The Ties That Bind
Robert Keohane
Brooks and Wohlforth are correct that the United States remains the most powerful country in the world. They are likely also right that China will not overtake it anytime soon.
But although their description of the world is largely correct, it is of limited use to policymakers—especially those focused on trying to prevent a U.S.-Chinese war. This frightening possibility would most likely arise from disagreements between China and the United States escalating into conflicts, not from a shift in the balance of power between the two countries. Analysts should therefore pay more attention to the characteristics of the U.S.-Chinese relationship than to whether the world is unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar. They must think about how the two states—and the states in their regions—are interdependent. And in the context of the U.S.-Chinese relationship, the very fact of interdependence creates the potential for conflict since the effective pursuit of each side’s interests affects the other side’s behavior.
As they monitor the contours of their countries’ relationship, American and Chinese policymakers should remember that Washington’s and Beijing’s interests, and thus the patterns of interdependence, are partly subjective. These are shaped as much by their perceptions of each other as by their material resources. The world may stumble into conflict even though one country still dominates.
MOVING PARTS
In Power and Interdependence, Joseph Nye and I argued that global power politics is defined not by the material resources held by various countries but by the characteristics of their relationships with each other. According to this conception, power in an interdependent relationship flows to the less dependent actor. “A less dependent actor in a relationship often has a significant political resource, because changes in the relationship will be less costly to the actor than to its partners,” we wrote. But the significance of asymmetrical interdependence with respect to a specific political resource—such as military capability, economic strength, or the appeal of a country’s values—varies depending on the nature of the relationship. And because relations between major powers are multidimensional, a country can have the advantage in one area while being subordinate in another. Yet which country has the advantage in which area is unlikely to become evident until the relationship is put under stress.
To understand how the power resources that Brooks and Wohlforth attribute to China and the United States affect these countries’ strategies and the likely outcomes of their interactions, analysts need to understand the multiple contexts that will affect how the two countries operate. In particular, they need to assess perceived conflicts of interest, whether institutions are in place to limit or manage conflict, how domestic politics intersect with geopolitical strategy, and the soft-power effects of great-power behavior.
On three of these four dimensions, the world is a much more dangerous place than it was 20 years ago. The perceived conflicts of interest between China and the United States have clearly become more severe since Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013. In particular, China now seems to indicate more urgency in its desire to control Taiwan, and the United States has edged toward a firmer commitment to Taiwan’s defense. As China’s military power has grown during this time, its capacity to attack Taiwan has increased. The combination of increased Chinese ambition and increased Chinese power has raised the chances of a cross-strait war that could draw in the United States.
Power is contextual.
At the same time, U.S.-Chinese relations lack the searing memories of barely avoided nuclear war, the institutional guardrails, and the established patterns of restraint that characterized U.S.-Soviet relations for the years after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Domestic politics in both states are also growing more dangerous. In the United States, politicians of both parties have been competing to show how tough they can be on Beijing. In China, proponents of “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy—in which Chinese officials aggressively berate external critics—have become more active and appear to receive support from the country’s top leadership. The dangers of a competition in toughness are obvious: loud political voices are pushing in the same direction, creating political incentives for leaders to refuse compromise for fear of seeming weak. Only on the soft-power dimension—the ability of each country to appeal to the populations of other countries and persuade them that one’s own country is more peace loving than its rival—do the incentives seem to work in favor of moderation and compromise. It is all too easy, then, to imagine China and the United States blundering into military conflict.
Brooks and Wohlforth’s assessment of hard-power relations may well be right. But the authors miss more significant relational issues. Drawing a balance sheet of hard-power resources held by China and the United States does not answer crucial questions about the most important potential sources of war. Power is contextual, so the implications of such a balance sheet will depend on the situations in which conflict arises. The United States can more easily deter a Chinese attack on its mainland or on its Australian or Japanese allies than it can a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of China.
Ultimately, the uncertainty created by rising Chinese power and ambiguous American power is more important than the balance of hard-power relations between the two states. If analysts don’t understand why, they should look back to July 1914. Experts from that era would have been wise to pay more attention to the dynamic uncertainty and the potential for unanticipated interactions inherent in the international system than to the relative economic or military capabilities of various countries. In 2023, the foreign policy community should also direct more attention to the potential for dangerous and unpredictable interactions resulting from changes in military technology and crisis dynamics rather than conduct an inventory of power resources.
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