The pendulum has been swinging wildly in Washington in recent months, from a conviction that China is rapidly displacing US leadership around the world to a growing perception that “peak China” has been reached and the country is now in economic and geopolitical decline.
Both may be true.
Opinions also vary on whether an economically weaker and geopolitically challenged China should be feared or embraced. On one hand, China’s slowdown reduces its resources and constrains its global ambitions. On the other hand, an insecure China might be more prone to lash out, particularly when it comes to Taiwan, using nationalist fervor to distract its 1.4 billion people from slowing growth and rising unemployment.
Both these arguments could also be true.
Here’s what to remember as the seventy-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) opens this week in New York. The world is in the beginning of a new global era, one in which the United States has begun a strategic contraction, and China has greatly increased its influence in most parts of the world. At the same time, middle powers are rising—India chief and most significant among them—with their own aspirations, while telling Washington they don’t want to pick sides.
The international order of rules and institutions has never been a neat one, but the global scrum is growing a lot messier with a host of regional and ad hoc groups ranging from BRICS and the QUAD to the Group of Seven and Group of Twenty (G20)—and countless others. No one quite knows what will emerge from this scrum, or which blocs and countries will gain influence. It won’t be a time of nonalignment, but more one of muddled multi-alignment.
In this new era, the question is how the United States should best manage its relations with China, which has decided that Washington is out to strangle its access to technology, contest its leadership in its own region, and undermine its rise.
In crafting its strategy, the United States should begin with a geopolitical serenity prayer, seeking the wisdom to distinguish between what it can and cannot change. By focusing sharply on what it can control, it may also have considerable influence on what it can’t determine—that is, China’s trajectory.
The United States should give urgent and ongoing attention to four broad categories: winning in Ukraine; reinvigorating alliances and reassuring allies; harnessing technological change for good; and, perhaps most difficult of all, addressing its own domestic, democratic weaknesses.
It’s important not to ignore the ever-shifting Chinese context. China’s economic slowdown has stunned investors, even as its military buildup and weapons advances worry strategists. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is shaking up his leadership, with a defense minister gone missing weeks ago, a little more than a month after Xi removed his foreign minister and the army’s top two generals.
Don’t let all that distract you. Here are the areas that will produce the best outcomes.
Ukraine
The stakes are as high for the United States in Ukraine as they were in West Berlin during the Cold War. The two situations are different in many respects, including the fact that US soldiers aren’t in Ukraine though their presence in Berlin was an ever-present deterrent to Moscow.
The situations are similar in that the security and freedom of West Berliners was crucial to the positive Cold War outcome: an expansion of democratic rule and open markets, the enlargement of the European Union and NATO, and (for a while, at least) economic globalization and expanding prosperity.
The security and freedom of Ukrainians will have no less an impact on the period ahead. It’s understandable that US President Joe Biden would want to avoid the downstream dangers of being drawn into the war in Ukraine or doing anything that would prompt Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons. At the same time, Biden needs to focus more on the historical advantages of Ukraine prevailing, which far outweigh such dangers.
Nothing could serve his legacy more. Success in Ukraine may have the added benefit of deterring China from aggression in Taiwan.
Alliances and allies
The United States’ strengths include a solid set of global allies and a NATO alliance that China can’t match. This is, however, a time to both modernize those alliances and reassure their members of US purpose.
Biden’s recent meeting at Camp David, bringing together South Korean and Japanese leaders, was a crucial breakthrough for the trilateral partnership—one which can be built upon. NATO’s seventy-fifth-anniversary summit in Washington next July provides a significant moment to prepare the Alliance for the future, by inviting Ukraine to join, deepening global partnerships, and advancing technological cooperation and capabilities.
In the game of alliances, China has only harmed itself by disengaging from the G20 and will continue that harm by failing to attend UNGA this week.
Harnessing technology
Imagine for a moment how different the world would be today if the Third Reich produced J. Robert Oppenheimer and got to the Manhattan Project first. What if the Soviet Union had invented the internet, produced Silicon Valley, or developed the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which put the United States at the forefront of military technologies?
The race for the commanding heights of new technologies—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and bioengineering, to name a few—will perhaps be even more significant in shaping the new era. There’s an accompanying need to work cooperatively and globally to establish the rules and set the standards to harness technological change for good.
Domestic affairs
Nothing hobbles China more than its one-party rule and its increasingly autocratic leadership. Xi won’t be able to produce the growth his country requires without loosening state control of his economy. However, he fears that relaxing that control could be the Communist Party’s undoing.
Just as China’s future depends on how it manages its autocracy, the United States’ future requires attention to the threats to its democracy.
These threats are not new, as Karl Rove powerfully wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. “It’s bad today, but it’s been worse before, and it will be better ahead. Change is coming. We don’t know precisely when, but it’s coming. The better angels of our nature as Americans will emerge and win out.”
One hopes he is right, but only Americans themselves can ensure that.
The United States’ friends are scratching their heads over how the United States, with its vast human resources, could be facing a 2024 election of historic consequence between an aging, 80-year-old Biden and a four-times-indicted, 77-year-old former President Donald Trump.
In a week when Americans needed inspiration, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) provided it through his announcement that he wouldn’t run for re-election at age 77. At the same time, he suggested Biden and Trump follow his lead. He’s not betting they will listen.
The United States can watch the pendulum swing on China without concern if it acts with greater purpose and consistency in supporting Ukraine, shoring up its alliances, advancing its critical technologies, and fixing its democracy.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.
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