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April 10, 2005
Friend to foe
Laura Rozen (via Matt Yglesias) points out a Boston Globe piece on an upcoming report that highlights the Israeli transfer of arms technology to China and its role in China's ongoing military modernization. Laura and Matt, quite wisely, further explore how and why such a pessimistic assessment could be used to justify particular expenditures in the U.S. defense budget. As has been noted here, there remains a strong constituency in U.S. policymaking and military circles that considers China to be this country's primary strategic adversary in the medium- to long-term. It is clearly within their interest to highlight China's growing military and geostrategic capacity, which has also been noted here.
In such a context, then, it's clear why the United States is pushing the EU so hard to retain its arms embargo on China. But why not a similar kind of pressure on Israel, whose technology transfers to China are nothing new? To be sure, the United States has known about such transfers for some time, and the Bush administration has registered its displeasure. But such complaints do not seem to have shut off the technology spigot from Israel to China. Why? Is the Bush administration exerting the same level of pressure on Israel as it is on the EU? Is Israel particularly more stubborn than the EU member states? If the Bush administration truly wanted Israel to cease its technology transfers to China, couldn't it find the right pressure points on which to squeeze Israel? I honestly don't know. But I'm inclined to think that there is more here than meets the eye.
Posted by Daniel Widome at 08:55 PM to Asia,
