Christopher Badeaux in the New Ledger:

The usual people who don’t understand foreign policy – which is to say, the sorts of people who are well-received, if not employed, by the State Department (which hasn’t understood foreign policy since Kissinger, or perhaps Dulles) – are of course charmed by the President’s playacting on the global stage. This is probably because the kabuki-dance of Metternichian diplomacy, though likely to allow untold millions to die of starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment, is more visually appealing than war and open conflict – not least because all of that starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment tends to happen in countries that don’t allow cameras near the atrocities.

This terrible conflation of form over substance elides the fact that Baron von Metternich developed the balance of power system he did to avoid a repeat of the devastation of Napoleon, and that ultimately, that very system of diplomatic communiqués, bows, negotiations, dinners, and playacting not only failed to avert the First World War, it positively accelerated and worsened the Second. In other words, the modern system is a shell of a remnant of a means of preventing a disaster that has long-since passed, and that failed miserably both times it was really well-tested. It is, in short, a system intended to devolve larger conflicts into smaller, more manageable ones, and is instead a method for preventing small conflicts by accumulating them into larger ones. Perversely, the whole, nominal point of the modern system of international diplomacy is to provide channels through which substantive foreign policy – that is, the real goals and desires of nations and nation-states – can flow without having more wars than necessary. Its loveliness should be secondary to its effectiveness. Applauding what President Obama has delivered – a foreign policy with better aesthetics than President Bush’s, without President Bush’s substance – is like wanting a faster car always stuck in the driveway: There’s no point if it’s not going anywhere.

This inability to separate substance and appearance – oddly appropriate for a President who has never shown much of an ability to do so since he began putting the finishing touch on his resume in 2004 – is nowhere better on display than in his dealings with China.

One would be hard-pressed to identify anyone who is neither a member of the Administration, a member of the American press corps (insofar as that isn’t the same thing), one of the aforementioned lovers of Metternichian avoidance, or a member of the government of the People’s Republic of China who thinks President Obama’s strolling photo-shoot through Asia was a success. The heretofore-unbroken foreign policy consensus of three decades has been that America wants to control a rising China to bring it into the community of nations – as a free and open society, trading freely with the world and keeping its torture to the bare minimum a quasi-fascist regime can accept as it transitions into something vaguely resembling a democratic empire. Because this requires a delicate dance of threats, cajolings, ingratiations, brute shows of force, and speeches about strategic partnerships while everyone clenches their teeth; and because that sort of thing is beyond the ability of any elected American President since Reagan if not Washington; Sino-American relations tend to look like a bizarrely schizophrenic bumble that extends the length of an Administration.

This is why President Clinton – in that way that only Bubba could – alternated between overlooking Chinese espionage at Los Alamos and sending a carrier battle group to the Taiwan Straits; why President Bush thanked China for capturing an American plane in international airspace on the one hand and met early and often with the Dalai Lama and made clear that America’s future strategic partnership lay with India, as an explicit counterweight to China.

The critical feature to all of this, however ineptly done, is that the carrot and the stick are closely joined. American Presidents praise a free, prosperous China. They speak of strategic partnerships while directing carrier battle groups in the Pacific. They talk about One China while approving arms shipments to Taiwan and hugging the Dalai Lama. They let China know that it faces no threat from the United States, but that it could.