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O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
Biden’s sanctions against Russia are a double-edged sword
Fareed Zakaria
The Washington Post, May 12, 2022
The Biden administration deserves huge credit for the tough economic sanctions it has been able to impose on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. As Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan note in a March essay, they “are the most comprehensive imposed against a major power since the Second World War.” On a “punishment scale of 1 to 10” — the two authors give the sanctions a ranking of at least an 8.
But the unprecedented nature of these measures is producing concerns around the world that the United States has “weaponized” its financial power and could lead, over time, to the decline of the dollar’s dominance, which is what gives America its financial superpowers in the first place.
I’ve been hearing about this firsthand from three sources I trust. The first, in New Delhi, recently told me about a conversation that took place at the highest levels of India’s government. The topic: how to make sure that the United States could never do to India what it has just done to Russia. The second, from Brussels, where staff at the European Commission has been tasked — even while working with Washington on the sanctions — with finding ways to reduce the role of the dollar in its energy imports. The third, an Asian observer of China, speculated that the overly severe lockdowns in Shanghai — which involved the rationing of food and basic supplies — might be part of an effort by Beijing to experiment with a scenario in which it faced economic sanctions from Washington (perhaps after an invasion of Taiwan).
A debate is raging around the world about whether the dollar’s total dominance of the international financial system is waning. Even Goldman Sachsand the IMFhave warned that that might well happen. I tend toward the opposite view: Namely, that you can only beat the dollar if you have an effective alternative, which so far does not exist.
But it’s clear that many countries — from hostile powers such as Chinaand Russia to friendly nations such as India and Brazil— are working hard on ways to reduce their vulnerability to Washington’s whims. None of these efforts has so far gained much traction, though it is worth noting that the share of global foreign exchange reserves held in dollars has declined from 72 percentto 59 percentover the past two decades.
Partly this is because the United States appears less stable and predictable in the use of its extraordinary privilege. In the two decades preceding Russia’s invasion, Washington massively ramped up sanctions for all kinds of reasons — by more than 900 percent. Many of these measures were overreactions and should be rolled back. After 9/11, Washington put in place highly intrusive measuresaimed at tracking money going to terrorists. It has inflicted harsh punishments on banks that did not adhere to all U.S. sanctions. It has imposed sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cubaand other countries often simply to satisfy domestic critics who wanted to “do something” without paying much of a price. This type of economic warfare has failed to change the regimes in these countries but has caused widespread misery for ordinary people in them. Sanctions against Russia are aimed at policy change, not regime change, and therefore could be more effective.
Economic sanctions increased sharply during the Trump administration, which unilaterally withdrewfrom the Iran nuclear deal and then threatenedto impose sanctionson any firms that traded with Iran — even though Tehran had adhered to the agreement, which took place under a U.N. framework. And then there are the fines pursued domestically by American regulators and judges, such as the almost $9 billion penalty against the French bank BNP Paribasin 2014. Again, such measures work only because of the power of the dollar.
I support the sanctions against Russia, but President Biden needs to make a speech explaining them. He needs to make clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks the most serious assault on the rules-based international system in decades. If it succeeds, it could tear that system apart. That is why Washington has worked with its allies to impose these extraordinary measures. The president needs to detail the legal basis for the actions taken by the United States and its allies.
How exactly can governments seize privately owned propertyfor which the owner, even if he is a Russian oligarch, has clear legal title? How can people be sure these powers will not be abused? Biden needs to emphasize that the United States will only take such measures in the future when there are blatant violations of international law, on the scale of Russia’s actions.
The dollar maintains its crucial role in the international system because the United States has the world’s largest economy. It also has the most liquid debt markets, its currency floats freely, and, crucially, it is regarded as a country based on the rule of law and not one prone to arbitrary and unilateral actions. That last criterion is not one that Washington has lived up to in recent years. Biden should make sure that, in fighting this battle against Russia, he does not erode America’s unique financial superpower.
Quando a Rússia invadiu a Ucrânia, inúmeros comentaristas acreditaram que ao menos uma coisa boa decorreria dessa nuvem de catástrofe. O ataque de Vladimir Putin contra a ordem liberal, esperavam eles, exporia e deslegitimaria forças iliberais populistas que têm surgido há anos.
Um deles especulou que a guerra na Ucrânia poria fim à era do populismo. Outro, o acadêmico Francis Fukuyama, considerou o episódio uma oportunidade para as pessoas finalmente rejeitarem o nacionalismo de direita. Contudo, passadas seis semanas do início deste conflito, tais noções parecem ilusões otimistas.
ELEIÇÕES. Na Europa, duas eleições cruciais – na Hungria e na França – revelam a verdade. Até poucos dias atrás, era possível sugerir, como o fez um artigo da Atlantic, que a guerra na Ucrânia estava “agitando a política europeia” ao expor registros iliberais e próPutin da líder francesa de extrema direita Marine Le Pen e do primeiro-ministro da Hungria, Viktor Orbán.
Esses especialistas foram citados afirmando que Orbán “estava tentando desesperadamente reformular os acontecimentos da guerra” e prevendo que os franceses veriam o presidente, Emmanuel Macron, neste momento, “provavelmente como a única pessoa capaz de liderá-los através desta crise”.
Na realidade, Orbán acaba de ser reeleito – e para o quarto mandato consecutivo – por uma margem conveniente, com sua coalizão obtendo cerca de 53% dos votos e os opositores, aproximadamente 34%. No mesmo dia, eleitores da Sérvia reelegeram um presidente populista, convictamente próPutin, que venceu de lavada.
LE PEN. Na França, onde o primeiro turno da eleição presidencial ocorre amanhã, pesquisas sugerem que a liderança de Macron tem evaporado e Le Pen cresceu significativamente. Conforme afirmou a manchete do New York Times: “Mesmo antes de a França votar, a direita francesa é a grande vencedora”. Na Europa, pelo menos, o populismo de direita continua a prosperar.
Isso não significa que as ações da Rússia na Ucrânia sejam populares, mas elas não dominam a visão de mundo das pessoas. As reputações de políticos pró-putin não sofreram com a guerra da maneira que muitos esperavam.
Frustrado com o líder húngaro se aconchegando com Putin, Volodmir Zelenski apostou num ataque direto a Orbán, afirmando que ele é “virtualmente o único na Europa a apoiar Putin abertamente”. Isso não funcionou.
Nos EUA, é possível observar forças similares em ação, apesar de não serem tão fortes. Nas primeiras semanas da guerra, o Partido Republicano parecia ter revertido sua histórica belicosidade em política externa. Muitos republicanos da velha-guarda são veementemente anti-putin e próUcrânia.
Mas essa posição não descreve as opiniões do homem que continua sendo o líder mais popular do partido: Donald Trump, que tem elogiado Putin desde o início da invasão. O âncora mais graduado da Fox News, Tucker Carlson, que mais de dois anos atrás declarou que estava do lado da Rússia em sua batalha contra a Ucrânia, passou recentemente a repetir propaganda russa a respeito da existência de supostos laboratórios de armas biológicas na Ucrânia.
VANTAGENS. Vale notar alguns matizes. Orbán manipulou a democracia da Hungria de maneiras que lhe proveram vantagens estruturais. Em 2010, ele se movimentou para conceder cidadania a 2,4 milhões de húngaros étnicos que viviam no exterior e se retratou como o único defensor de seus direitos, o que lhe garantiu amplo apoio desses novos eleitores. Ele esmagou quase todos os meios de comunicação independentes.
O governo húngaro promove a imagem de Orbán, distribuindo pôsteres financiados com dinheiro público. Esse tipo de prática levou a Freedom House a classificar a Hungria como o único país da Europa que é “parcialmente livre”.
POPULISMO. Mesmo assim, o populismo de direita é genuinamente popular na Hungria e em outros países. Ainda que Le Pen tenha tirado vantagem da inflação em alta, culpando o governo de Macron por todo e qualquer aumento de preços, o magnetismo fundamental dela emana de seu estridente nacionalismo cultural. Orbán, Le Pen e outras personalidades da direita vociferam constantemente contra imigrantes, multiculturalismo e “lacração”, a nova palavra que aflora na França.
Ao mesmo tempo, esses líderes deixam de lado a economia de livre mercado da velha direita. Le Pen criticou muitas das reformas neoliberais de Macron e abraçou antigas políticas estatizantes da esquerda, como jornada de trabalho de 35 horas e aposentadoria antecipada. Ela especulou publicamente que poderia trazer membros da esquerda que concordem com suas ideias a respeito de protecionismo e política industrial. Orbán tem praticado há muito tempo um tipo de populismo estatizante que distribui generosos subsídios estatais para grupos que seu partido favorece.
Na França, Marine Le Pen, de extrema direita, subiu nas pesquisas às vésperas das eleições
ULTRAJES. Nos EUA, Carlson gasta pouco tempo com a guerra na Ucrânia, preferindo em vez disso colocar o foco de seu programa num cardápio diário de ultrajes contra políticas lacradoras e a cultura do cancelamento. Republicanos proeminentes, como o governador da Flórida, Ron Desantis, fazem o mesmo. Se você ouvisse a direita americana, você acreditaria que os temas mais prementes do mundo atual são diretorias de escolas que doutrinam crianças com ideias de fluidez de gênero.
É verdade que essas ideias atraem apenas parte do eleitorado – especialmente os eleitores mais velhos, mais rurais e menos educados. Mas já deveria estar claro que esses eleitores são numerosos o suficiente e apaixonados o suficiente para vencer eleições – nos dois lados do Atlântico.
Dois artigos e uma resenha que vale por um artigo, para tentar penetrar nos meandros de um novo cenário estratégico ainda em definição.
The Atlantic Council, Washington DC - 10.3.2021
Who is going to organize the world? And what forces and whose interests will shape the global future?
That’s what is at stake in the Biden-Xi contest
Frederick Kempe
Those were the underlying questions behind two events this past week, one in Washington and the other in Beijing, that set the stage for the geopolitical contest of our times.
The Washington piece was President Joe Biden’s release of the “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” which is unprecedented at this stage in a new administration.Biden’s purpose was to provide early clarity about how he intends to set and execute priorities in a fast-changing world.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out the thinking behind the guidance in his first major speech since entering office. It was a compelling one, underscoring the urgent need to shore up US democracy and revitalize America’s alliances and partnerships.
“Whether we like it or not, the world does not organize itself,” Blinken said. “When the U.S. pulls back, one of two things is likely to happen: either another country tries to take our place, but not in a way that advances our interests and values; or, maybe just as bad, no one steps up, and then we get chaos and all the dangers it creates. Either way, that’s not good for America.”
Relations with China, which Blinken called “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century,” are the wrench in this organizational thinking.
Said Blinken: “China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system—all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.”
Biden’s biggest departure from former President Donald Trump’s approach to China is his emphasis on working with partners and allies. This week’s move by the United States and European Union to ease trade tensions, suspending a long list of tariffs related to the Airbus-Boeing dispute over government subsidies, underscores Biden’s seriousness of purpose.
China’s take on organizing the world
Unsurprisingly, Beijing is offering up a different view of the future around the second key event this past week: China’s National People’s Congress that convened Friday and will continue this coming week.
Chinese President Xi Jinping sees momentum building for Beijing in a world where “the East is rising, and the West is declining.” His argument was that China offers order, in contrast to the United States’ chaos, and effective governance, in contrast to Washington’s ineffectiveness, demonstrated by how much better it has handled the pathogen it unleashed.
Xi’s most comprehensive swipe at how China would organize the world came in late January at this year’s virtually convened World Economic Forum. The speech’s title underscored its all-embracing ambition: “Let the Torch of Multilateralism Light up Humanity’s Way Forward.”
If Biden’s vision is for the United States to create a band of reinvigorated democratic sisters and brothers, inspired by the country’s revitalization, Xi’s vision is for a world where each country’s political system, culture, and society are its own business.
In this world, America’s value judgments are passé.
The subtext for Xi is simple: How countries organize themselves internally, along with whatever authoritarian strictures and human rights violations they include—whether against the Uighur minority in Xinjiang, democracy activists in Hong Kong, or perhaps even ultimately Taiwan’s independence—just is not Washington’s business.
“Each country is unique with its own history, culture and social system, and none is superior to the other,” Xi told the virtual Davos crowd. “The best criteria are whether a country’s history, culture and social system fit its particular situation, enjoy people’s support, serve to deliver political stability …” Xi made clear this approach is meant to “avoid meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.”
By contrast, in a letter that accompanied the strategic guidance this week, President Biden wrote, “I firmly believe that democracy holds the key to freedom, prosperity, peace, and dignity… We must prove that our model isn’t a relic of history; it’s the single best way to realize the promise of our future. And if we work together with our democratic partners, with strength and confidence, we will meet every challenge and outpace every challenger.”
As democracy weakens globally, the world’s democracies must act
The context for these competing visions was this week’s release of Freedom House’s annual survey that said, “less than 20 percent of the world’s population now lives in a Free country, the smallest proportion since 1995.”
In the study, called “Democracy under Siege,” Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz wrote, “as a lethal pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, and violent conflict ravaged the world in 2020, democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny.”
It was the fifteenth successive year in which countries with declines in political rights and civil liberties outnumbered those with gains. The report said that nearly 75 percent of the world’s population lived in a country that faced a deterioration of democratic freedoms last year.
It may seem that this is absolutely the wrong time to expect the world’s democracies to rally to shape the global order. Yet just the opposite is true: At a time when democracy is being tested across the world, there’s no better time to work together to address these challenges and ensure that the global gains in freedom over the past seventy-five years don’t continue to erode.
Chastened by the global situation, the Biden administration knows its work must begin at home. Blinken also was modest in how the United States would go about advancing democracy.
“We will use the power of our example,” he said. “We will encourage others to make key reforms, overturn bad laws, fight corruption, and stop unjust practices. We will incentivize democratic behavior.”
What the United States won’t do is promote democracy “through costly military interventions,” said Blinken, “or by attempting to overthrow authoritarian regimes by force. We have tried these tactics in the past. However well intentioned, they haven’t worked.”
In the end, the world is not going to be organized either by Chinese or American fiat, but rather by a concert of national interests influenced by the trajectory of the world’s two leading powers.
Xi’s bet is that China’s momentum is unstoppable, that the world is sufficiently transactional, and that his economy has become indispensable to most US allies. Biden must not only shift that narrative but also work in common cause to reverse the reality of democratic weakening.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council.
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Financial Times, Londres – 11,3,2021
The decline of democracy is not America’s responsibility
The spread of freedom after the cold war was the exception to the autocratic norm
Janan Ganesh
Were it not for Israel, a rash motorist could drive from Russia’s north-eastern, Alaska-facing tip to the south-western point of Angola without passing through a “free” or even “partly free” country.That daunting map alone earns Democracy Under Siege, a report by the Freedom House watchdog, its lurid title.
The authors then lather on the sombre details. In no year since 2005 have more countries improved their democratic institutions than weakened them. Recent malefactors include the strongest nation (the US) and the second most populous (India). China, the potential master of the century, scores nine out of 100 for overall freedom.
Methodological snags abound here. Should “punitive” immigration tactics bring down the US score? And what’s all this about “exacerbated income inequality” in a civic review? Still, to the extent that values are quantifiable, the liberal style of government is in well-charted decline. The US and the wider west have just one consolation. Most of the crisis is not their fault. It follows that its alleviation is a task beyond them.
There is nothing strange, or even new, about unfreedom. It was the democratic boom after the cold war that constitutes the historic aberration. Countries with little or no experience of free institutions trialled them at last. While the subsequent backsliding is tragic, it takes a special kind of innocence to feel much shock. If there is a “democratic recession”, it began from a unique, never-sustainable high. Like most recessions, it has not undone all the gains of the prior expansion. If anything, the real news is how tenaciously democracy has stuck in much of ex-communist Europe and South America. There, despite qualms about Brazil, only Venezuela is “not free”.
Tellingly, the world’s de-liberalisation goes on regardless of what the US does. If the process began in 2006, then what Freedom House calls the “eclipse of US leadership” under Donald Trump cannot bear the explanatory weight. Presidents over the period include a warlike democracy-spreader (George W Bush), an orthodox liberal (Barack Obama) and, in Trump himself, an amoral nationalist. Whether America was using righteous force, upholding the global order or flattering strongmen, the life signs of democracy did not flicker in response. At some point, Washington may have to entertain the possibility that other countries possess free will.The state of the world is not the sum of US foreign policies, whether brutish, well-meaning or brutishly well-meaning.
It is hard to know which political party needs the lesson more. Among Democrats, the delusion is that Trump, either directly or through neglect, had much to do with the world’s democratic malaise (beyond advancing it at home). On the martial right, the belief in cause-and-effect foreign policy extends to the stunningly persistent notion that America “lost” China to communism in 1949.
For all its blandness, the alternative view feels almost subversive to put forward. That is, democracy need not be the teleological destiny of all countries.Means of stoking it from outside are often reckless (war) or patchily effective (sanctions). And if the west could not entrench freedom as the global standard when it was ascendant, it is hardly likely to as the balance of world power tilts increasingly eastward.
It is not even as if leadership through example achieves much. There is a line doing the rounds that President Joe Biden can help democracy abroad by securing it at home. It is a sweet thought, one that allows for a measure of idealism without the violent fiascos of Iraq and Libya. It also feels intuitively true.
The trouble is squaring the theory with the facts. American democracy was plainly healthier in 1971 than it is in 2021. But the number of democracies elsewhere was much lower. Through the 1960s, as the US enfranchised millions of black voters, a watching world “should” have been inspired. Instead, autocracies proliferated. Even if we allow for a lag, and squint really hard, it is hard to spot a correlation, much less a causal link, between the internal life of the US and the fate of freedom on earth. The reason to shore up democracy at home is that it is an innate good. That it makes the slightest difference abroad has become one of those tenets that survive only with repetition.
The universal franchise is just a century or so old. Republics as established as India and America knew the Emergency and Jim Crow before their more recent lapses. Aged 39, I predate several democracies in Europe. When the liberal system is not under siege, that is news. Despair at its decline is only natural. Amazement at its survival is more fitting.
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The New York Times – 9.3.2021
Books
How the Dead Hand of Imperialism Continues to Influence World Politics
Fareed Zakaria
THE SHADOWS OF EMPIRE
How Imperial History Shapes Our World
By Samir Puri
We are all in the throes of a hangover, Samir Puri writes, a “great imperial hangover.” He explains in “The Shadows of Empire” that we are living in the “first empire-free millennium” in history and yet the legacy of these empires still powerfully shapes our times. He is aware of the notion of informal empires but makes a strong case that there was something distinct and notable about formal empires, which existed from the days of the oldest human civilizations until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. This juxtaposition — imperial legacies in a postimperial world — is an intriguing idea that proves a clever prism through which to look at the world. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Britain’s exit from the European Union and the breakdowns in Iraq and Syria all have deep roots in an imperial past that still casts shadows on the present.
Once you start to think along these lines, you see the shadows of empires everywhere. The day I began the book, I had been reading about a topic that Puri does not discuss but is one more example of his thesis: the roiling debate about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of artifacts that were, over the centuries, taken from across the globe and now sit proudly in the great museums of the West. In recent history, because of the reach of Western power, most countries have either acted as imperialists or found themselves subjugated, and in both cases their national identity was profoundly shaped by the experience. Even the United States has been deeply affected by imperialism, Puri says, arguing that American slavery was an idea imported from Europe’s empires and was “the ultimate manifestation of colonization, not of land but people.” In fact, the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes has described the historical circumstance of African-Americans as “a colony within a nation.”
Puri, an expert on armed conflict who has worked in the British Foreign Office, makes the case that Britain’s two pivotal decisions of the last several decades — joining the United States in the Iraq war and Brexit — were both crucially conditioned by the country’s imperial hangover. Once the world’s greatest imperial power, Britain clung to the idea that it had the military strength, the diplomatic skill and above all the ambition to shape far-flung parts of the globe. In addition, modern-day Iraq was a British creation, cobbled together in 1920 out of three provinces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. London could once again decide Baghdad’s fate.
Brexit was animated by a view that Britain was not a country defined by its proximity to Europe. In fact, what had often characterized British nationalism was its separation from the Continent. (In Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” John of Gaunt gives voice to a deep-rooted English nationalism when he describes the island nation as “this precious stone set in the silver sea / Which serves it in the office of a wall / Or as a moat defensive to a house, / Against the envy of less happier lands.”)The leading Brexiteers, including now-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, often spoke about a “global Britain,” continuing its historical mission around the world, forging closer ties in particular with its old colonies and dominions from Canada to India to Australia.
The Russian case is in some ways even easier to make. Puri points out that “the evolution of Russia was inextricably linked to its expansion, so much so that it is unclear whether Russia created an empire or the process of imperialism created Russia.” He dates the start of Russia’s European-facing empire to the kingdom of Kievan Rus, which began in the ninth century in Kyiv, the present-day capital of Ukraine. From those modest beginnings grew an empire that at its height, after the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, spanned 11 time zones and comprised almost 200 million people. When you consider this history, Vladimir Putin’s remark that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “a major geopolitical disaster of the century” makes sense, especially if you listen to what he said immediately after: “Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.” These deep imperial ties with Ukraine help explain why Putin’s brazen annexation of Crimea was broadly popular within Russia.
We enter the postimperial 21st century with an unusual geopolitical dynamic. The two leading powers on the planet, the United States and China, both derive a great deal of their internal legitimacy and purpose from the notion that they are anti-imperial nations. In America’s case, its identity is tied to its birth story of rebelling against the British Empire. In China’s case, every schoolchild is taught that the country’s modern history began with Western imperialism humiliating and crippling the Middle Kingdom for over a century.And yet both countries have informal empires. The American one is a vast network of economic alliances and military bases scattered around the world. China, for its part, is trying to develop something quite similar with its huge Belt and Road Initiative, which may swell to 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan.
How will these two distinctive postimperial superpowers interact in the 21st century? What will be the consequences of the imperial shadows cast in this new, emerging bipolar era? Unfortunately, Puri does not have much to say about any of this. Having provided a fresh perspective on all the issues I have raised above, he offers brief and intelligent speculation, but mostly proceeds to simply recount the imperial histories of major countries or parts of the world. Much of this is well written, comprehensive and judicious, but it is still potted history. Having introduced a fascinating subject, Puri declines to fully engage and explore his own thesis. He seems to imply that this task is left to the reader, but that leaves too much to us, and lets the author of this stimulating book off the hook too easily.
Claro, não é um americano, e sim um estrangeiro radicado nos EUA, e um dos mais famosos, Fareed Zakaria, comentarista da CNN, aqui escrevendo na Foreign Affairs, que nos últimos meses parecia ter sucumbido à paranoia (normal) do Pentágono e à (anormal) do establishment, contra a China, elevada à categoria de "adversária" (quando não inimiga) dos EUA, um dos maiores erros estratégicos dos EUA desde que eles renunciaram a fazer parte da Liga das Nações em 1919-1920. Vamos ver no que vai dar... Paulo Roberto de Almeida
The New China Scare
Why America Shouldn’t Panic About Its Latest Challenger
Fareed Zakaria
Foreign Affairs, December 2019
In February 1947, U.S. President Harry Truman huddled with his most senior foreign policy advisers, George Marshall and Dean Acheson, and a handful of congressional leaders. The topic was the administration’s plan to aid the Greek government in its fight against a communist insurgency. Marshall and Acheson presented their case for the plan. Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, listened closely and then offered his support with a caveat. “The only way you are going to get what you want,” he reportedly told the president, “is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.”
Over the next few months, Truman did just that. He turned the civil war in Greece into a test of the United States’ ability to confront international communism. Reflecting on Truman’s expansive rhetoric about aiding democracies anywhere, anytime, Acheson confessed in his memoirs that the administration had made an argument “clearer than truth.”
Something similar is happening today in the American debate about China. A new consensus, encompassing both parties, the military establishment, and key elements of the media, holds that China is now a vital threat to the United States both economically and strategically, that U.S. policy toward China has failed, and that Washington needs a new, much tougher strategy to contain it. This consensus has shifted the public’s stance toward an almost instinctive hostility: according to polling, 60 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the People’s Republic, a record high since the Pew Research Center began asking the question in 2005. But Washington elites have made their case “clearer than truth.” The nature of the challenge from China is different from and far more complex than what the new alarmism portrays. On the single most important foreign policy issue of the next several decades, the United States is setting itself up for an expensive failure.
Let’s be clear: China is a repressive regime that engages in thoroughly illiberal policies, from banning free speech to interning religious minorities. Over the last five years, it has intensified its political control and economic statism at home. Abroad, it has become a competitor and in some places a rival of the United States. But the essential strategic question for Americans today is, Do these facts make China a vital threat, and to the extent that they do, how should that threat be addressed?
The consequences of exaggerating the Soviet threat were vast: gross domestic abuses during the McCarthy era; a dangerous nuclear arms race; a long, futile, and unsuccessful war in Vietnam; and countless other military interventions in various so-called Third World countries. The consequences of not getting the Chinese challenge right today will be vaster still. The United States risks squandering the hard-won gains from four decades of engagement with China, encouraging Beijing to adopt confrontational policies of its own, and leading the world’s two largest economies into a treacherous conflict of unknown scale and scope that will inevitably cause decades of instability and insecurity. A cold war with China is likely to be much longer and more costly than the one with the Soviet Union, with an uncertain outcome.
BROKEN ENGAGEMENT
Henry Kissinger has noted that the United States has entered all its major military engagements since 1945—in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq—with great enthusiasm and bipartisan support. “And then, as the war developed,” Kissinger said, “the domestic support for it began to come apart.” Soon, everyone was searching for an exit strategy.
To avoid retreading that path, the United States should take the time to examine closely the assumptions behind the new China consensus. In broad terms, they are the following. First, engagement has failed because it did not “transform China’s internal development and external behavior,” as the former U.S. officials Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner wrote in these pages in 2018. Second, Beijing’s foreign policy is currently the most significant threat to U.S. interests and, by extension, to the rules-based international order that the United States created after 1945. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone much further, saying in a 2019 speech at the Hudson Institute that “the Chinese Communist party is a Marxist-Leninist party focused on struggle and international domination.” And third, a policy of active confrontation with China will better counter the threat than a continuation of the previous approach.
This bipartisan consensus has formed in response to significant and in many ways worrying changes in China. Ever since President Xi Jinping became the country’s supreme ruler, China’s economic liberalization has slowed and its political reform—limited in any case—has been reversed. Beijing now combines political repression with nationalist propaganda that harks back to the Mao era. Abroad, China is more ambitious and assertive. These shifts are real and worrying. But how should they alter U.S. policy?
On the most important foreign policy issue of the next decades, Washington is setting itself up for failure.
Formulating an effective response requires starting with a clear understanding of the United States’ China strategy up to this point. What the new consensus misses is that in the almost five decades since U.S. President Richard Nixon’s opening to Beijing, U.S. policy toward China has never been purely one of engagement; it has been a combination of engagement and deterrence. In the late 1970s, U.S. policymakers concluded that integrating China into the global economic and political system was better than having it sit outside it, resentful and disruptive. But Washington coupled that effort with consistent support for other Asian powers—including, of course, continued arms sales to Taiwan. That approach, sometimes described as a “hedging strategy,” ensured that as China rose, its power was checked and its neighbors felt secure.
In the 1990s, with no more Soviet foe to contain, the Pentagon slashed spending, closed bases, and reduced troop numbers around the world—except in Asia. The Pentagon’s 1995 Asia-Pacific strategy, known as the Nye Initiative, warned of China’s military buildup and foreign policy ambitions and announced that the United States would not reduce its military presence in the region. Instead, at least 100,000 American troops would remain in Asia for the foreseeable future. Arms sales to Taiwan would continue in the interest of peace in the Taiwan Strait—that is, to deter Beijing from using force against the self-governing island, which the mainland government considers to be part of China.
This hedging approach was maintained by presidents of both parties. The George W. Bush administration overturned decades of bipartisan policy and embraced India as a nuclear power, in large part to add yet another check on China. Under President Barack Obama, the United States ramped up deterrence, expanding its footprint in Asia with new military agreements with Australia and Japan and nurturing a closer relationship with Vietnam. Such was also the purpose of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, designed to give Asian countries an economic platform that would enable them to resist dominance by the Chinese market. (The Trump administration pulled out of the agreement in early 2017.) Obama personally confronted Xi about Chinese cybertheft and placed tariffs on tire imports to retaliate against China’s unfair trade policies.
To say that hedging failed reflects a lack of historical perspective. In the early 1970s, before Nixon’s opening to China, Beijing was the world’s greatest rogue regime. Mao Zedong was obsessed with the idea that he was at the helm of a revolutionary movement that would destroy the Western capitalist world. There was no measure too extreme for the cause—not even nuclear apocalypse. “If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died,” Mao explained in a speech in Moscow in 1957, “the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.” Mao’s China funded and fomented anti-Western insurgencies, guerrilla movements, and ideological movements around the world, from Latin America to Southeast Asia. By one estimate, Beijing spent between $170 million and $220 million from 1964 to 1985 in Africa alone, training 20,000 fighters from at least 19 countries.
By comparison, today’s China is a remarkably responsible nation on the geopolitical and military front. It has not gone to war since 1979. It has not used lethal military force abroad since 1988. Nor has it funded or supported proxies or armed insurgents anywhere in the world since the early 1980s. That record of nonintervention is unique among the world’s great powers. All the other permanent members of the UN Security Council have used force many times in many places over the last few decades—a list led, of course, by the United States.
China has also gone from seeking to undermine the international system to spending large sums to bolster it. Beijing is now the second-largest funder of the United Nations and the UN peacekeeping program. It has deployed 2,500 peacekeepers, more than all the other permanent members of the Security Council combined. Between 2000 and 2018, it supported 182 of 190 Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on nations deemed to have violated international rules or norms. Granted, the principles anchoring Beijing’s foreign policy today—“respect for sovereignty,” “territorial integrity,” and “nonintervention”—are animated in large part by a desire to fend off Western interference. Yet they highlight a remarkable shift from a radical agenda of revolution to a conservative concern for stability. Had someone predicted in 1972 that China would become a guardian of the international status quo, few would have believed it possible.
Chinese UN peacekeepers in Juba, South Sudan, May 2017 Samir Bol / Reuters
TRADING PLACES
The new consensus on China’s economic behavior holds that China has forced multinational companies to transfer their technology, has subsidized its “national champions,” and has placed formal and informal barriers in the path of foreign firms seeking to enter its market. Beijing has, in short, used the open international economy to bolster its own statist and mercantilist system.
It is true that these unfair policies demand attention and action from the rest of the world. The Trump administration deserves some credit for tackling this problem—especially in light of Xi’s embrace of statism after decades of liberalization. But how large and permanent is this reversal? How different are China’s practices from those of other emerging market countries today? And again, what is the right American response?
Almost all economists agree that China owes much of its economic success to three fundamental factors: the switch from communist economics to a more market-based approach, a high savings rate that makes possible large capital investments, and rising productivity. Over the last three decades, the country has also opened itself up substantially to foreign investment—more so than many other large emerging markets—allowing capital to pour in. China is one of only two developing countries to have ranked in the top 25 markets for foreign direct investment since 1998. Of the BRICS group of large emerging markets (which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), China is consistently ranked as the most open and competitive economy. As for the effect of mercantilist Chinese policies on the U.S. economy, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has noted that “it cannot be argued seriously that unfair Chinese trade practices have affected U.S. growth by even 0.1 percent a year.”
It is worth noting that on the economic front, almost every charge leveled at China today—forced technology transfers, unfair trade practices, limited access for foreign firms, regulatory favoritism for locals—was leveled at Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, Clyde Prestowitz’s influential book Trading Places: How America Is Surrendering Its Future to Japan and How to Win It Back explained that the United States had never imagined dealing with a country in which “industry and trade [would be] organized as part of an effort to achieve specific national goals.” Another widely read book of the era was titled The Coming War With Japan. As Japanese growth tapered off, so did these exaggerated fears.
China today presents some new challenges, especially given Xi’s determination to have the state play a leading role in helping the country gain economic dominance in crucial sectors. But in the broad sweep of history, China’s greatest advantage in the global trading system has come not from its willingness to violate the rules but from its sheer size. Countries and companies want access to China and are willing to make concessions to get it. This hardly makes China unusual. Other countries with similar clout often get away with similar behavior or worse—none more so than the United States. A 2015 report by the financial services giant Credit Suisse provides a useful tally of nontariff barriers against foreign goods put in place by major countries between 1990 and 2013. With a total count of almost 450, the United States is in a league of its own. Next is India, then Russia. China comes in at number five, with one-third as many nontariff barriers imposed as the United States. The picture hasn’t changed much in the years since.
On the economic front, almost every charge leveled at China today was once leveled at Japan.
Most of the recent changes in Beijing’s economic policy have been negative, but even that is not the entire story. China is changing along several, sometimes contradictory lines. Even with the return to greater state control under Xi, a wild free market has flourished in vast spheres such as consumer goods and services. There has also been some real regulatory liberalization—even administrative and judicial reform, as the political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang has detailed. Government support for state-owned enterprises is greater than it was a few years ago, but Beijing has abandoned what was once a central part of its mercantilist strategy: using an undervalued currency to boost growth. The economist Nicholas Lardy has calculated that the end of currency mercantilism accounts for “about half of China’s growth slowdown since the global financial crisis.”
Or consider what is, according to Peter Navarro, U.S. President Donald Trump’s top trade adviser, issue number one in the United States’ trade dispute with China: “the theft of our intellectual property.” That China engages in rampant theft of intellectual property is a widely accepted fact—except among U.S. companies doing business in China. In a recent survey of such companies conducted by the U.S.-China Business Council, intellectual property protection ranked sixth on a list of pressing concerns, down from number two in 2014. These companies worry more about state funding for rival companies and delayed approval of licenses for their products. Why this shift from 2014? That year, China created its first specialized courts to handle intellectual property cases. In 2015, foreign plaintiffs brought 63 cases in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court. The court ruled for the foreign firms in all 63.
Of course, reforms such as these are often undertaken only in the face of Western pressure and, even then, because they serve China’s own competitive interests—the largest filer of patents worldwide last year was the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. But it is also true that many Chinese economists and senior policymakers have argued that the country will modernize and grow its economy only if it pursues further reform. Failure to do so, they have warned, will get the country stuck in the “middle-income trap”—the common fate of countries that escape poverty but hit a wall at a GDP of around $10,000 per capita, having failed to modernize their economic, regulatory, and legal systems any further.
As far as China’s political development is concerned, the verdict is unambiguous. China has not opened up its politics to the extent that many anticipated; it has in fact moved toward greater repression and control. Beijing’s gruesome treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China, has created a human rights crisis. The state has also begun to use new technologies, such as facial recognition software and artificial intelligence, to create an Orwellian system of social control. These realities are a tragedy for the Chinese people and an obstacle to the country’s participation in global leadership. It would be an exaggeration, however, to adduce them as proof of the failure of U.S. policy. In truth, few U.S. officials ever argued that engagement would lead inexorably to liberal democracy in China. They hoped that it would, even expected it, but their focus was always on moderating China’s external behavior, which they achieved.
CROSSING THE LINE
Under Xi, China’s foreign policy has become more ambitious and assertive, from its pursuit of leadership roles in UN agencies to the vast Belt and Road Initiative and the construction of islands in the South China Sea. These moves mark a break with the country’s erstwhile passivity on the global stage, captured by the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s adage “Hide your strength, bide your time.” China’s military buildup, in particular, has been of a size and designed in a manner that suggest that a long-term plan is being systematically executed. But what would an acceptable level of influence for China be, given its economic weight in the world? If Washington does not first ask this question, it cannot make serious claims about which uses of Chinese power cross the line.
China is, by some measures, already the world’s largest economy. Within ten to 15 years, it will probably take this spot by all measures. Deng offered his advice to “bide your time” when the country’s economy represented roughly one percent of global GDP. Today, it represents over 15 percent. China has indeed bided its time, and now, a much stronger China naturally seeks a larger regional and global role.
At a construction site in Shenzhen, China, February 2012 Tomas van Houtryve / VII / Redux
Consider the case of another country that was rising in strength, this one back in the nineteenth century, although not nearly on the scale of China today. The United States in 1823 was what would now be called a developing country—not even among the world’s top five economies—and yet with the Monroe Doctrine, it declared the entire Western Hemisphere off-limits to the great powers of Europe. The American case is an imperfect analogy, but it serves as a reminder that as countries gain economic strength, they seek greater control and influence over their environment. If Washington defines every such effort by China as dangerous, it will be setting the United States up against the natural dynamics of international life and falling into what the scholar Graham Allison has called “the Thucydides trap”—the danger of a war between a rising power and an anxious hegemon.
China hardly qualifies as a mortal danger to the liberal international order.
For the United States, dealing with such a competitor is a new and unique challenge. Since 1945, the major states rising to wealth and prominence have been Washington’s closest allies, if not quasi protectorates: Germany, Japan, and South Korea. A normally disruptive feature of international life—rising new powers—has thus been extraordinarily benign for the United States. China, however, is not only much larger than the rising powers that came before; it has also always been outside the United States’ alliance structures and sphere of influence. As a result, it will inevitably seek a greater measure of independent influence. The challenge for the United States, and the West at large, will be to define a tolerable range for China’s growing influence and accommodate it—so as to have credibility when Beijing’s actions cross the line.
So far, the West’s track record on adapting to China’s rise has been poor. Both the United States and Europe have, for example, been reluctant to cede any ground to China in the core institutions of global economic governance, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which remain Euro-American clubs. For years, China sought a larger role in the Asian Development Bank, but the United States resisted. As a result, in 2015, Beijing created its own multilateral financial institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (which Washington opposed, fruitlessly).
Pompeo has asserted—in a patronizing statement that would surely infuriate any Chinese citizen—that the United States and its allies must keep China in “its proper place.” China’s sin, according to Pompeo, is that it spends more on its military than it needs to for its own defense. But the same, of course, could be said of the United States—and of France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and most other large countries. In fact, a useful definition of a great power is one that is concerned about more than just its own security.
The old order—in which small European countries act as global heavyweights while behemoths such as China and India are excluded from the first ranks of global institutions—cannot be sustained. China will have to be given a place at the table and genuinely integrated into the structures of decision-making, or it will freelance and unilaterally create its own new structures and systems. China’s ascension to global power is the most significant new factor in the international system in centuries. It must be recognized as such.
NEITHER LIBERAL NOR INTERNATIONAL NOR ORDERLY
To many, Beijing’s rise has sounded the death knell of the liberal international order—the set of policies and institutions, forged largely by the United States after World War II, that compose a rules-based system in which interstate war has waned while free trade and human rights have flourished. China’s domestic political character—a one-party state that brooks no opposition or dissent—and some of its international actions make it an uneasy player in this system.
It is, however, worth remembering that the liberal international order was never as liberal, as international, or as orderly as it is now nostalgically described. From the very beginning, it faced vociferous opposition from the Soviet Union, followed by a series of breakdowns of cooperation among allies (over the Suez crisis in 1956, over Vietnam a decade later) and the partial defection of the United States under Nixon, who in 1971 ended Washington’s practice of underwriting the international monetary order using U.S. gold reserves. A more realistic image is that of a nascent liberal international order, marred from the start by exceptions, discord, and fragility. The United States, for its part, often operated outside the rules of this order, making frequent military interventions with or without UN approval; in the years between 1947 and 1989, when the United States was supposedly building up the liberal international order, it attempted regime change around the world 72 times. It reserved the same right in the economic realm, engaging in protectionism even as it railed against more modest measures adopted by other countries.
The truth about the liberal international order, as with all such concepts, is that there never really was a golden age, but neither has the order decayed as much as people claim. The core attributes of this order—peace and stability—are still in place, with a marked decline in war and annexation since 1945. (Russia’s behavior in Ukraine is an important exception.) In economic terms, it is a free-trade world. Average tariffs among industrialized countries are below three percent, down from 15 percent before the Kennedy Round of international trade talks, in the 1960s. The last decade has seen backsliding on some measures of globalization but from an extremely high baseline. Globalization since 1990 could be described as having moved three steps forward and only one step back.
China hardly qualifies as a mortal danger to this imperfect order. Compare its actions to those of Russia—a country that in many arenas simply acts as a spoiler, trying to disrupt the Western democratic world and its international objectives, often benefiting directly from instability because it raises oil prices (the Kremlin’s largest source of wealth). China plays no such role. When it does bend the rules and, say, engages in cyberwarfare, it steals military and economic secrets rather than trying to delegitimize democratic elections in the United States or Europe. Beijing fears dissent and opposition and is especially neuralgic on the issues of Hong Kong and Taiwan, using its economic clout to censor Western companies unless they toe the party line. But these are attempts to preserve what Beijing views as its sovereignty—nothing like Moscow’s systematic efforts to disrupt and delegitimize Western democracy in Canada, the United States, and Europe. In short, China has acted in ways that are interventionist, mercantilist, and unilateral—but often far less so than other great powers.
Riot police officers charging toward antigovernment protesters in Hong Kong, December 2019Leah Millis / Reuters
The rise of a one-party state that continues to reject core concepts of human rights presents a challenge. In certain areas, Beijing’s repressive policies do threaten elements of the liberal international order, such as its efforts to water down global human rights standards and its behavior in the South China Sea and other parts of its “near abroad.” Those cases need to be examined honestly. In the former, little can be said to mitigate the charge. China is keen on defining away its egregious human rights abuses, and that agenda should be exposed and resisted. (The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council achieved the exact opposite by ceding the field to Beijing.)
But the liberal international order has been able to accommodate itself to a variety of regimes—from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Vietnam—and still provide a rules-based framework that encourages greater peace, stability, and civilized conduct among states. China’s size and policies present a new challenge to the expansion of human rights that has largely taken place since 1990. But that one area of potential regression should not be viewed as a mortal threat to the much larger project of a rules-based, open, free-trading international system.
CONTAINMENT AND ITS COSTS
The final assumption undergirding the new consensus is that some form of persistent confrontation with China will deter its adventurism abroad and set the stage for an internal transformation. Few embrace the Cold War term “containment,” but many adopt some version of its logic. The theory is that a hard line against China will force it to behave and even reform. Unspoken but clearly central to the hawks’ strategy is the notion that containing China will precipitate the collapse of its regime, just as happened with the Soviets.
But China is not the Soviet Union, an unnatural empire that was built on brutal expansion and military domination. In China, the United States would be confronting a civilization, and a nation, with a strong sense of national unity and pride that has risen to take its place among the great powers of the world. China is becoming an economic peer, indeed a technology leader in some areas. Its population dwarfs that of the United States, and the world’s largest market for almost every good is now in China. It houses some of the planet’s fastest computers and holds the largest foreign exchange reserves on earth. Even if it experienced some kind of regime change, the broader features of its rise and strength would persist.
The Pentagon has embraced the notion of China as the United States’ top “strategic competitor.” From a bureaucratic point of view, this designation makes perfect sense. For the last 20 years, the U.S. military has fought against insurgencies and guerrillas in failed states, and it has time and again had to explain why its expensive machinery has failed against these underequipped, cash-strapped enemies. To make an enemy of China, by contrast, is to return to the halcyon days of the Cold War, when the Pentagon could raise large budgets by conjuring the specter of a war against a rich, sophisticated military with cutting-edge technology of its own. All the while, the logic of nuclear deterrence and the prudence of the great powers ensured that a full-scale war between the two sides would never take place. Yet whatever the advantages for Pentagon budgets, the costs of such a cold war with China would be immense, distorting the United States’ economy and further inflating the military-industrial complex that U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower once warned against.
Add to this the large degree of interdependence between the United States and China. U.S. exports to China are up by 527 percent since 2001, and in 2018, China was the largest supplier of goods to the United States. There is also human interdependence—the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students who study in the United States, along with the almost five million U.S. citizens and residents of Chinese descent. The United States has benefited greatly from being the place where the brightest minds gather to do the most cutting-edge research and then apply it to commercial ends. If the United States barred its doors to such talent because it came with the wrong passport, it would quickly lose its privileged place in the world of technology and innovation.
The Trump administration’s current approach to China runs along two distinct and contradictory tracks, at once eschewing interdependence and embracing it. On trade, Washington’s aim is, broadly speaking, integrationist: to get China to buy more from the United States, invest more in the United States, and allow Americans to sell and invest more in China. If successful, this effort would create more interdependence between the two countries. It is a laudable effort, although it bears pointing out that tariffs usually cost the party imposing the tax more than the recipient. By some estimates, the Obama administration’s tire tariffs cost around $1 million for every American job saved. The general approach, however, is wise, even if undertaken in pursuit of a narrow “America first” agenda, as interdependence gives the United States greater leverage over China.
In matters of technology, on the other hand, the Trump administration’s approach is decidedly disintegrationist. The strategy here is to sever ties with China and force the rest of the world to do the same—creating a world split between two camps. The Trump administration’s global campaign against Huawei has followed this logic; the meager results of that campaign indicate the logic’s flaws. The rest of the world is not following the lead of the United States (which lacks an alternative technology to compete with Huawei’s 5G offerings). The Trump administration has asked 61 countries to ban the company. So far, only three have acceded, all three of them close U.S. allies.
This dismal success rate is an early indicator of what a broader “decoupling” strategy would look like. China is the largest trading partner of many countries besides the United States, including key players in the Western Hemisphere, such as Brazil. When asked how they would respond to decoupling, senior leaders around the world almost all offer some version of the answer that one head of government gave me: “Please do not ask us to choose between the United States and China. You will not like the answer you get.” This is not to say that they would necessarily side with China—but they might well prefer to stay nonaligned or play the two powers off against each other. What is more, an isolated China that built its own domestic supply chains and technology would be impervious to U.S. pressure.
Strangely absent from most discussions of U.S. policy toward China is the question of China’s reaction. Beijing, too, has its hard-liners, who have warned for years that the United States seeks to keep China down and that any sign of Chinese ambition would be met with a strategy of containment. More and more, the United States’ posture toward China is allowing those voices to claim vindication, thereby giving them leverage to push exactly the kind of assertive and destabilizing behavior that U.S. policy aims to prevent.
The United States is in competition with China—that is a fact and will remain so for much of this century. The issue is whether the United States should compete within a stable international framework, continuing to try to integrate China rather than attempting to isolate it at all costs. A fractured, bifurcated international order, marked by government restrictions and taxes on trade, technology, and travel, would result in diminished prosperity, persistent instability, and the real prospect of military conflict for all involved.
The breakdown of globalization is, of course, the goal of many of the leading lights of the Trump administration. The president himself has decried “globalism” and considers free trade a way for other countries to loot American industry. He regards the United States’ alliances as obsolete and international institutions and norms as feckless constraints on national sovereignty. Right-wing populists have embraced these views for years. And many of them—especially in the United States—correctly understand that the easiest way to crack the entire liberal international edifice would be to trigger a cold war with China. More puzzling is that those who have spent decades building up that edifice are readily supporting an agenda that will surely destroy it.
AMERICA’S NOT-SO-SECRET STRATEGY
A wiser U.S. policy, geared toward turning China into a “responsible stakeholder,” is still achievable. Washington should encourage Beijing to exert greater influence in its region and beyond as long as it uses this clout to strengthen the international system. Chinese participation in efforts to tackle global warming, nuclear proliferation, money laundering, and terrorism should be encouraged—and appreciated. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative could be a boon for the developing world if pursued in an open and transparent manner, even in cooperation with Western countries wherever possible. Beijing, for its part, would need to accept U.S. criticism about issues of human rights, freedom of speech, and liberty more generally.
The most dangerous flash points are likely to be Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the status quo is fragile and the balance of power favors Beijing. The Pentagon has reportedly enacted 18 war games against China over Taiwan, and China has prevailed in every one. Washington should make clear that any such victory would be Pyrrhic, resulting in economic collapse in Hong Kong or Taiwan, mass emigration from those islands, and international condemnation. If Beijing acts precipitously in either Hong Kong or Taiwan, a U.S. policy of cooperation will become untenable for years.
Turning China into a “responsible stakeholder” is still possible.
The new consensus on China is rooted in the fear that the country might at some point take over the globe. But there is reason to have faith in American power and purpose. Neither the Soviet Union nor Japan managed to take over the world, despite similar fears about their rise. China is rising but faces a series of internal challenges, from demographic decline to mountains of debt. It has changed before and will be forced to change again if the combined forces of integration and deterrence continue to press on it. Beijing’s elites know that their country has prospered in a stable, open world. They do not want to destroy that world. And despite a decade of political stagnation on the mainland, the connection between the rise of a middle class and demands for greater political openness is real, as is apparent in two Chinese societies watched closely by Beijing—Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Some American observers talk of China’s long view, of its patient, secret plan to dominate the world, consistently executed since 1949, if not before. The scholar and former U.S. Defense Department official Michael Pillsbury has called it China’s “hundred-year marathon,” in a book often praised by the Trump administration. But a more accurate picture is that of a country that has lurched fitfully from a tight alliance with the Soviet Union to the Sino-Soviet split, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution to a capitalist success story, and from deep hostility toward the West to close ties with the United States and back to a flirtation with hostility. If this is a marathon, it has taken some strange twists and turns, many of which could have ended it altogether.
