Now, Catching up on US-China Relations
This Post continues a series of 'catch up' posts - this for late this weekend or early in the work week.
While it has been interesting to follow up on the consequences of recent global elections, India, Mexico and South Africa - see my recent Post on the latter - and there certainly have been real consequences arising from these recent democratic expressions. Meanwhile, other things have been happening. So, I thought, I’d catch up on events and views on the current state of US-China relations.
On the diplomatic strategic front, the meeting of US and China defence ministers at the margins of the Shangri-La Dialogue seemingly marked the next step in continuing official meetings. As pointed out in a WAPO piece reviewing the discussions:
The meeting, held on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, a regional security summit, saw Austin and Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun agree to work toward better communications to stabilize military relations and avert crises, according to a statement from the Defense Department. The United States and China will “convene a crisis-communications working group by the end of the year.
Though most analysts noted the harsh statements emerging from at least the public statements, especially those of Minister Dong Jun, it would seem the military-to-military discussions remain in place. In fact a second set of meetings occurred as pointed out by the FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo:
In another sign of re-engagement, Ely Ratner, the top Pentagon official for the Indo-Pacific, on Thursday spoke to Major General Li Bin, head of the Central Military Commission office for international military co-operation. It was the first exchange between the occupants of the positions since 2019.
What is interesting is that while there is some debate as to whether or not the two great powers are engaged in a ‘new Cold War’ to some degree experts in general see the US tackling the aggressiveness, as they see it, of China and its current leader, Xi Jinping. Without question experts, as we will see in a moment, acknowledge the seriousness of the competition and the tensions in the relationship. They differ however, on the appropriate US approach.
What is interesting is that when I last reviewed US-China relations, I commented in part on the piece by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, “No Substitute for Victory”. This article has received a lot of attention in part because of the view expressed by these authors that the US needs to tackle China as the US did with the Soviet Union. It is worth recalling their view:
No country should relish waging another cold war. Yet a cold war is already being waged against the United States by China’s leaders. Rather than denying the existence of this struggle, Washington should own it and win it. Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a hot war; they signal complacency to the American people and conciliation to Chinese leaders. … Victory requires openly admitting that a totalitarian regime that commits genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war will never be a reliable partner. Like the discredited détente policies that Washington adopted in the 1970s to deal with the Soviet Union, the current approach will yield little cooperation from Chinese leaders while fortifying their conviction that they can destabilize the world with impunity.
As I said in that previous examination: “Pottinger and Gallagher are committed to a view that Xi Jinping is stoking the current rivalry and encouraging disorder and chaos in the global order:”
There certainly have been reactions to the Pottinger/Gallagher article. Several China specialists have reacted to the Pottinger/GallagherForeign Affairs (FA) article, in - no surprises here I suppose, Foreign Affairs. In a series of responses colleagues including Rush Doshi, now of the Council on Foreign Relations, Jessica Chen Weiss of Cornell and her colleague James Steinberg of Johns Hopkins and Paul Heer of the Chicago Council tackle the original Pottinger/ Gallagher piece and in fact there is a Reply by the original two authors.
Though I will not comment on all the author reactions, let me begin with Rush Doshi. Rush is currently Director of the Initiative on China Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. More pertinently Rush just ended a stint in the current Biden Administration serving as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council. Now Rush has been quite aggressive in his own right with respect to China. One need only read his work: “The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy and the Displacement of American Order” as described in this review. But I suspect, given his current remarks here, he has become, it seems, more reflective when it comes to the tensions between the two great powers and the real potential for conflict after serving in government. For Doshi makes clear in his FA piece that he is not sympathetic to the Pottinger/Gallagher view:
But above all, they make a bad bet: they contend that the United States should forget about managing competition, embrace confrontation without limits, and then wait for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collapse. This approach risks runaway escalation and could force a moment of reckoning before the United States has taken the very steps the authors recommend to strengthen its defense industrial base and improve its competitive position. … The authors argue that their approach will work against China because it worked against the Soviet Union. But the Biden administration recognizes that this contest is different from that one.
Doshi clearly disagrees with Pottinger/Gallagher in their strategic approach but he does concede that from his perspective there is much to be appreciated in their policy calls. As Doshi argues:
Pottinger and Gallagher provide an important service to the China policy debate by presenting a good-faith critique of the current approach. But what is most useful about their argument is not the areas of difference with the Biden administration but the areas of overlap. U.S. policy toward China will need bipartisan foundations to succeed. Their essay shows that regardless of where one starts in the China debate, at the moment, most policymakers are arriving at a similar set of common-sense policies.
The problem is, so argues Pottinger/Gallagher in their Reply to the authors in their critiques of them, that the US is already in a Cold War with China. As they describe:
... the United States is already in one—not because Americans desired or started it, but because Xi is laser-focused on prevailing in a global struggle in which “capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph,” as he put it in a quintessential secret speech shortly after rising to power. Xi’s internal speeches, edicts, and actions show that he is pursuing global, not just regional, initiatives to discredit and dissolve Western alliances, co-opting international bodies to advance illiberal and autocratic aims, and even undermining the centuries-old Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states.
More critical of the Pottinger/Gallagher approach to US-China competition are the views expressed by Weiss and Steinberg. Their opening expresses a rather stark view of the Pottinger/Gallagher appraisal:
The Chinese government does not share the United States’ commitment to liberal democracy, is at odds with many of the United States’ key international partners, and pursues economic policies that harm American workers and companies. Meeting that challenge requires a nuanced understanding of the forces driving China’s external policies and a clear-eyed view of the sources of U.S. strength. The path forward suggested by Pottinger and Gallagher reflects neither. Instead, they offer an illusory appeal to victory, one that will harm the cause of freedom in China, damage Washington’s relations with key U.S. allies, and risk a dangerous confrontation reminiscent of the worst days of the Cold War—a Cold War they enthusiastically embrace.
While they are determined to respond firmly to Chinese threats it is also, “… in the interest of both Beijing and Washington to reduce the risk of war and cooperate on key issues of mutual concern, such as climate change, public health, and the management of potentially destabilizing new technologies”
Furthermore, according to the two authors:
Even when direct diplomacy fails to resolve key issues, Washington’s openness to engage demonstrates to the world that the United States is acting responsibly.
The two remain committed to enhanced people-to-people contact. As they urge:
Even as the United States works to counter Chinese cyberattacks, information operations, and unfair economic practices, it should also welcome Chinese tourists, businesspeople, and students.
Weiss and Steinberg are clearly not fans of of the Pottinger/Gallagher attraction for a ‘new Cold War’ and conclude as follows:
Pottinger and Gallagher’s nostalgia for the Cold War and their call for a new generation of cold warriors could be issued only by those who have no memory of how dangerous that war often was.
In the end it seems to me that all these authors, with the exception of Pottinger/Gallagher, are less concerned with amplifying whether we are witnessing a ‘new Cold War’ but instead are far more focused on the policy choices each offers in the current US-China tensions. And here the critics of Pottinger/Gallagher are quite clear that the Pottinger/Gallager are unnecessarily aggressive and risk confrontation when in fact this is not the inevitable outcome of current US-China competition.