By Natalie Sambhi & Nicole Yeo
China’s participation in RIMPAC is a good start. Now, the goal must be to sustain and expand security cooperation.
With the 2014 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise now underway, commentators have once again begun to question the usefulness of the U.S. and its allies and partners engaging China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) at all, given the America’s legal limitations (PDF) on the level of interaction that is allowed between its armed services and the PLA and the generally limited scope of such exercises.
Such skepticism needs to be framed in the context of what the goals of security cooperation with China are. In its latest annual report (PDF) to Congress on military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. Department of Defense placed strong emphasis on “building a military-to-military relationship with China that is sustained and substantive.” The report highlighted the importance of using military-to-military ties with China as a way to “encourage China to contribute constructively to efforts with the United States, [America's] allies and partners, and the greater international community to maintain peace and stability.”
Contrary to the view that international military exercises, particularly with China, are meaningful in name only, there are long-term benefits to such engagements that can only be gained through a sustained commitment to slowly building up personal relationships and communication channels with the PLA. Furthermore, security cooperation can encompass paramilitary or constabulary-level cooperation and does not always have to come in the form of large-scale RIMPAC-style interactions. It is important for commentators to calibrate their expectations of individual exercises and for policymakers to sustain their efforts at fostering broader and deeper security cooperation. While deepening security ties could involve consistent repetition of existing exercises to reinforce their place in institutional culture, broadening the scope of such interaction (while still working with the United States’ NDAA FY 2000 constraints) requires some creative thinking. Here are three alternative approaches for engaging the PLA that the United States and its regional allies and partners should consider:
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