Beyond victory over China

Our Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has just visited Chinese leaders. Recently, President Joe Biden has met with leaders from Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Things are heating up in Asia. The relationship between China and the United States is the most important in the world and will define our future for the remainder of the century. What is our goal with China? Victory, keeping it contained under American power?

An important article has been written by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher (herein the authors): “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition with China Must Be Won, Not Managed,” Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2024. Pottinger served on the National Security Council under President Donald Trump; Gallagher served as U.S. representative of Wisconsin, chairing the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, having a Ph.D. in international relations from Georgetown University. Their thesis is that the “United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it. Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and to usher in an antidemocratic order.” I disagree. We can go beyond victory to create a stable world society.

The authors are concerned about China’s relationship with other expansionist dictatorships like Russia, Iran and North Korea. These four states make up a coalition of nondemocratic states. China has doubled its nuclear arsenal since 2020 and is building up its conventional forces “faster than any country since World War II.” The authors look at this evidence and conclude that “China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.”

The authors look disparagingly at the concept of détente in the Nixon-Kissinger era of the 1970s and look approvingly at the strategy of President Ronald Reagan: “Reagan sought to win, not manage, the Cold War … ’Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’”

The authors say that the strategy should be: “Rearm, Reduce, Recruit (a strategy that) rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.” Refreshingly, the authors do not harp on China’s civil rights.

Taiwan is the big threat. The authors say that there is a risk we will fail to deter a Chinese attack given our current budget, which is insufficient. The U.S. should immediately “build and surge enough hard power to deny Xi a successful invasion of Taiwan.”

The authors say that we need a new generation of “cold warriors to apply their talents to the contests with China…by unapologetically touting the virtues of an elite, colorblind, all-volunteer force.” We need to develop persons with a “deep expertise in Asia and in the history and ideology of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).” “Finally, U.S. officials need to recruit everyday Americans to contribute to the fight.”

The fight? Are we mobilizing for a war with China? The authors, by their myopic view of the future, put us in danger of catastrophic war and do not see the possibility of evolution to a more civilized world order. There is no reason to recycle the Churchill and Chamberlain debate as our basic theory of international relations. There has been much development in international law and institutions since the 1930s!

The authors, I think, undermine their thesis of no substitute for victory when they admit that success occurred in the Cold War “only after the Soviet Union produced a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom Reagan could make real progress.” Far from militarily defeating Russia in a victorious war, our Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, in 1989, invited the Russian Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, for a one-on-one meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Much progress was made. “It was in this pristine and glorious setting that Eduard and I developed a personal friendship … that would prove invaluable in the tumultuous days ahead.” (James A. Baker III, “Work Hard, Study…,” 2006, 289).

Instead of hoped-for victory at war, there is the balancing of military forces, the growing international institutions, the development of international law, the UN Security Council, empathy, and a common humanity – and friendships. The authors urge a future of the jungle, not a higher human existence. The world is large enough for ideological diversity. America should not try to govern the world in its own image. Democracy requires a diversity of parties, not single ideological rule.

James W. Pfister, J.D. University of Toledo, Ph.D. University of Michigan (political science), retired after 46 years in the Political Science Department at Eastern Michigan University. He lives at Devils Lake and can be reached at jpfister@emich.edu.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: James Pfister: Beyond victory over China