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October 19 - November 24, 2019
The United States defeated Spain before the end of August and signed a peace treaty in December. For Spain, the terms were severe: Cuba gained its independence, and Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the US.34 In the aftermath of the war, historian and Roosevelt confidant Brooks Adams declared that the events of 1898 would become “the turning point in our history.” Looking ahead, he predicted that “we may dominate the world, as no nation has dominated it in recent time . . . I look forward to the next ten years as probably the culminating period of America.”
For Roosevelt, a canal through Central America was also required for national security. Without it, American warships based on the Atlantic coast had to travel fourteen thousand miles on a journey of over two months around Chile’s Cape Horn to reach the West Coast and protect American interests in the Pacific (and vice versa).
The deal was, Roosevelt’s secretary of state admitted privately, “very satisfactory, vastly advantageous to the United States, and we must confess, with what face we can muster, not so advantageous to Panama.”60 The arrangement only proved more imbalanced in the years that followed. For example, while Panama continued to receive only $250,000 annually from the canal, the US Treasury collected about $1 million in profits from the canal in 1921, close to $14 million in 1925, and over $18 million each year from 1928 to 1930.61 Moreover, this does not include the impact of reduced shipping costs,
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As we watch Beijing’s renewed assertiveness in its neighborhood, and the South and East China Seas along its border in particular, should we hear echoes of TR’s actions in the Caribbean? If China were to become half as
demanding now as the US was then, will American leaders today find a way to adapt as adroitly as the British did? Reviewing the record to this point, the differences between Xi and TR are more striking than the similarities. However, there are few signs that Americans are preparing to accept Britain’s fate. Watching the trend lines, Thucydides would likely say: buckle up — we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Lee foresaw the twenty-first century as a “contest for supremacy in Asia.”
It captures the intense yearning of a billion Chinese: to be rich, to be powerful, and to be respected. Xi exudes supreme confidence that in his lifetime China can realize all three by sustaining its economic miracle, fostering a patriotic citizenry, and bowing to no other power in world affairs. And while these extraordinary ambitions engender skepticism among most observers, neither Lee nor I would bet against Xi. As Lee said, “This reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.”7
Fairbank’s summary, classical Chinese foreign policy consisted of three key tenets: demand for regional “dominance,” insistence that neighboring countries recognize and respect China’s inherent “superiority,” and willingness to use this dominance and superiority to orchestrate “harmonious co-existence” with its neighbors.
Finally, Fairbank taught that Chinese civilization was profoundly ethnocentric and culturally supremacist, seeing itself as the apex of all meaningful human activity.
Reflecting its civilization’s centripetal orientation, Chinese foreign policy traditionally sought to maintain international hierarchy, not to expand its borders through military conquest.
In sum, China “expanded by cultural osmosis, not missionary zeal.”14
The exhausted Qing administrators held out as long as they could, but in 1912 the disgraced dynasty collapsed, plunging the country into chaos. Warlords divided China and fought a civil war that lasted for almost forty more years. Japan exploited this weakness in 1937, invading and occupying much of the country in a brutal campaign that killed as many as twenty million Chinese. Every high school student in China today learns to feel the shame of this
Chinese officials are keenly aware of the hurdles they face. For example, Xi’s key economic adviser Liu He — whom I have known for two decades, since he was a student at Harvard Kennedy School — keeps a list of more than two dozen problems, among them: demographics (will China become old before it can become rich?); the challenges of fostering innovation; maintaining social stability while downsizing inefficient state-owned enterprises; and meeting energy demands without making the environment unlivable. He has analyzed each with deeper insight and more nuance than any Western observer I have
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it will build a “moderately prosperous society” (double 2010 GDP per capita, to around $10,000) by 2021, when it celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Second, it will become a “modernized, fully developed, rich and powerful” nation by the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic in 2049.*
For good measure, Lee added: “Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I am meaningless.”
The planned projects abroad are massive. From an 1,800-mile, $46 billion corridor of roads, railways, and pipelines running through Pakistan, to hydroelectric dams and tin mines in Myanmar, to a new naval installation in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, China is moving at a pace never seen in these countries.
The ability to project power in the area will also give China greater influence over the $5.3 trillion in trade that passes through the South China Sea every year.68 As it slowly muscles the United States out of these waters, China is also absorbing the nations of Southeast Asia into its economic orbit and pulling in Japan and Australia as well. It has so far succeeded without a fight. But if fight it must, Xi intends to win.
Xi also believes that a military that is “able to fight and win wars” is essential to realizing every other component of the China Dream. “To achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation,” he has argued, “we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and strong military.”73 While all great powers build strong militaries, the “Strong Army Dream” is especially important to China as it seeks to overcome its humiliation at the hands of foreign powers.
But in Xi’s case it underscores Beijing’s deadly serious commitment to building a modern military that can take on and defeat all adversaries — in particular the United States. While Chinese military planners are not forecasting war, the war for which they are preparing pits China against the US at sea.
Together, these capabilities have degraded the position of Pacific military dominance to which the US had become accustomed since the Battle of Midway in 1942.
Of course, just because China wants to be able to “fight and win” does not mean that it wants to fight. Clearly, it does not. But as it pursues its objectives, its rivalry with the US is exacerbated by deep cultural differences. This clash of cultures has never been more consequential for the world than it is today.
Though today Beijing and capitals around the world engage in trade and diplomatic relations, fundamental differences between these two ancient systems remain. Globalization has smoothed transactions but not erased primal fault lines.
Exactly two hundred years after the Macartney mission, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington published a landmark essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” It asserted that the fundamental source of conflict in the post–Cold War world would not be ideological, economic, or political, but instead cultural. “The clash of civilizations,” Huntington predicted, “will dominate global politics.”
Huntington identifies five key ways in which Western and Confucian societies tend to differ. First, as he notes, Confucian cultures reflect an ethos that reinforces “the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, ‘saving face,’ and, in general, the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual.”
“Chinese are those of the same ‘race, blood, and culture.’
Similarly, as a colleague of mine was told by a deputy mayor of Shanghai, he would know that China was rich again when every upper-middle-class family in Shanghai had an American houseboy.
Hillary Clinton spoke for most Americans when she said, “I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world dominated by the Chinese.”
Despite their many differences, the United States and China are alike in at least one respect: both have extreme superiority complexes. Each sees itself as exceptional — literally without peers.
The sense of cultural supremacy of the Americans will make this adjustment most difficult.”
To manage this challenge, they designed, as Richard Neustadt taught us, a government of “separated institutions sharing power.”31 This deliberately produced constant struggle among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches that meant delay, gridlock, and even dysfunction. But it also provided checks and balances against abuse. As Justice Louis Brandeis explained eloquently, their purpose was “not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary authority.”
In contrast, to be Chinese one has to be born Chinese. US labor markets are open, diverse, and flexible. This gives the nation a marked advantage in the global competition for talent: half of the 87 American startup companies worth more than $1 billion in 2016 were founded by immigrants.
As political scientist Taylor Fravel has shown in a study of its twenty-three territorial disputes since 1949, China employed force in only three of them. As these cases suggest, China becomes more likely to resort to force if it believes an adversary is shifting the balance of forces against it at a time of domestic unrest.
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. — Winston Churchill
Similarly, in 1969, Soviet leaders could not imagine that China would react to a minor border dispute by launching a preemptive strike against a power with overwhelming nuclear superiority.
This chapter reviews four historical cases in which China initiated limited war, summarizes four concepts that war planners study to understand sources of conflict, and sketches five plausible paths to war between today’s two greatest powers.
The Chinese civil war had come to an end less than a year earlier. That savage conflict had torn the country apart and claimed up to 3.5 million lives.
Losing a war he thought he had won, MacArthur called on President Harry Truman to authorize him to use nuclear weapons against China.6 Instead of accepting the rogue five-star general’s plan, Truman fired him.
Many Soviet military leaders believed a preemptive nuclear first strike was the only way to end the growing Chinese threat. In fact, the Soviet Union was so serious about attacking China that it quietly approached the Nixon administration to gauge how the US would react.
In April 2001, a US surveillance aircraft flying near Hainan Island collided with a Chinese fighter jet that was harassing it to demonstrate Beijing’s opposition to these intelligence-gathering flights. The Chinese pilot was killed, while the US pilots were forced to make a crash landing in Chinese territory, sparking the first international crisis of the George W. Bush administration. The American crew, who were detained by the Chinese after their emergency landing, were freed after ten days. But the Chinese held the plane for longer, allowing them an opportunity to extract its top-secret
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Unlike Germany and Britain, the US and China are on opposite sides of the globe. Noting that fact, Chinese strategists sometimes remind Americans wryly that there is currently little chance of an accidental collision between US and Chinese ships in the Caribbean. If the
US Navy would follow their example in the East and South China Seas and stay in its own hemisphere, they say, there would be no risk of colliding with Chinese ships. Furthermore, what Pentagon planners call the “tyranny of distance” raises questions about America’s ability to sustain a campaign against China in those bodies of water.
Both the American and Chinese militaries acknowledge that the US has lost, or at least failed to win, four of the five major wars it has entered since World War II.21 (Korea was at best a draw, Vietnam a loss, and Iraq and Afghanistan unlikely to turn out well. Only President George H. W. Bush’s war in 1991 to force Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to retreat from Kuwait counts as a clear win.)
Many in China are demanding that Xi order the PLA to destroy US military bases in Guam, Japan, and elsewhere in the Pacific. Some want China to attack the United States itself. No one is calling for China to exercise restraint. As millions of its citizens’ social media postings are reminding the government, after its century of humiliation at the hands of sovereign powers, the ruling Communist Party has promised: “never again.”
If Taiwan were an independent nation, it would be among the most successful countries in the world.
Enraged that the Chinese government is backtracking on its promises, residents of Hong Kong take to the streets to demand that Beijing uphold its commitment to “One Country, Two Systems.” As the protests drag on for weeks with no resolution in sight, Xi orders the Chinese military to do what it did in Tiananmen Square in 1989: crush the protests.
Could a trade conflict escalate into a hot war that ends with nuclear weapons exploding on the territory of the adversary? Unlikely but not impossible: remember Pearl Harbor.
War between the United States and China is not inevitable, but it is possible. Indeed, as these scenarios illustrate, the underlying stress created by China’s disruptive rise creates conditions in which accidental, otherwise inconsequential events could trigger a large-scale conflict.
On current trajectories, a disastrous war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than most of us are willing to allow.
The June 2016 “Brexit” vote for the UK to leave the EU was for many the final sign of the post–Cold War order’s imminent collapse. But as the architects of the European project understood, while crises that threaten the survival of the union are inevitable, collapse is not. Indeed, from their perspective, crises present opportunities to strengthen integration in ways that political resistance would otherwise make impossible.
Germany is the poster child of an economic and political giant that remains a military dwarf. It is economically integrated with its neighbors and protected by an American security overlord with a nuclear umbrella.
