Has China Won? : the Chinese Challenge to American Primacy / by Kishore Mahbubani
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Copyright Copyright © 2020 by Kishore Mahbubani Cover design by Pete Garceau Cover copyright © 2020 Hachette Book Group, Inc. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. PublicAffairs Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 www.publicaffairsbooks.com @Public_Affairs First Edition: April 2020 Published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The PublicAffairs name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group. The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mahbubani, Kishore, author. Title: Has China won? : the Chinese challenge to American primacy / by Kishore Mahbubani. Other titles: Chinese challenge to American primacy Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019045550 | ISBN 9781541768130 ; (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541768123 ; (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: China—Relations—United States. | United States— Relations—China. | China—Economic conditions—20th century. | United States—Strategic aspects. | China—Strategic aspects. Classification: LCC D740.4 .M3115 2020 | DDC 327.51073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045550 ISBNs: 978-1-5417-6813-0 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-6812-3 (ebook), 978- 1-5417-5867-4 (international) E3-20200221-JV-NF-ORI CONTENTS COVER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2 CHINA’S BIGGEST STRATEGIC MISTAKE CHAPTER 3 AMERICA’S BIGGEST STRATEGIC MISTAKE CHAPTER 4 IS CHINA EXPANSIONIST? CHAPTER 5 CAN AMERICA MAKE U-TURNS? CHAPTER 6 SHOULD CHINA BECOME DEMOCRATIC? CHAPTER 7 THE ASSUMPTION OF VIRTUE CHAPTER 8 HOW WILL OTHER COUNTRIES CHOOSE? CHAPTER 9 A PARADOXICAL CONCLUSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR APPENDIX: THE MYTH OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM PRAISE FOR HAS CHINA WON? Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ONE THING IS CERTAIN. The geopolitical contest that has broken out between America and China will continue for the next decade or two. Although President Donald Trump launched the first round in 2018, it will outlast his administration. The president has divided America on all his policies, except one: his trade and technological war against China. Indeed, he has received strong bipartisan support for it, and a strong consensus is developing in the American body politic that China represents a threat to America. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that “China probably poses the greatest threat to our nation by about 2025.”* The summary of America’s 2018 National Defense Strategy claims that China and Russia are “revisionist powers” seeking to “shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.”* Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has said, “One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat… and I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.”* Even George Soros, who spent millions trying to prevent Trump from being elected, has praised Trump on China. He has said: “The greatest—and perhaps only— foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration has been the development of a coherent and genuinely bipartisan policy toward Xi Jinping’s China.”* He also added that it was right for the Trump administration to declare China “a strategic rival.” Yet, even though the American establishment has, by and large, enthusiastically supported Trump on China, it is curious that no one has pointed out that America is making a big strategic mistake by launching this contest with China without first developing a comprehensive and global strategy to deal with China. The man who alerted me to this was one of America’s greatest strategic thinkers, Dr. Henry Kissinger. I still remember vividly the one-on-one lunch I had with him in a private room in his club in midtown Manhattan in mid- March 2018. On the day of the lunch, I was afraid that it would be canceled as a snowstorm was predicted. Despite the weather warning, he turned up. We had a wonderful conversation over two hours. To be fair to him, he didn’t exactly say that America lacked a long-term strategy toward China, but that was the message he conveyed over lunch. This is also the big message of his own book, On China. By contrast, America thought hard and deep before it plunged into the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The master strategist who formulated America’s successful containment strategy against the Soviet Union was George Kennan. The strategy was first publicly spelled out in the famous essay he wrote in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym Mr. X, derived from his “long telegram” written in February 1946. Kennan wrote this when he was serving in the critical post of director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, whose key mission is long-term strategic planning. The director of policy planning in the State Department from September 2018 to August 2019 was Professor Kiron Skinner of Carnegie Mellon University. In a public panel discussion on April 29, 2019, she revealed that in response to the resurgence of China, her department was still trying to work out a comprehensive strategy to match the one spelled out by her predecessor, Kennan. When I served in the Singapore Foreign Service, I was also assigned to write long-term strategy papers for the Singapore government. The big lesson I learned from Singapore’s three exceptional geopolitical masters (Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, and S. Rajaratnam) was that the first step to formulate any long-term strategy is to frame the right questions. If one gets the questions wrong, the answers will be wrong. Most importantly, as Rajaratnam taught me, in formulating such questions, one must always “think the unthinkable.” In this spirit of “thinking the unthinkable,” I would like to suggest ten areas that provoke questions that the policy planning staff should address. Having met George Kennan once in his office in the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the late 1990s, I believe that he would favor confronting head-on the toughest issues that lie ahead. THE BIG TEN 1. With 4 percent of the world’s population, America’s share of the global GDP was close to 50 percent at the end of World War II. Throughout the Cold War, the GDP of the Soviet Union never came close in size to that of America, reaching only 40 percent that of America’s at its peak.* Could America’s GDP become smaller than China’s in the next thirty years? If so, what strategic changes will America have to make when it no longer is the world’s dominant economic power? 2. Should America’s primary goal be to improve the livelihood of its 330 million citizens or to preserve its primacy in the international system? If there are contradictions between the goals of preserving primacy and improving well-being, which should take priority? 3. In the Cold War, America’s heavy defense expenditures proved prudent as they forced the Soviet Union, a country with a smaller economy, to match America’s military expenses. In the end, this helped to bankrupt the Soviet Union. China learned a lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is restraining its defense expenditures while focusing on economic development. Is it wise for America to continue investing heavily in its defense budget? Or should it cut down its defense expenses and its involvement in expensive foreign wars and instead invest more in improving social services and rejuvenating national infrastructure? Does China want America to increase or reduce its defense expenditures? 4. America did not win the Cold War on its own. It formed solid alliances with its Western partners in NATO and cultivated key third world friends and allies, like China, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Egypt. To preserve these close alliances, America kept its economy open to its allies and generously extended its aid. Above everything else, America was known for its spirit of generosity in the Cold War. The Trump administration has announced an America First policy and threatened to impose tariffs on key allies like the EU and Japan and third world friends like India. Can America build up a solid global coalition to counterbalance China if it also alienates its key allies? Was America’s decision to walk away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) a geopolitical gift to China? Has China already mounted a preemptive strike against a containment policy by engaging in new economic partnerships with its neighbors through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? 5. The most powerful weapon that America can use to bring its allies and adversaries into line and conform to its wishes is not the US military but the US dollar. The US dollar has become virtually indispensable for global trade and financial transactions. In this regard, it serves as a global public good servicing the interdependent global economy.