https://www.homelandsecuritynewHere’s How Scared of China You Should Be
(Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy)
A critical issue in current debates on U.S. grand strategy is the priority the country should place on competing with China. How many resources (money, people, time, attention, etc.) should the United States devote to this problem? Is China the greatest geopolitical challenge the United States has ever faced, or a colossus with feet of clay? Should countering China take precedence over all other problems (Ukraine, climate change, migration, Iran, etc.), or is it just one issue among many and not necessarily the most important?
The answers to these five questions would tell you a lot about how worried you should be:
No. 1: Is China’s economic future bright, dark, or somewhere in between?;
No. 2: Will U.S. export controls work?; No.
3: Is Xi Jinping another Mao Zedong or another Lee Kuan Yew?; No.
4: Will Asia balance effectively?; No.
5: What will the rest of the world do?
So how scared should you be? I don’t know. If history is any guide, the United States is more likely to overreact to a possible China challenge than to under-respond, and the current bipartisan enthusiasm for confronting China on multiple fronts supports that prediction. But whether you think we are doing too much or too little depends to a considerable extent on how you answer the five questions listed above. I’d be ever so grateful if some smart China experts put their heads together and tried to narrow the range of disagreement. It would be even better if they did so publicly and laid out their sources and reasoning in as much detail as possible so that those of us who care about these questions could have better-informed debates on this vital strategic question.
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