US President Joe Biden’s national security team is sorting out what to salvage from the policies of former US president Donald Trump’s administration and what to resuscitate from prior approaches by Democrats.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Kurt Campbell, his coordinator for the Indo-Pacific region, previewed their strategic thinking in October’s Foreign Affairs. They expressed predictable skepticism about the Trump team’s National Security Strategy (NSS), but also about the policies of administrations they served.
They wrote that foreign “policy frameworks beginning with the word ‘strategic’ often raise more questions than they answer. ‘Strategic patience’ [of former US president Barack Obama] reflects uncertainty about what to do and when. ‘Strategic ambiguity’ [of former US president Bill Clinton] reflects uncertainty about what to signal. And in this case, ‘strategic competition’ [Trump] reflects uncertainty about what that competition is over and what it means to win.”
The formulation understates the straight-line thinking between the Clinton and Obama administrations. On China’s growing aggression toward Taiwan, neither team knew “what to do.” When then-US assistant secretary of defense for international affairs Joseph Nye was asked by Chinese interlocutors in 1995 how Washington would respond if China attacked Taiwan, he gave what has been judged the perfect expression of strategic ambiguity: “We don’t know and you don’t know. It would depend on the circumstances.”
Trump, when asked the same question, said emphatically that he knew exactly what he would do and that “China knows what I’m gonna do. China knows.” His unstated message: The US will defend Taiwan.
The Campbell-Sullivan article minimizes the Trump administration’s clear thinking on “What, exactly ... the United States [is] competing for.” In the three years since the NSS was published, former US vice president Mike Pence, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, and other Trump administration officials have laid out the range of economic, security and human rights areas of US-China contention.
The strategic competition started with Trump’s trade talks. “Phase one” was succeeding in extracting economic concessions that portended parallel political changes — until COVID-19. That virus ex machina pre-empted Chinese reform, reversed the booming US economy and derailed Trump’s re-election.
The authors’ puzzlement over the nature of the US-China “competition” is baffling: “What might a plausible desired outcome of this competition look like?”
The answer is what it has been for the entire post-World War II period: the liberal, rules-based international order, where most nations peacefully coexist without threatening the fundamental rights of their own people. In other words, the world that exists beyond communist China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and other tyrannies.
Campbell and Sullivan acknowledge that the decades-long engagement policy they and most foreign policy elites advocated made “the basic mistake” of assuming that “it could bring about fundamental changes to China’s political system, economy and foreign policy.”
Now they warn that “policymakers may be substituting a new variety of wishful thinking for the old ... by assuming that competition can succeed in transforming China where engagement failed — this time forcing capitulation or even collapse.”
Rather than offering fresh thinking on how to achieve the aim of changing China — former US president Richard Nixon’s going-in objective for his historic opening — the authors say the goal is simply unattainable; the world must live with China as it is — ie, the realpolitik philosophy advanced by former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and others.
Instead, the authors advocate what might be called competitive coexistence: “Each will need to be prepared to live with the other as a major power.”
This advice is entirely self-directed, intended for US policymakers only, as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and his colleagues are not in the habit of taking advice from US experts on what China “needs to do,” and China’s communist leaders decided as early as 1949 that the US is its existential enemy No. 1.
The practical effect of the Sullivan-Campbell policy would be a permanent US-China “Cold War II,” even as they reject the US-Soviet competition as a model: “The analogy has intuitive appeal ... but [it] is ill-fitting. China today is a peer competitor that is more formidable economically, more sophisticated diplomatically and more flexible ideologically than the Soviet Union ever was. And unlike the Soviet Union, China is deeply integrated into the world and intertwined with the US economy. The Cold War truly was an existential struggle.”
If a weaker, poorer, cruder, more rigid and isolated Soviet Union was an existential challenge for the US, it is unclear why Campbell and Sullivan are less concerned about the more powerful China, which Obama’s director of national intelligence called “America’s greatest mortal threat.”
They wrote that the danger is “exaggerated,” as “the risk of conflict ... is by no means as high, nor is the threat of nuclear escalation as great, as it was in Cold War Europe. The kind of nuclear brinkmanship that took place over Berlin and Cuba has no corollary in US-Chinese ties.”
Yet, a former Clinton administration official described the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait standoff as “our own Cuban missile crisis; we had stared into the abyss.” That confrontation occurred long before China had built the anti-ship ballistic missiles and attack submarines it wields today.
It was those events and the accompanying strategic ambiguity doctrine that precipitated China’s massive buildup, as Beijing mobilized to exploit the US “uncertainty” Sullivan and Campbell disparage earlier in their piece.
The authors wrote: “The US strategy of containment was built on the prediction that the Soviet Union would one day crumble under its own weight — that it contained ‘the seeds of its own decay,’ as George Kennan, the diplomat who first laid out the strategy, declared with conviction.”
Such conviction does not apply to China, they wrote: An “expectation of collapse cannot form the basis of a prudent strategy. Even if the state does collapse, it is likely to be the result of internal dynamics rather than US pressure.”
The Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and the BBC can play the same liberating role in affecting China’s internal dynamics as their predecessors did during the Cold War. As with the populations once trapped behind the Iron Curtain, the truth can set the Chinese people free.
Pompeo said in his Nixon Library speech in July that changing “the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party’s] behavior cannot be the mission of the Chinese people alone. Free nations have to work to defend freedom.”
Mobilizing the international community toward that goal is a natural and necessary undertaking for a Biden administration that promises to focus on human rights and multilateralism.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the advisory committee of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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