Parece que a Doutrina Obama é a do retraimento, a de se desvencilhar dos
problemas do mundo.
Mas o mundo não quer. O mundo quer a presença americana.
Menos os companheiros, claro.
Esses preferem a companhia de russos, chineses, cubanos, essas
maravilhas da democracia e dos direitos humanos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
More Chopsticks, Please
The New York Times, May 10, 2014
HANOI, Vietnam — BY an accident of scheduling, I’ve visited Kiev and
Hanoi in the last couple weeks, and it’s been accidentally extremely
revealing. Ukraine is
a middle power living next to a giant bear, and Vietnam is
a middle power living next to a giant tiger. Ukraine is struggling with how to
deal with a declining Russia that is looking for dignity in all
the wrong places — like in Crimea — and Vietnam is struggling with how to deal
with a rising China that
is looking for oil in
all the wrong places — like in Vietnam’s territorial waters. Russia’s attitude
toward Ukraine has been: “Marry me, or I’ll kill you.” And China’s toward Vietnam
has been a variation of that line from “There Will Be Blood”: “I have a long
straw, so I think I’ll drink my milkshake and yours.”
Meanwhile, America is trying to figure out how to buttress both Vietnam
and Ukraine in their struggles with their giant neighbors without getting
entangled in either dispute. And in my jet-lagged torpor, all I’ve been trying
to do is make sure I don’t order Chicken Kiev in Hanoi and Chicken Spring Rolls
in Kiev.
Both conflicts tell us a lot about the post-post-Cold War world. Neither
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine nor China’s in Vietnam’s territorial waters is
based on grand ideology or global aspiration. Both are about regional control,
spurred by nationalism and resource competition.
Another similarity is that both Russia and China have not engaged in
traditional crossborder aggression with their neighbors, choosing instead to
operate behind cutouts. Russia used “little green men” in Ukraine — camouflaged
pro-Russia gunmen whose identities are unclear — and China deployed a flotilla
of 70 civilian vessels and just a few navy ships to the South China Sea. They
towed a giant deep-sea drilling rig 130 nautical miles off the coast of Vietnam
— well within Vietnam’s continental shelf but also in range of the disputed
Paracel Islands that China claims are its own and therefore entitle Beijing to
control a wide arc of surrounding waters.
Vietnamese TV has been airing an animated re-enactment of the
confrontation: When a Vietnamese navy patrol boat challenged a larger Chinese
vessel, it rammed the Vietnamese ship, wounding six sailors. Then another
Chinese ship used a giant water cannon to shoo away the Vietnamese boats. It’s
a huge story here in Hanoi.
In both cases, Russia and China used tactics firm enough to get their
way but calibrated not to galvanize the international community to react much.
China’s timing, though, right after President Obama’s visit to the region —
when he criticized China’s expansive maritime claims — seemed to be a squirt
gun in his face.
“It has been a real shock for the whole region,” Ha Huy Thong, the vice
chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Vietnamese Parliament told me.
“They use civilian vessels, and then if you attack them they say, ‘Why did you
attack our civilians?’ ”
But Vietnam has limited options. China “is a rising power. The question
is how can we deal with it?” said Thong. “It is not only a violation of our
territory but of international law.”
The only way to deter such regional powers when they bully one neighbor
is with a coalition of all the neighbors. But such coalitions are hard to build
when the threat is to just one country, is relatively low level and when the
threatening country (China or Russia) controls so much trade to the rest of
Asia in the case of China and so much gas to Ukraine and Europe in the case of
Russia.
“We have a saying in Vietnamese,”
added Thong: “It’s easy to break two chopsticks, but it’s very hard to break a
bundle of them.” Until such a coalition gets built, Vietnam — in an irony of
history — finds itself now looking to America for more protection from its
historical predator, China.
Le Duy Anh, 24, a lecturer at Hanoi’s FPT School of Business (FSB),
remarked to me when I visited his campus that whenever China does something to
Vietnam these days people go to the American Embassy in Hanoi and demonstrate.
For so many years, Vietnamese fought a war with Americans “trying to get you
out,” he said, “and now we are demonstrating to get you to intervene. We don’t
want bloodshed, so we need someone to tell someone else to calm down.”
So Americans may think we’ve lost influence in the world, but, the truth
is, many people out here want our “presence” more than ever. This is especially
true of those living on the borders of Russia and China, who are each sort of
half in and half out of today’s globalization system — beneficiaries of its
trading and investment regimes but revisionists when it comes to playing by all
the rules in their own neighborhoods. We may not be so interested in the world,
but a lot of the world is still interested in us — and saying: “Yankee come
hither” more than “Yankee go home.”
We’re not going to go to war on either front. And Russia and China also
have claims and interests that bear consideration. But if we are to persuade
Moscow and Beijing to resolve these border disputes peacefully, not
unilaterally, we’ll clearly need a few more chopsticks in our bundle. Which is
why America’s ability to build coalitions is as vital today as the exercise of
its own power.
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