Sphinx

Is this the moment when the Trump administration decisively repudiates one of the great traditions of American politics, honoured by both parties for over a century? I’m not thinking of the executive order to denounce Twitter and Facebook, since all manner of presidents have sought to manipulate or gag the media over the years (but, hey, can they both lose?). No, this is a subtler but perhaps more significant shift in behaviour and attitude, signalled in a US State Department paper on Arms Control and International Security, published under the name of Dr Christopher A. Ford, Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation and currently moonlighting as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, on US National Security Export Controls and Huawei.

Now, I must admit that I don’t read a lot of State Department papers, but I may have to change that habit if this one is typical, because the opening section is hilarious.

Huawei is a PRC-state-supported information and communications technology firm that serves as a tool of manipulation and influence for the CCP, both at home and abroad, and of course the company is therefore nothing whatsoever like a beautiful ancient Chinese painting.

Okay.

Nevertheless, I hope the reader will forgive a loose analogy to Chinese art as we look at the challenges Huawei presents to the United States and to many other countries around the world.

It is not uncommon in Chinese landscape painting – as seen, for example, in the early 11th-century masterpiece Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan, a classic of Northern Song landscape painting that is currently in the permanent collection of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan – for an artist to employ multiple different perspectives in the same painting. This ancient approach made no use of the “laws” of one-point linear perspective later articulated in the Italian Renaissance during the 14th and 15th centuries. Instead, works such as Fan’s Travelers often painted the foreground, middle ground, and distance as if each were being seen from a slightly different angle, yet at the same time.  This was not so much a technical failing, one presumes, than it was simply a way to help the viewer appreciate a landscape more fully – albeit less “realistically” – than is arguably possible with merely a single, quasi-photographic perspective.  Such overlapping perspectival framing permitted immediate visual access to more facets of a scene than could be directly apprehended from a single vantage point.

Taking that artistic insight as inspiration, therefore, this paper will offer three overlapping and complementary perspectives upon the Huawei challenge that the Western world faces today, and upon what we in the U.S. Government are doing to meet it.  Each of these framings is valid, significant, and compelling in its own right, but the reader will benefit most – and be able more fully to appreciate the U.S. position – by having all three of these overlapping and complementary perspectives spelled out distinctly.

Seriously? All that to say “I’m going to offer three different but complementary perspectives”? Is tunnel vision the official State Department policy, so that acknowledging the complexity of things requires elaborate self-justification? Or is he padding things out to reach a word limit?

Alternatively, this is all about messaging. (1) Look at me, I know all about art history, so you can trust me on contemporary security issues; (2) See how we value and validate Chinese culture! It’s the regime and their agents that we hate, not the great Chinese people and their achievements, like a wall you can see from space. A great bunch of lads! (3) But it’s a masterpiece that’s in Taiwan, not Beijing! Ha-ha!

After this, the style settles down a bit, and we get a lot of sober (though exceedingly vague) assertions about technology theft, strategic competition and human rights – largely concerned with the PRC state, on the assumption that this automatically transfers to Huawei. I’m tempted to award credit for the absence of any mention of the Thucydides Trap in the second section – but then wonder whether it’s a significant absence, given that it’s an idea promoted largely by those who want to avoid conflict (there have been increasing references on the Twitter in recent months to Graham Allison as a ‘China appeaser’, so perhaps a message is being subtly pushed from somewhere).

But there is not a total absence of Thucydides. On the contrary. We come to the conclusion. US policy, Ford insists, is no longer as naive as it used to be about the threat, and is seeking to make its international partners see sense as well.

We are today not, for instance, open-heartedly foolish in the ways suggested in Thucydides’ rendering of Pericles’ famous funeral oration for Athens’ early casualties in Peloponnesian War:

“We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality ….”

WHOA! Liberal western states have been quoting Pericles, as an expression of their own core values, since the 19th century – as did authoritarian regimes in Germany in the first half of the 20th, so it’s not as if the Trump crew need to see these words as a threat. As Liz Sawyer has charted, US politicians have been especially fond of quoting him, albeit not so much this passage – but plenty of them don’t, and that seems like the obvious approach if you don’t feel the ideas are useful or appropriate. This is something else, a direct repudiation of part of the original celebration of democratic culture that implies suspicion of the whole: if Pericles could be so naive and wrong about the virtues of openness, what else was he wrong about..? And even if he was right about some stuff, you shouldn’t let that sucker you into accepting his highly suspect cosmopolitanism and potentially treasonous openness.

If we reject Pericles (and/or Thucydides), whom do we turn to instead? Aristotle, obviously.

Nor, however, are we needlessly paranoid and restrictive about engaging with foreigners in the high-end technologies of our day – as were, for example, the Venetian officials who in 1745 actually dispatched an assassination team to pursue two local glass-blowers who had taken the lucrative secrets of their trade abroad. In truth, the right answer surely lies between such asymptotes, and – as in so many other arenas – we will all suffer if we cannot navigate a prudent middle way between such extremes.  In the arena of national security export controls, it is just such an Aristotelian Mean of a response that we have been trying to implement.

No assassination teams for those suspected of undermining security; Graham Allison can sleep soundly, at least for the moment…