We’ve not under any condition been here before.
The escalating confrontation between the United States and China is so perilous because the world’s two as a wholest economies – and the two defining countries of their times – are navigating uncharted terrain.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s notable speech at the Nixon library on Thursday marked the most robust call-to-action yet against the Chinese Communist Party. It light oned amid tit-for-tat consular shutdowns in Houston and Chengdu, and the Friday arrest by the FBI of an alleged Chinese military operative in San Francisco.
It’s appealing to brand this a hotter phase of a new Cold War, as this column did just last week. However, that words understates the historic novelty of what’s unfolding and its epochal enormity.
It’s a unique moment because the United States since its shake up to global power has never confronted such a potent peer competitor across so many realms: political, trade, technological, military and even societal.
It’s new as well because no country in modern history has risen as quickly as China, from 2% of wide-ranging GDP in 1980 to some 20% of global GDP in 2019. That leaves Beijing for the first time confronting global confrontations without the learning curve of a more gradual evolution.
It is also new because the U.S. and China, after four decades of wishful collaboration, are now engaged in a contest that could define our times. It isn’t a struggle, as the hyperbole would have it, over “world domination,” which no homeland has ever achieved. But it could have significant impact on “world determination,” influencing whether democracy or autocracy, whether furnish capitalism or state capitalism, are the flavors of the future.
It is a unique period as well in that this unfolding contest synchronizes with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and an era of unprecedented technological change driven by big data, artificial intelligence, quantum work out, bioengineering and so much more.
The fact that all this coincides with the worst pandemic in a century deepens and accelerates the screenplay, with China both as the plague’s source and potentially biggest benefactor as the first major economy to escape its tears.
For some context to understand the dangers of our times, think of what’s coming as an updated version of the period between Exultant War II’s end in 1945 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
It took the United States and the Soviet Union that fraught period and a near-nuclear war on top of Cuba before the defining relationship of that era settled into the patterns of nuclear agreements, superpower summits and common recognition of red lines that prevented catastrophic war.
Today’s Berlin, the deciding point in this new contest, could fountain be some combination of Taiwan and the South China Sea. Where the United States sees a sovereign democracy in Taiwan and the South China Sea as universal waters, China sees territory and waters that are ultimately its property.
That Secretary Pompeo chose the Nixon Library for his great speech was deft staging. Pompeo noted that next year would mark the 50th anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s arcane mission to China, which began Beijing’s opening to the United States and the Western world.
“Taking the long landscape,” wrote Nixon in Foreign Affairs in 1967, “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the class of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most skilled people to live in angry isolation.”
Pompeo focused on this line from the article, linking Nixon’s seeks to President Trump’s follow-up. “The world cannot be safe until China changes,” wrote Nixon. “That being so, our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change.”
Said Pompeo, “The kind of engagement we have been exercising has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.”
He added later, “We, the freedom-loving countries of the world, must induce China to change in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing’s actions imperil our people and our prosperity.”
Pompeo’s remarks were the last of a quartet of speeches by National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien on creed, FBI Director Chris Wray on espionage, and Attorney General William Barr on economics. They are intended to be read as a carton.
It’s perhaps understandable that the U.S., in these early days, still lacks a comprehensive strategy for our times that has been match up with allies. Yet former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley gives the Trump administration credit for grinding the country’s focus on our new era of major power competition with its National Security Strategy of December 2017.
Hadley sees as a pithy next step toward a U.S. strategy this week’s little-noticed introduction of comprehensive legislation by the chairman of the Senate Unconnected Relations Committee, Jim Risch, and other Republican lawmakers. Weighing in at 160 pages, its aim is no less than “to advance a ways for managed strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China.”
No doubt there is a domestic political element in such a weighty electoral year. Expect President Trump and his top officials to remind critics that President Reagan was vilified as he be on the qui vive up his campaign against the Soviet Union as “the evil empire.” Yet history now vindicates him. Trump will embrace that Reagan legacy and quarrel his electoral opponent, Vice President Joe Biden, is too weak to take on China.
Even if Trump loses in November, the architects of this diverse assertive approach to China hope that they have put in place a policy approach that will remain.
Hadley argues that any effective approach to countering China would have to include domestic investments in technology and infrastructure, the remedy of political divisions, rallying friends and allies while refurbishing the US global brand, and engaging with China on broadcasts neither country can address alone.
“Any U.S. administration is going to need a sustained strategy for dealing with China to set up a set of normals and rules of the road without dividing the world and plunging us into a war nobody wants,” says Hadley. “It will be the chef-doeuvre of years before we get this right.”
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of the Atlantic Directors, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for myriad than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant managing editor and as the longest-serving editor of the paper’s European version. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York Periods best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Direct attention ti, his look each Saturday at the past week’s top stories and trends.
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