the state of is
Subject: Fwd: Kissinger at Foreign Affairs website, on future of US-China relations
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The Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations
Conflict Is a Choice, Not a Necessity
By Henry A. Kissinger
March/April 2012
On January 19, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu
Jintao issued a joint statement at the end of Hu’s visit to Washington. It
proclaimed their shared commitment to a “positive, cooperative, and
comprehensive U.S.-China relationship.” Each party reassured the other
regarding his principal concern, announcing, “The United States reiterated
that it welcomes a strong, prosperous, and successful China that plays a
greater role in world affairs. China welcomes the United States as an
Asia-Pacific nation that contributes to peace, stability and prosperity in
the region.”
Since then, the two governments have set about implementing the stated
objectives. Top American and Chinese officials have exchanged visits and
institutionalized their exchanges on major strategic and economic issues.
Military-to-military contacts have been restarted, opening an important
channel of communication. And at the unofficial level, so-called track-two
groups have explored possible evolutions of the U.S.-Chinese relationship.
Yet as cooperation has increased, so has controversy. Significant groups in
both countries claim that a contest for supremacy between China and the
United States is inevitable and perhaps already under way. In this
perspective, appeals for U.S.-Chinese cooperation appear outmoded and even
naive.
The mutual recriminations emerge from distinct yet parallel analyses in
each country. Some American strategic thinkers argue that Chinese policy
pursues two long-term objectives: displacing the United States as the
preeminent power in the western Pacific and consolidating Asia into an
exclusionary bloc deferring to Chinese economic and foreign policy
interests. In this conception, even though China’s absolute military
capacities are not formally equal to those of the United States, Beijing
possesses the ability to pose unacceptable risks in a conflict with
Washington and is developing increasingly sophisticated means to negate
traditional U.S. advantages. Its invulnerable second-strike nuclear
capability will eventually be paired with an expanding range of antiship
ballistic missiles and asymmetric capabilities in new domains such as
cyberspace and space. China could secure a dominant naval position through
a series of island chains on its periphery, some fear, and once such a
screen exists, China’s neighbors, dependent as they are on Chinese trade
and uncertain of the United States’ ability to react, might adjust their
policies according to Chinese preferences. Eventually, this could lead to
the creation of a Sinocentric Asian bloc dominating the western Pacific.
The most recent U.S. defense strategy report reflects, at least implicitly,
some of these apprehensions.
No Chinese government officials have proclaimed such a strategy as China’s
actual policy. Indeed, they stress the opposite. However, enough material
exists in China’s quasi-official press and research institutes to lend some
support to the theory that relations are heading for confrontation rather
than cooperation.
U.S. strategic concerns are magnified by ideological predispositions to
battle with the entire nondemocratic world. Authoritarian regimes, some
argue, are inherently brittle, impelled to rally domestic support by
nationalist and expansionist rhetoric and practice. In these theories --
versions of which are embraced in segments of both the American left and
the American right -- tension and conflict with China grow out of China’s
domestic structure. Universal peace will come, it is asserted, from the
global triumph of democracy rather than from appeals for cooperation. The
political scientist Aaron Friedberg writes, for example, that “a liberal
democratic China will have little cause to fear its democratic
counterparts, still less to use force against them.” Therefore, “stripped
of diplomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy [should
be] to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep away
China’s one-party authoritarian state and leave a liberal democracy in its
place.”
On the Chinese side, the confrontational interpretations follow an inverse
logic. They see the United States as a wounded superpower determined to
thwart the rise of any challenger, of which China is the most credible. No
matter how intensely China pursues cooperation, some Chinese argue,
Washington’s fixed objective will be to hem in a growing China by military
deployment and treaty commitments, thus preventing it from playing its
historic role as the Middle Kingdom. In this perspective, any sustained
cooperation with the United States is self-defeating, since it will only
serve the overriding U.S. objective of neutralizing China. Systematic
hostility is occasionally considered to inhere even in American cultural
and technological influences, which are sometimes cast as a form of
deliberate pressure designed to corrode China’s domestic consensus and
traditional values. The most assertive voices argue that China has been
unduly passive in the face of hostile trends and that (for example, in the
case of territorial issues in the South China Sea) China should confront
those of its neighbors with which it has disputed claims and then, in the
words of the strategic analyst Long Tao, “reason, think ahead and strike
first before things gradually run out of hand . . . launch[ing] some
tiny-scale battles that could deter provocateurs from going further.”
THE PAST NEED NOT BE PROLOGUE
Is there, then, a point in the quest for a cooperative U.S.-Chinese
relationship and in policies designed to achieve it? To be sure, the rise
of powers has historically often led to conflict with established
countries. But conditions have changed. It is doubtful that the leaders who
went so blithely into a world war in 1914 would have done so had they known
what the world would be like at its end. Contemporary leaders can have no
such illusions. A major war between developed nuclear countries must bring
casualties and upheavals impossible to relate to calculable objectives.
Preemption is all but excluded, especially for a pluralistic democracy such
as the United States.
If challenged, the United States will do what it must to preserve its
security. But it should not adopt confrontation as a strategy of choice. In
China, the United States would encounter an adversary skilled over the
centuries in using prolonged conflict as a strategy and whose doctrine
emphasizes the psychological exhaustion of the opponent. In an actual
conflict, both sides possess the capabilities and the ingenuity to inflict
catastrophic damage on each other. By the time any such hypothetical
conflagration drew to a close, all participants would be left exhausted and
debilitated. They would then be obliged to face anew the very task that
confronts them today: the construction of an international order in which
both countries are significant components.
The blueprints for containment drawn from Cold War strategies used by both
sides against an expansionist Soviet Union do not apply to current
conditions. The economy of the Soviet Union was weak (except for military
production) and did not affect the global economy. Once China broke off
ties and ejected Soviet advisers, few countries except those forcibly
absorbed into the Soviet orbit had a major stake in their economic
relationship with Moscow. Contemporary China, by contrast, is a dynamic
factor in the world economy. It is a principal trading partner of all its
neighbors and most of the Western industrial powers, including the United
States. A prolonged confrontation between China and the United States would
alter the world economy with unsettling consequences for all.
Nor would China find that the strategy it pursued in its own conflict with
the Soviet Union fits a confrontation with the United States. Only a few
countries -- and no Asian ones -- would treat an American presence in Asia
as “fingers” to be “chopped off” (in Deng Xiaoping’s graphic phrase about
Soviet forward positions). Even those Asian states that are not members of
alliances with the United States seek the reassurance of an American
political presence in the region and of American forces in nearby seas as
the guarantor of the world to which they have become accustomed. Their
approach was expressed by a senior Indonesian official to an American
counterpart: “Don’t leave us, but don’t make us choose.”
China’s recent military buildup is not in itself an exceptional phenomenon:
the more unusual outcome would be if the world’s second-largest economy and
largest importer of natural resources did not translate its economic power
into some increased military capacity. The issue is whether that buildup is
open ended and to what purposes it is put. If the United States treats
every advance in Chinese military capabilities as a hostile act, it will
quickly find itself enmeshed in an endless series of disputes on behalf of
esoteric aims. But China must be aware, from its own history, of the
tenuous dividing line between defensive and offensive capabilities and of
the consequences of an unrestrained arms race.
China’s leaders will have their own powerful reasons for rejecting domestic
appeals for an adversarial approach -- as indeed they have publicly
proclaimed. China’s imperial expansion has historically been achieved by
osmosis rather than conquest, or by the conversion to Chinese culture of
conquerors who then added their own territories to the Chinese domain.
Dominating Asia militarily would be a formidable undertaking. The Soviet
Union, during the Cold War, bordered on a string of weak countries drained
by war and occupation and dependent on American troop commitments for their
defense. China today faces Russia in the north; Japan and South Korea, with
American military alliances, to the east; Vietnam and India to the south;
and Indonesia and Malaysia not far away. This is not a constellation
conducive to conquest. It is more likely to raise fears of encirclement.
Each of these countries has a long military tradition and would pose a
formidable obstacle if its territory or its ability to conduct an
independent policy were threatened. A militant Chinese foreign policy would
enhance cooperation among all or at least some of these nations, evoking
China’s historic nightmare, as happened in the period 2009–10.
DEALING WITH THE NEW CHINA
Another reason for Chinese restraint in at least the medium term is the
domestic adaptation the country faces. The gap in Chinese society between
the largely developed coastal regions and the undeveloped western regions
has made Hu’s objective of a “harmonious society” both compelling and
elusive. Cultural changes compound the challenge. The next decades will
witness, for the first time, the full impact of one-child families on adult
Chinese society. This is bound to modify cultural patterns in a society in
which large families have traditionally taken care of the aged and the
handicapped. When four grandparents compete for the attention of one child
and invest him with the aspirations heretofore spread across many
offspring, a new pattern of insistent achievement and vast, perhaps
unfulfillable, expectations may arise.
All these developments will further complicate the challenges of China’s
governmental transition starting in 2012, in which the presidency; the
vice-presidency; the considerable majority of the positions in China’s
Politburo, State Council, and Central Military Commission; and thousands of
other key national and provincial posts will be staffed with new
appointees. The new leadership group will consist, for the most part, of
members of the first Chinese generation in a century and a half to have
lived all their lives in a country at peace. Its primary challenge will be
finding a way to deal with a society revolutionized by changing economic
conditions, unprecedented and rapidly expanding technologies of
communication, a tenuous global economy, and the migration of hundreds of
millions of people from China’s countryside to its cities. The model of
government that emerges will likely be a synthesis of modern ideas and
traditional Chinese political and cultural concepts, and the quest for that
synthesis will provide the ongoing drama of China’s evolution.
These social and political transformations are bound to be followed with
interest and hope in the United States. Direct American intervention would
be neither wise nor productive. The United States will, as it should,
continue to make its views known on human rights issues and individual
cases. And its day-to-day conduct will express its national preference for
democratic principles. But a systematic project to transform China’s
institutions by diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions is likely to
backfire and isolate the very liberals it is intended to assist. In China,
it would be interpreted by a considerable majority through the lens of
nationalism, recalling earlier eras of foreign intervention.
What this situation calls for is not an abandonment of American values but
a distinction between the realizable and the absolute. The U.S.-Chinese
relationship should not be considered as a zero-sum game, nor can the
emergence of a prosperous and powerful China be assumed in itself to be an
American strategic defeat.
A cooperative approach challenges preconceptions on both sides. The United
States has few precedents in its national experience of relating to a
country of comparable size, self-confidence, economic achievement, and
international scope and yet with such a different culture and political
system. Nor does history supply China with precedents for how to relate to
a fellow great power with a permanent presence in Asia, a vision of
universal ideals not geared toward Chinese conceptions, and alliances with
several of China’s neighbors. Prior to the United States, all countries
establishing such a position did so as a prelude to an attempt to dominate
China.
The simplest approach to strategy is to insist on overwhelming potential
adversaries with superior resources and materiel. But in the contemporary
world, this is only rarely feasible. China and the United States will
inevitably continue as enduring realities for each other. Neither can
entrust its security to the other -- no great power does, for long -- and
each will continue to pursue its own interests, sometimes at the relative
expense of the other. But both have the responsibility to take into account
the other’s nightmares, and both would do well to recognize that their
rhetoric, as much as their actual policies, can feed into the other’s
suspicions.
China’s greatest strategic fear is that an outside power or powers will
establish military deployments around China’s periphery capable of
encroaching on China’s territory or meddling in its domestic institutions.
When China deemed that it faced such a threat in the past, it went to war
rather than risk the outcome of what it saw as gathering trends -- in Korea
in 1950, against India in 1962, along the northern border with the Soviet
Union in 1969, and against Vietnam in 1979.
The United States’ fear, sometimes only indirectly expressed, is of being
pushed out of Asia by an exclusionary bloc. The United States fought a
world war against Germany and Japan to prevent such an outcome and
exercised some of its most forceful Cold War diplomacy under
administrations of both political parties to this end against the Soviet
Union. In both enterprises, it is worth noting, substantial joint
U.S.-Chinese efforts were directed against the perceived threat of
hegemony.
Other Asian countries will insist on their prerogatives to develop their
capacities for their own national reasons, not as part of a contest between
outside powers. They will not willingly consign themselves to a revived
tributary order. Nor do they regard themselves as elements in an American
containment policy or an American project to alter China’s domestic
institutions. They aspire to good relations with both China and the United
States and will resist any pressure to choose between the two.
Can the fear of hegemony and the nightmare of military encirclement be
reconciled? Is it possible to find a space in which both sides can achieve
their ultimate objectives without militarizing their strategies? For great
nations with global capabilities and divergent, even partly conflicting
aspirations, what is the margin between conflict and abdication?
That China will have a major influence in the regions surrounding it is
inherent in its geography, values, and history. The limits of that
influence, however, will be shaped by circumstance and policy decisions.
These will determine whether an inevitable quest for influence turns into a
drive to negate or exclude other independent sources of power.
For nearly two generations, American strategy relied on local regional
defense by American ground forces -- largely to avoid the catastrophic
consequences of a general nuclear war. In recent decades, congressional and
public opinion have impelled an end to such commitments in Vietnam, Iraq,
and Afghanistan. Now, fiscal considerations further limit the range of such
an approach. American strategy has been redirected from defending territory
to threatening unacceptable punishment against potential aggressors. This
requires forces capable of rapid intervention and global reach, but not
bases ringing China’s frontiers. What Washington must not do is combine a
defense policy based on budgetary restraints with a diplomacy based on
unlimited ideological aims.
Just as Chinese influence in surrounding countries may spur fears of
dominance, so efforts to pursue traditional American national interests can
be perceived as a form of military encirclement. Both sides must understand
the nuances by which apparently traditional and apparently reasonable
courses can evoke the deepest worries of the other. They should seek
together to define the sphere in which their peaceful competition is
circumscribed. If that is managed wisely, both military confrontation and
domination can be avoided; if not, escalating tension is inevitable. It is
the task of diplomacy to discover this space, to expand it if possible, and
to prevent the relationship from being overwhelmed by tactical and domestic
imperatives.
COMMUNITY OR CONFLICT
The current world order was built largely without Chinese participation,
and hence China sometimes feels less bound than others by its rules. Where
the order does not suit Chinese preferences, Beijing has set up alternative
arrangements, such as in the separate currency channels being established
with Brazil and Japan and other countries. If the pattern becomes routine
and spreads into many spheres of activity, competing world orders could
evolve. Absent common goals coupled with agreed rules of restraint,
institutionalized rivalry is likely to escalate beyond the calculations and
intentions of its advocates. In an era in which unprecedented offensive
capabilities and intrusive technologies multiply, the penalties of such a
course could be drastic and perhaps irrevocable.
Crisis management will not be enough to sustain a relationship so global
and beset by so many differing pressures within and between both countries,
which is why I have argued for the concept of a Pacific Community and
expressed the hope that China and the United States can generate a sense of
common purpose on at least some issues of general concern. But the goal of
such a community cannot be reached if either side conceives of the
enterprise as primarily a more effective way to defeat or undermine the
other. Neither China nor the United States can be systematically challenged
without its noticing, and if such a challenge is noted, it will be
resisted. Both need to commit themselves to genuine cooperation and find a
way to communicate and relate their visions to each other and to the world.
Some tentative steps in that direction have already been undertaken. For
example, the United States has joined several other countries in beginning
negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free-trade pact
linking the Americas with Asia. Such an arrangement could be a step toward
a Pacific Community because it would lower trade barriers among the world’s
most productive, dynamic, and resource-rich economies and link the two
sides of the ocean in shared projects.
Obama has invited China to join the TPP. However, the terms of accession as
presented by American briefers and commentators have sometimes seemed to
require fundamental changes in China’s domestic structure. To the extent
that is the case, the TPP could be regarded in Beijing as part of a
strategy to isolate China. For its part, China has put forward comparable
alternative arrangements. It has negotiated a trade pact with the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations and has broached a Northeast Asian
trade pact with Japan and South Korea.
Important domestic political considerations are involved for all parties.
But if China and the United States come to regard each other’s trade-pact
efforts as elements in a strategy of isolation, the Asia-Pacific region
could devolve into competing adversarial power blocs. Ironically, this
would be a particular challenge if China meets frequent American calls to
shift from an export-led to a consumption-driven economy, as its most
recent five-year plan contemplates. Such a development could reduce China’s
stake in the United States as an export market even as it encourages other
Asian countries to further orient their economies toward China.
The key decision facing both Beijing and Washington is whether to move
toward a genuine effort at cooperation or fall into a new version of
historic patterns of international rivalry. Both countries have adopted the
rhetoric of community. They have even established a high-level forum for
it, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which meets twice a year. It has
been productive on immediate issues, but it is still in the foothills of
its ultimate assignment to produce a truly global economic and political
order. And if a global order does not emerge in the economic field,
barriers to progress on more emotional and less positive-sum issues, such
as territory and security, may grow insurmountable.
THE RISKS OF RHETORIC
As they pursue this process, both sides need to recognize the impact of
rhetoric on perceptions and calculations. American leaders occasionally
launch broadsides against China, including specific proposals for
adversarial policies, as domestic political necessities. This occurs even
-- perhaps especially -- when a moderate policy is the ultimate intention.
The issue is not specific complaints, which should be dealt with on the
merits of the issue, but attacks on the basic motivations of Chinese
policy, such as declaring China a strategic adversary. The target of these
attacks is bound to ask whether domestic imperatives requiring affirmations
of hostility will sooner or later require hostile actions. By the same
token, threatening Chinese statements, including those in the semiofficial
press, are likely to be interpreted in terms of the actions they imply,
whatever the domestic pressures or the intent that generated them.
The American debate, on both sides of the political divide, often describes
China as a “rising power” that will need to “mature” and learn how to
exercise responsibility on the world stage. China, however, sees itself not
as a rising power but as a returning one, predominant in its region for two
millennia and temporarily displaced by colonial exploiters taking advantage
of Chinese domestic strife and decay. It views the prospect of a strong
China exercising influence in economic, cultural, political, and military
affairs not as an unnatural challenge to world order but rather as a return
to normality. Americans need not agree with every aspect of the Chinese
analysis to understand that lecturing a country with a history of millennia
about its need to “grow up” and behave “responsibly” can be needlessly
grating.
On the Chinese side, proclamations at the governmental and the informal
level that China intends to “revive the Chinese nation” to its traditional
eminence carry different implications inside China and abroad. China is
rightly proud of its recent strides in restoring its sense of national
purpose following what it sees as a century of humiliation. Yet few other
countries in Asia are nostalgic for an era when they were subject to
Chinese suzerainty. As recent veterans of anticolonial struggles, most
Asian countries are extremely sensitive to maintaining their independence
and freedom of action vis-à-vis any outside power, whether Western or
Asian. They seek to be involved in as many overlapping spheres of economic
and political activity as possible; they invite an American role in the
region but seek equilibrium, not a crusade or confrontation.
The rise of China is less the result of its increased military strength
than of the United States’ own declining competitive position, driven by
factors such as obsolescent infrastructure, inadequate attention to
research and development, and a seemingly dysfunctional governmental
process. The United States should address these issues with ingenuity and
determination instead of blaming a putative adversary. It must take care
not to repeat in its China policy the pattern of conflicts entered with
vast public support and broad goals but ended when the American political
process insisted on a strategy of extrication that amounted to an
abandonment, if not a complete reversal, of the country’s proclaimed
objectives.
China can find reassurance in its own record of endurance and in the fact
that no U.S. administration has ever sought to alter the reality of China
as one of the world’s major states, economies, and civilizations. Americans
would do well to remember that even when China’s GDP is equal to that of
the United States, it will need to be distributed over a population that is
four times as large, aging, and engaged in complex domestic transformations
occasioned by China’s growth and urbanization. The practical consequence is
that a great deal of China’s energy will still be devoted to domestic
needs.
Both sides should be open to conceiving of each other’s activities as a
normal part of international life and not in themselves as a cause for
alarm. The inevitable tendency to impinge on each other should not be
equated with a conscious drive to contain or dominate, so long as both can
maintain the distinction and calibrate their actions accordingly. China and
the United States will not necessarily transcend the ordinary operation of
great-power rivalry. But they owe it to themselves, and the world, to make
an effort to do so.
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