Global Engagement

Philip has brought two very interesting Atlantic Monthly articles on China to my attention: one by Robert Kaplan, the other by Benjamin Schwarz. It seems to me that Schwarz hits the nail on the head: the fundamental problem with a realpolitik mindset is its potential self-fulfilling nature. A fundamental given for realists like Kaplan is that maximizing power, both absolute and relative, should be the primary goal of any state. The U.S. dominance of current international power relations is historically unparalleled; to a realist, it is obvious that the U.S. must do all that it can to increase that dominance, or at the very least, maintain its current level. But this would involve, as Kaplan suggests, taking a confrontational stance towards China. As Schwarz points out, by doing so, the U.S. might well create an enemy where none needs exist.

Of course, Schwarz’s argument is also based on the realist idea of a balance of power, i.e. states like Russia and China will naturally form alliances to try to balance U.S. hegemony. Where he deviates from realist thinking is his suggestion that it might be in U.S. interests to welcome, or at least “acquiesce” to, China’s reemergence as a dominant power in Asia, whereas Kaplan clearly expects the U.S. to “confront” China in the coming decades.

However, the distance between the two positions is not as far as it seems at first glance. Both see China’s military rise as both natural and inevitable. Both would ideally like to see this happen without a U.S.-China war. (Kaplan’s goal is to “dissuade China so subtly that over time the rising behemoth would be drawn into the PACOM alliance system without any large-scale conflagration—the way NATO was ultimately able to neutralize the Soviet Union”.) Clearly, there are a number of places where such a war could break out without warning (Taiwan and North Korea are the most prominent examples), so it is impossible to make any concrete predictions about what will happen. The best that any analyst can do is try to minimize the risk of such a war- and here I think that Schwarz’s recommendations are more likely to succeed than Kaplan’s.

One central question that neither article addresses is whether China’s leadership will be able to continue to develop economically without granting its citizens any more political freedom or making any moves towards democracy. Schwarz and Kaplan seem to assume that the status quo will hold. But remember, Tiennanmen Square happened just 11 years after China began to open up its economy. Since then, for 16 years political dissent has been forcefully silenced, but it would be foolish to think that it’s not there under the surface.

It’s quite possible that the avowedly anti-Japan demonstrations of recent months were also partially a reflection of suppressed domestic dissent. One of my teachers pointed out that the Chinese government’s actions regarding these demonstrations seems very reminiscent of the “hundred flowers campaign” of 1956, when the government asked all patriotic citizens to engage in constructive criticism of its policies, carefully took down the names of all who did so, and then rounded them all up the following year. (Mao apparently said that he had deliberately let the “snakes crawl out of their holes”). Fast forward to 2005: the government first seems to give tacit consent to the demonstrations, then it traces the email lists and arrests most of the leaders. There’s no proof here, but the actions certainly seem similar.

If China ever did successfully democratize, it would naturally strengthen the pro-engagement arguments of analysts like Schwartz. But this is easier said than done, especially in a country of more than a billion people. And here again, a confrontational U.S. approach could backfire, by increasing popular support for the authoritarian regime controlling the country. As usual, I think that a course of engagement has the chance of success, both as a way of minimizing the risk of war and as a way of encouraging (or at least not hindering) any possible democratization movement that might arise.

The lesson here is a much broader one than just China. Start with the fact that the U.S. benefits from being on top of a peaceful world order of increasing globalization. Next, consider that if U.S. power is ever eclipsed by another rising power, it would be very much in U.S. interests for this shift to occur in the context of a strengthened peaceful world order (rather than by a World War, for example). Either way, the U.S. stands to gain by bringing as much of the world as it can into this system. Of course, the assumption that increased economic engagement with authoritarian states like North Korea, Iran and China increases the prospects of democratization is an unproven one. But at the very least, a world hegemon that seemed focused on a global policy of economic engagement would be much less threatening than one seems determined to confront any state it dislikes.