Um dos debates mais importantes da atualidade.
Kotkin on China: Cold War 2.0, Reagan, and Stalin vs. Mao
“We want a world in which the rule of law, open society, an open, dynamic market economy, rules, reciprocity — where those are the values, those are the terms of the relationship.”
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ChinaTalk coverage continues with another stream of insights from the legendary Stephen Kotkin! Today’s newsletter digs into:
The case for optimism about US-China relations, despite — or because of — the recent ratcheting up of tensions;
Why Kotkin believes a US-China Cold War is both good and necessary;
How the US can get on the diplomatic “front foot”;
Making sense of Reagan’s foreign policy — how he was both a “movement conservative” and a “dealmaking conservative.”
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If Kotkin Ran America’s China Foreign Policy
Jordan Schneider: [On March 6], Xi said,
Western countries — led by the US — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.
Any thoughts on that as the new rhetorical space that Xi is now comfortable occupying in public?
Stephen Kotkin: It’s hurting now, isn’t it? He’s feeling it now. The changeover that we got from Secretary of State [Mike] Pompeo, and National Security Advisor [HR] McMaster and his deputy Matt Pottinger, and the Trump administration (which sometimes played out clumsily because “Trump” and “policy” are hard to put in the same sentence, and Trump was the president, but his staff was remarkable, and his cabinet officers in some cases were remarkable) — we got a turnaround in China policy.
We went from a fairytale — from an imagined China, from a China that didn’t exist in reality and an engagement policy based on a fairytale — to a better understanding of what China was doing, and where it was going in the game it was playing, and the game that we were in. That’s actually the basis for a better engagement policy, ultimately — for a better diplomacy, for a stabilized relationship.
Trying to engage in diplomacy and stabilize a relationship based upon illusions and a misunderstanding of the nature of the Chinese system and the direction it was going is not a sustainable project.
So the ratcheting up of tensions that we’re in right now is actually more promising for getting to a stabilization of the relationship — more promising because it’s more realistic, it’s more empirical, it’s more accurate; it’s a better understanding of how each side is operating, and what the strengths and weaknesses are of each side.
So I’m actually quite optimistic about the state of play right now — provided we open up the diplomatic stuff, because being strong, and being deterrent, and showing your teeth, and putting some export technology control is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end — and that end has to be a more stable relationship.
And the Biden administration is complaining — and no doubt that this is accurate — that the Chinese are refusing to engage, they’re refusing to meet, that they don’t want to engage in diplomacy again. So I would be appearing in every single capital of the world — I would fly into all the ASEAN capitals, I would fly into all our allied capitals, and I would fly into all the Global South capitals — and I would announce, “We are ready to engage with the Chinese in diplomacy, and here are the fifteen issues that we’d like to talk about, and the Chinese won’t meet with us. So let’s meet right now — any place you want.”
So if it’s empirically true that the Chinese are not responding to the overtures of the Biden administration to engage in diplomacy again because they see the US as overly aggressive, I would say, “Let’s get on the front foot there. Let’s put the Chinese on the back foot.”
The Chinese like to say that the US is engaged in the suppression of China’s rise: that’s all we do — we’re committed 100% to holding China down. And then out of the next breath, they like to say, “Oh, nobody can hold us back. Nobody can hold China back.” And so what’s our response to that? Our response is to deny we’re trying to hold them down, that we’re trying to prevent China’s rise.
And nobody believes that response. The Chinese don’t believe it. The Global South doesn’t believe it. Some of our allies even don’t believe it — and I’m not sure how many people on our side believe it. So that’s actually not the correct response, even if the Biden people think it’s true to their word.
The correct response is, “You say that we’re trying to hold you down, and then in the next breath, you say that nobody can hold you down. So what are you afraid of? We can’t hold you down. You just said that. Why are you all bent out of shape about us trying to hold you down when you are declaring across the world that nobody can hold you down?”
And so that’s how you get on the front foot as opposed to the back foot. That’s how you win that kind of debate. That’s how you engage in the diplomatic give-and-take and say, not just to the Chinese, but to all of the others who are listening and watching how this crucial relationship for world order and stability is being managed.
And now we have Xi saying that “we’re having problems because they’re trying to hold us down.” And so my view on that is we are doing something right — because Xi’s now trying to use that as an excuse for his own ineptitude and his own failures. I’m not of the opinion (many China watchers are) that Xi Jinping is an American agent — that is to say, he is eroding Chinese power in every domain, vigorously and really across the board: he’s ruining China’s reputation; he’s undermining China’s strategic position.
The Europeans (Angela Merkel) attempted to appease China in the first instance by rushing through a trade agreement with China minutes before Joe Biden was going to be inaugurated. It was a distancing of Europe from the US on China policy. And what happened? Xi Jinping did not permit the Europeans to appease him at the expense of the Americans. He undermined the Europeans’ attempt to undercut the Biden administration before it was even in power.
And I look at that, and I say, Sure, I understand why you think [Xi] is an American agent, that he’s doing our work for us — but we can’t talk like that. We have to talk in terms of, “China is a great civilization. China has remarkable achievements. You don’t need me to explain the greatness of China. You don’t need a visit to a museum to see the greatness of China. It’s everywhere in our common civilization, so many of the innovations and the achievements — [China] is just a spectacular story, and it will continue to be so going forward.”
That’s how we talk. That’s how we talk about China. We love China. We’re impressed by China. We think China is one of the greatest civilizations that has ever existed. We want to share the planet with China.
The issue is: under what terms are we going to share the planet?
Is it going to be what happened to Lotte World inside China and the boycotts of South Korean businesses? Is it going to be the terms that they tried to impose on our friend Australia, those fourteen demands and those boycotts? Is it what they did to Hong Kong — are those the terms, with that National Security Law? Is it what’s happening in Xinjiang? Is it what’s happening in Tibet? What are the terms of sharing the planet?
And my answer to that is: we need better terms than what the Chinese have on offer — but we need to negotiate those terms. And the way you negotiate those terms: you get on the front foot; you’re not anti-China — you’re pro-China; you deconflate Xi Jinping and China; you deconflate the regime and the people, the nation and the civilization and the history — and you say, “We’re going to deal with your regime because you are the legal government of China right now. But we’re going to deal with it not on the terms that you’re trying to set. We’re going to deal with it on our terms. And if you don’t want to talk, we’re going to tell everybody that you don’t want to talk."
What are we doing shutting down Confucius Institutes — like we’re afraid of them, or like we’re the Communist regime? We opened a Confucius Institute at Stanford University — and we love-bomb Chinese culture, and ours is pluralistic, and it doesn’t eliminate certain ways of thinking, certain ideas, certain topics. In fact, Communism can be one of the topics. We can have Communist officials deliver lectures about Communism at our own Confucius Institute because we practice pluralism and we’re not afraid. And we love Chinese culture, and we love everything about their great achievements, and we do have to share the world with them.
But, we want a world in which the rule of law, open society, a dynamic market economy, rules, reciprocity — where those are the values, those are the terms of the relationship. And if we can’t get it all with China, we have to get as much of that as possible — and we have to keep both the pressure on and the diplomacy.
There’s a new biography of George Shultz, my former colleague here at the Hoover Institution. We were yesterday in his seminar room, the Annenberg Room, where he presided for decades over conversations, including China policy. Let’s remember that Shultz was a diplomat, that Shultz dedicated his whole life to dealmaking — but the issue was always the terms of those deals. That’s in our DNA; that’s something we can do.
And so this is not hawkishness for hawkishness’s sake. This is not “run China right off the globe.” We can’t do that, we shouldn’t do that, and trying to do that would ruin us. We’re in this together. But what are the terms of that deal?
And so I like the fact that Xi Jinping is now crying uncle and trying to use American pressure as an excuse to cover up his own mistakes and failures and some of the weaknesses of [his] system. It would be foolish to count the Chinese out. It would be foolish to count Xi Jinping out. It would be foolish to think that he’s an American agent, and he’s going to go on continuing to mess up. There’s only so far a superpower like the United States can go when someone else is doing the work for them. We have to do some of that work ourselves.
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