Will there be a war on China after the war on terror? Friedman’s theses (New York Times)

What Thomas L. Friedman sees and predicts in the New York Times

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan after a failed 20-year nation-building exercise has left many Americans and analysts saying, "If only we had known then what we know now, we would never have taken this path." I'm not sure that's true, but it nonetheless raises this question: What are we doing today in foreign policy that we could look back in 20 years and say, "If only we had known then what we know now, we would never have taken that path"?
My answer can be summed up in one word: China. – writes Thomas L. Friedman in the NYT .

And my fears can be summed up in a few paragraphs: The 40 years from 1979 to 2019 were an era in US-China relations. There have been many ups and downs, but all in all it was a time of constant economic integration between our two countries.

The depth of that US-China integration has helped fuel a much deeper globalization of the world economy and sustain four decades of relative peace between the two great powers of the world. And always remember that it is the conflicts between great powers that give us enormously destabilizing world wars.

The era of US-China globalization has left some US manufacturing workers unemployed while opening huge new export markets for others. It has lifted hundreds of millions of people in China, India and East Asia out of poverty, making many products much more accessible to American consumers.
In short, the relative peace and prosperity the world has experienced over those 40 years cannot be explained without a reference to the US-China link.

In the last five years, however, the United States and China have been stumbling on a path of de-integration and perhaps towards a real confrontation. In my opinion, it is China's increasingly domineering leadership style at home and abroad, its head-we-win-tail-lose trade policies and the change in the composition of its economy that are largely responsible. of this inversion.

That said, if it continues, there is a good chance that both of our countries – not to mention many others – will look back in 20 years and say that the world has become a more dangerous and less prosperous place due to the breakdown of relations. between the United States and China in the early 2020s.

These two giants have gone from doing a lot of business on the table and occasionally kicking each other under the table to doing a lot less business on the table and kicking much harder under the table – so much so that they risk breaking the table and leaving each other limping. . That is, with a world far less capable of handling climate change, biodiversity loss, cyberspace and growing areas of disorder.

But before moving on from "coopetition" to confrontation with China, we should ask ourselves some difficult questions. China must do the same. Because we both may miss this relationship when it's gone.
To begin with, we need to ask: what aspects of our competition / conflict with China are inevitable between a rising power and a status quo power, and what can be dampened by intelligent politics?

Let's start with the inevitable. For about the first 30 of the 40 years of economic integration, China has been selling us what I call “superficial goods” – shirts, tennis shoes and solar panels that we hung from our roofs. America, on the other hand, sold China "deep goods" – software and computers that went deep into its system, which it needed and could only buy from us.

Well, today, China can do more and more of those "deep goods" – such as Huawei 5G telecommunication systems – but we no longer have the shared trust between us to install its deep technologies in our homes, bedrooms and businesses. or even to sell our deepest assets to China, such as advanced logic chips. When China sold us "superficial goods," we didn't care whether its government was authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian. But when it comes to buying China's "deep goods", shared values ​​matter and are not there.

Then there is President Xi Jinping's leadership strategy, which has been to extend the Communist Party's control into every pore of Chinese society, culture and commerce. This has reversed a trajectory of China's gradual opening up to the world since 1979. Add to this Xi's determination that China should never again depend on America for advanced technologies, and Beijing's willingness to do whatever it takes. – buy, steal, copy, invent or intimidate – to guarantee that, you have a much more aggressive China.

But Xi pushed too hard. The level of technology theft and penetration into US institutions has become intolerable – not to mention China's decision to stifle democracy in Hong Kong, wipe out Muslim Uygur culture in Western China, and use its economic power and its own. warrior diplomats to intimidate neighbors like Australia if only to ask for a proper investigation into the origins of the new coronavirus in Wuhan.

Xi is pitting the entire Western world against China – we will see how much when China hosts the 2022 Winter Olympics – and has prompted this US president and his predecessor to identify the fight against China as the number 1 strategic goal of the United States. America.

But have we really thought about the "how" of how to do it?

Nader Mousavizadeh, founder and CEO of Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical consulting firm, suggests that if we are going to shift our focus from the Middle East to an irreversible strategy of confrontation with China, we should start asking three fundamental questions:

First, Mousavizadeh says, “Are we sure we understand the dynamics of a huge and changing society like China well enough to decide that its inevitable mission is the global spread of authoritarianism? Especially when this will require a conflicting generational commitment from the United States, generating in turn an even more nationalist China?

Second, says Mousavizadeh, who has long served as senior adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan: If we believe our network of alliances is "a uniquely American asset, we have listened as much as we have spoken to our Asian allies and Europeans on the reality of their economic and political relations with China – making sure their interests and values ​​are embedded in a common approach to China? Because without this, any coalition will crumble ”.

There is no doubt that the best way for America to counterbalance China is to do the one thing China hates the most – face it with a broad transnational coalition, based on shared universal values ​​regarding the rule of law, the free trade, human rights and basic accounting standards.

When we make the confrontation with China the president of the United States versus the president of China, Xi can easily leverage all the Chinese nationalists on his side. When we turn the world against China on what are the best and fairest international norms, we isolate the fundamentalists in Beijing and leverage more Chinese reformists on our side.

But China will not only respond to high-sounding speeches about international norms, even if faced with a global coalition. These speeches must be supported by an economic and military weight. Many US businesses are now pushing for the repeal of phase 1 of the Trump tariffs on China – without asking China to repeal the subsidies that led to these tariffs in the first place. Bad idea. When dealing with China, speak softly but always carry a large fare (and an aircraft carrier) with you.

The third question, argues Mousavizadeh, is whether we believe our priority after a 20-year war on terrorism must now be "home repair – addressing huge deficits in infrastructure, education, income and racial equity" – is more useful or more dangerous to point out the Chinese threat? It could start a fire under the Americans to get serious about national renewal. But it could also ignite a fire for the entire US-China relationship, affecting everything from supply chains to student exchanges to Chinese purchases of US government bonds.

Either way, this would be my initial checklist before moving on from the war on terror to the war on China. Let's think about it.

Our grandchildren will thank us in 2041.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/guerra-cina-stati-uniti/ on Sat, 11 Sep 2021 06:00:58 +0000.