influence had remained limited until ‘11 September’, the neocons did receive a new
boost with George W. Bush’s election victory in 2000 (Muravchik
2003; Halper and
Clarke 2004). Despite the new administration’s initial qualms about the neoconservative
agenda of ‘nation-building’, Bush himself acknowledged that his administration
‘borrowed’ 20 of the AEI’s best people for state service in America’s hour of need
(Parmar 2005: 12). Or to take the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission (USCC) for example, among its first twelve commissioners appointed by
Congress in early 2001, no fewer than four (Michael A. Ledeen, Roger W. Robinson,
Jr., Arthur Waldron, and Larry M. Wortzel) came from the largely neoconservative
think tanks such as the AEI and the Center for Security Policy.
The influence of the neocons made further inroads into U.S. China policy making in the
wake of the ‘spy plane’ incident of April 2001. Robert Kagan and William Kristol,
editors of the neoconservative mouthpiece Weekly Standard, quickly seized on the
midair collision between a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane and a Chinese jet fighter
off China’s coast. They urged the new Bush administration to at once sell more
advanced weapons to Taiwan and actively contain China. ‘Not only is the sale of Aegis
[to Taiwan]… the only appropriate response to Chinese behavior’, they wrote. ‘We have
been calling for the active containment of China for the past six years precisely because
we think it is the only way to keep the peace’ (Kagan and Kristol 2001: 11). While
falling short of following their advice word for word, Bush nevertheless approved the
biggest arms package for Taiwan in a decade. Indeed, the package is so big that as of
the writing the Taiwan legislature still finds it difficult to justify its passage. Meanwhile,
in a marked departure from America’s longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity, Bush
announced shortly after the incident that the U.S. would do ‘whatever it takes’ to help
Taiwan defend itself (Wallace 2001). As Benjamin Schwarz (2005: 27) points out,
when George W. Bush came to office, his administration’s dominant national-security
issue ‘was not terrorism or even Iraq but China’. Indeed, Bush and his national security
team had concentrated so single-mindedly on Beijing that, as journalist Bob Woodward
(2002: 25, 39) observed, when New York and Washington were struck by terrorists,
their major concern was not with Osama bin Laden, nor did the White House and the
Pentagon appear to have off-the-shelf plans for attacking al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Thus,
in the lead up to the terrorist attacks of ‘11 September’, numerous signs suggested that
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Convention