How to Avert a Debacle in East Asia
If Americans want to avert a “debacle in East Asia,” our government should reject hawkish recommendations on China policy.
Ross Douthat wants you to be very afraid of China:
The establishment of Chinese military pre-eminence in East Asia would be a unique geopolitical shock, with dire effects on the viability of America’s alliance systems, on the likelihood of regional wars and arms races and on our ability to maintain the global trading system that undergirds our prosperity at home.
All of this exaggerates what is at stake for the U.S., and it inflates the threat from China to U.S. interests. That makes it a very conventional hawkish argument, and like other conventional hawkish arguments it gets the most important things wrong. If Americans want to avert a “debacle in East Asia,” our government should reject hawkish recommendations on China policy.
China containment isn’t necessary, and a containment policy would commit the U.S. to decades of fruitless effort expending resources that could have been better used in other ways at home or elsewhere in the world. The quickest way to get “regional wars and arms races” is to pursue an intensifying, militarized rivalry with another major power. Peace in East Asia depends on a number of things, but one of them has been a relatively stable and cooperative U.S.-Chinese relationship. It will be much more difficult to keep the peace in East Asia if that earlier relationship is permanently replaced with a deeply hostile one.
Pursuing primacy in Asia is reckless and it will sooner or later lead to a destructive “debacle in East Asia.” As Van Jackson put at the start of this year, “Washington can support regional peace or pursue regional primacy, but it cannot do both.” China hawks want primacy, but pretend that it secures the peace, and they’re wrong. Great power conflict is one of the biggest threats to global trade and prosperity, and the pursuit of primacy makes such a conflict much more likely.
Sam Roggeveen’s The Echidna Strategy is mainly about the kind of foreign policy Australia should have, but in it he also makes a compelling case that U.S. interests do not require the U.S. to engage in a contest for supremacy in Asia with China. As he says, “America’s core security interests are not threatened by China’s rise.”1 He goes on to say that “America will remain wealthy and immensely powerful, but it will be unmotivated to maintain the present Asian security order because that order, while favourable and valuable to America, is not a sufficiently vital interest to justify the immense scale of competition required to maintain it.”2 He concludes, “While the United States remains formally committed to strategic leadership in Asia, it doesn’t have a good enough reason to pursue such a policy and it refuses to devote sufficient resources to it.”3 To borrow a phrase from Biden, it’s just not worth it.
If you worry about the potential consequences of U.S. defeat in a great power war, it is foolish to go out of your way to court that conflict. American security and interests do not require the U.S. to take such grave risks.
Roggeveen, The Echidna Strategy: p.16.
Roggeveen, p. 16.
Roggeveen, p. 40.