Major Power Rivalries Are Dead Ends

Going down either path means more unnecessary wars and an increasingly heavy burden on the United States.

Janan Ganesh urges confrontation with both Russia and China:

An issue, I think, is that some in Washington, not just on the right, had always hoped to peel Russia away from China. There are cold war memories of sowing discord between the two. But if they fall out, it is unlikely to be through outside instigation. The Sino-Soviet split began more than a decade before Richard Nixon visited China. It was a doctrinal schism between Marxists and then a rather more earthly one about whether India was friend or foe. It might happen again to the pair. An alliance of nationalists is an odd concept. Until then, to confront one is to confront the other.

The fight in D.C. over which major power to confront first is notable in that both camps are badly wrong in their own ways about what the U.S. should do in the world. The China hawks that think the U.S. is overinvesting in Europe at the expense of confronting China are wrong about the desirability of pursuing rivalry with China, and their critics are wrong that the focus on Ukraine doesn’t detract from pursuing that rivalry. While the China hawks acknowledge the need to set priorities and recognize that resources are limited, they use that knowledge in a bad cause that would squander U.S. resources in a fruitless standoff with the rising power in East Asia. The hawks that believe that “to confront one is to confront the other” are even worse because they refuse to make meaningful trade-offs and assume that the U.S. can confront all foes simultaneously. The two camps are offering a choice between catastrophe and exhaustion.