Prof. Stephen Walt [Harvard Kennedy School] :
U.S. leaders are usually loathe to learn from others’ experiences, but China’s dramatic rise offers a few lessons that they would do well to ponder.
And no, that doesn’t mean US should become a one-party dictatorship. Latest FP column here:
foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/20/uni…
In any competitive realm, rivals constantly strive to do better. They search for innovations that will improve their position and they strive to imitate whatever appears to be working for their opponents. We see this phenomenon in sports, in business, and in international politics. Emulation doesn’t mean one has to do exactly what others have done, but ignoring the policies from which others have benefited and refusing to adapt is a good way to keep losing.
Today, the need to compete more effectively with China is perhaps the only foreign-policy issue on which nearly all Democrats and Republicans agree. That consensus is shaping the U.S. defense budget, driving the effort to shore up partnerships in Asia, and encouraging an expanding high-tech trade war. Yet apart from accusing China of stealing U.S. technology and violating prior trade agreements, the chorus of experts warning about China rarely considers the broader measures that helped Beijing pull this off. If China really is eating America’s lunch, shouldn’t Americans ask themselves what Beijing is doing right and what the United States is doing wrong? Might China’s approach to foreign policy provide some useful lessons for people in Washington?
To be sure, a big part of China’s rise was due to purely domestic reforms. The world’s most populous nation always had enormous power potential, but that potential was suppressed for more than a century by deep internal divisions or misguided Marxist economic policies. Once its leaders abandoned Marxism (but not Leninism!) and embraced the market, it was inevitable that the country’s relative power would increase sharply. And one could argue that the Biden administration’s efforts to develop a national industrial policy via the Inflation Reduction Act and other measures reflect a belated attempt to imitate China’s state-backed efforts to seize the high ground in several key technologies.
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But China’s rise was not due solely to domestic reforms or Western complacency. In addition, China’s ascent has been facilitated by its broad approach to foreign policy, which U.S. leaders would do well to contemplate.
First, and most obviously, China has avoided the costly quagmires that have repeatedly ensnared the United States. Even as its power has grown, Beijing has been leery of taking on potentially costly commitments abroad. It hasn’t promised to go to war to defend Iran, for example, or to protect its various economic partners in Africa, Latin America, or Southeast Asia. It is supplying Russia with militarily valuable dual-use technologies (and getting paid well for it), but Beijing isn’t sending Russia lethal weaponry, debating whether to send military advisors, or contemplating sending its own troops to help Russia win the war. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin may talk a lot about their “no-limits” partnership, but China continues to drive hard bargains in its dealings with Russia, most notably in demanding that it get Russian oil and gas at bargain prices.
The United States, by contrast, seems to have an unerring instinct for foreign-policy quicksand.
When it isn’t toppling dictators and spending trillions of dollars trying to export democracy to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, it is still extending security guarantees it hopes never to have to honor to countries all over the world. Remarkably, U.S. leaders still think it is some sort of foreign-policy achievement whenever they take on the job of protecting yet another country, even when that country is of limited strategic value or cannot do much to help advance U.S. interests.
The United States is now formally committed to defending more countries than at any time in its history, and trying to meet all those commitments helps explain why the U.S. defense budget is much larger than China’s. Just imagine what the United States could do each year with the more than half-trillion-dollar difference between what China spends and what we do. If it wasn’t trying to police the whole world, maybe the United States could have world-class rail, urban transit, and airport infrastructure—you know, like China has—as well as a lower budget deficit, too.
This is not an argument for leaving NATO, severing all U.S. commitments, and retreating to Fortress America, but it does imply being more judicious about extending new commitments and insisting that our existing allies should pull their weight. If China can grow stronger and more influential without pledging to protect dozens of countries around the world, why can’t we?
Second, unlike the United States, China maintains businesslike diplomatic relations with nearly everyone. It has more diplomatic missions than any other country, its ambassadorial posts are rarely unfilled, and its diplomats are increasingly well-trained professionals (instead of amateurs whose main qualification is their ability to raise funds for successful presidential candidates). China’s leaders recognize that diplomatic relations are not a reward to others for good behavior; they are an essential tool for acquiring information, communicating China’s views to others, and advancing their interests via persuasion rather than brute force.
By contrast, the United States is still prone to withholding diplomatic recognition from states with whom we are at odds, thereby making it more difficult to understand their interests and motivations and making it much harder to communicate our own. Washington refuses to officially recognize the governments of Iran, Venezuela, or North Korea, even though being able to communicate with these governments on a regular basis would be useful. China talks to all of these states, of course, and to all of America’s closest allies, too. Shouldn’t we do the same?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/20/united-states-china-rise-foreign-policy-lessons/
