A point/counterpoint between Michael Listner and Joan Johnson-Freese. I’m not a big fan of China cooperation myself (a dispute I have with Buzz), but this is probably the best argument I’ve seen for it:
Wolf’s rationale assumes the United States has nothing to gain by working with the Chinese. On the contrary, the United States could learn about how they work — their decision-making processes, institutional policies and standard operating procedures. This is valuable information in accurately deciphering the intended use of dual-use space technology, long a weakness and so a vulnerability in U.S. analysis. Working together on an actual project where people confront and solve problems together, perhaps beginning with a space science or space debris project where both parties can contribute something of value, builds trust on both sides, trust that is currently severely lacking. It also allows each side to understand the other’s cultural proclivities, reasoning and institutional constraints with minimal risk of technology sharing.
If it’s the current NASA cooperating with China, I’m not much worried about technology sharing, either, since NASA’s not allowed to spend much money on useful technology. I just think that cooperation with China (or anyone, really) is an unnecessary distraction from actually doing things in space. But the Congress isn’t really interested in that. It just wants to build big rockets. I certainly wouldn’t put any other country, whether China or even in Europe, on the critical path to anything.
The Listner “Pro” case is remarkably weak. To begin with, he grapples not at all with China’s frequent characterization of the U.S. as its principal enemy. Listner prefers the more neutral word “competitor” to describe the overall U.S.-China relationship. And yet he regards his as the “realist” viewpoint. Departing from a point of refusal to acknowledge the actual nature of the U.S.-China relationship as perceived by the Chinese is not realism, it is the usual willful blindness of the American liberal to realities that do not advance the narrative that, in any dispute with a hostile nation, it is always America that is at fault.
He points out that keeping China out of the ISS has resulted in Chinese plans to build their own space station. That strikes me as a feature, not a bug. Making the Chinese pay the entire bill for their own space station is far preferable to footing much of the bill for their space program, which we have already done for another “competitor” – Russia – to no obvious long-term gain.
Listner also notes that American efforts to isolate China with regard to space technology have failed because other countries are still willing to trade with China in such things. U.S.-led sanctions regimes have never been 100% effective – as witness the much more draconian sanctions against Iran – but they don’t have to be. Making the Chinese work harder to get less is an acceptable outcome so long as it is the best that can be achieved.
The following key paragraph is perhaps the most remarkably wrong-headed in the entire exercise:
Second, Wolf’s rationale assumes the United States has nothing to gain by working with the Chinese. On the contrary, the United States could learn about how they work — their decision-making processes, institutional policies and standard operating procedures. This is valuable information in accurately deciphering the intended use of dual-use space technology, long a weakness and so a vulnerability in U.S. analysis. Working together on an actual project where people confront and solve problems together, perhaps beginning with a space science or space debris project where both parties can contribute something of value, builds trust on both sides, trust that is currently severely lacking. It also allows each side to understand the other’s cultural proclivities, reasoning and institutional constraints with minimal risk of technology sharing.
Rep. Wolf is criticized for “assuming” the U.S. has nothing to gain from working with the Chinese. Then the best thing Listner can apparently come up with, by way of such “gains,” is the hoary liberal Kumbiyahism about learning each other’s “decision-making processes, institutional policies and standard operating procedures” and “building trust.”
Over drinks after work, one supposes, Chinese colleagues in some space-related effort would carefully explain to Americans unfamiliar with their “standard operating procedres” that the reason for the sudden absence of one of their number is that he was called back home where he was accused of “deviationism and revanchism,” tried and convicted of same, executed with a single pistol round to the back of the head and, finally, harvested for organs to be sold on the black market. Gee, isn’t cultural exchange fun!
Almost as risibly rich is Listner’s apparently unironic suggestion of space debris abatement as a possible suitable joint space project with the Chinese. Hey, how about maybe the most significant contribution the Chinese could make to space debris abatement is not to blow up any more old satellites in order to test their ASAT weaponry! Given that the current inventory of space debris is somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of Chinese origin from just one such episode of orbital litterbugging, simply securing future Chinese non-repetition of this anti-social little exercise would be more valuable than anything they could allegedly contribute toward cleaning up what is largely their own mess.
As to Listner’s breezy assumption of “minimal risk of technology sharing,” his opposite number Freese’s citation of Chinese appropriation of European technology for China’s own version of GPS through participation in the Galileo project is more than sufficient refutation of this fatuous assertion.
This next paragraph runs the previously cited one a close second for unironic levity inducement.
From a practical perspective, working with China could diversify U.S. options for reaching the ISS. The need for diversification has become painfully apparent consequent to Vladimir Putin’s expansionist actions in Ukraine resulting in U.S. sanctions. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin subsequently stated, “I propose that the United States delivers its astronauts to the ISS with the help of a trampoline.”
Uh, right. Having helped the Russians into a position from which they are now able to extort over seventy million dollars from NASA to fly a single astronaut to ISS – or even cut off ISS access entirely – it would now be in our best interests to do the same with the Chinese. Sure. Right. You betcha.
Arranging the details of such a “cooperative” deal would take so long that our own Commercial Crew program – which goes oddly unmentioned by Listner – will have long-since restored American crew-to-LEO capability well before the first seat for an American could be available on China’s Soyuz knock-off. Beyond that, however, the sheer inanity of suggesting that we – with eyes wide open – make the same major policy mistake anent the Chinese that we are now scrambling to undo anent the Russians is quite breathtaking.
Rep. Wolf is correct. China has nothing we need.