US economy

US and China: how to prove Thucydides wrong


The relationship between the US and China is the most consequential of the 21st century. Conflict between the two great powers is not inevitable. The world has changed since Thucydides described the collision between Athens and Sparta in the Peloponnesian wars. The risks, however, are high. Competition is unavoidable; misunderstandings and miscalculations likely.

After a period in which US presidents sought to co-opt Beijing into the existing order, Donald Trump has set a path of unilateral confrontation. The about-turn has struck a chord beyond the economic nationalists and China hawks who count themselves among Mr Trump’s natural supporters. The global ambition of President Xi Jinping’s “ China Dream”, frustration with Beijing’s unfair trade and investment policies, and the plundering of the west’s intellectual property have fed wider disenchantment.

The shift in US policy started before Mr Trump’s presidency. Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 heralded a more robust military posture balanced by a Trans-Pacific Partnership incorporating US economic interests. Washington’s invitation to Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder” in a US-designed global order had run its course.

Mr Trump believes the US can forestall China’s ambitions. He is mistaken. Preserving the peace as China continues to rise does require hard-headed resolve from western democracies. But it also demands restraint and engagement. An effort to suppress or “contain” China’s growing economic and geopolitical power would be a route to conflict.

For 70 years the US has been the leading, and balancing, power in east Asia. Its presence has held in check myriad national rivalries, territorial disputes and unsettled historical scores. China’s rise was always going to upset this equilibrium. The challenge is to remodel the regional order to accommodate US power while respecting China’s legitimate interests.

In the early days of the Trump presidency, there was talk of “dealmaking” between the US and Chinese presidents. Mutual suspicion now prevails. Mr Trump’s punitive tariffs on US imports from China have been wedded to a broader attack on Beijing’s international behaviour.

The US administration has pointed to cyber attacks on, and thefts of intellectual property from, US companies. It has designated China a threat to the US military’s critical supply chains of materials such as rare earths. The Pentagon backs a more assertive US naval posture in the South China Sea in response to Beijing’s growing military presence. In rewriting trade deals with Mexico and Canada, Mr Trump has insisted on provisions that could block America’s partners from signing similar agreements with China.

Mike Pence, US vice-president, has charged Beijing with interference in America’s democratic process. Labelling China the foremost threat to US security, Mr Pence said the US had hoped economic liberalisation would bring it into international partnership. Instead: “China has chosen economic aggression, which has in turn emboldened its growing military.” John Bolton, national security adviser, echoes the charges.

Beijing should not be surprised. The west’s view of China has changed because China itself has changed. Beijing roundly denies that its “peaceful rise” conceals hegemonic intent. Wang Yi, foreign minister and state council member, protests that China “lacks the gene of external expansion”. In style and substance, Mr Xi has struck a rather different pose.

The Chinese president has given his rule an imperial hue, abolishing the two-term presidential limit. Abroad, the modesty of the “hide and bide” strategy followed by his predecessors has been replaced by an unapologetic avowal of China’s rights and interests. Historical, but hitherto passive, territorial claims in the South China Sea have been revived by reclamation projects to set up military outposts on disputed islands.

Rocky outcrops have become military airfields. Beijing has rejected international arbitration to settle the competing claims of nations such as the Philippines and Vietnam. Tensions with Japan have been stoked by louder assertions of Chinese sovereignty over the Senkaku (Diaoyu in Chinese) islands in the East China Sea.

Many of Mr Trump’s complaints about China’s trade and business practices are echoed in Europe. Mr Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative is viewed increasingly as an effort to translate economic weight into geopolitical hegemony. The UK government, once receptive to investment in sensitive areas such as communications and nuclear power, has grown nervous that Chinese companies act first and foremost as agents of the state.

Beijing’s answer is that great powers have legitimate international interests, whether protecting overseas investments or safeguarding supply routes. It adds that its overseas military footprint remains small relative to its global economic role and that it makes a big contribution to global order through, for example, UN peacekeeping. The question that troubles western democracies is one of motives. Can China be trusted?

Containment is not the answer. Glib comparisons with the cold war misunderstand history. The Soviet Union was all but outside the western economic system. The economic interests of China and the US are bound up in the web of interdependence called globalisation. The Soviet Union never matched US economic power. China will soon overtake it.

That said, the cold war does carry lessons. Most obviously, the west is infinitely stronger when it stands together. The grand strategy to contain the communism of George Kennan, Dean Acheson and others projected a powerful alliance of western democracies rooted in shared values.

Mr Trump’s bellicose unilateralism leaves America’s friends on the sidelines. He repudiates multilateralism as inimical to US national interests. Yet the single most important measure he could take to build a sustainable China strategy would be to reverse his decision to pull the US out of the TPP. By deepening US economic engagement, the TPP would re-energise Washington’s old alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia while building bridges to nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines.

The US could, by rebuilding support for robust international rules and for an appropriate weight for China in shaping them, do much to prevent unavoidable rivalry sliding into uncontrolled confrontation. Mr Trump has travelled far along the road of belligerence. Yet the president has shown a remarkable facility for reversing himself. Tough on China is one thing; tough and engaged is what the world needs if it is to escape the dismal determinism of those who follow Thucydides.



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