HEIDI FISKE | Mexico – A Vector for Chinese Aggression? (Post 2 of 2)

President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico (L) and
President Xi Jinping of China, September 2017.

This is Part 2 of a two-part guest post by Heidi S. Fiske. The first post is here. 

Aggression by a foreign power, using a Latin American base, brought America to the verge of nuclear war in 1962.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

Seared into the memory of all who lived through it, 56 years ago the United States came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war with Russia. It was so close, in fact, that, on October 27, 1962, then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara declared: “This may be the last Saturday I ever see.”

It began on October 14, 1962, when a US plane spotted a Soviet missile being assembled on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy convened a very small team to consider what to do. Invade? Bomb? 

He decided on an embargo, hoping to keep Russian warheads from reaching the island (fruitlessly, we later learned – the Russians already had 162 tactical and strategic nuclear warheads there). On October 22, a tense American public listened as Kennedy announced the blockade on television, and said that the United States was prepared to use military force to protect its security. After another fevered week of negotiations, the Soviets backed down and removed the missiles.

But let’s consider what our position would be today if a hostile power had major bases in Mexico.

A Weakened United States and a Strong Mexico

Cuba is a small island 90 miles to our south. It was and is poor. We had robust international alliances all over the world. Our national debt was $298 billion, less than 10 percent of our GDP. While the Cold War was expensive, we were not engaged in any hot war. President Kennedy was schooled in history, hard-working and a very bright man with an outstanding cabinet.

By contrast, Mexico is the 15th largest economy in the world. It is smack up against us for 2,000 miles, and has territorial waters that abut ours in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. And we have a different sort of President now, presiding over a cabinet whose divisions and shortcomings are legendary. Our national debt is $20 trillion, 106 percent of GDP – before the new tax reductions and budget take effect.

Thus if we found ourselves facing Chinese aggression via Mexico, we would be weaker than we were in 1962. And China would have far more territory, much closer to us, from which to launch a cyber or military attack.

How likely is it that China might gain a military foothold in Mexico? The camel’s nose is its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Belt and Road

China’s BRI may be the largest international investment project in history. Xi Jinping announced its two parts in the fall of 2013 – the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), and the sea-based Maritime Silk Road (MSR). 

The BRI goal is to create infrastructure that connects developing countries. Less than five years old, it already covers more than 68 countries, equivalent to 65 percent of the world's population and 40 percent of global GDP.

This may be a peculiarly Chinese way to seek influence. In On China, Henry Kissinger points to the stunning fact that, for 18 of the past 20 centuries, China had the highest GDP in the world. Its  superb communications and roads linked markets among its vast population and territory. BRI is just such an initiative, this time on the world stage.

Today, add China’s growing pre-eminence in AI and other key technologies to the mix, and its increasing use of authoritarian power to curtail what its citizens can see. “Technology in the service of an authoritarian regime is a very very dangerous thing,” says Robert Kaplan, author of the just-released The Return of Marco Polo’s World, which looks, among other things, at BRI.

While BRI was originally designed to foster economic cooperation with developing countries in Eurasia and Africa, last May it was extended to Latin America. In January 2018, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) Forum in Santiago and formally invited the 33 nations represented there to join forces. CELAC, formed in 2011, does not include the United States or Canada. Pointedly, Chile’s Foreign Minister Heraldo Muñoz used the occasion to say that “This meeting represents a categoric repudiation of protectionism and unilateralism.”

China had already become the most significant new force in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the World Economic Forum in 2017, Angel Melguizo, Chief Economist in the Latin American Unit, OECD Development Centre, noted:

“China has become one of Latin America’s key trading partners. In fact, it is the most important partner for Brazil, Chile and Peru. Trade between China and Latin America has multiplied 22 times since 2000, a stark contrast to Latin American trade with the United States and Europe, which merely doubled in the same time period.” 

The scale of potential BRI projects is indicated by a proposed 19,000-kilometer trans-Pacific fiber-optic internet cable from China to Chile.

Though wary of China’s growing role in this hemisphere, the United States seems strangely insouciant about it, with Trump now exercising what Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass wryly dubs “the Withdrawal Doctrine.”

To be sure, US-Mexican ties run deep and broad. There is a long history of friendship, cross-border businesses, and alliances. Many families on both sides of the border, at all socio-economic levels, are bi-national. And we share some important history and cultural roots, especially in the southwest.

But will this be enough to counter a Chinese juggernaut patiently building in Latin America? “Washington,” says Antonio Hsiang, Professor and Director of the Center for Latin American Economy and Trade Studies at Chihlee University of Technology, Taiwan. “is now in danger of damaging its core interests through neglect.”

Looking Down the New Silk Road

BRI is supposedly peaceful in intent. At his talk to the CELAC Forum, Foreign Minister Wang said:

“China will always stay committed to the path of peaceful development and the win-win strategy of opening up, and stands ready to share development dividends with all countries.”

But this is spoken by a top official of the country that is building military bases in territory it does not own, in the South China Sea. How difficult would it be to convert major infrastructure installations in Mexico into bases for spying, cyber attacks or even a hot war against us?

This is the real menace from Mexico. And it means that Trump’s attacks on Mexico are 180 degrees away from what strategic considerations would dictate.

HEIDI FISKE | Risks Created by Trump's Trashing Mexico (Post 1 of 2)

Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto with China's President
Xi Jinping, September 2017.

The following guest post was written for CityEconomist by Heidi S. Fiske.

There is a looming menace from Mexico, but it is none of the ones identified by Trump. The threat is not one of drug dealers, rapists, and murderers flooding across our borders. It is not MS 13. It is not jobs lost to Mexican workers or Mexican factories or Mexican steel.

They are flyspecks compared with the real danger that Trump is creating by his relentless insults, as well as his threats to NAFTA, his proposed tariffs, his cancelling of DACA, and his insistence that Mexico pay for a border wall. And to add insult to injury, he has just announced his plan to send Jared Kushner (who just lost his White House security clearance) to Mexico tomorrow to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The real menace is the strategic threat to our security that an emboldened China may pose, using an alienated Mexico as its base.

China has recently, sweepingly, broadened its Latin American ties. And just as it has gotten stronger on the world stage and filled some of the vacuum created by Trump’s unilateralism, it has not, as the US hoped, gotten more democratic. On the contrary, it has tightened authoritarian control, flexing new muscle against foreign enterprises on its soil, and forcing western news outlets to limit what Chinese citizens can see. Most strikingly, on February 25, China's Premier Xi Jinping arrogated the power to rule for life by abolishing the two-term limit that had been the law. The National People’s Congress is expected to rubber stamp his decision this week.

Does China as a major force in Mexico sound unlikely? To be sure, it will not happen fast. But a look at the history of aggression from the south, and of China’s recent moves, shows that it is a geopolitical threat of such potential magnitude that we should be vigorously working to counter it now.

“Bad Uncle Sam”

But Trump is doing the opposite, and thereby encouraging Mexico to turn away from the United States, however reluctantly. His insistence that Mexico pay for the wall, for instance, has caused Peña Nieto to cancel two trips to the United States, most recently last month.

And on March 1, career diplomat Roberta Jacobson, our highly respected ambassador to Mexico, announced she would quit in May. As Trump has not even proposed a candidate for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, her departure leaves us particularly depleted in Latin American diplomacy on the highest levels.

To be sure, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has recently made a five-country tour of Latin America to try to placate leaders there, but with limited success. “This is a way for Tillerson to say, ‘We’re elevating our voice,’” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, the director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego. But, “this is the ‘bad Uncle Sam’ of the past,” he added. “The horrendous insults to Mexicans, to every single Latin American immigrant, are there. They cannot have it both ways.”

The Trump Shock and Mexican Response

Reportedly much of retiring Ambassador Jacobson’s time has had to be spent smoothing ruffled feathers rather than accomplishing substantive gains in Mexico.

“With his tweets Trump has torn up 20 years of good relations,” said a Mexican friend as we drank afternoon tea in her kitchen a year ago. “It is as if your gentle father suddenly slapped you across the face for no reason. You don’t leave the family but you are certainly wary, and waiting to see what happens next.”

What has happened since is, if anything, worse. Last week I checked in with Warren Hardy, an American who became a Mexican citizen in 1990. Beginners at his Spanish language school in San Miguel de Allende are treated to an hour-long history lesson designed to impress on them that Mexicans are inordinately sensitive to being insulted. Mexicans, he explains, have great pride in their indigenous cultures on the one hand, but have been brutally treated successively by the Aztecs, Spanish and most recently the US on the other. The result is that “the core value of the Mexican people is respect. Mexicans demand respect from each other and particularly from foreigners.  What Mr. Trump has done is strike a blow at the heart of our relationship by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals."

Small wonder that Mexico’s leaders are looking for new partners. When Trump renewed his threat to scrap NAFTA late last August, slamming Mexico in the process, the very next week Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto travelled to China to discuss increased trade. While there, he participated with 800 business leaders  in a summit of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which Mexico might join to cooperate on investment, trade, finance, and the sea.  And the day after that Peña Nieto visited the Alibaba Group, hoping to get more Mexican products onto this China-based leading e-commerce platform.

Could increased trade with China morph into Mexicans being receptive to becoming a base for aggression against the United States? Consider events a century ago.

The Zimmermann Telegram

In January 1917, Germany’s Foreign Office proposed to the Mexican government that, if the US entered World War I against Germany, the Mexicans should fight on the German side, thus making it a two-front war for the US. In return, Germany would recover Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico for Mexico.

The famous Zimmermann Telegram that conveyed this offer was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence, which shared it with America in March of 1917. It backfired mightily on the Germans. So enraged was the American public that President Wilson went before Congress and swiftly won a declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917.

As it happened, Mexico turned Germany down, not believing that it could deliver either financially or militarily on its promise, or that Mexico could control the large English-speaking territories it might have re-acquired. But there was fertile ground among Mexicans to accept an offer that promised revenge on the United States, just as there is today. It was not just because the United States had seized almost half of Mexico in the Nineteenth Century. The United States had invaded Mexico in 1914 to protect US business interests during the Mexican revolution, and again in 1916-17 in a vain attempt to punish Pancho Villa for killing Americans in New Mexico.

While this German effort fizzled, 45 years later, a military threat from the south, from Cuba, became very real indeed.

In my next post, following shortly, we examine that threat, how much worse it would be if it were repeated today, and just how China is moving into Latin America.

This is Post 1 of 2. The second post is here:
https://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2018/03/heidi-fiske-mexico-vector-for-chinese.html