Conflict between America and China

In today’s Wall Street Journal Robert Kagan argues, persuasively, that China ought not to  underestimate American resolve. It also ought not to overestimate America’s decadence.

Germany and Japan made the same mistake before, and look what happened to them. Kagan assumes that history will repeat itself and that America will not rise to the challenge of an ascending China. He might be right. He might be wrong. Surely, the leaders of China are as well aware of the possibility as anyone else.

You might ask how America is responding to the challenge of Chinese scientific and industrial prowess. Apparently, the answer is-- with more diversity. And with trash talk about how China is bad. Evidently, this was not what happened in the world wars.

According to Kagan, Chinese policy is expansionist and even imperialistic. The fact that China has never been an expansionist power does not faze him. He believes that China is trying to rule the world, beginning with Taiwan. 

Of course, Taiwan is not the world. And I for one suspect that China is merely rattling its sabers over Taiwan, not preparing for an invasion.

Allow Kagan his say:

Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping rests on certain basic assumptions: that in a just world, China should be hegemonic in East Asia, the center of a system in which the other regional powers pay their respect and take direction from China, as was the case for two millennia prior to the 19th century; that regions once considered by Beijing to have been part of China should be “reunified” with it; and that a revived China should have at least an equal say in setting the norms and rules of international life. These goals are achievable, Mr. Xi asserts, because the world is undergoing “great changes unseen in a century,” namely, the “great rejuvenation” of Chinese power and the decline of American power. “Time and momentum are on our side,” according to Mr. Xi.

If time is on your side you do not need to press your case.

We ought to mention that America has been fighting against China for years now. We  are fighting with tariffs and sanctions, not to mention a campaign to malign that country’s reputation. If you think that such malevolence goes unchallenged you are living in a dream world.

As for Chinese intentions, try this. Perhaps China is convinced that its way of doing things, its authoritarian capitalism, will eventually win out over the decadent west. While Kagan thinks that the Ukraine conflict shows Russian weakness, that war is not yet over.

And perhaps Chinese policy aims at ensuring that the nation does not become too Westernized, too weak, too decadent to compete in world markets. It does not want to return to Maoist impoverishment.

Kagan sees it all in terms of dominance and the exercise of power. 

There is no denying that China has acquired substantial global power and influence in recent decades. Even if this is “peak China,” as some suggest, it is already East Asia’s economic hegemon and, were it not for the U.S., would likely become the region’s political and military hegemon as well (though perhaps not without a conflict with Japan). Left to itself, a modernizing China could one day dominate its neighbors much as a unified, modernizing Germany once dominated Europe and a modernizing Japan once dominated China and the rest of East Asia. Those powers also believed that “time and momentum” were on their side, and in many respects they were right.

Yet those examples should give Chinese leaders pause, for both Japan and Germany, while accomplishing amazing feats of rapid expansion for brief periods of time, ultimately failed in their ambitions for regional hegemony. They underestimated both the actual and potential power of the U.S. They failed to understand that the emergence of the U.S. as a great power at the beginning of the 20th century had so transformed international circumstances that longstanding ambitions of regional hegemony were no longer achievable. At this moment of high tension over Taiwan and the Chinese spy balloon detected this week over the U.S., Xi Jinping runs the risk of making the same historic mistake.

Or maybe he will not. There is no law that says that history repeats itself, that twentieth century conflicts will form the template for twenty-first century conflicts.

Kagan is a cheerleader. He believes that the sleeping giant of America will be roused, as it was in the world wars, and will smite the enemy. Call it a confidence boost, if you like, but there is no guarantee that it will. He has simply isolated one of the reasons why China might choose not to have a direct confrontation with America and the West.