Short of War
How to Keep U.S.-Chinese Confrontation From Ending in Calamity
BY KEVIN RUDD
March/April 2021
·
KEVIN RUDD is President of the Asia Society, in New York, and
previously served as Prime Minister of Australia.
·
Officials in Washington and Beijing don’t
agree on much these days, but there is one thing on which they see eye to eye:
the contest between their two countries will enter a decisive phase in the
2020s. This will be the decade of living dangerously. No matter what strategies
the two sides pursue or what events unfold, the tension between the United
States and China will grow, and competition will intensify; it is inevitable.
War, however, is not. It remains possible for the two countries to put in place
guardrails that would prevent a catastrophe: a joint framework for what I call
“managed strategic competition” would reduce the risk of competition escalating
into open conflict.
The Chinese Communist Party is
increasingly confident that by the decade’s end, China’s economy will finally
surpass that of the United States as the world’s largest in terms of GDP at
market exchange rates. Western elites may dismiss the significance of that milestone;
the CCP’s Politburo does not. For China, size always matters. Taking the number
one slot will turbocharge Beijing’s confidence, assertiveness, and leverage in
its dealings with Washington, and it will make China’s central bank more likely
to float the yuan, open its capital account, and challenge the U.S. dollar as
the main global reserve currency. Meanwhile, China continues to advance on
other fronts, as well. A new policy plan,
announced last fall, aims to allow China to dominate in all new technology
domains, including artificial intelligence, by 2035. And Beijing now intends to
complete its military modernization program by 2027 (seven years ahead of the
previous schedule), with the main goal of giving China a decisive edge in all
conceivable scenarios for a conflict with the United States over Taiwan. A
victory in such a conflict would allow President Xi Jinping to carry out a
forced reunification with Taiwan before leaving power—an achievement that would
put him on the same level within the CCP pantheon as Mao Zedong.
Washington must decide how to respond to
Beijing’s assertive agenda—and quickly. If it were to opt for economic
decoupling and open confrontation, every country in the world would be forced
to take sides, and the risk of escalation would only grow. Among policymakers
and experts, there is understandable skepticism as to whether Washington and
Beijing can avoid such an outcome. Many doubt that U.S. and Chinese leaders can
find their way to a framework to manage their diplomatic relations, military
operations, and activities in cyberspace within agreed parameters that would
maximize stability, avoid accidental escalation, and make room for both
competitive and collaborative forces in the relationship. The two countries
need to consider something akin to the procedures and mechanisms that the
United States and the Soviet Union put in place to govern their relations after
the Cuban missile crisis—but in this case, without first going through the
near-death experience of a barely avoided war.
Managed strategic competition would
involve establishing certain hard limits on each country’s security policies
and conduct but would allow for full and open competition in the diplomatic,
economic, and ideological realms. It would also make it possible for Washington
and Beijing to cooperate in certain areas, through bilateral arrangements and
also multilateral forums. Although such a framework would be difficult to
construct, doing so is still possible—and the alternatives are likely to be
catastrophic.
BEIJING'S LONG
VIEW
In the United States, few have paid much
attention to the domestic political and economic drivers of Chinese grand
strategy, the content of that strategy, or the ways in which China has been
operationalizing it in recent decades. The conversation in Washington has been
all about what the United States ought to do, without much reflection on
whether any given course of action might result in real changes to China’s
strategic course. A prime example of this type of foreign policy myopia was an
address that then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered last July, in which
he effectively called for
the overthrow of the CCP. “We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must
induce China to change,” he declared, including by “empower[ing] the Chinese
people.”
The only thing that could lead the Chinese
people to rise up against the party-state, however, is their own frustration
with the CCP’s poor performance on addressing unemployment, its radical
mismanagement of a natural disaster (such as a pandemic), or its massive
extension of what is already intense political repression. Outside
encouragement of such discontent, especially from the United States, is
unlikely to help and quite likely to hinder any change. Besides, U.S. allies
would never support such an approach; regime change has not exactly been a
winning strategy in recent decades. Finally, bombastic statements such as
Pompeo’s are utterly counterproductive, because they strengthen Xi’s hand at
home, allowing him to point to the threat of foreign subversion to justify
ever-tighter domestic security measures, thereby making it easier for him to
rally disgruntled CCP elites in solidarity against an external threat.
That last factor is particularly important
for Xi, because one of his main goals is to remain in power until 2035, by
which time he will be 82, the age at which Mao passed away. Xi’s determination
to do so is reflected in the party’s abolition of term limits, its recent
announcement of an economic plan that extends all the way to 2035, and the fact
that Xi has not even hinted at who might succeed him even though only two years
remain in his official term. Xi experienced some difficulty in the early part of
2020, owing to a slowing economy and the COVID-19 pandemic, whose Chinese
origins put the CCP on the defensive. But by the year’s end, official Chinese
media were hailing him as the party’s new “great navigator and helmsman,” who
had prevailed in a heroic “people’s war”
against the novel coronavirus. Indeed, Xi’s standing has been aided greatly by
the shambolic management of the pandemic in the United States and a number of
other Western countries, which the CCP has highlighted as evidence of the
inherent superiority of the Chinese authoritarian system. And just in case any
ambitious party officials harbor thoughts about an alternative candidate to
lead the party after Xi’s term is supposed to end in 2022, Xi recently launched
a major purge—a “rectification campaign,” as the CCP calls it—of members deemed
insufficiently loyal.
Meanwhile, Xi has carried out a massive
crackdown on China’s Uighur minority in the region of Xinjiang; launched
campaigns of repression in Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet; and stifled
dissent among intellectuals, lawyers, artists, and religious organizations
across China. Xi has come to believe that China should no longer fear any
sanctions that the United States might impose on his country, or on individual
Chinese officials, in response to violations of human rights. In his view,
China’s economy is now strong enough to weather such sanctions, and the party
can protect officials from any fallout, as well. Furthermore, unilateral U.S.
sanctions are unlikely to be adopted by other countries, for fear of Chinese
retaliation. Nonetheless, the CCP remains sensitive to the damage that can be
done to China’s global brand by continuing revelations about its treatment of
minorities. That is why Beijing has become more active in international forums,
including the UN Human Rights Council, where it has rallied support for its
campaign to push back against long-established universal norms on human rights,
while also regularly attacking the United States for its own alleged abuses of
those very norms.
Xi is also intent on achieving Chinese
self-sufficiency to head off any effort by Washington to decouple the United
States’ economy from that of China or to use U.S. control of the global
financial system to block China’s rise. This push lies at the heart of what Xi
describes as China’s “dual circulation economy”: its shift away from export
dependency and toward domestic consumption as the long-term driver of economic
growth and its plan to rely on the gravitational pull of the world’s biggest
consumer market to attract foreign investors and suppliers to China on
Beijing’s terms. Xi also recently announced a new strategy for technology R
& D and manufacturing to reduce China’s dependence on imports of certain
core technologies, such as semiconductors.
The trouble with this approach is that it
prioritizes party control and state-owned enterprises over China’s
hard-working, innovative, and entrepreneurial private sector, which has been
primarily responsible for the country’s remarkable economic success over the
last two decades. In order to deal with a perceived external economic threat from
Washington and an internal political threat from private entrepreneurs whose
long-term influence threatens the power of the CCP, Xi faces a dilemma familiar
to all authoritarian regimes: how to tighten central political control without
extinguishing business confidence and dynamism.
Xi faces a similar dilemma when it comes
to what is perhaps his paramount goal: securing control over Taiwan. Xi appears
to have concluded that China and Taiwan are now further away from peaceful
reunification than at any time in the past 70 years. This is probably correct.
But China often ignores its own role in widening the gulf. Many of those who
believed that China would gradually liberalize its political system as it
opened up its economic system and became more connected with the rest of the
world also hoped that that process would eventually allow Taiwan to become more
comfortable with some form of reunification. Instead, China has become more
authoritarian under Xi, and the promise of reunification under a “one country,
two systems” formula has evaporated as the Taiwanese look to Hong Kong, where
China has imposed a harsh new national security law, arrested opposition
politicians, and restricted media freedom.
With peaceful reunification off the table,
Xi’s strategy now is clear: to vastly increase the level of military power that
China can exert in the Taiwan Strait, to the extent that the United States
would become unwilling to fight a battle that Washington itself judged it would
probably lose. Without U.S. backing, Xi believes, Taiwan would either
capitulate or fight on its own and lose. This approach, however, radically
underestimates three factors: the difficulty of occupying an island that is the
size of the Netherlands, has the terrain of Norway, and boasts a well-armed
population of 25 million; the irreparable damage to China’s international
political legitimacy that would arise from such a brutal use of military force;
and the deep unpredictability of U.S. domestic politics, which would determine
the nature of the U.S. response if and when such a crisis arose. Beijing, in
projecting its own deep strategic realism onto Washington, has concluded that
the United States would never fight a war it could not win, because to do so
would be terminal for the future of American power, prestige, and global
standing. What China does not include in this calculus is the reverse
possibility: that the failure to fight for a fellow democracy that the United
States has supported for the entire postwar period would also be catastrophic
for Washington, particularly in terms of the perception of U.S. allies in Asia,
who might conclude that the American security guarantees they have long relied
on are worthless—and then seek their own arrangements with China.
As for China’s maritime and territorial
claims in the East China and South China Seas, Xi will not concede an inch.
Beijing will continue to sustain pressure on its Southeast Asian neighbors in
the South China Sea, actively contesting freedom-of-navigation operations,
probing for any weakening of individual or collective resolve—but stopping
short of a provocation that might trigger a direct military confrontation with
Washington, because at this stage, China is not fully confident it would win.
In the meantime, Beijing will seek to cast itself in as reasonable a light as
possible in its ongoing negotiations with Southeast Asian claimant states on
the joint use of energy resources and fisheries in the South China Sea. Here,
as elsewhere, China will fully deploy its economic leverage in the hope of
securing the region’s neutrality in the event of a military incident or crisis
involving the United States or its allies. In the East China Sea, China will
continue to increase its military pressure on Japan around the disputed
Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, but as in Southeast Asia, here too Beijing is unlikely
to risk an armed conflict, particularly given the unequivocal nature of the
U.S. security guarantee to Japan. Any risk, however small, of China losing such
a conflict would be politically unsustainable in Beijing and have massive
domestic political consequences for Xi.
AMERICA THROUGH
XI'S EYES
Underneath all these strategic choices
lies Xi’s belief, reflected in official Chinese pronouncements and CCP
literature, that the United States is experiencing a steady, irreversible
structural decline. This belief is now grounded in a considerable body of
evidence. A divided U.S. government failed to craft a national strategy for
long-term investment in infrastructure, education, and basic scientific and
technological research. The Trump administration damaged U.S. alliances,
abandoned trade liberalization, withdrew the United States from its leadership
of the postwar international order, and crippled U.S. diplomatic capacity. The
Republican Party has been hijacked by the far right, and the American political
class and electorate are so deeply polarized that it will prove difficult for
any president to win support for a long-term bipartisan strategy on China.
Washington, Xi believes, is highly unlikely to recover its credibility and
confidence as a regional and global leader. And he is betting that as the next
decade progresses, other world leaders will come to share this view and begin
to adjust their strategic postures accordingly, gradually shifting from
balancing with Washington against Beijing, to hedging between the two powers,
to bandwagoning with China.
But China worries about the possibility of
Washington lashing out at Beijing in the years before U.S. power finally
dissipates. Xi’s concern is not just a potential military conflict but also any
rapid and radical economic decoupling. Moreover, the CCP’s diplomatic
establishment fears that the Biden administration, realizing that the United
States will soon be unable to match Chinese power on its own, might form an
effective coalition of countries across the democratic capitalist world with
the express aim of counterbalancing China collectively. In particular, CCP
leaders fear that President Joe Biden’s proposal to hold a summit of the
world’s major democracies represents a first step on that path, which is why
China acted rapidly to secure new trade and investment agreements in Asia and
Europe before the new administration came into office.
Mindful of this combination of near-term
risks and China’s long-term strengths, Xi’s general diplomatic strategy toward
the Biden administration will be to de-escalate immediate tensions, stabilize
the bilateral relationship as early as possible, and do everything possible to
prevent security crises. To this end, Beijing will look to fully reopen the
lines of high-level military communication with Washington that were largely
cut off during the Trump administration. Xi might seek to convene a regular,
high-level political dialogue, as well, although Washington will not be
interested in reestablishing the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue,
which served as the main channel between the two countries until its collapse
amid the trade war of 2018–19. Finally, Beijing may moderate its military
activity in the immediate period ahead in areas where the People’s Liberation
Army rubs up directly against U.S. forces, particularly in the South China Sea
and around Taiwan—assuming that the Biden administration discontinues the
high-level political visits to Taipei that became a defining feature of the
final year of the Trump administration. For Beijing, however, these are changes
in tactics, not in strategy.
As Xi tries to ratchet down tensions in
the near term, he will have to decide whether to continue pursuing his hard-line
strategy against Australia, Canada, and India, which are friends or allies of
the United States. This has involved a combination of a deep diplomatic freeze
and economic coercion—and, in the case of India, direct military confrontation.
Xi will wait for any clear signal from Washington that part of the price for
stabilizing the U.S.-Chinese relationship would be an end to such coercive
measures against U.S. partners. If no such signal is forthcoming—there was none
under President Donald Trump—then Beijing will resume business as usual.
Meanwhile, Xi will seek to work with Biden
on climate change. Xi understands this is in China’s interests because of the
country’s increasing vulnerability to extreme weather events. He also realizes
that Biden has an opportunity to gain international prestige if Beijing
cooperates with Washington on climate change, given the weight of Biden’s own
climate commitments, and he knows that Biden will want to be able to
demonstrate that his engagement with Beijing led to reductions in Chinese
carbon emissions. As China sees it, these factors will deliver Xi some leverage
in his overall dealings with Biden. And Xi hopes that greater collaboration on
climate will help stabilize the U.S.-Chinese relationship more generally.
Adjustments in Chinese policy along these
lines, however, are still likely to be tactical rather than strategic. Indeed,
there has been remarkable continuity in Chinese strategy toward the United
States since Xi came to power in 2013, and Beijing has been surprised by the
relatively limited degree to which Washington has pushed back, at least until
recently. Xi, driven by a sense of Marxist-Leninist determinism, also believes
that history is on his side. As Mao was before him, Xi has become a formidable
strategic competitor for the United States.
UNDER NEW
MANAGEMENT
On balance, the Chinese leadership would
have preferred to have seen the reelection of Trump in last year’s U.S.
presidential election. That is not to say that Xi saw strategic value in every
element of Trump’s foreign policy; he didn’t. The CCP found the Trump
administration’s trade war humiliating, its moves toward decoupling worrying,
its criticism of China’s human rights record insulting, and its formal
declaration of China as a “strategic competitor” sobering. But most in the
CCP’s foreign policy establishment view the recent shift in U.S. sentiment
toward China as structural—an inevitable byproduct of the changing balance of
power between the two countries. In fact, a number have been quietly relieved
that open strategic competition has replaced the pretense of bilateral
cooperation. With Washington having removed the mask, this thinking goes, China
could now move more rapidly—and, in some cases, openly—toward realizing its
strategic goals, while also claiming to be the aggrieved party in the face of
U.S. belligerence.
But by far the greatest gift that Trump
delivered to Beijing was the sheer havoc his presidency unleashed within the
United States and between Washington and its allies. China was able to exploit
the many cracks that developed between liberal democracies as they tried to
navigate Trump’s protectionism, climate change denialism, nationalism, and
contempt for all forms of multilateralism. During the Trump years, Beijing
benefited not because of what it offered the world but because of what
Washington ceased to offer. The result was that China achieved victories such
as the massive Asia-Pacific free-trade deal known as the Regional Comprehensive
Economic Partnership and the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment,
which will enmesh the Chinese and European economies to a far greater degree
than Washington would like.
China is wary of the Biden
administration’s ability to help the United States recover from those
self-inflicted wounds. Beijing has seen Washington bounce back from political,
economic, and security disasters before. Nonetheless, the CCP remains confident
that the inherently divisive nature of U.S. politics will make it impossible
for the new administration to solidify support for any coherent China strategy
it might devise.
Biden intends to prove Beijing wrong in
its assessment that the United States is now in irreversible decline. He will
seek to use his extensive experience on Capitol Hill to forge a domestic
economic strategy to rebuild the foundations of U.S. power in the post-pandemic
world. He is also likely to continue to strengthen the capabilities of the U.S.
military and to do what it takes to sustain American global technological
leadership. He has assembled a team of economic, foreign policy, and national
security advisers who are experienced professionals and well versed in China—in
stark contrast to their predecessors, who, with a couple of midranking exceptions,
had little grasp of China and even less grasp of how to make Washington work.
Biden’s advisers also understand that in order to restore U.S. power abroad,
they must rebuild the U.S. economy at home in ways that will reduce the
country’s staggering inequality and increase economic opportunities for all
Americans. Doing so will help Biden maintain the political leverage he’ll need
to craft a durable China strategy with bipartisan support—no mean feat when
opportunistic opponents such as Pompeo will have ample incentive to disparage
any plan he puts forward as little more than appeasement.
To lend his strategy credibility, Biden
will have to make sure the U.S. military stays several steps ahead of China’s
increasingly sophisticated array of military capabilities. This task will be
made more difficult by intense budgetary constraints, as well as pressure from
some factions within the Democratic Party to reduce military spending in order
to boost social welfare programs. For Biden’s strategy to be seen as credible
in Beijing, his administration will need to hold the line on the aggregate
defense budget and cover increased expenses in the Indo-Pacific region by
redirecting military resources away from less pressing theaters, such as
Europe.
As China becomes richer and stronger, the
United States’ largest and closest allies will become ever more crucial to
Washington. For the first time in many decades, the United States will soon
require the combined heft of its allies to maintain an overall balance of power
against an adversary. China will keep trying to peel countries away from the
United States—such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea,
and the United Kingdom—using a combination of economic carrots and sticks. To
prevent China from succeeding, the Biden administration needs to commit itself
to fully opening the U.S. economy to its major strategic partners. The United
States prides itself on having one of the most open economies in the world. But
even before Trump’s pivot to protectionism, that was not the case. Washington
has long burdened even its closest allies with formidable tariff and nontariff
barriers to trade, investment, capital, technology, and talent. If the United
States wishes to remain the center of what until recently was called “the free
world,” then it must create a seamless economy across the national boundaries
of its major Asian, European, and North American partners and allies. To do so,
Biden must overcome the protectionist impulses that Trump exploited and build
support for new trade agreements anchored in open markets. To allay the fears
of a skeptical electorate, he will need to show Americans that such agreements
will ultimately lead to lower prices, better wages, more opportunities for U.S.
industry, and stronger environmental protections and assure them that the gains
won from trade liberalization can help pay for major domestic improvements in
education, childcare, and health care.
The Biden administration will also strive
to restore the United States’ leadership in multilateral institutions such as
the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade
Organization. Most of the world will welcome this after four years of watching
the Trump administration sabotage much of the machinery of the postwar
international order. But the damage will not be repaired overnight. The most
pressing priorities are fixing the World Trade Organization’s broken
dispute-resolution process, rejoining the Paris agreement on climate change,
increasing the capitalization of both the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (to provide credible alternatives to China’s Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank and its Belt and Road Initiative), and restoring U.S. funding
for critical UN agencies. Such institutions have not only been instruments
of U.S. soft power since Washington helped create them after the last world
war; their operations also materially affect American hard power in areas such
as nuclear proliferation and arms control. Unless Washington steps up to the
plate, the institutions of the international system will increasingly become
Chinese satrapies, driven by Chinese finance, influence, and personnel.
MANAGED STRATEGIC
COMPETITION
The deeply conflicting nature of U.S. and
Chinese strategic objectives and the profoundly competitive nature of the
relationship may make conflict, and even war, seem inevitable—even if neither
country wants that outcome. China will seek to achieve global economic
dominance and regional military superiority over the United States without
provoking direct conflict with Washington and its allies. Once it achieves
superiority, China will then incrementally change its behavior toward other
states, especially when their policies conflict with China’s ever-changing
definition of its core national interests. On top of this, China has already
sought to gradually make the multilateral system more obliging of its national
interests and values.
But a gradual, peaceful transition to an
international order that accommodates Chinese leadership now seems far less
likely to occur than it did just a few years ago. For all the eccentricities
and flaws of the Trump administration, its decision to declare China a
strategic competitor, formally end the doctrine of strategic engagement, and
launch a trade war with Beijing succeeded in making clear that Washington was
willing to put up a significant fight. And the Biden administration’s plan to
rebuild the fundamentals of national U.S. power at home, rebuild U.S. alliances
abroad, and reject a simplistic return to earlier forms of strategic engagement
with China signals that the contest will continue, albeit tempered by
cooperation in a number of defined areas.
The question for both Washington and
Beijing, then, is whether they can conduct this high level of strategic
competition within agreed-on parameters that would reduce the risk of a crisis,
conflict, and war. In theory, this is possible; in practice, however, the
near-complete erosion of trust between the two has radically increased the
degree of difficulty. Indeed, many in the U.S. national security community
believe that the CCP has never had any compunction about lying or hiding its
true intentions in order to deceive its adversaries. In this view, Chinese
diplomacy aims to tie opponents’ hands and buy time for Beijing’s military,
security, and intelligence machinery to achieve superiority and establish new
facts on the ground. To win broad support from U.S. foreign policy elites,
therefore, any concept of managed strategic competition will need to include a
stipulation by both parties to base any new rules of the road on a reciprocal
practice of “trust but verify.”
The idea of managed strategic competition
is anchored in a deeply realist view of the global order. It accepts that
states will continue to seek security by building a balance of power in their
favor, while recognizing that in doing so they are likely to create security
dilemmas for other states whose fundamental interests may be disadvantaged by
their actions. The trick in this case is to reduce the risk to both sides as
the competition between them unfolds by jointly crafting a limited number of
rules of the road that will help prevent war. The rules will enable each side
to compete vigorously across all policy and regional domains. But if either
side breaches the rules, then all bets are off, and it’s back to all the
hazardous uncertainties of the law of the jungle.
The first step to building such a
framework would be to identify a few immediate steps that each side must take
in order for a substantive dialogue to proceed and a limited number of hard
limits that both sides (and U.S. allies) must respect. Both sides must abstain,
for example, from cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure. Washington
must return to strictly adhering to the “one China” policy, especially by
ending the Trump administration’s provocative and unnecessary high-level visits to
Taipei. For its part, Beijing must dial back its recent pattern of provocative
military exercises, deployments, and maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait. In the
South China Sea, Beijing must not reclaim or militarize any more islands and
must commit to respecting freedom of navigation and aircraft movement without
challenge; for its part, the United States and its allies could then (and only
then) reduce the number of operations they carry out in the sea. Similarly,
China and Japan could cut back their military deployments in the East China Sea
by mutual agreement over time.
If both sides could agree on those
stipulations, each would have to accept that the other will still try to maximize
its advantages while stopping short of breaching the limits. Washington and
Beijing would continue to compete for strategic and economic influence across
the various regions of the world. They would keep seeking reciprocal access to
each other’s markets and would still take retaliatory measures when such access
was denied. They would still compete in foreign investment markets, technology
markets, capital markets, and currency markets. And they would likely carry out
a global contest for hearts and minds, with Washington stressing the importance
of democracy, open economies, and human rights and Beijing highlighting its
approach to authoritarian capitalism and what it calls “the China development
model.”
Even amid escalating competition, however,
there will be some room for cooperation in a number of critical areas. This
occurred even between the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of
the Cold War. It should certainly be possible now between the United States and
China, when the stakes are not nearly as high. Aside from collaborating on
climate change, the two countries could conduct bilateral nuclear arms control
negotiations, including on mutual ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty, and work toward an agreement on acceptable military
applications of artificial intelligence. They could cooperate on North Korean
nuclear disarmament and on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. They
could undertake a series of confidence-building measures across the Indo-Pacific
region, such as coordinated disaster-response and humanitarian missions. They
could work together to improve global financial stability, especially by
agreeing to reschedule the debts of developing countries hit hard by the
pandemic. And they could jointly build a better system for distributing
COVID-19 vaccines in the developing world.
That list is far from exhaustive. But the
strategic rationale for all the items is the same: it is better for both
countries to operate within a joint framework of managed competition than to
have no rules at all. The framework would need to be negotiated between a
designated and trusted high-level representative of Biden and a Chinese
counterpart close to Xi; only a direct, high-level channel of that sort could
lead to confidential understandings on the hard limits to be respected by both
sides. These two people would also become the points of contact when violations
occurred, as they are bound to from time to time, and the ones to police the
consequences of any such violations. Over time, a minimum level of strategic trust
might emerge. And maybe both sides would also discover that the benefits of
continued collaboration on common planetary challenges, such as climate change,
might begin to affect the other, more competitive and even conflictual areas of
the relationship.
There will be many who will criticize this
approach as naive. Their responsibility, however, is to come up with something
better. Both the United States and China are currently in search of a formula
to manage their relationship for the dangerous decade ahead. The hard truth is
that no relationship can ever be managed unless there is a basic agreement
between the parties on the terms of that management.
GAME ON
What would be the measures of success
should the United States and China agree on such a joint strategic framework?
One sign of success would be if by 2030 they have avoided a military crisis or
conflict across the Taiwan Strait or a debilitating cyberattack. A convention
banning various forms of robotic warfare would be a clear victory, as would the
United States and China acting immediately together, and with the World Health
Organization, to combat the next pandemic. Perhaps the most important sign of
success, however, would be a situation in which both countries competed in an
open and vigorous campaign for global support for the ideas, values, and
problem-solving approaches that their respective systems offer—with the outcome
still to be determined.
Success, of course, has a thousand
fathers, but failure is an orphan. But the most demonstrable example of a
failed approach to managed strategic competition would be over Taiwan. If Xi
were to calculate that he could call Washington’s bluff by unilaterally
breaking out of whatever agreement had been privately reached with Washington,
the world would find itself in a world of pain. In one fell swoop, such a
crisis would rewrite the future of the global order.
A few days before Biden’s inauguration,
Chen Yixin, the secretary-general of the CCP’s Central Political and Legal
Affairs Commission, stated that “the rise of the East and the decline of the
West has become [a global] trend and changes of the international landscape are
in our favor.” Chen is a close confidant of Xi and a central figure in China’s
normally cautious national security apparatus, and so the hubris in his
statement is notable. In reality, there is a long way to go in this race. China
has multiple domestic vulnerabilities that are rarely noted in the media. The
United States, on the other hand, always has its weaknesses on full public
display—but has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity for reinvention and
restoration. Managed strategic competition would highlight the strengths and
test the weaknesses of both great powers—and may the best system win.
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