While the Constitution vests in the Congress the power to declare war, American presidents wield great discretion in initiating hostilities. Lyndon B. Johnson dribbled troops into combat in Vietnam in a series of halfway measures that led to disaster. After taking care to build a broad alliance, George H. W.<\/b>
\nWhile the Constitution vests in the Congress the power to declare war, American presidents wield great discretion in initiating hostilities. Lyndon B. Johnson dribbled troops into combat in Vietnam in a series of halfway measures that led to disaster. After taking care to build a broad alliance, George H. W. Bush ordered the assault that threw the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991. His son, George W. Bush, orchestrated the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, after gaining the support of Congress. And recently, without involving the Congress, President Donald Trump has shifted the field of battle to economics by declaring a trade war against China.
By so doing, he has initiated a drama of historical proportions, with consequences far beyond the fracas about tariffs. Looking out several decades, it is China\u2014not Russia, North Korea, or Iran\u2014that is emerging as America\u2019s superpower adversary. President-for-Life Xi Jinping and his authoritarian regime have claimed sovereignty over the 1.3 million square miles of the South China Sea, three times the size of the Mediterranean. China has constructed a chain of forts with anti-ship missiles to enforce the claim. Xi has announced a plan to achieve high-tech dominance over the United States by 2025.
In its \u201cBelt and Road Initiative,\u201d China is offering long-term infrastructure loans to developing nations. As the loans default, China acquires ownership over ports and leverage over impoverished governments. The U. S. has labeled this as \u201c predatory economic behavior \u201d\u00a0intended to colonize poor nations. \u201cDo not accept foreign debt that could compromise your sovereignty,\u201d Pence told leaders at the recent Asia Pacific Economic summit. \u201cThe United States deals openly and fairly, and we don\u2019t offer a constricting belt or a one-way road.\u201d 1 So great was the friction between China and the U. S. that the summit ended with no communiqu\u00e9 on world trade. The twenty-one nations in attendance accounted for sixty percent of the world\u2019s economy.
Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, previously an advocate of close ties with China, recently said, \u201cEconomic tensions are reaching a breaking point\u2026 If the US and China don\u2019t resolve their differences, the world will face a systemic risk of monumental proportions.\u201d 2 What are these economic differences? Simply put, for two decades a series of American presidents have tolerated rampant Chinese hacking, the massive theft of intellectual property, and one-sided tariffs.
President Trump has declared all this must end. President Xi has refused to moderate China\u2019s behavior. So will President Trump back down and accept a fig leaf from Xi? In terms of economic and military leverage, America currently is playing a much stronger hand. But Mr. Trump has not brought together a global alliance, although it is equally in the interests of Japan and Europe to modify China\u2019s budding sense of manifest colonial destiny. And domestically, it is not clear whether the Democrats will support or undercut his efforts to rein in China.
The support of American corporations is equally opaque. Google, for instance, has designed a search engine that complies with Beijng\u2019s insistence to block information about human rights, religion, and other concepts offensive to the regime. Google\u2019s chief executive Sundar Pichai sanctimoniously said, \u201cWe are compelled by our mission [to] provide information to everyone, and [China is] 20% of the world\u2019s population.\u201d\u00a0Yet while sharing high tech with China, Google refuses to work with our own Defense Department.
Google\u2019s hypocrisy drew a sharp rebuke from General Joseph Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. \u201cI have a hard time with companies,\u201d he said, \u201cthat are working very hard to engage in the market inside China…then don\u2019t want to work with the U. S. military. I just have a simple expression: \u2018 We are the good guys.\u2019\u201d
We are witnessing is a high-stakes showdown with ramifications far beyond economics. Rep. Gerry Connolly is a Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Commenting after the Asia Pacific Economic summit, he said, \u201cIf China wants to somehow assert that, no, it and only it is the power in that region, they are going to have a very serious problem with the United States. Japan made that mistake. They paid a terrible price for it.\u201d
America either employs its leverage and accepts some economic pain and market losses in order to tamps down China\u2019s professed global ambitions now, or lives later with an international system less amenable to American values and interests. It remains to be seen whether \u201cthe good guys\u201d will stick together.<\/p>\n