PT:2
As the full impact of the virus strikes Africa, Pakistan and Latin America, all places with extensive Chinese political presence and economic investment, we can expect China to deepen its influence even as Europe, Australasia and the Americas find themselves swamped.
TH: How can the U.S. and allies like Australia blunt China’s coronavirus PR gambit and attempts to use the crises to further its goal of global leadership?
DK: We can tell the truth about the origin of the virus and about our own successes and failures in dealing with it. People are rightly suspicious of Chinese data and assertions, given Beijing’s track record of lies and coverups. We have had more than our share of failures, hubris and overconfidence, too, but if we show we’re telling the truth, and begin helping others on an altruistic basis once our own considerable industrial capacity kicks into gear to respond, I think we can blunt Beijing’s approach.
Longer-term, one result from this crisis needs to be a recognition that nonmilitary aspects of national resilience — public health, education, critical infrastructure, perhaps most importantly political reconciliation — are crucial. We need to think carefully about where we want our manufacturing base to reside, how dependent we want our critical-commodity supply chain to be on a hostile communist power, and how to balance the positive impacts of globalization against the risks we are experiencing now. That’s not a call for xenophobia or pulling up the drawbridge — just a recognition that there are trade-offs here.
TH: I did a quick text search of my digital version of “The Dragons and the Snakes,” and it appears you’ve managed to write a book about great-power rivalry without the words “Thucydides Trap.” I’m in awe. Still, do you think a military conflict on some scale is inevitable between the U.S. and China?
DK: There are certainly strategists in both countries who think that it is. I quote one Chinese general who suggests China will fight Taiwan by 2025 and the U.S. by 2035. I do think there’s a very real possibility of such a conflict, with devastating effects worldwide. In a situation of “conceptual envelopment” where one side’s definition of war is vastly broader than the other’s, two extremely dangerous things can happen. First, an adversary can be at war with us while we remain blissfully unaware until it’s too late, only realizing we’re in a war when we’ve already lost. Second, and even more dangerously, we can be engaging in what we think are normal peacetime interactions — trade wars, tariffs, competition over 5G infrastructure, for example — while an adversary with a broader concept of war sees these as warlike acts, and responds accordingly.
I think the most important thing is that we not talk ourselves into a war with China. Based on the interviews I did for the book, and the documents I studied, I don’t think either Beijing or Washington wants a war. Rather, the most dangerous thing is that we so misunderstand each other that we end up miscalculating, blundering into a conflict neither side wants, but which we fall into anyway.
TH: Looking to the long term, you are skeptical that the U.S. can maintain its “hard power” edge globally against China and Russia. If so, what is the best approach for Washington and its allies to push for their interests and values globally?
DK: I sketch three options in the book. One is “doubling down,” which as you note I don’t think will work. If our adversaries have already evolved to invalidate our current approach, doing the same thing harder won’t help. The second option, to use military slang, is “embracing the suck” — accepting our inevitable decline and shooting for a soft landing by transitioning away from the current U.S.-led world order to something more sustainable and affordable for us. I suggest (and I’m sure both presidents would hate me saying this) that Barack Obama and Donald Trump pursued a version of this strategy, albeit with extremely different rhetoric! I suggest this isn’t going to work either: China is not interested in assuming our global burden, Russia isn’t capable of doing so, and neither is friendly enough that we would find them acceptable.
In the end I go with a third way — what I call the “Byzantine approach” in reference to Byzantium, which survived more than a millennium after the fall of Rome by selectively copying adversaries, getting out of the business of occupying and trying to govern whole provinces as the Romans had done, mastering certain niche technologies, and (most importantly) focusing on resilience and sustainability at home. To be clear, I say that this too might not work, but I suggest it’s the best bet to buy time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-28/coronavirus-response-is-a-...
Forum
Pages: 1 
