We need to deflate Beijing’s ambitions, without bursting them.
“My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic,” Ronald Reagan told his adviser Richard Allen in January 1977, four years before he became president. “It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?”
As the U. S. now girds for a trade war, and perhaps a new cold war, with China, it’s worth thinking through what our endgame should be now.
It can’t be Reagan’s.
The Soviet Union and its satellites were an apparatus of state terror, resting on an ideology of class hatred, foisted on nations that wanted no part of either. It was always a house of cards. China is not like that. It’s a regime, but it’s also a nation and a civilization, and the three are tightly woven. It will evolve one way or another, but it’s unlikely to simply collapse.
It can’t be Donald Trump’s.
The president believes that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” We’ll see about that. He has turned a trade dispute into a test of wills, and the willingness of dictatorships to let their people absorb economic blows usually exceeds the ability of democracies to do likewise. Besides, even if Washington and Beijing could settle on new terms of trade (and, more improbably, stick to them) it would do nothing to address the broader strategic rivalry.
Finally, the endgame can no longer be what presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama hoped it would: Beijing’s “peaceful rise” as an economic power and a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China has behaved in increasingly nefarious ways. Domestically, it has shifted from one-party to one-man rule and become a surveillance state that locks up innocent people by the hundreds of thousands in concentration camps.
