Just as Georgia gave Bush a warm welcome earlier this year, Mongolia has opened their arms to Bush’s visit.
From the IHT:
If you are an American president in need of just a few hours of temporary political asylum – no debate about Iraq, no Chinese leaders stiff-arming the U.S. agenda, and plenty of adulation – here is the solution: Come to the endless steppes that Ghengis Khan made famous.
When Air Force One descended low over the barren but breathtaking landscape here, Mongolians had never seen anything like it. None of the previous 42 U.S. presidents had made the journey while in office.
And so Mongolians came to this decrepit capital’s central square, past the construction celebrating the spectacular victories some 800 years ago, when the Mongol empire stretched from the Yellow Sea to Baghdad, to hear George W. Bush say that today, “Mongolia and the United States are standing together as brothers in the cause of freedom.”… Mongolia recently sent its fifth rotation of troops to Iraq – there are only 160 or so at a time, but as one White House official pointed out, in a surfeit of spin, on a per capita basis that makes Mongolia the third largest contributor of troops.
In truth, there were four protesters on the streets as Bush bumped over the potholes and past the belching industrial complexes outside of Ulan Bator. Two held a sign urging him to get out of Iraq. Two others wanted him to sign the Kyoto protocol, which he termed dead in the first few months of his presidency. For the record, Mongolia signed it.
Anti-Americanism? “I haven’t heard any,” said Brett Burkhart, a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer from California who has been living in a ger – a traditional Mongolian domed tent – in a rural village. “Well, I did hear it once, but I think the guy was drunk.”
It’s nice to hear about a country that doesn’t blame its problems on the US. I’ve always wanted to visit Mongolia, and their positive attitude to the US adds to my interest in seeing the place.
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I think the second photo is begging for a Riding Sun-style caption contest. I’m fighting the urge to make a South Park reference right now…
How about “Whoa! I thought you guys were only in the credit card commercials!”
Here’s an interesting blog on Mongolia
New Mongols: Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of Mongolia
newmongols.blogspot.com
There’s a good section on Mongolia/US relations in Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, as I’m sure Curzon knows. I really had no idea we had such positive relations with them. The chapter in the book shows what one good envoy can accomplish. How easy would it be for Mongolia just to side with the Chinese and reap all sorts of easy trade and construction rewards? But because they fear China a little, and because we’ve gotten on well, they’re willing to buck regional trends and buddy up with us. Nice.
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Caught between two gobbler nations, Russia and China, Mongolia chose the only alliance that would forever support its independence — the U.S. That does not diminish at all our delight in their active support in Iraq, of course. Mongolia is such an interesting, historic region. I’m thrilled that the President is visiting them!
I can’t believe I’m running a country full of idiots. Let me spell it out for you fellow Americans.
It’s economics 101. These guys are f*ckin’ poor and defenseless as anything. It makes C-E-N-T-S to become friendly with one of the most militarily powerful and rich countries in the world. Us. Remember the Japanese during the late 1940′s, 50′s, and 60′s? How about the Koreans after the Korean war? These countries were at the bottom of the list. Poorest countries in the world.
Get friendly. Get rich. Get even. (Show them how you really feel.) That’s the game plan from the get-go, folks. The Koreans are a little more upfront about how they feel. The Japs just hate your American guts behind their polite smiles. Get a clue people and stop kidding yourselves.
Your president,
George Bush
I don’t know what the fuss is over Bush’s visit to Mongolia is. I’ll put this bluntly, Mongolia is essentially a geo-political non-entity as far as anyone is concerned and the only reason it still exists today as an autonomous state is to have a buffer between Russia and China, Period. No matter how Bush hobknobs or how many troops the Mongolians dispatch to Iraq, it won’t particularly change any of the economic or politican fundamentals of the country. Mongolia does most of it’s trade with China, it is completly landlocked, it has a miniscule population, and U.S. patronage can never be more than a paper shield. If the Chinese or Russians decide to squeeze, short of a full blown military invasion, the U.S. is too distant and Mongolia too isolated to guarantee it’s security. I know many coming anarchy readers like to think of themselves as realists, but if they were, they should realize that Mongolia will never fulfill any significant geo-political objective, its position, or rather it’s vulnerability, is far more akin to West Berlin than it ever will be to South Korea. The handclapping and self-congratulatory back patting by many about Bush’s Mongolian visit is in my opinion terribly overblown compared to the actual results if any.
a ‘west berlin’, with a much smaller population :)
i have tried to keep silent about this, but since Jing already broke the secret then i would speak.
1. US wants to give them money and feel good. why not?
2. let our mongolian friends take the greenback and
3. … spend on chinese consumer goods.
sounds like a win-win-win solution to me :) thanks kaplan, everybody is happy.
Jing: we’re well aware. To quote Kaplan from March 2004:
this shows some of ther ignorance of kaplan on mongolia:)
1) mongolians believe in lamaism. uighur terrorist have no market there. dalai might find some follower though.
2) fine, one more vote, one more international ‘participant’ in bush’s effort to conquer the world while preteningd it is int’l coalition. but i would really doubt if russia and china feel threatened, maybe if when US gets an air-base there. but what will be the excuse and how to fly your fighters in without passing China or Russia’ airspace?
3) :) that is the best point. i would add, to preserve the pristine environment, and to secure supply and quality of cashmere wool.
This shows some of your ignorance on reading a whole sentence. “Securing Mongolia’s borders” doesn’t mean “stopping the appeal of Uyghur extremists to the downtrodden in Mongolia.” Look at how Chechen extremists use Georgia’s border, or how Iraqi insurgents use the Syrian border. The Uyghur threat of terrorism loomed larger five years ago than it did today (although there are several Uyghurs still in Guantanamo), but that doesn’t change the fact that if militants did move across the border that there would be serious consequences for Mongolia’s territorial integrity from a pissed China (I’m thinking specifically of the Russia-Georgia-Chechen example here).
well….there are muslim in georgia, and definitely syria.
none in mongolia.
2 conditions needed for cross border terrorism
1. neighboring towns, so it is easy to cross
2. some sympathizers in the other end, or at least someone who is not suspicious of them
the border between mongolia and xinjiang is the Gobi desert. it is almost impossible to cross.
—
the risk of cross border terrorism is a lot higher in the CIS-stans. that explains why terrorism dropped dramatically after 2002
– getting rid of taliban, al queda root
– cooperating of the stan’s in shanghai coop.
curzon,
you can read japanese, right?
(amazing that japanese have done some of the best research in china…)
look at the pop table in “this site”:http://home.m01.itscom.net/shimizu/yultuz/guide/information/xinjiang/population.htm
and this map
!http://home.m01.itscom.net/shimizu/yultuz/guide/information/xinjiang/map_population.gif!
the 3 bordering counties are Altai, Changji and Hami
dominated by Kazakh, Han and Han respectively
Uighur population %? 1.7%, 4%, 18%
in Hami (where Uighur has 18%), it is no man’s land in the border with Mongolia — the Batanjilin Desert.
Kaplan could have spent 5 minutes doing such desk research.
this further shows that mongolia borders kazakh, not uighur popoluation in China
!http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/IMG/arton8604.jpg!
fine, one more vote, one more international “Ëœparticipant’ in bush’s effort to conquer the world while preteningd it is int’l coalition. but i would really doubt if russia and china feel threatened, maybe if when US gets an air-base there. but what will be the excuse and how to fly your
Maybe I’m naive, but I think the US-Mongolia one is merely, from the US side, about protecting a democratic country from being swallowed up by less democratic neighbors, especially China, without much consideration for strategic value. Maybe there is some element of wanting to keep China hemmed in, but I wouldn’t expect USFM to start having major bases anytime soon.
It reminds me of Bush41 putting four hundred (?) troops on the ground in Macedonia (the Yugolsav one) as ethnic Serbs, with the help of Serbia itself, were trying to take back the former Yugoslave republics that had declared independence. Bush said something like, “We consider an attack on Macedonia to be an attack on the United States,” and that was that. No air bases, just a promise to defend Macedonia if its big, bad neighbor tried to take over. And it worked.
Mongolia fine. In fact, it helped them to negotiate for a better deal with China (and potentially Russia as well).
But India and Japan not. See this NYT editorial, NYT is getting more sense after getting rid of Judith Miller.
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bq. A Cold War China Policy; [Editorial]
New York Times. Nov 19, 2005. pg. A.26
President Bush probably won’t mention the word ”containment” when he visits China this weekend. But his hosts can surely be excused for wondering whether his administration is now trying to revive that cold war anti-Soviet strategy and apply it to the very different circumstances of today’s complex relationship between Washington and Beijing.
China’s headlong economic advance presents real challenges to American policy makers, like potentially destabilizing trade and currency imbalances and a growing competition for scarce global energy supplies. But China poses no obvious military threat to the United States at this time. In the one area of potential future conflict, Taiwan, tensions have notably eased in recent months.
Yet for the past few months, the Bush administration has been going out of its way to build up its military ties with countries surrounding China. India and Japan are the two most troubling examples. Washington has pressed ahead with an ill-advised initiative to share civilian nuclear technology with India, despite that country’s refusal to abide by the restrictions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. And it has actively encouraged an already worrisomely nationalist Japanese government to shed postwar restraints on its military and embrace more ambitious regional security goals. Washington has also taken steps to strengthen military cooperation with Vietnam and Indonesia. Mr. Bush’s stopover in Mongolia on Monday will likewise be aimed at cementing a new security partnership.
The risk is that this neo-containment policy could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading China to start throwing its own military and economic weight around to break out of the containment trap.
Asia’s great challenge at the start of the 21st century is to find ways to adjust to an economically stronger China without falling into the destructive military rivalries of the past. That, not a new version of containment, should be the central concern right now for the United States, and for Japan and India as well.
Agreed, and that is the central concern of those states (at least Japan and the United States) right now. The United States and Japan (to the degree America would let her) could easily throw China into a recession whenever they want. That both instead wish for a rich China.
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