Playing
at War Games with China
2021- 02 - 11
China, Economics, Environment, Finance, Global, Law, Military, Nuclear, Science, Speeches, Strategy, Taiwan, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Politics, War
Playing at War Games with China
Remarks to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs
Ambassador Chas W.
Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown
University
By video link, Washington, D.C. 11 February 2021
Fifty years ago,
Richard Nixon decided to ignore Napoleon’s advice to “let [China] sleep, for
when it wakes it will astonish the world.”[1]
I was there when China opened its eyes. And I have watched it transform
the various orders of the world and become an American obsession.
Every generation of Americans feels obliged to
reinvent the China policies it inherits from its predecessor. We can be
sure our country will eventually get its policies right – after we’ve exhausted
all the alternatives. But we have not yet done so. And, for many
reasons, our latest policies toward China are almost certain to prove
self-defeating.
We have just exited the most bizarre presidency in our
history. One of its distinguishing characteristics was the substitution
in our foreign relations of unrestricted economic warfare for diplomacy.
Bluster and bullying replaced dialogue and reason aimed at convincing the
recalcitrant to see that it could be in their interest as well as ours for them
to do things our way.
In the last half of the last century, we Americans
made the rules. Others got into the habit of following us. To some
extent, that habit – though fading – has outlasted our adherence to the
principles we once stood for. So military posturing, economic
intimidation, diatribe, and attempted regime change are becoming the norm in
international relations. China is a case in point. Sino-American
relations now exemplify Freeman’s third law of strategic dynamics: for every
hostile act there is an even more hostile reaction.
Americans have an inbuilt missionary impulse. We
enjoy protecting, tutoring, lecturing, and hectoring other peoples on how to
correct their character to approximate our idealized image of ourselves.
We are offended when others insist on independence from us and on preserving
their own political culture. China has never wavered in its determination
to do both, wishful thinking by American politicians and pundits notwithstanding.
In America’s pas de deux with China, we
have consistently been the initiator of the dance and taken the lead. We
developed some well-founded complaints about Chinese economic behavior, so we
launched a trade war with it. We were alarmed about China’s potential to
outcompete us internationally, so we decided to try to cripple it with an
escalating campaign of “maximum pressure.” We saw China as a threat to
our continued military primacy, so we sought to contain and encircle it.
Cumulatively, we have:
·
declared China to be an adversary and
called for regime change in Beijing;
·
launched an invective-filled global
propaganda campaign against China, its ruling Communist Party, and its fumbled
initial response to COVID-19;
·
sanctioned allies and partners for
failing to curtail their own dealings with China;
·
replaced market-driven trade with China
with government management of economic exchanges based on tariffs, quotas,
sanctions, and export bans;
·
abandoned or attempted to sabotage
international organizations in which we deemed Chinese influence to be greater
than ours;
·
kneecapped the WTO, trashing the
rule-bound order for international economic relations we had taken seven
decades to elaborate;
·
attempted to block Chinese investment
and lending in third countries;
·
blacklisted Chinese companies and
delisted them on our stock markets;
·
curtailed visas, criminalized scientific
exchanges, and banned technology exports to China;
·
closed a Chinese consulate (losing one
of our own as a result) and initiated tit-for-tat reductions in reporting by
journalists;
·
sought to terminate Chinese sponsorship
of language teaching in our country, and discouraged in-country study by
potential federal employees;
·
reidentified the United States with
Beijing’s civil war adversary in Taipei and violated the Taiwan-related terms
of U.S. normalization with Beijing;
·
stepped up provocative air and sea
patrols along China’s borders; and
·
begun to reconfigure both our
conventional and nuclear forces to fight a war with China in its near seas or
on its claimed and established territory.
These actions have gotten China’s attention, much as
they got Japan’s when we applied a range of considerably less hostile measures
to it in 1941. Japan reacted by attacking Pearl Harbor. China has
not yet lost its cool. But it has:
·
reciprocated U.S. tariffs and sanctions;
·
begun to diversify its sources of
essential agricultural and industrial products to end dependence on the United
States, which it now regards as its supplier of last resort;
·
broadened and accelerated its effort to
become scientifically and technologically self-reliant and independently
innovative;
·
courted countries and international
organizations alienated by U.S. unilateralism;
·
created new international institutions
to complement existing bodies, in which it is now increasingly assertive;
·
refocused its foreign policy toward the
development of cooperative relationships with Europe, Southeast and West Asia,
Africa, and Latin America;
·
joined other countries aggravated by
unilateral U.S. sanctions based on dollar hegemony in seeking a new world
monetary order in which the dollar is no longer the dominant medium of trade
settlement;
·
adopted an obnoxiously uncivilized
demeanor in its foreign relations while remaining risk averse on issues like
Taiwan and U.S. naval harassment of its presence in the South China Sea; and
·
continued to modernize its military to
fend off and defeat an American attack on its homeland or near seas.
If this were a game of
chess, we’d be easy to spot. We’re the player with no plan beyond an
aggressive opening move. That is not just not a winning
strategy. It’s no strategy at all. The failure to think several
moves ahead matters. The protracted struggle we have launched with China
is not a board game, but something vastly more serious. It is not in any
respect a repeat of our victorious competition with the sclerotic USSR.
And the days when we could act internationally without incurring consequences
are past.
So far in the contest with China, not so good.
Our farmers have lost
most of their $24 billion market in China, perhaps permanently. Our
companies have had “to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for U.S.
workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for
American consumers or companies.”[2] Our
tariff increases and turn to government-managed trade have cost an estimated
245,000 American jobs,[3] while
shaving something like $320 billion off our GDP.[4]
On average, American families are paying as much as $1,277 more each year for
everything from apparel and shoes to toys, electronic goods, and household appliances.[5]
In 2017, when we
launched the first of our wave of economic attacks on China, our trade deficit
with it was $375 billion. Last year, it appears to have fallen to about
$295 billion. Over the same period, however, our global trade deficit
rose from $566 billion to an estimated $916 billion. This reflects a shift of
Chinese production to Taiwan, the EU, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and
elsewhere. There has been almost no “reshoring” of the industrial jobs
American companies originally outsourced to China. According to an Oxford
Economics study, if the Biden administration leaves current policies in place,
the United States can expect cumulative job losses of 320,000 by 2025, and our
GDP will be $1.6 trillion less than it would otherwise be.[6]
As is normal in wars, whether economic or military,
the other side has also taken some casualties, but they appear to have been
considerably lighter than ours. China’s overall trade surplus last year
rose to a new high of $535 billion. Beijing improved its international
position by lowering tariff barriers to imports from sources other than the
United States, striking free trade deals with other Asian countries and the EU,
and helping to sponsor a trade dispute-settlement mechanism to replace the
US-sabotaged WTO. China is expected to contribute one-third of global
growth this year. It is becoming an innovation powerhouse. Forty
percent of global venture capital investments are now Chinese – on a par with
our own.
The U.S. focus has been on tripping up China rather
than improving our own international competitiveness. This is an
expression of complacent hubris rather than a plan. It is a sure way to
lose ground, not gain it. The United States continues to disinvest in
education, infrastructure, and science. We are making no effort to
curtail the anti-competitive impact of domestic oligopolies or reform the
corporate culture that drives companies to offshore work instead of retaining
and retraining American workers to use more efficient technologies. Our
country is more closed to foreign talent and ideas than ever before. The
United States is still among the most innovative societies on the planet, but
others are overtaking us. It does not help that we have come to value
financial engineering more than the real thing.
Recent polling shows
that most of the world now sees our political system as broken, our governance
as incompetent, our economic and racial inequalities as perniciously debilitating,
our policies as domineering, and our word as unreliable. Ranting and
raving about China’s initial mishandling of the outbreak in Wuhan a bit over a
year ago of a previously unknown coronavirus has not made the world less
impressed by Beijing’s amazing ability to recover from a bungled start and
counter and control the pandemic on its territory.[7]
Nor has it obscured the contrast between China’s performance and the catastrophically
incompetent U.S. response to the virus. Even our closest allies,
partners, and friends now expect China to surpass us in wealth and power within
the decade. Last year, in the culmination of a trend that preceded the
pandemic, China passed the United States to become the world’s largest
recipient of foreign companies’ investments. If we do not fix our
domestic embarrassments, other countries may come to see us as a problem to be
avoided rather than a partner to be courted.
Meanwhile, China has not broken stride. Its
students’ performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) is already among the best in the world. It is investing 8 percent
more each year in education. China already accounts for one-fourth of the
world’s STEM workforce and is widening its lead. Measured in purchasing
power, its investment in science is now almost on a par with our own and rising
at an annual rate of 10 percent, as ours continues to fall. China’s
infrastructure is universally envied. It already accounts for 30 percent
of the world’s manufactures, versus our 16 percent, and the gap is
growing. Last year it became the world’s largest consumer market.
Its economy is, for the most part, not dominated by monopolies or oligopolies,
but fragmented and ferociously competitive.
In short, China has many problems, but it has its act
together and appears, by and large, to be on top of them.
China’s principal challenge to us is not military but
economic and technological. But our country is geared up to deal
only with military threats. So, China has become both the antidote to our
post-Cold War enemy deprivation syndrome and a gratifying driver of U.S.
defense spending. If you think you’re St. George, everything looks like a
dragon. We have been unable to tame China, so we now dream of slaying
it. The dragon is alert to this. We are in China’s face. It
is not in ours. Not yet anyway. But if you go abroad in search of
dragons to arouse, they may eventually follow you home.
There are American aircraft and ships aggressively
patrolling China’s borders, but no Chinese aircraft and ships off ours.
American bases ring China. There are no Chinese bases near us.
Still, we are upping our defense budget to make our ability to overwhelm
China’s defenses more credible. We do so in the name of deterring Chinese
aggression against China’s Asian neighbors. But military assault is not
the threat from China that agitates its neighbors.
The countries of the Indo-Pacific are universally
apprehensive about China’s increasingly bullying demands for deference, but
none fears Chinese conquest. We are distraught that we can no longer
breeze through China’s increasingly effective defenses to strike it. We
have counted on being able to do so if the unfinished civil war with the newly
democratized descendant of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan resumes. We
seem to think that a war with China over Taiwan could be limited like Korea and
Vietnam. But such a war would begin on Chinese territory and be fought directly
with Chinese forces, not in third countries or by allies or proxies of either
China or the United States.
It’s comforting to assume that we are so powerful
that, if we strike another people’s homeland, they will refrain from
retaliating against ours. We prefer not to think about China’s capacity
to reach out and hurt us, including with nuclear weapons, if we hurt it.
But this is delusional and it misses the point. We cannot hope to deal
with China’s politico-economic, diplomatic, and technological challenge by
engaging it in armed combat or threatening to do so. We cannot outspend it
militarily. And we can no longer hope to beat it on its home ground.
Rivalry, in which each side competes to outdo another,
can raise the competence of those engaged in it. So, it is potentially
beneficial. But adversarial antagonism, in which competitors seek to win
by hamstringing each other, is not. It entrenches hostility, justifies
hatred, injures, and threatens to weaken both sides.
If we are to compete effectively with China and other
rising and resurgent powers, we must upgrade many aspects of our
performance. This will require a serious effort at domestic reform and
self-strengthening. And it will take time. Trying to bring down
foreign countries to prevent them from surpassing us is more likely to backfire
than to succeed. We need to take a hard look at where we are falling
behind and make the changes necessary to power ahead.
The United States is endowed with unexampled
geopolitical, human, ideological, and physical advantages. With the right
policies, we can outcompete any challenger, however formidable. But, if
we seek to hamstring our competitors, we should expect them to respond in
kind. If we treat China as our Nemesis, China has the capacity to become
Her.
In the third decade of
the 21st century,
Americans can no longer reliably command international support for our
preferred approaches to international issues. Others have come to doubt
the wisdom, propriety, and constancy of our policies and suspect they are
formulated without taking their interests into account.
Many countries are apprehensive about the growth of
China’s wealth and power. But – without exception — they want
multilateral or plurilateral backing to balance and cope with this challenge,
not unilateral, confrontational American activism. They seek to expand
trade with China, not contract it. They want to accommodate China on
terms that maximize their own independent sovereignties, not make China an
enemy or reinstate America as their overlord.
If the United States persists in defining our contest
with China in confrontational bilateral terms, we will find ourselves
increasingly isolated. Given the unconvincing state of our democracy at
present, if we misdefine our China policy as an effort to combat
authoritarianism, we will alienate, not attract most other nations. Only
if we are willing to be a team player and can credibly claim to be serving the
interests of partner powers as well as our own will they stand behind us in
support of perceived common interests.
China is an increasingly formidable world power with
interests that range from some that parallel ours to others that are
antithetical, and still others that are of no consequence to us. We
should treat China as the disparate bundle of challenges it is. There are
many issues of concern to us that cannot be effectively addressed without
Chinese participation. We need to leverage Chinese capacities that serve
our interests and counter or immobilize those that don’t. Specifically,
we should:
·
stop pushing China and Russia together
in opposition to us;
·
let market forces – rather than paranoid
plutocrats, xenophobic politicians, and ideological crackpots – play the major
part in governing trade and investment;
·
create a predictable framework for trade
with China in strategically sensitive sectors, like semiconductors, that
safeguards U.S. defense interests while taking advantage of China’s
contributions to global supply chains;
·
compete with China and other countries
for influence in international organizations, rather than withdrawing from them
because we can no longer dominate them;
·
seek to cooperate with China to address
planetwide problems of common concern like:
·
the mitigation of climate and
environmental degradation;
·
the reinforcement of global capacity to
respond to pandemics and other public health challenges;
·
the inhibition and, if possible,
reversal of nuclear proliferation;
·
the reconstruction of a globally agreed
framework to manage the international transfer of goods, services, and capital;
·
the maintenance of global economic
growth amid financial stability;
·
the healthy development of the world’s
poorer countries;
·
the setting of standards for new
technologies and competition in new strategic domains; and
·
the reform of global governance.
We should:
·
work with China and others to ease the
now inevitable transition from dollar hegemony to a multilateral monetary order
in ways that preserve maximum American influence and independence;
·
leverage, not boycott, China’s “Belt and
Road Initiative,” to ensure that we benefit from the business opportunities and
connectivities it creates;
·
promote cross-Strait negotiations and
mutual accommodation rather than military confrontation between Beijing and
Taipei;
·
expand consular relations, restore
journalistic exchanges, and promote Chinese language and area studies to
enhance both our presence and our understanding of China.
China and the United States
began 2021 in different moods. This year, China will celebrate the 100th anniversary of
its ruling Communist Party. Chinese associate the Party with the
astonishingly rapid transformation of their country from a poor and beleaguered
nation to a relatively well off and strong one. Most Chinese have set
aside their traditional pessimism and are optimistic that the enormous progress
they have experienced in their lifetimes will continue. China’s decisive
handling of the pandemic has bolstered its citizens faith in its system.
Morale is high. China is focused on the future.
By contrast, the United States entered this year in an
unprecedented state of domestic disarray and demoralization. A plurality
of Americans disputes the legitimacy of the newly installed Biden
administration, which faces an uphill battle with a Congress well-practiced at
gridlock and evading its constitutional responsibilities. Despite a
booming stock market supported by cheap money and chronic deficit spending, we
are in an economic depression. So far, our answer to this has been
limited to subsidizing consumption rather than investing in the rejuvenation of
our political economy through attention to infrastructure, education, and
reindustrialization. We have our eyes fixed firmly on the immediate,
rather than the long term. But, without serious repairs to restore a
sound American political economy, our future is in jeopardy, and we will be in
no condition to compete with the world’s rising and resurgent great powers, especially
China.
Doubling down on
military competition with Beijing just gives its military-industrial complex a
reason to up the ante and call our bluff. An arms race with China leads
not to victory but to mutual impoverishment. As President Eisenhower
reminded us sixty years ago, “every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” And stoking
China’s neighbors’ dependency on us rather than helping them become more
self-reliant implicates them in our conflicts of interest with China without
addressing their own. They need our diplomatic support even more than our
military backing to work out a stable modus
vivendi with China, which is not going
away.
Our China policy should be part of a new and broader
Asia strategy, not the main determinant of our relations with other Asian
nations or the sole driver of our policies in the region. And to be able
to hold our own with China, we must renew our competitive capacity and build a
society that is demonstrably better governed, better educated, more
egalitarian, more open, more innovative, and healthier as well as freer than
all others.
To paraphrase
Napoleon, let China take its own path while we take our own. We need to
fix our own problems before we try to fix China’s. If we Americans get
our priorities right, we can once
again be the nation to rise and astonish the world
.
[1]Looking
at a map of the world and, pointing at China, the newly crown Emperor Napoleon
said “Ici repose un géant endormi, laissez le dormir, car quand il s’éveillera,
il étonnera le monde.” He repeated the thought during his exile on
St. Helena: “Laissez donc la Chine dormir, car lorsque la Chine s’éveillera le
monde entier tremblera.”
[2] More
pain than gain: How the US-China trade war hurt America, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/08/07/more-pain-than-gain-how-the-us-china-trade-war-hurt-america/
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-jobs/u-s-china-trade-war-has-cost-up-to-245000-u-s-jobs-business-group-study-idUSKBN29J2O9
[4] “Trump’s
China Buying Spree Unlikely to Cover Trade War’s Costs,” Bloomberg Economics,
December 18, 2019,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-18/trump-s-china-buying-spree-unlikely-to-cover-trade-war-s-costs
[5] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56073
[6] https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2021/01/15/10595900/us-to-face-heavy-economic-losses-if-trade-war-with-china-continues
[7] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30800-8/fulltext
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Written by Chas Freeman
Ambassador Freeman chairs Projects
International, Inc. He is a retired U.S. defense official, diplomat, and
interpreter, the recipient of numerous high honors and awards, a popular public
speaker, and the author of five books.
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