A New Cold War, Yes. But It’s With
China, Not Russia 新的冷戰? 沒錯，可這次是槓上中國而非蘇俄
Something that
as recently as a decade ago was almost never discussed in polite company—the
prospect for a prolonged geopolitical struggle between the United States and
China (Cold War 2.0)—is now Topic A in the foreign policy salons of both
Washington and Beijing. In the United States, the centrist Council on Foreign
Relations issued a lengthy report calling for the U.S. to “revise” its “grand
strategy” toward China. In Beijing, Liu Mingfu, a colonel in the People’s
Liberation Army and one of its most influential strategists, wrote in his
recent book, The China Dream, “In the 21st century China and the
United States will square off and fight to become the champion among nations.’’
The current
tension in the South China Sea, where Beijing is building artificial islands in
the Spratlys, a contested chain claimed by six countries, certainly sounds like
a Cold War in the making. The U.S. Defense Department let it be known in
mid-May that it was considering sending surveillance aircraft and warships to
within 12 nautical miles of the chain, as a signal to Beijing to back off. The
Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry immediately condemned Washington for even
thinking about it.
Meanwhile, nine
Chinese and Russian warships came together for joint exercises in the Mediterranean
Sea—the most recent evidence of the warmer ties between the two historical
antagonists. A month earlier, Vietnam, deeply distrustful of Beijing, hosted a
dozen U.S. defense contractors for meetings in Hanoi. They came just eight days
before celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of Vietnam’s defeat of the
United States.
War games,
prospective weapons sales, a war of words over contested real estate in some
far-flung part of the world. That’s all pretty much standard Cold War fare,
familiar to anyone in Moscow or Washington who fought the last one. But a
Washington vs. Beijing Cold War 2.0—should it prove to be unavoidable—would be
very different from its predecessor.
The fundamental,
obvious difference is that Beijing would bring far more economic power to the
contest than the Soviet Union ever did. Indeed, for Soviet citizens, the
enduring image from the last days of Communism is empty shelves at the food
store. And pretty much everywhere the Soviets exerted their influence—from
Eastern Europe to Africa to Latin America—economic calamity ensued. The command
and control, state-dominated form of economic management didn’t work, and
that—more than how many nuclear weapons Moscow possessed—was what mattered in
the end.
Contrast that
with China. Already the second-largest economy in the world, it may well
surpass the United States as the biggest in a decade or so. While the state
controls the commanding heights of the economy—banking, telecommunications,
energy—it tries to do so in a market-friendly way, and it allows unfettered
private enterprise in a range of industries (including, critically, high
technology) that have helped drive China’s extraordinary three-decade-long
ascent from poverty. Alibaba is but one recent example of a private Chinese
company with an increasingly global footprint. Remember all those great Soviet
companies with initial public offerings of billions of dollars on the Nasdaq or
the New York Stock Exchange? Right. You don’t. Because there weren’t any.
China is in the
business of deploying its economic power abroad in a big way. It invests
heavily in infrastructure projects in Africa. It uses its massive foreign
exchange reserves to buy up resources—oil, gas and minerals—throughout Africa
and Latin America. This is often—inaccurately—described as “soft” power.
Economic power is not the same as soft power. Soft power has to do with lots of
things—the form of government, the transparency of government, the
accountability of elites to the broad citizenry, what a country stands for and
stands against. The projection of economic power means the ability to put money
in local pockets. Beijing is doing that aggressively, and, given its enormous
accumulation of foreign exchange reserves, it is in a position to continue to
do so for quite some time, even as its frantic economic growth now slows.
The United
States, in the view of many analysts, is in a different and arguably more
difficult place. Its hard power—its military assets—still dwarfs China’s, even
though Beijing has rapidly increased its defense spending in recent years. But
the prospect of a Cold War between the two countries was—and to a certain
extent still is—dismissed by many China hands in the U.S. because, as former
National Security Council staffer Aaron Friedberg wrote last year in his
book A Contest for Supremacy, “the enormous advantages the United
States now enjoys are the product of its long-standing lead in the development
and deployment of new technologies, and the unmatched ability of its huge and
dynamic economy to carry the costs of military primacy.”
Is the United
States still more technologically advanced than China? Absolutely. Is it still
more innovative. Yes. But those leads are narrowing, and the U.S. plainly faces
a host of domestic economic issues—from debt to demographics to an economy
seemingly stuck at stall speed—that are daunting. As Friedberg wrote, “Whether
[the United States] will continue to enjoy [its economic advantages] in a
long-term strategic rivalry with China is by no means obvious.”
The other
critical difference between Cold War 1.0 and the Cold War 2.0 that now looms is
the simple fact that China is the most important market in the world for the
Fortune 500. By contrast, the Soviet Union, for 99.5 percent of America’s biggest
companies, simply didn’t exist. Beijing can use access to its market as
leverage in geopolitical disputes, and in so doing will be playing to a core
establishment constituency in the United States: big business. As long as China
avoids an economic crisis that upends the current economic reality, that
reality is going to be difficult for Washington to finesse as geopolitical
competition intensifies.
There is, of
course, tremendous irony in that. For decades, U.S. policy was to help China
succeed economically. We had convinced ourselves that through trade and
prosperity, political change would come in Beijing (just as it had in South
Korea and Taiwan, former authoritarian economic success stories turned vibrant
democracies). That notion is now long gone. The Chinese Communist Party, and
its one-party rule, doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. It’s also playing a
long game; its military is just a regional player now, but by 2049, when the
party expects to celebrate its 100th anniversary in power, it may well be able
to project force globally. That, anyway, is the intention of the more hawkish
elements of the party and its military.
Washington had
earnestly hoped that the days of a global struggle against a powerful adversary
were gone, the stuff of history books. That it’s now waking up and
acknowledging a different reality is step one in what Liu Mingfu calls the
central “fight” for the 21st century.
06/24/2015/
