US-China Diplomacy and Grand Strategy

The United States and China bear preeminent responsibilities to promote international stability, prosperity and peace – in Asia and across the globe. This means in the first instance doing everything possible to avoid a crisis in U.S.-China relations. Despite the feel-good atmospherics of the November Obama-Xi Summit in Beijing, I worry that both sides may be on a downward path to such a confrontation. This would produce nothing less than a prolonged international convulsion, with consequential and damaging effects in Asia and around the world.

For example, take into account the negative consequences for each country’s formidable domestic challenges if the U.S. and PRC seriously mismanage their relationship. Imagine the tumultuous effects on the global economy. Consider the dramatic increase in tension throughout Asia and the fact that no country in this vast region wants to have to choose between China and the United States. Envision the corrosive impact on U.S.-China collaboration on climate change. Picture the fallout on attempts to deal with the nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran.

In this context, let me state what I believe is the fundamental problem in U.S.-China relations. It concerns the balance of power in Asia. As Henry Kissinger has put it, “In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.”

Because of profound differences in history, ideology, strategic culture, and domestic politics, the United States and China have diametrically opposed and mutually incompatible perceptions regarding the future balance of power in Asia – in short, the two countries have conflicting grand strategies.

Although both sides will deny it publicly, the main thrust of U.S. policy is to maintain its strategic primacy in Asia, and the main thrust of China’s policy is to replace the United States as Asia’s leading power. There are those in each country who disagree with these trends, but they are in a distinct minority in both nations. This being the case, until one side or the other, or both, change grand strategy which I do not foresee happening anytime soon, there is no prospect of building fundamental trust not to say a strategic partnership between the United States and China. The agreements of the recent Beijing Summit on climate, military confidence building measures, investment facilitation, high-tech cooperation and visa conveniences do not affect that deeply rooted and potentially dangerous strategic reality.

Rather, the most that can be hoped for by the two governments in the period ahead is caution, restrained predictability, and adherence to signed bilateral agreements, and even that will be no easy task to achieve in the next decade.

With this in mind, the U.S.-China discourse should be more candid, high level, and private than current practice – no rows of officials principally trading sermons across the table in Washington or Beijing. Bureaucracies wish to do today what they did yesterday, and wish to do tomorrow what they did today. It is, therefore, inevitable that representatives from Beijing and Washington routinely mount bills of indictment regarding the other side. All are familiar with these calcified and endlessly repeated talking points. As the Chinese proverb puts it, “to talk much and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish.”

For such an intensified high-level bilateral dialogue between Washington and Beijing to be fruitful, it should avoid concentrating primarily on the alleged negative behavior of the other side. For instance, no amount of American condemnation of China’s human rights practices, including regarding Hong Kong – private or by megaphone – will in my judgment affect PRC policies; and no degree of Chinese complaints will lead the United States to weaken its alliance systems which are indispensible to the protection of its vital national interests. Endemic contention will over time contribute to a systemic worsening of U.S.-China bilateral relations with all the destructed consequences I enumerated earlier.

So what to do? The two sides should commit themselves to working together on two or three issues that would make a positive contribution to bilateral ties and to international peace and security. After the recent U.S.-China Summit in Beijing, Asian security would be good subject with which to begin. For example, subjects for joint exploration could include the possibility of creating a variety of OSCE for Asia; and/or expanding the Five Power talks on North Korea to include 4 broader Asian security issues; and/or agreeing on enhanced security confidence building measures between the two sides.

To inspire fresh thinking and creative policy initiatives, it might be best if the senior policy makers who would take the lead in these talks were not in the direct national security chain of command. My bipartisan candidates for such a U.S. team would be Thomas Donilon, former Obama National Security Advisor, and Robert Zoellick, former World Bank President and George W. Bush administration policy maker. The Chinese side would have similar credentials and all these individuals would, of course, have to have the confidence of their respective leaders. Such a channel would simply recognize the reality that the two countries’ strategic policies are being designed not by foreign and defense ministries, but instead by those close to each president and by the presidents themselves; and that the current means of bilateral interaction are not adequate to the task.

The purpose of this intense presidential diplomacy in these dangerous circumstances would be to mitigate and manage the severe inherent tensions between these two conflicting strategic paradigms, but it cannot hope to eliminate them. I agree with former Australian Prime Minister and distinguished Sinologist Kevin Rudd who believes that China has come to the same conclusion, “There is emerging evidence to suggest that

President Xi, now two years into his term, has begun to conclude that the long term strategic divergences between U.S. and Chinese interests make it impossible to bring about any fundamental change in the relationship.”

So let me sum up. In my view, given the irreconcilable grand strategies of the United States and China, the current quality of bilateral diplomacy is insufficient to avoid the danger of an eventual sustained confrontation between the two countries, even though neither Washington nor Beijing want such a crisis.

Only the two presidents can address this problem by creating a new, intense and utterly private channel of communication between them. They should urgently do so.