America in the World | Notable arguments

John Tkacik: Democracies must reach consensus to balance China's rise

John Tkacik of The Heritage Foundation concludes that China's existing policies provide an unwelcome indicator for the future - and will soon be combined with a more formidable economic and military weight than America has yet faced. He calls for America to do more to build up an international consensus in opposition to a rising, authoritarian China:

"Managing China's rise requires a quiet, coherent, multi-dimensional, and disciplined strategy that must be coordinated with allies and friendly democracies. Crucial to achieving America's strategic policy goals is consensus among the world's democracies to "balance" China's rise. The key obstacle to consensus is China's sheer economic weight and its willingness to use that weight to punish its adversaries and reward its friends. Unless the United States is able to focus our own friends on the magnitude of the task at hand and lead them in addressing it, the world's democracies will ultimately acquiesce in the undemocratic and irredentist nature of Beijing's worldview.

"America has confronted assertive authoritarian dictatorships with absolute authority over large economies in the past. But, false perceptions of the Soviet economic strength aside, in the past century the United States has never had to deal with a competitor of such economic, industrial, political, and—soon—military weight.

"Some U.S. politicians hope to wish the problem away and "look to China" to do the right thing. President George W. Bush is "optimistic about China's future" because, he believes "young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas." A soothing thought, but history suggests that "freedom to trade goods" never, of itself, leads to democracy, which is why the Chinese Communist Party is comfortable with it."

Gideon Rose: American guarantees risk moral hazard

Gideon Rose, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, writes an important article reflecting both on US backing for Georgia and Taiwan in light of the notion of moral hazard: "offering insurance to somebody often leads them to take greater risks than they otherwise would".

"If Georgia had not been led to believe that the United States might back it in a crisis, it probably would have played its hand more carefully -- and whatever compromises it might have had to make, it would have been better off as a result. This sort of thing happens all the time, and shows why great powers need to be careful lest their dependents embroil them in unnecessary conflicts."

"It is only natural for small democratic states living in bad neighborhoods to seek American support and protection, and in certain cases it is entirely appropriate for the United States to give it to them. But when it chooses to do so, the U.S. should make clear that along with the backing comes the responsibility to act prudently -- and should, without sentiment, use all the tools at its disposal to enforce the deal. The Bush 43 team has recognized this in Asia but forgot it in the Caucasus. How forcefully it would handle a third such case in the Middle East during its final months remains unclear."

See also America in the World's commentary on this article.

David Frum: China won't "catch up" any time soon

David Frum, writing for Foreign Policy:

"If the US economy continues to grow at its recent average of 3% a year, even a booming China will not overtake US GDP for half a century. If China's growth rate slows, the moment of "catch up" recedes even further into the future. Such a slowdown seems inevitable. China's financial sector is rickety to the point of collapse, inflation is accelerating, and the country is quickly bumping up against the limits of low-wage manufacturing. Energy and water shortages are rampant. Environmental degradation is escalating into a serious political issue. Political tensions between the central and regional governments are intensifying. And, very soon, China's aging population will have to leave work and begin tapping into its savings. Even if China somehow escapes the laws of economic gravity, what precisely is an American president to do about it? Try to stunt China's growth? How? And to what end?"

Edward Luttwak attacks "absurd" idea that China will lead global alliance against America

Edward Luttwak in Prospect magazine:

"There is a longing in some quarters to yoke together Bush's perceived mismanagement of America's foreign policy with the diminishment of US power itself. More charitably, one might suggest that it shows a confusion between absolute and relative change. The economies of China and now India have been growing rapidly ever since their governments gave up self-destructive policies, and Brazil and many smaller countries from Israel to Singapore are doing the same. This has diminished the relative wealth of the US and Europe, while at the same time greatly enriching them. It is, after all, enriching to have new markets that import American and German technology and European luxuries, and in a different way it is enriching just to know that hundreds of millions have escaped utter misery and filth to move up into more decent lives, or even affluence. So the relative statistical decline of US and European income has no negative substantive meaning—unless it were true that today's economic capacity will become tomorrow's military capability aimed at the US, if not Europe. Implicit in this is an absurd assumption: that China, India and Brazil and the rest of the fast-growers will form a global alliance to confront the US and Europe—presumably encouraged by the blunders and bullying of Bush. Once again, wish-fulfilment. The opposite is far more likely: China has been the ally of the US over decades, and its enemy only between 1950 and 1953; India and the US had their moment of tension in 1971 during the Indo-Pakistan war, but have been slowly converging for two decades. The idea that China is another Wilhelmine Germany, just waiting to convert its new industrial wealth into military power, would make perfect sense if the Chinese were Prussians, supremely dedicated to the service of the state, and personally eager for the opportunity to send their brave sons to war. That describes everything that the Chinese are not, and have never been. The Chinese empire was aggressive and expansionist under the Yuan dynasty and again under the Qing. But one dynasty was established by horseriding Mongols, the other by horseriding Manchus, both the products of foreign warrior cultures. The Han Chinese prefer other pursuits. Perhaps they will change, as cultures sometimes do. But if so, they will confront all the other newly rich allies of the US."

Thomas Friedman asks if the world would welcome Russia and China filling America's shoes

Thomas L Friedman in The New York Times:

"Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.  Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.  I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe."