WASHINGTON — America’s top military official, Admiral Mike Mullen, returns from China this week after a series of intensive talks. The visit—the first by a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in four years—ought to signify a continued warming in the on-again, off-again military relationship between the world’s sole superpower and Asia’s largest rising power. Yet it did little to reduce U.S. mistrust of China. Some observers might point to specific areas of contention, such as friction over Taiwan and the status of the South China Sea, as sources of enduring U.S. anxiety. But the underlying cause is China’s system of one-party rule.

An autocracy’s rise inevitably and predictably sows mistrust. Without an independent media capable of extracting information from government authorities, a credibility gap exists between stated objectives and actual intentions, which remain opaque. Moreover, autocracy limits opportunities to influence a rising power’s strategic behavior. Pervasive secrecy hinders outsiders from identifying and bolstering moderates among top-level decision-makers. With business and civil society groups relegated to the sidelines of foreign policy and interactions with external powers regulated, there are inherent limits to engaging domestic actors inside an authoritarian state.

Conversely, a democratic government functions as a source of reassurance as a new power rises. Democracy clarifies intentions: a free press guarantees that information about a state’s ambitions cannot remain secret for long. In addition, the combination of transparent governance and decentralized authority creates opportunities for outsiders to shape a rising power’s trajectory. Other states can locate and freely engage domestic actors who might influence the foreign policy of the ascendant state. Thus, democratic government mitigates the mistrust a new power’s rise would otherwise generate.

The transatlantic world can look to its own history for affirmation that regime type matters as nations rise and fall. At the turn of the twentieth century, Great Britain, then the transatlantic world’s dominant power, entered a period of relative decline as the United States and Germany burst onto the global scene. Although both of these emerging giants challenged Great Britain on diverse fronts, the level of mistrust they generated sharply differed.

Democratic government illuminated American intentions and enabled Great Britain to shape U.S. foreign policy from within by cultivating influential friends in the executive branch, Congress, and the business community. As the United States rose to power, the British anticipated their eclipse with relative equanimity.

Autocratic Germany, however, elicited a different reaction from Great Britain. With foreign policy determined behind closed doors by the Kaiser and his advisors, Germany’s naval buildup triggered an outpouring of British mistrust. The result was a maritime rivalry and, eventually, war.

The current leadership in Beijing would like to believe that past is not prologue; they hope that unlike other autocracies, China can rise and reassure. This is wishful thinking. Economic interdependence and references to “peaceful development” and “harmonious society” have failed to curb growing concerns about China’s intentions in Washington and Asian capitals. Europe, too, has begun to express new reservations about the direction of China’s rise.

Beijing needs to recognize that a lack of domestic political reform is becoming a strategic liability. Widespread mistrust of China’s ambitions will handicap its ability to take a leadership role in the international community. Put bluntly, there is no substitute for evidence of greater transparency and liberalism at home. Chinese leaders are right to argue that democracy overnight would prove vastly destabilizing, but gradually embracing rule of law and participatory government would reduce mistrust, while enabling China to address some of its internal problems more effectively.

For its part, Washington should keep in mind the limits of conventional confidence-building efforts. Military exchanges such as Admiral Mullen’s visit have an important purpose. They put in place a network of relationships that could prove important to successfully deescalating a military confrontation between Washington and Beijing. They will not, however, dispel the mistrust that overhangs the U.S.-China relationship.

While continuing to engage China militarily, the United States should emphasize that real reassurance requires domestic political reform at home. America’s partners in Europe should echo this message in their human rights dialogues with China. The West cannot force China to democratize, but working in concert, the United States and Europe can inform Beijing’s internal debates about political liberalization and thereby support gradual reform. Although periods of flux in the hierarchy of nations often end in war, China’s ascendance is not destined to culminate in conflict. The only way for China to rise and reassure, however, is to institute gradual political reforms at home.

Daniel M. Kliman is a Transatlantic Fellow for Asia at the German Marshal Fund of the United States.

Picture by Burns

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WASHINGTON – Al Qaeda’s attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, precipitated an unprecedented level of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. With Afghanistan beset by a resurgent Taliban, and Pakistan increasingly unstable, the United States subsequently doubled down in this troubled region even as the Asia-Pacific became the locus of global economic growth and great-power military competition. Although U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan for years to come, bin Laden’s death heralds the beginning of the end of America’s “Af-Pak” fixation. Increasingly, the United States will look eastward; Europe should as well.

Many forget that, pre-September 11, America’s strategic focus was gravitating toward Asia. Coming into office, President George W. Bush was determined to rethink how the United States managed China’s rise, a development that posed a long-term challenge to American economic and military primacy. This determination was reinforced when a Chinese fighter jet rammed a U.S. spy plane in April 2001, resulting in a short-lived crisis. However, the terrorist attacks orchestrated by al Qaeda redirected the Bush administration toward Afghanistan and the larger Muslim world. Although America remained active in the Asia-Pacific throughout President Bush’s tenure, the primary focus of U.S. strategy lay elsewhere.

Like his predecessor, President Barack Obama entered the White House intending to prioritize the Asia-Pacific. Again, events intervened. To prevent the Taliban from solidifying control over large parts of Afghanistan, Obama authorized a surge of U.S. troops there and ratcheted up armed drone attacks against terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. Yet his commitment to reorienting the United States toward Asia appears to have never wavered. Prior to bin Laden’s death, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon told The New Yorker that the United States was “overweighted” in the Middle East and Afghanistan and “underweighted” in the Asia-Pacific.

The death of bin Laden in a shootout with U.S. special forces does not presage an imminent pullout from Afghanistan or a rapid drawdown in American assistance to Pakistan. The United States has committed itself to a “responsible transition” in Afghanistan and will retain a considerable military presence there in the years ahead. Terrorist networks that have metastasized within Pakistan over the past decade and now threaten the integrity of the state will not disband because of bin Laden’s demise. Even if elements of the Pakistani government were complicit in hiding the leader of al Qaeda, the United States cannot risk lightly the collapse of a nuclear-armed state by cutting off foreign aid.

At the same time, the completion of America’s original mission in Afghanistan that bin Laden’s death symbolizes will allow for a strategy that increasingly reflects the Asia-Pacific geography of U.S. interests. This shift will not occur overnight. For the moment, the revolutions rocking the Arab world will absorb U.S. attention. Nor will this shift automatically substitute China for al Qaeda as America’s animating enemy, a development some in China may fear. In fact, the outlines of a U.S. reorientation toward Asia are already clear. The United States will strengthen existing alliances and strategic partnerships, forge new ones, and link likeminded nations together. To reinforce its military presence in the region, the United States will retain permanent bases, negotiate agreements for temporary access to facilities, and deploy more of its naval and air forces to the Indo-Pacific rim stretching from Japan and South Korea to Southeast Asia and the approaches to India. At the same time, the United States will pursue a reinvigorated trade agenda anchored by the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks that seek to lay the foundation for a free trade area spanning the Pacific Ocean. Lastly, Washington will continue to champion democracy and rule of law as universal norms that all countries in the region should embrace.

U.S. rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific will have significant repercussions for Europe. Over the past decade, Afghanistan has become a central theater for transatlantic security cooperation. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization will continue to operate in Afghanistan, but, in the future, the United States will increasingly look to Europe as a partner in Asia. Yet transatlantic cooperation in this region remains weak, and many in Europe continue to regard Asia primarily as a market rather than as the cockpit of international politics in the 21st century. This should change. Europe should anticipate America’s eastward shift and begin to define a role in the Asia-Pacific that transcends trade.

During the second half of the 20^th century, the United States and Europe, acting in concert, transformed what was then the world’s most important region—the North Atlantic. If Europe can join the United States and refocus on the Asia-Pacific, the transatlantic partners can shape this century’s most vital region as well.

Daniel M. Kliman is a Transatlantic Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

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WASHINGTON—Bronislaw Komorowski’s victory in last Sunday’s presidential elections in Poland gives the Warsaw government a rare window of opportunity to advance a packed domestic reform and foreign policy agenda. With a fellow member of the centrist Civic Platform as the head of state, Prime Minister Donald Tusk can finally move to act, without the daily obstructions and veto-threats emanating from the office of the late President Lech Kaczynski. But both will have to fight to keep their victory.

Komorowski won—after a nail-biting election night, and initial exit polls that gave his opponent Jaroslaw Kaczynski of the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) a clear lead—by a mere six percent, a significant drop from a commanding advantage earlier this spring. Everything changed on April 10, the day a government plane crashed in Smolensk, taking the lives of much of Poland’s leadership, including then head of state Lech Kaczynski. After much deliberation, Jaroslaw, the late President’s twin brother, decided to run for PiS. Shrewdly, he discarded his penchant for divisive policies, and recast himself as a moderate, even on sensitive questions such as Poland’s Communist past. The strategy clearly worked: Kaczynski got an unexpected 47 percent of the vote. This success may well encourage the PiS leadership to continue their political shift from the far right to the center. This could turn them into a formidable opponent in this fall’s local elections, and even more importantly, in the October 2011 parliamentary elections. Some observers even argue that Kaczynski’s narrow defeat buys him time to consolidate the PiS’s position as well as his own.

All this puts considerable pressure on the winners of the election, President-elect Komorowski and Prime Minister Tusk. The challenges of reform are indeed enormous: despite the fact that Poland’s conservative fiscal policies (including a constitutional debt brake) have largely sheltered it from the otherwise devastating impact of the global economic crisis in Eastern Europe, its budget deficit stands at 7 percent, and public debt is nearing the ceiling (55 percent of GDP) which, if breached, would trigger unpleasant spending cuts. Experts are also calling for health care and pension reforms, as well as a more general overhaul of public finances: all likely to be unpopular steps in a country that feels it has already paid a high price for austerity.

On the foreign policy front, Komorowski’s election largely signals continuity—albeit without the nuisance factor. The squabbles between the Prime Minister and the former President ranged from disagreements over ambassadorial appointments or over who would represent Poland at international summit meetings to running a parallel foreign policy through the National Security Council.

One of Mr. Komorowski’s first state visits will take him to Brussels; Poland will hold the EU Presidency in the second half of 2011. However, his main foreign policy focus will be on bilateral relations: in particular, on building better bilateral ties with Russia and Germany. One of the key topics with Berlin will be the disputed status of the large Polish diaspora in Germany (estimated at between one and two million). As for Moscow, Komorowski’s main objective will be to cajole the Russian government into continuing its current constructive stance towards Poland.

On transatlantic relations, Komorowski’s record is one of friendly pragmatism. The President knows and likes the United States; his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama immediately invited him to visit. Nonetheless, there is one highly sensitive issue: the withdrawal of Polish troops from Afghanistan—a mission deeply unpopular at home. During a visit to Afghanistan in June, Komorowski said his country’s soldiers should leave by 2012; the U.S. position is that troop drawdown should begin in 2011. Careful handling and coordination with American and European allies, not least ahead of the Lisbon NATO summit, will be critical.

Bronislaw Komorowski’s greatest challenge, however, will be to become the supreme representative of all Poles, a role all his post-Communist predecessors have struggled to assume. That will mean bridging deep-seated divisions within society–reflected in the presidential poll—and standing above party politics, as the Polish Constitution demands.

One final fact will certainly help Prime Minister Tusk and President Komorowski focus on their tasks: since 1989, no Polish government has managed to win reelection. They have just over a year to break with that tradition.

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