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The Courage Of A Vision For Sino-American Relations

May 20, 2018

By articulating its China policy as an alternative between engagement and containment, the US is not only misinterpreting the nature of the Chinese transformation, but it is also failing to develop what should be a long-term vision for a new era of interdependence.

For many in Washington, engaging China equals to the conviction that the US has the means to gradually shape the course of China's development so it does not fundamentally alter the status quo of an international architecture designed at the end of WWII. It is the attractiveness of soft power which is at the heart of the engagement doctrine advocated by a liberal approach of foreign policy.

Realists arguing in favor of the containment of the Middle Country put, by contrast, the emphasis on the different dimensions of hard power – economy, finance and military – in order to limit the influence of a re-emerging China.

It is obviously a realist approach which inspires Donald Trump, the 45th US President, and its administration. The activation of protectionism, the shift from multilateralism to bilateralism with the knowledge that it advantages the most powerful player, and the notion of an Indo-Pacific region counteracting Beijing's moves along new Silk Roads are three components of a strategic posture in which the world's second largest economy is simply seen, as exemplified in the most recent National Security Strategy of the US, as a rival to be contained.

However, what is often presented as two radically different paths proceeds in fact from the same miscalculation and misinterpretation of the forces at play. When the US seriously contemplates the hope to impact China's evolution through engagement or check its reach through containment, it not only overestimates its own strength but also misreads the nature of the Asian dynamics. In that sense, the frameworks of engagement and containment have simply become irrelevant.

It is not the relative strength of a political entity that should occupy the minds of American strategists but a more profound phenomenon, the renaissance of a civilization. Beyond the quantitative equations of the economic, technological or even military realms, it is the renaissance of China as a civilization which really matters and which has to be addressed by Western leaders.

A relevant and operative China policy would take its root in the realization that when a living civilization of 1.4 billion people is reinventing itself through a process of modernization which is not synonymous with Westernization, it can neither be essentially affected nor controlled by external forces.

Engaging China to impact its trajectory can't be really effective since, to a certain extent, the ongoing Chinese renaissance is precisely a collective effort to resist the calculated attempts by foreign actors to alter the course of the Chinese history.

Containment, besides the extremely serious risk that it could rapidly evolve into a new Cold War or even more destructive forms of conflict, can't be an appropriate response to the Chinese renaissance since China is not on a missionary journey to impose any ideology or belief upon others but, in a constant reflection on her strengths and weaknesses, the Middle Country keeps working on itself, not expanding but re-forming itself.

A vision to synergize with the Chinese renaissance that President Xi Jinping has put at the center of his worldview shall be articulated around three premises.

First, in its relation with Beijing, the West and in particular the US should be less concerned by the other than by itself, it is less the structured and predictable behavior of the Middle Country than the West's complacency towards its own shortcomings and unwise excesses which causes the diminishing of its attractiveness.

As China's effective governance allows her to modernize, to innovate and to adjust to global complexities, the West would enormously benefit by focusing on the necessity to perfect itself. In a period of change, it is the relative capacity of the Nations to reform themselves which determines their fate. The real competition takes place within political entities not between them, and the refusal to recognize this reality can be highly damaging.

Second, the regression from multilateralism to what should be seen as combinations of the past is not the answer to contemporary complexity. If not always satisfactory, one has to rethink but certainly not abandon multilateralism. For short term gains, the most powerful Nations can be tempted by the zero-sum game logic of unilateralism and bilateralism, but the long-term reality of global interdependence calls for equilibria reached through multilateral agreements.

The long-term threats are neither connected with one particular Nation nor one unidimensional problem, but they are transnational and transversal in nature. As complex and interrelated issues, global inequalities, migrations, terrorism, environmental degradation, cyber security, regional instability, and the impact of disruptive technologies on human societies can't be tackled by one State or a series of bilateral agreements whose overall coherence can't be assured, they can only be effectively addressed with the renewed instruments of a better global governance.

Third, in a reverse of the hypothetical "Thucydides's Trap", and fully taking culture into account, it can be argued that the greatest opportunity of our time is the compatibility between the Western and the Chinese civilizations. What, in opposition to the "Thucydides's Trap" can be named the "Silk Road effect", is a catalyst to take our world at another level of security and prosperity. When wisely articulated, Western and Chinese humanisms stand against obscurantism and can defeat all forms of extremism.

For the world's best long-term interests, it is not as rivals that the US and China have to coexist in the 21st century but as partners. Time has come to put aside the poor dichotomy between liberals and realists and to focus, instead, on the opposition between the courage of a long-term constructive vision and shortsightedness.

The real choice for the West and America is not between engagement and containment, but between co-creating value with the Chinese civilization in a world of interdependence and missing what is for mankind a historical opportunity.