indeed, the very term “war” implies an at least temporary suspension of individual freedoms in service of a larger cause.  But more alarmingly and more permanently we are fighting our war on terrorism by systematically and permanently clamping down on civil rights, increasing surveillance, reducing freedom of action, and inventing new forms of criminal proceedure that suspend to one extent or another the rights of defendants.

Inadvertantly we are contributing to the expansion of totalitarianism as we fight the war on terrorism.  I wonder, do we need a “war on totalitarianism?”  Perhaps ”war” is not the right term here–but I think we need to make the rolling back of totalitarianism a major emphasis of our foreign policy. 

We are also taking our eye off the expansion of totalitarianism worldwide. The story we are not following is the expansion of what I have called the “Genocide Bloc” because of its inclusion of the government of Sudan.  The Genocide Club is anchored by China.  Here are excerpts from a very important article in The New York Times yesterday, describing China’s expanding influence:

The turnabout is just one sign of the broad new influence Beijing has accumulated across the Asian Pacific with American friends and foes alike. From the mines of Newman - an outpost of 3,000 in a corner of the outback - to theforests of Myanmar, the former Burma, China’s rapid growth is sucking up resources and pulling the region’s varied economies in its wake. The effect is unlike anything since the rise of Japanese economic power after World War II.

For now, China’s presence mostly translates into money, and the doors it opens. But more and more, China is leveraging its economic clout to support its political preferences.

Beijing is pushing for regional political and economic groupings it can dominate, like a proposed East Asia Community that would cut out the United States and create a global bloc to rival the European Union. It is dispersing aid and, in ways not seen before, pressing countries to fall in line on its top foreign policy priority: its claim over Taiwan.

China’s higher profile is all the more striking, analysts, executives and diplomats say, as Washington’s preoccupation with Iraq and terrorism has left it seemingly disengaged from the region, which in turn has found the United States more off-putting and harder to penetrate after Sept. 11.

American military supremacy remains unquestioned, regional officials say. But the United States appears to be on the losing side of trade patterns. China is now South Korea’s biggest trade partner, and two years ago Japan’s imports from China surpassed those from the United States. Current trends show China is likely to top American trade with Southeast Asia in just a few years.

More on this in my next few posts.  China is doing more than extending its trading influence.  It is also extending its policies of abuse of human rights.  In Africa particularly, it is teaming up with the “new dictators” in Sudan and other totalitarian countries–and working together with them to establish social and political “stability” to protect its trade relationships–and particularly, in Africa, to protect sources of oil.