Reshaping the US Global Order Role

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Alan Alexandroff

It is not a surprise with a month to go till the US election that ‘folks’ are assessing where the US global order role is, where it should be, or needs or can be, as we look towards a new administration. I have no crystal ball to tell me who is about to win the election and I am not about to contemplate the return of Trump. But I will look, however, at a possible Harris administration and it appears evident that observers and experts are with a month to go reflecting on what’s next for US global leadership.

Let’s start with one who has had responsibility in the near past for US foreign policy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently penned an assessment of ‘his’ foreign policy in FA, titled, “America’s Strategy of Renewal: Rebuilding Leadership for a New World”. Now you’ll not be surprised that the piece is a narrative and strong expression of policy gone right:

President Biden and Vice President Harris pursued a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.

This twin-pillared strategy, they believed, was the best way to disabuse competitors of their assumptions that the United States was declining and diffident.

Blinken acknowledges that US leadership and action was required to meet the challenge of these revisionist powers that appeared to be determined to reshape leadership and the principles of the current global order:

A fierce competition is underway to define a new age in international affairs. A small number of countries—principally Russia, with the partnership of Iran and North Korea, as well as China—are determined to alter the foundational principles of the international system. While their forms of governance, ideologies, interests, and capabilities differ, these revisionist powers all want to entrench autocratic rule at home and assert spheres of influence abroad.

They all wish to resolve territorial disputes by coercion or force and weaponize other countries’ economic and energy dependence. And they all seek to erode the foundations of the United States’ strength: its military and technological superiority, its dominant currency, and its unmatched network of alliances and partnerships. While these countries are not an axis, and the administration has been clear that it does not seek bloc confrontation, choices these revisionist powers are making mean we need to act decisively to prevent that outcome.

Implicitly and explicitly Blinken describes what he believes to be a very successful competitive policy with these revisionist actors and most particularly China. As Blinken describes Biden administration policy efforts:

The Biden administration’s commitment to compete vigorously yet responsibly along these lines took away the revisionists’ pretext that the United States was the obstacle to maintaining international peace and stability. It also earned the United States greater trust from its friends—and, along with it, stronger partnerships.

Second, we infused U.S. alliances and partnerships with new purpose.We elevated the Quad—the partnership with Australia, India, and Japan—and took concrete steps to realize a shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, from enhancing maritime security to manufacturing safe, effective vaccines. We launched the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, marshaling the world’s biggest economic partnership to shape global standards for emerging technologies and protect the United States’ and Europe’s most sensitive innovations.

To Blinken the alliances and partnerships that the US renewed or built were the keys to Biden administration success in a highly competitive world:

From day one, President Biden and Vice President Harris made a foundational choice that in a more competitive and combustible world, the United States cannot go it alone. If America wants to protect its security and create opportunities for its people, it must stand with those who have a stake in a free, open, secure, and prosperous world and stand up to those who threaten that world.

Notwithstanding then the revisionist power efforts to alter the global order, the US and its partners have been able to maintain the free and open global order and limit revisionist efforts to undermine the opportunities for the US and its partners:

The choices the United States makes in the second half of this decisive decade will determine whether this moment of testing remains a time of renewal or returns to a time of regression—whether Washington and its allies can continue to outcompete the forces of revisionism or allow their vision to define the twenty-first century.

Clearly Blinken is referencing the possibility of a return to Trump. Otherwise Blinken seems to show some content with the actions of the Biden administration. That satisfaction is not shared by all. From the outside today but with experience of serving in the Biden administration another distinct point of you is expressed by a colleague, Jessica Chen Weiss. Jessica was from 2021 to 2022 a senior advisor to the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State on a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured IR Scholars (IAF-TIRS). Jessica just recently took up a new academic appointment as the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. and a nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis. Once again in FA, Jessica examines Biden administration foreign policy in a piece titled, “The Case Against the China Consensus”. Jessica does not fall in line with Blinken’s description and actions of recent US foreign policy – its successful competition with the revisionist powers, most notably China. As Jessica describes recent Biden administration actions:

Washington faces growing criticism for pursuing open-ended competition with China without defining what success would look like. Even as China’s coercive capabilities and threatening behavior have rightly focused U.S. attention on the risks to American interests, the absence of clear metrics for success leaves the door open for partisan aspersions of the Biden administration’s approach.

With that Jessica strikes out toward an improved US-China relationship. As she describes it:

Yet beneath this charged atmosphere, ample space for debate and discernment remains. The apparent hardening of a U.S. consensus on China is shallower and wobblier than it appears. In this fluid environment, there is an opportunity for the next presidential administration to develop a more affirmative, less reactive approach, one that dials down the heat and focuses on reducing the risks while preserving the benefits of the vast web of ties that connect the United States and China.

Now it is clear from Jessica’s analysis the current administration has taken steps to at least maintain a balance with China:

The Biden administration, by contrast, has rightly invoked a sense of shared purpose, underlining the urgency of defending an international order in which might does not make right and working with governments of different persuasions to tackle problems that respect no borders or walls.

Still the emphasis from the current administration to compete successfully with China is dominant and leads to significant persistent competition with China that can, unfortunately lead to conflict:

But in the broader U.S. public and policy conversation, the impulse to thwart China often overwhelms efforts to work toward common objectives and advance U.S. interests. Rhetoric about winning the twenty first century reinforces the idea that competition is zero-sum, accelerating a rush on both sides of the Pacific to prepare for conflict and making it all too easy for critics in both societies to deride ordinary forms of diplomatic, commercial, and scientific interaction as naive at best and appeasement at worst. This emphasis on preparing for worst-case scenarios prevails in both countries.

For Jessica, then, the current policy posture is inadequate and maintains a dangerous locked in competition:

To halt this spiral, Beijing and Washington will need to identify the outcomes they wish to see, avoiding measures of success that are defined by slowing down or one-upping the other. Pursuing resilience and deterrence, not primacy or hegemony, would set them on a more stable course. Post–Cold War U.S. unipolarity in global politics was the exception, not the rule. Today, neither China nor the United States can aspire to dominance across every sector and every technology.

Resilience and deterrence, then is the goal. And here is some of what the US and presumably China must do:

It is therefore imperative that China and the United States maintain a degree of integration in order to detect and learn from new advances. If the technological leaders in a given sector are Chinese, Washington should want U.S. firms to have access to the latest innovation. Right now, Chinese manufacturers are far in front in solar, battery, and electric vehicle production. Licensing Chinese technology to construct an electric vehicle factory in the United States, for example, would build domestic expertise and help U.S. automakers transition more quickly with top-of-the-line technology.

Yet it is not clear that within the current US-China competition, and the efforts by this administration to stabilize the relationship – high level discussions including military-to-military discussions – that the US is not seeking to maintain the economic integration that Jessica suggests is vital. There seems to be in her analysis a hint at least that what is required is the end of competition:

Diversification is healthy, but the United States needs to establish limits on decoupling and “derisking.” …

Right now, much of the U.S. public and policy conversation is consumed by how to counter China and defend American workers, infrastructure, technology, and intellectual property against foreign threats. This focus downplays the domestic harms that measures ostensibly aimed at strengthening U.S. national security can have on the health and vibrancy of the United States’ democracy, society, and innovation ecosystem. Getting China right is critical to the United States’ success, both under the next president and for years beyond.

Now positively Jessica does prompt a close look at the state of US-China competition. A closer look at the state of global economic competition is needed and worth engaging but for the moment it would not seem likely that a Harris administration, if she were to win the presidency, would abandon, or at least dramatically diminish political and economic competition between the US and China. And without greater understanding of the goals each seeks, the US and China that is, there is not a strong logic to acting unilaterally.

A close examination, and strong dialogue might provide insight in constructing an altered foreign policy that is in part driven by competition but with much greater bilateral and multilateral actions better able to contain the US-China competition and engage in policies that stabilize the relationship. Deterrence for sure but stronger two-way assurances that lowers the heat on several fronts including: Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, the South China Sea, nuclear policies and more. We all would benefit from that.

This blog first appeared on my Substack at Alan’s Newsletter

https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/reshaping-the-us-global-order-role?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Image Credit: The Standard

GrappIing with Explanations for US-China Relations

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Alan Alexandroff

I was intrigued by the recent efforts to understand and reveal the dynamic and direction of the US-China relations. In a global order where US-China tensions, or not, are likely the most consequential for either encouraging stability or instability in global affairs, new, and possibly some old insights, are key. It is why I was caught by a number of articles by colleague Ryan Hass of Brookings. Ryan is currently the Director of the John L. Thornton China Center and the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies at Brookings. He is also a senior fellow in the Center for Asia Policy Studies and is, as well, a nonresident affiliated fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. Importantly, Ryan served as the director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council (NSC) staff from from 2013 to 2017. In that role, he advised President Obama and senior White House officials on all aspects of U.S. policy toward China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and coordinated the implementation of U.S. policy toward this region among U.S. government departments and agencies. The point of this Post: it is very helpful to follow Ryan’s recent assessments of the US-China relationship.

I found quite helpful a number of relatively recent articles by Ryan where he tries to understand what drives the US-China relationship. The current views range from: individual great power assessments of their own power in relation to their competitors; to a range of interactive actions between and among the great powers; to domestic drivers and their impact on relations with other great powers. I was pleased to see him assess various conceptions of great power actions and their impact on current global relations with a focus on US-China relations. So what drives US-China competition and explains in part stability in international affairs?

For Ryan it is the domestic factors that energize each country’s foreign policy actions as set out in his Brookings article from March titled, “How does national confidence inform US-China relations?”. As he writes in this piece:

Based on a review of the relationship over the past 75 years, this paper argues that when both countries feel secure and optimistic about their futures, the relationship generally functions most productively. When one country is confident in its national performance but the other is not, the relationship is capable of muddling through. And when both countries simultaneously feel pessimistic about their national condition, as is the case now, the relationship is most prone to sharp downturns. Domestic factors dictate the trajectory of relations. They do, however, play a larger role in influencing the relationship than otherwise has been observed in much recent public commentary.

This model for evaluating the relationship yields several policy-relevant conclusions. It suggests the relationship is dynamic and responsive to developments in both countries, as opposed to being captive to historical forces leading immutably toward conflict. It highlights that the relationship has navigated frequent zigs and zags over the past decades and rarely travels a straight line for long.” … The current task for policymakers in Washington and Beijing is to navigate through the concurrent down cycles in both countries while keeping bilateral tensions below the threshold of conflict.

Clearly, while the interactions of the two are important aspects of the bilateral competitive relations, it is domestic dynamics that are, according to Ryan, the significant drivers that promote cooperative relations or energize tensions:

At their core, both countries believe their governance and economic models are best equipped to meet the 21st century’s challenges. Both believe they are natural leaders in Asia and on the world stage. Both countries are contending with rapid societal transformations, which are being exacerbated by the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution. And both countries are determined to limit vulnerabilities to the other while seeking to gain an edge in emerging technologies.This is all occurring while the United States and China remain unsatisfyingly locked into a relationship that is at once both competitive and interdependent. The United States and China are competing to demonstrate which governance, economic, and social system can deliver the best results in the 21st century.

Thus in the present circumstances of US-China competition the following is the case, according to Ryan:

It [this article] argues that the United States and China presently find themselves in a simultaneous cycle of insecurity and dissatisfaction with their national conditions. Like when U.S.and PRC national down cycles have coincided in the past, this simultaneity is serving as a propellant in both countries for framing the national contest for power and influence in dramatic and, to some, existential terms.

Rather, by analyzing upturns and downturns in U.S.-China relations over the past 80 years, the U.S.-China relationship appears most prone to sharp volatility when both countries simultaneously are experiencing cycles of insecurity and pessimism about their futures.

That the U.S.-China rivalry has continued to intensify throughout the Trump and Biden administrations supports the argument that factors beyond the personalities and preferences of individual leaders inform the trajectory of U.S.-China relations. Trump and Biden are different in many respects. One through line of both of their presidencies, though, has been a sense of pessimism and loss of control among large portions of the American electorate about their country’s future.

Now the question is in the current political circumstance – with the end of Biden’s run for a second term and his replacement by Kamala Harris – what appears to be a far more optimistic leader, its seems to me, whether this may open up a stronger prospect that the US-China relations could, assuming a Harris electoral win, stabilize and open up the prospect for more collaborative global governance efforts led by the two leading powers?

Whether Ryan’s domestic framing is an adequate explanation for US-China relations is unclear. Ryan himself allows that this described approach is not a detailed empirical analysis of great power relations but rather more of a thought experiment.

Now it is clear that this approach, just described, is but one of many contenders for understanding the state of great power relations and more particularly the US-China great power relations. In particular Ryan raises some classic IR approaches. One in particular I was interested in and Ryan examines this which he describes as: “immutable historic forces or a function of their leaders’ personalities and preferences.” As he concludes:

In other words, the United States and China are not predestined to conflict based on past patterns between rising and established powers. The nature of bilateral relations also is not simply an extension of two leaders’ preferences and personalities. There are other factors involved, specifically both countries’ internal dynamics and their levels of confidence in their national directions.

So Ryan appears unenthusiastic over ‘simple’ great power dynamics that are urged by some IR specialists. He is not attracted to a view that focuses on the state of national power and a leader’s determination to act, or to not act, in the face of a leader’s assessment of immediate power advantage or not with rivals . Ryan mentions this in this Brookings piece but then tackles it more directly in a follow-on article where he describes in greater detail the framework, “peak power”. Ryan lays this out in an article titled, “Organizing American Policy Around “Peak China” is a Bad Bet” in China Leadership Monitor. The core argument in the ‘peak power’ thesis is that a great power, read that China, is more likely to act aggressively towards its competitors when leaders determine that that its national strength based on economic, political and military factors is waning:

China’s leaders explicitly reject suggestions that the country’s best daysare behind it. They believe China’s path to greater global influence is widening as America’s dominance in the international system wanes. It would be a mistake to organize American policy around “peak China” theory.

There certainly has been broad analysis that China, unlike in past decades, is currently struggling economically, demographically, and suffering push back from regional and other powers internationally and more. Chinese dominance regionally or even beyond is increasingly questioned. The peak power view of China has been popularized in part by two colleagues, Michael Beckley from Tufts and Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at SAIS. Ryan examines their analysis of China’s leadership. As Beckly and Brands warned in a 2021 in a Foreign Affairs piece titled: “The End of China’s Rise,”the growing limits to China’s economic and political power. As Ryan suggests these IR specialists focus on strategic imperatives of great powers and their need to maintain influence and authority in the international system:

Such is the work of grand strategists who seem unconcerned about understanding China’s own vision and its strategies for securing it. Proponents of “peak China theory” treat the country as an inanimate object that is being blown off course by immutable historic forces. They assume that Beijing’s national ambitions resemble those of past rising powers that ran up against forces opposing their goals. Such analyses overlook the fact that China has agency. China’s leaders also maintain their own internal narratives and metrics for measuring progress in pursuit of their national objectives.

Ryan’s review leads him to this conclusion about China’s actions:

If any forecast of China acting as a peaking power is to hold explanatory value, there must be evidence that China’s leaders accept the diagnosis of their current condition and feel an urgency to act before their moment at the apex of national power passes. In the case of China today, no such evidence is available, at least not in the public record.

Now, I was encouraged by Ryan’s analysis of China’s power and actions to go back to the Beckley and Brands piece. Now to be fair, I should note that the two did produce a jointly authored book after the article and there may be a more elaborate explication in the volume of peak power and its influence on great power politics though most comments on their approach generally refer to the article. Here they describe what they see as the state of China’s international position in the face of declining domestic power factors:

China is a risen power, not a rising one: it has acquired formidable geopolitical capabilities, but its best days are behind it. That distinction China’s leaders are determined to move fast because they are running out of time. It matters, because China has staked out vaulting ambitions and now may not be able to achieve them without drastic action. The CCP aims to reclaim Taiwan, dominate the western Pacific, and spread its influence around the globe.

And from the article by Beckley and Brands there is surprisingly just this one paragraph in the piece that points to the consequences for great powers and the global order from the impact of peak power:

When authoritarian leaders worry that geopolitical decline will destroy their political legitimacy, desperation often follows. For example, Germany waged World War I to prevent its hegemonic aspirations from being crushed by a British-Russian-French entente; Japan started World War II in Asia to prevent the United States from choking off its empire.

Now I don’t want to extend this Post – it is already too long, and I have not read their follow-up 2022 study but I am underwhelmed by their explanation in Foreign Affairs. I have not examined closely enough the complex details of the politics of Japan before the war in the Pacific but I have examined closely the lead up to World WarI. Their view of Germany and its actions leading to World War I is just dramatically underwhelming. In my reading the crisis was driven by a decades-long decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and not just German aspirations and threat posed by Russia. And the state of the entente at the time of the July crisis was far from united, especially in looking at British views of the powers prior to the war.

But let’s not ‘get into the weeds’ on this. I am for the moment content to examine closely the analysis of China’s leadership by Ryan. It appears to reveal much about the state of US-China competition and geopolitical tensions in the current global order.

Image Credit: South China Morning Post

The Trouble with Today’s Multilateralism: An Intro

Posted on August 9, 2024 by Alan Alexandroff

So in this week’s Post I was all set to hone in on the struggles over reenergizing faltering multilateralism in the current global order. Today’s troubles encompass the formal institutions – the Formals – from the UN, and many of its specialized agencies to the international financial ones – the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. And the troubles extend to the Informals, the G7, the G20 to the BRICS+ and more. The struggles over multilateralism are the flip side of the return, seemingly ever more strongly power politics – the wars in the Ukraine and Gaza, and geopolitics, especially the rise in bilateral tensions between China and the United States.

But before I could go there, I couldn’t ignore the just excellent article – recommended by my colleague, and China expert, John Gruetzner – in Foreign Affairs by Zongyuan Zoe Liu, titled, “China’s Real Economic Crisis: Why Beijing Won’t Give Up on a Failing Model”. This very good piece leaned strongly into the discussion I had raised in my previous Alan’s Newsletter Post, ‘China, Seemingly, Stays the Course’. The Post chronicled the disappointment expressed by analysts and experts in the West primarily but in a rather more modulated form in China as well. The disappointment according to these experts emerged over the failure in the Third Plenum to initiate significant economic reform in the Chinese domestic economy and a clear determination to tackle domestic consumption.

Liu gets it right:

The Chinese economy is stuck. … But there is a more enduring driver of the present stasis, one that runs deeper than Xi’s growing authoritarianism or the effects of a crashing property market: a decades-old economic strategy that privileges industrial production over all else, an approach that, over time, has resulted in enormous structural overcapacity.

Simply put, in many crucial economic sectors, China is producing far more output than it, or foreign markets, can sustainably absorb. As a result, the Chinese economy runs the risk of getting caught in a doom loop of falling prices, insolvency, factory closures, and, ultimately, job losses.

Since the mid-2010s, the problem has become a destabilizing force in international trade, as well. By creating a glut of supply in the global market for many goods, Chinese firms are pushing prices below the breakeven point for producers in other countries. In December 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that excess Chinese production was causing “unsustainable” trade imbalances and accused Beijing of engaging in unfair trade practices by offloading ever-greater quantities of Chinese products onto the European market at cutthroat prices.

Despite vehement denials by Beijing, Chinese industrial policy has for decades led to recurring cycles of overcapacity. At home, factories in government-designated priority sectors of the economy routinely sell products below cost in order to satisfy local and national political goals.

Now there continues to be some contention over whether in fact production is below cost but I I was pleased by Liu’s ‘recommendation’ that the two – the West and China – consider options other than just piling on the tariffs. Liu correctly points out the negative consequences of such trade policy:

A China that is increasingly cut off from Western markets will have less to lose in a potential confrontation with the West—and, therefore, less motivation to de-escalate. As long as China is tightly bound to the United States and Europe through the trade of high-value goods that are not easily substitutable, the West will be far more effective in deterring the country from taking destabilizing actions. China and the United States are strategic competitors, not enemies; nonetheless, when it comes to U.S.-Chinese trade relations, there is wisdom in the old saying “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

That is why I have suggested negotiating – and one aspect in this case could be Voluntary Export Restraints or VERS. VERS are not super policy actions – I get that but they do encourage bilateral discussions rather than just unilateral penalties. As Liu suggest:

The U.S. government should discourage Beijing from building a wall that can sanction-proof the Chinese economy. To this end, the next administration should foster alliances, restore damaged multilateral institutions, and create new structures of interdependence that make isolation and self-sufficiency not only unattractive to China but also unattainable. A good place to start is by crafting more policies at the negotiation table, rather than merely imposing tariffs. … If the government [China] also implemented voluntary export controls, it could kill several birds with one stone: such a move would reduce trade and potentially even political tensions with the United States; it would force mature sectors to consolidate and become more sustainable; and it would help shift manufacturing capacity overseas, to serve target markets directly.

While working through the WTO might be preferable, and many analysts suggest such an approach for multilateral trade frictions, realistically that course of action is out of reach for the moment.

So there you are on the Third Plenum and global trade. Let me at least turn to the original subject for this Post; let’s at least open the discussion on multilateralism and its problems. I was particularly attracted to a piece published recently by Pascal Lamy. Pascal Lamy (pascallamy.eu) is currently the Vice-President of the Paris Peace Forum, and coordinator of the Jacques Delors Institutes (Paris, Berlin, Brussels). Importantly, Pascal Lamy served two terms as Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) from September 2005 to September 2013. He is someone that is very familiar with critical aspects of the multilateral system. Recently his piece, ‘Reshaping the Global Order’ was published in a large edited volume by colleagues from the Center for China & Globalization, CCG, Henry Huiyao Wang and Mabel Lu Miao, Enhancing Global Governance in a Fragmented World: Prospects, Issues, and the Role of China. Now Lamy sets out the critical structural issues that impair today’s multilateralism efforts. As he says:

The main long-term, structural factors at play can be summarized by sovereignty as a founding principle of an international order, by the obsolescence of the previous order, and by the US-China rivalry.

It is not surprising that he identifies ‘sovereignty’ as the first key to multilateralism’s problems:

Sovereignty has been, is, and will remain the main obstacle to building a fully fledged international order as long as it is accepted as the core principle of international law.

So many analysts acknowledge the burst in new actors in the international system: substate actors, regions and cities and also non-state actors like NGOs, large public and private corporations but all struggle against dominant state actors. National sovereignty dominates international relations and often leads to unilateral actions that undermines wider cooperation.

Then there is ‘obsolescence’. This focuses around the elements of the system, especially the Formals that were put in place at the end of World War Two at a time when the Global South that has had such a recent impact on international relations existed primarily as colonies of the West:

Obsolescence has to do with the origins of the current global system, the architecture of which dates from arrangements made after the Second World War. The ‘universal’ nature of these arrangements is increasingly seen as a product of a past pattern of Western dominance at a time when new nation states are now reshuffling the old power distribution …

Lamy then targets the impact of the evolving international order:

All in all, the previous international order is being shaken by increasing North-South and East-West tensions and frustrations, and by a change in the balance between geoeconomics and geopolitics, the former losing the force it had gathered in recent decades, and the latter regaining its past dominance over world affairs. We are thus moving toward less of a rules-based system, and more toward the use of force. This context obliges us to consider new paths, tentative as they may be.

And finally Lamy underlines the rise of geopolitical tensions, especially between China and the United States, and the impact that these tensions have had on the current multilateral order:

The intensification of the US-China rivalry is the third main factor shaping the demise of the international order, as this rivalry increasingly pits the two main world superpowers against each other. Indeed, they now believe they have become dangerously vulnerable to each other—hence a change of view on both sides about globalization. Whereas the US and China previously celebrated the benefits of increased economic interdependence in fostering development and reducing poverty, they are now trying to address what today they consider as overdependence and have embarked on a decoupling journey which challenges the rest of the world with hard binary choices and which permeates international life in the form a sort of ‘cold war 2.0.’

So what is to be done? How can a multilateral system be revivified and made effective – bringing greater stability to the global order and energizing transnational global governance efforts?

That’s where we will start in the next Post.

Image Credit: Geneva Interdisciplinary Centre for Economics and Law

This Blog originally appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter – https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/the-trouble-with-todays-multilateralism?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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Responding to Disorder

Posted on July 12, 2024 by Alan Alexandroff

I have to start with the Biden press conference last night, of course. I wish Biden’s performance could allay concerns about his competence but, unfortunately, it was not good enough to do that. Biden was certainly less combative than what was on display earlier but the stubbornness has not abated. And the mistakes remain. So, the Democrats are stuck for the moment.

Let’s turn now to the focus of this Post: coping with the disorder in the current international system and the real fear for the electoral outcome.

My close colleague, Yves Tiberghien, Professor of Political Science and the Konwakai Chair in Japanese Research, and also the Director of the Center for Japanese Research at the University of British Columbia put his finger on the stability/instability tension in the current global order. As he wrote recently for the Asia-Pacific Foundation:

In the current moment we are witnessing a rapidly changing geopolitical environment, with several dangerous hot spots and an acceleration of tit-for-tat dynamics.

The prime movers in this situation are China and the U.S., each animated and constrained by their domestic politics that sometimes limit their ability to deeply understand each other and engage in strategic, long-term calculations. The moves that each of them makes – which are usually framed as being defensive and reactive – are feeding a cycle of interactions that is transforming the region.

The central tension between the two leading powers is not aided by the current fallout from the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the war in Gaza but the macro disorder is driven in the first instance by difficult US-China interests. And, it is because of the knotty interactions and the prospect for even greater bilateral tensions that so many of us are kinda ‘quaking in our boots’ over the impending national US elections. I was caught by the insight and ‘unexpressed’ emotion of one of the NYT’s most well known Opinion Columnists, Tom Freidman. He just recently wrote in the NYT, a piece titled: “The Devil May Be Enjoying This Election Season, but I Am Not”:

Both men running for president right now are unfit for the job: One is a good man in obvious cognitive and physical decline, and the other is a bad man who lies as he breathes, whose main platform is revenge — and who is in his own cognitive tailspin.

It kinda chills one’s ‘political soul’ when contemplating current US politics and policy. It leaves open the prospect of dangerous international politics that demands effective Presidential leadership – which is exactly what seems to be missing in the current presidential contest. As Friedman writes:

At the same time, we are in the middle of defining the post-post-Cold War order, now that the U.S.-dominated post-Cold War order has come unstuck since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Managing a hostile Russia — aligned with an increasingly hostile China, aligned with malign actors like Iran and North Korea, and super-empowered nonstate actors like Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah — will take not only incredibly wise U.S. leadership but also a U.S. leader able to forge multiple alliances. The post-post-Cold War world can’t be managed by a lonely American superpower telling all its allies to spend more on defense or we will leave you to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin.

Turning back to Yves Tiberghien for a moment, Yves identifies 3 hotspots in the current international scene: The Philippines, North Korea and Taiwan. Let me look at just one, what Yves identifies as the number one hotspot, the Philippines:

This is the top hot spot right now, and one without good safeguards or guardians. Some view it as perhaps the closest example in the region to a 1914 scenario. There is an urgency for talks between high-ranking officials in the U.S. and China talks, but the Biden Administration is distracted.

Now I will avoid any comparative historical references, – you know, it is just like World War I, or just like the Iraq decision etc. I am not attracted to this form of analysis. And you should be careful as well. For my part having examined, rather long ago, the dramatically complex interactions and unique diplomatic actions of long ago political figures, including especially those political decisions leading up to World War I – thank you James Joll, these comparisons fail to attract me. The primary reason is most analyses comparing historical crises focus on the similarities but almost never examine the often dramatic differences in these historical comparisons. There are not only similarities but differences as well. And both must be examined, though they seldom are.

So let’s leave historical comparisons aside and let’s turn to a recent analysis. I was very pleased to see a just released piece by Ryan Hass in Foreign Affairs, titled: “Avoiding War in the South China Sea”. Ryan is from Brookings and is currently the Director of the John L. Thornton China Center, Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Center for Asia Policy Studies, John L. Thornton China Center and he is also the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies. Ryan served from 2013 to 2017, as the director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council (NSC) staff. From what I know he retains links with many in the Biden Administration.

There are a number of valuable insights that Ryan conveys in the current problem. Let’s first start with the problem. The South China Sea (SCS) dispute arises over the Spratly Islands with ongoing territorial disputes among Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam concerning “ownership” of the Spratly Islands, a group of islands and associated “maritime features” (reefs, banks, and cays etc.) and strong positioning in the South China Sea. The central bully in this story is China that essentially claims all of the South China Sea. Nevertheless, the others also maintain their individual country claims. In 1999 the Philippines ran an old vessel, the Sierra Madre aground on the Second Thomas Shoal. China initially demanded that the Philippines remove the vessel and has harassed the Philippine efforts to resupply the military personnel that remain on the vessel though to this point China has been unsuccessful in preventing Philippine resupply. As Ryan points out:

The risk remains high that an incident could result in the death of a Filipino soldier, potentially triggering the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty and bringing American and Chinese forces to the brink of conflict.

That is the heart of the problem for the US, China and the Philippines. Threading the needle is what it will take; and of course that is exactly what chills those of us looking at the current race for the presidency. But Ryan suggests a policy that enhances deterrence and limits what Yves described as ‘tit-for-tat’ actions.

For Washington, success is upholding the credibility of its alliance commitments, avoiding conflict with China, and preventing Chinese occupation of Second Thomas Shoal. Achieving these results will require Washington to weigh every policy decision against whether it does more to prevent or provoke a crisis. Second Thomas Shoal is a strategic challenge with a military dimension.

It is a touchy balance of maintaining commitment, and thereby deterring China and at the same time not giving full rein to the strategic – and not so strategic actions in the US and in fact in the Philippines, to tip over into conflict. Reflecting this balance is Ryan’s positioning:

It is not a military problem with a military solution. Washington must resist pressure to frame this issue as a test of wills between the United States and China and instead leverage Beijing’s bullying at Second Thomas Shoal to strengthen its relationships in the region.

Given the conflicting imperatives of the three major participants, the United States will need to walk a tightrope. It cannot allow itself to beseen as passive in the face of Chinese pressure against its treaty ally. On the other hand, Washington must preserve its position as defender of the status quo, thereby sharpening the contrast with China’s revisionist attempts to alter the situation at Second Thomas Shoal.

It is, as Ryan points out, critically important to signal soundly to China, US commitment without creating reactive offense:

U.S. policymakers must resist the urge to turn Second Thomas Shoal into a contest of wills between the United States and China and urge Beijing to do the same. The more the standoff becomes publicly framed as a showdown between great powers, the more likely that nuclear-armed rivals could find themselves in a nose-to-nose confrontation over a rusting boat.

And I think sensibly Ryan urges the following:

Washington should enlist as many concerned countries as possible to privately counsel Beijing against further escalation. Greater engagement by more actors, especially the Southeast Asian states that Beijing seeks to pull closer, will make the current dispute seem less like a binary clash between the United States and China.

The United States’ best option for limiting risk is to chart a middle path between succumbing to a military test of wills and putting pressure on the Philippines to give in to Chinese pressure. Conflict is possible, but far from preordained.

All this examination underscores the complexity and careful steps required to contain tit-for-tat US-China actions that could lead to a security disaster. It is hard now not to contemplate the worst with either crazy Trump, for sure but now possibly a seriously diminished Biden. We can only hope that the presidential outcome is not as currently predicted.

Image Credit: Al Jazeera

Calming US-China Tensions

Posted on March 17, 2024 by Alan Alexandroff

My colleague, Michael Swaine, now a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has produced two very insightful pieces on US-China relations. The longer piece can be found as a Quincy Brief and well worth reading. But if that is not possible, then a shorter examination is set out by Michael at WPR. The ‘heart’ of both pieces is that stability arising from the Biden-Xi Summit at the margin of the APEC meeting in San Francisco late in 2023 is far less than meets the eye. As Michael narrates in the WPR piece:

All this means that, far from developing the incentives and the means to avert a crisis or conflict, efforts on both sides to reassure each other on their vital interests are ringing increasingly hollow, with the result that both continue to view each other as engaging in evasive or, worse yet, hypocritical and duplicitous behavior.

And with respect to Taiwan, set out in the Quincy Brief, Michael paints a rather bleak picture:

The reality, however, is that the features and trends pushing both countries toward a confrontation over Taiwan persist, fueling a dangerous, interactive dynamic that could quickly overcome any diplomatic thaw between the world’s foremost powers.

Why have the two leading powers come to such a serious pass in the face of what appeared to be a solid effort to stabilize the relationship at the margins of APEC? Here Michael is clear:

Achieving this requires each nation to match its formal statements clearly and reliably with its actual behavior—in other words, to avoid hypocrisy—with regard to what each side regards as its vital interests, and to do so consistently over time. This in turn requires both sides reaching a mutual understanding of what their vital interests are, the meaningful assurances regarding them that each desires, and what would constitute violations of those assurances and, hence, threats to the concerned party’s vital interests. …

Unfortunately, despite some initial efforts, neither Washington nor Beijing has thus far met these requirements. Perhaps the most prominent example of this failure involves what began as the “Four Noes and One No Intention,” but which Beijing now calls the “Five Noes.” These reportedly affirm that the United States: does not seek a new Cold War with China; does not aim to change China’s political system; is not revitalizing its alliances to counter China; does not support Taiwan’s independence; and does not seek a conflict with China. [WPR]

From Michael’s perspective the United States has failed to reassure China that indeed it is committed to the “Five Noes”. Then, added to this is the failure to provide the reassurances necessary over Taiwan. As Michael describes the Taiwan situation:

The increasingly high (and arguably growing) stakes the Taiwan issue presents for both Beijing and Washington;
Deepening levels of domestic threat inflation on each side;
The growing tendency on both sides to worst case the motives and intentions of others (fed by a persistent lack of trust) while failing to recognize the interactive nature of the rivalry;
A resulting steady erosion of confidence in the original, stabilizing bilateral understanding regarding Taiwan reached between Beijing and Washington during the 1970s normalization process, and a related stress on deterrence over assurance;
The absence of effective bilateral crisis prevention and management Mechanisms”. [Brief]

While the two articles focus on somewhat different aspects of the US-China relationship, the big conclusion I draw from these two very insightful pieces by Michael is that both leading powers are providing insufficient assurances to the other of the desire of each to maintain the status quo and peaceful relations.

The rising gyre of action and response between the two is underlined by Michael:

In China, U.S. assertions that the One China Policy has not changed, or that its relations with Taiwan remain unofficial, thus fall on deaf ears. And the apparent hypocrisy of U.S. behavior is then used to justify more provocative Chinese actions, which lead many Americans to conclude that Beijing is jettisoning its commitment to peaceful unification.

This worsening situation is made even more dangerous by the absence of substantive crisis prevention and management mechanisms and procedures between the two nations. It is true that Washington and Beijing have recently agreed to resume a nascent military–to–military crisis communication working group that remained suspended since 2019 and appear to be working to revive a few other more established agreements designed to avoid incidents in the air and at sea. [Brief]

For Michael the heavy reliance on military deterrence, as opposed to material bilateral reassurance is at the heart of the shaky relations between the two. What is needed is clear, according to him:

There are, however, concrete steps that the U.S. government, Congress, and civil society can take to reduce the mounting tension around the Taiwan issue and remove it as a major factor driving the growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing. Most importantly, both sides must reverse the tendency to regard the island as a surrogate for the overall U.S.–China strategic competition.

This requires, as a first step, efforts to reduce the overall intensity of the bilateral rivalry, by eliminating the heretofore divisive, often politically–induced, zero–sum rhetoric that has dominated much of the dialogue in Washington and Beijing, and ending, to the extent possible, the mismatch between the words spoken and actions taken on both sides.” “… Such overblown rhetoric and hypocrisy deepen distrust and signal that there is no potential common ground on critical issues such as Taiwan’s future. They reinforce worst–case assumptions about motives and therefore increase the likelihood that manageable crises will become severe conflicts.[Brief]

Michael then sets out a rather lengthy list of reassuring statements that the US might express to undermine any trajectory toward confrontation and conflict. As he says:

These statements would represent a clear shift from the current drift toward confrontation and abandonment of the “One China” normalization understandings with China over Taiwan. They would not constitute a new U.S. policy so much as an attempt to restore policy understandings that have maintained peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait for decades.”[Brief]

In an ideal world such efforts backed by equally reassuring statements and actions from China could well represent an optimal path for US-China relations in the immediate circumstances. Unfortunately, in a Presidential election year and with the heavy cloud of a possible Trump re-election and his growing wild rhetoric of an 8-month campaign, it seems to me Michael’s solutions in these circumstances may well unfortunately be overreach. What therefore can be done in this difficult period.

It would be nice if a Leaders Summit was planned relatively soon but unfortunately the Brazil G20 Summit is scheduled to take place after the US election. Thus a bilateral meeting at the margins of a summit is not going to be possible. Bad timing I’m afraid. In the face of a poor calendar the best that might be hoped for are confidence building gatherings of senior officials. Here too the G20 can be useful. There are a large number of ministerial sessions that provide the setting for side meetings by US-China senior officials. These bilateral side gatherings provide opportunities where expressions of reassurance could be had and public statements made that underline the US-China effort to maintain stability and express specific collaborative policy initiatives. It might provide just the kind of opportunities that Michael believes might help stabilize US-China relations.

Image Credit: France24

This Post first appeared at my Substack, Alan’s Newsletter https://globalsummitryproject.substack.com/p/calming-us-china-tensions?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

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US-China Relations- How difficult is the relationship?

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Alan Alexandroff

This week I, and just about everybody else holding some interest in sport, or at least in innovative commercials were distracted by the events leading up to, and including, the 58th Super Bowl. Notwithstanding the quickening approach of this Super Bowl Sunday, however, I was drawn to an examination by a number of experts for the Brookings Institution of the US-China relationship.

So in this somewhat shortened Post, thanks to the Event, I thought I might pay a bit of attention to their useful views.

Graham Allison, one of the experts called on to respond to the question, pointed to the issue posed to the experts:

The invitation from Brookings’ debate organizers asked: “Is the U.S.-China relationship the most consequential bilateral relationship for the United States in the world?

He went on to lay out just why the bilateral relationship is so consequential:

My answer is: yes. If not China, who?

China is:

– one of only two nations that poses an existential threat to the United States.

– the only nation that poses a systemic threat to the U.S. position as the global leader, architect, and guardian of the post-World War II international order.

– the largest emitter of greenhouse gases—accounting for more emissions in 2022 than the United States and Europe combined.

– the second backbone of the world economy: the manufacturing workshop of the world, the No. 1 trading partner of most countries in the world (including the European Union and Japan), and the supplier of most critical items (including everything green and clean) in global supply chains.

– both a classic Thucydidean rival and America’s inseparable, conjoined Siamese twin.

The folks who commented included, as I noted above, Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor – Harvard, and additionally, John Cartin, Adjunct Professor, Walsh School of Foreign Service – Georgetown, Elizabeth Economy, Senior Fellow – Hoover Institutions and Susan Thornton, Senior Fellow – Paul Tsai China Center, Yale Law School, and nonresident fellow, the Brookings Thornton China Center.

It is, for sure, a significant question. After all, the state of the US-China relationship, largely without question, drives the geopolitics of current international relations. And the answers did not fail to satisfy. The assessments by these experts are all very revealing and if you have a moment the answers are worth a read. I say this notwithstanding that not all even saw the relationship as most consequential. In fact Elizabeth Economy promoted a somewhat contrary notion. As she argued:

There are many ways to describe the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. For example, the relationship is the world’s most complex, most challenging, or most competitive. However, the relationship is not “the most consequential in the world for America. Far more consequential is the United States’ relationship with its network of allies and partners in Asia, Europe, and North America. Unlike China, the United States’ allies and close partners share the same values, norms, and strategic objectives. … However, over the almost half-century since the normalization of the U.S.-China relationship, the bilateral relationship has never realized the potential Washington imagined. The two countries’ values, norms, and interests have increasingly diverged, and the ties that have bound them together have increasingly frayed.

In his response, Allison is unwilling to let the Economy argument pass and sets it out his views starkly:

In arguing against the significance of the U.S.-China relationship, both Economy and Cartin duck the reality of China’s existential threat. The brute fact is that China is one of only two nations in the world with nuclear arsenals that constitute genuine “existential” threats—meaning threatening existence.

While not unanimous, then, still I think most would underscore that the US-China bilateral relation is highly consequential. Having said that though, I was most taken with Susan Thornton’s response. Now admittedly I know Susan most of all the experts as she is a key figure in our own China-West Dialogue (CWD). But she argued and targeted exactly what I would have also zoned in on. Susan accepted that the relationship was indeed the most consequential but then targeted what I would have as well: the key to the relationship and its likely impact on the global order is the state of domestic affairs in the US. As Susan argued:

And just to be clear, relations with or actions taken by any other single country will have little consequence for Americans in the world compared to our own decisions and actions. Our fate lies in our own hands. … In short, America cannot escape “China impact.” China is big, capable, changing rapidly, and operating in all priority zones. Still, obsessing over what China does or might do is a mistake that will carry large opportunity costs for America that it cannot afford. China may be the most consequential “other country,” but we need to take responsibility for our own future, a future that will involve “China impact,” but that we can shape.

Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. In the face of the real possibility of a return of Donald Trump as American President, most anything, and likely everything else pales in comparison to that reality and the real chaos likely to be generated by his return both for domestic and US foreign policy.

Image Credit: MIssouri State University

This Post originally appeared at my Substack, Alan’s Newsletter. https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/us-china-relations-how-consequential?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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The Troubling Aggressiveness of the House Select Committee on China

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Alan Alexandroff

This is an effort to unpack the US-China relationship and its impact on the current global order following the Xi-Biden Summit at the margins of the APEC Summit last month in San Francisco. It is difficult to assess the consequences of the very real US-China competition and the potential for not just competition but confrontation and conflict. As Fareed Zakaria describes it in an opinion piece in the Washington Post:

China is the largest of the challenges and the one that, in the long run, will shape the international order — determining whether the open international system collapses into a second Cold War with arms races in nuclear weapons, space and artificial intelligence.

But that nuanced assessment is not found everywhere. We’ve made passing reference in the past in this Substack posts to the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (Select Committee). With the most recent Select Committee Report the grim clarity of the Select Committee’s view is on full display.

This Committee, it seems to me, is the cutting edge of the reaction against decades-long ‘engagement’ strategy in US-China foreign policy. The ‘death of engagement’ came with the Trump years but has continued with some in the Biden Administration. From a position that argued that economic interdependence between the United States and China would encourage peace and stability between the two and in the more extreme view that such engagement would even be a force for political liberalization in China, that view is ‘dead and buried’. While the latter view of political liberalization was clearly ‘over the top’, the notion of economic interdependence promoting economic growth and prosperity and encouraging continuing focus on societal wellbeing was not then and is not now. But not for the Select Committee.

The Select Committee was created on January 10, 2023 at the beginning of the 118th Congress to, according to the recent Select Committee Report, to: “investigate and submit policy recommendations on the status of the Chinese Communist Party’s economic, technological, and security progress and its competition with the United States.” At that time, it was then Speaker Kevin McCarthy – yes the same guy who was fired from Speaker and has now left Congress – who appointed Mike Gallagher its Chair. Gallagher was first elected to the US House of Represenattives in 2016 and is a Marine veteran who was deployed twice to Iraq as a commander of intelligence teams, and was on now-retired Army Gen. David Petraeus’s Central Command Assessment Team.

Gallagher has been vocal about what he sees as the Biden Administration’s failure to understand the threat posed by China. In an early set of remarks as Chair Gallagher made clear what he believed to be the necessary course correction in US policy toward China. In an interview in the spring Gallagher laid out his vision:

I think there should be three pillars to our grand strategy vis-a-vis China. One is traditional military competition, hard power, and there we need multiyear appropriations for critical munition systems that need to be prepositioned in the Indo-Pacific. … The second line of effort involves ideological competition. Human rights go in this bucket. One of the things we can do in this area is make sure that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is fully implemented and that companies aren’t exploiting any loopholes. … The third line of effort is the most complex. It’s what I call economic statecraft, or what others refer to as “selective economic decoupling.

From early on, indeed from his opening remarks at the Select Committee’s first hearing in February, Gallagher has been explicit that he views the competition and rivalry with China as an “existential struggle”:

We may call this a “strategic competition,” but this is not a polite tennis match. This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.

The Select Committee is made up of the following members:

Chair: Mike Gallagher WI-08

Republican Members

Robert J. Wittman VA-01

Blaine Luetkemeyer MO-03

Andy Barr KY-06

Dan Newhouse WA-04

John R. Moolenaar MI-02

Darin LaHood IL-16

Neal P. Dunn FL-02

Jim Banks IN-03

Dusty Johnson SD-

Michelle Steel CA-45

Ashley Hinson IA-02

Carlos A. Gimenez FL-28

Ranking Member: Raja Krishnamoorthi IL-08

Democratic Members

Kathy Castor FL-14

André Carson IN-07

Seth Moulton MA-06

Ro Khanna CA-17

Andy Kim NJ-03

Mikie Sherrill NJ-11

Haley M. Stevens MI-11

Jake Auchincloss MA-04

Ritchie Torres NY-15

Shontel M. Brown OH-11

It is notable that all members of the Committee, Republican and Democrat, with the exception of Representative Auchincloss, a Democrat, signed this most recent recent Report by the Select Committee. It underscores the growing negative shift in Congress over the relationship with China. As pointed out recently in the NYTimes:

… that ties to China could be weaponized in the event of a conflict. It could be catastrophic for the U.S. economy or the military, for example, if the Chinese government cut off its shipments to the United States of pharmaceuticals, minerals or components for weapons systems.

Beijing’s subsidization of Chinese firms and incidents of intellectual property theft have also become an increasing source of friction. In some cases, China has allowed foreign firms to operate in the country only if they form partnerships that transfer valuable technology to local companies.

The report said that the United States had never before faced a geopolitical adversary with which it was so economically interconnected, and that the full extent of the risk of relying on a strategic competitor remained unknown. The country lacks a contingency plan in the case of further conflict, it said.

And, it reflects what is today described as ‘bipartisanship’ in US-China relations.

The current Report, titled ‘Reset, Prevent, Build: A strategy to win America’s economic competition with the Chinese Communist Party’ was intended to address, what the Report describes as an “equally critical concern: America’s economic and technological competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC)” – one of three pillars identified by the Select Committee. The central narrative of US-China relations, according to the Select Committee was, and is:

For a generation, the United States made a bipartisan bet that robust engagement with the PRC would lead the PRC to open its economy and financial markets, which would in turn lead to reforms in the political system, greater freedom for the Chinese people, and peace and stability in the region. That bet has failed. The PRC, led by the CCP, has abandoned the path of economic and political reform, doubled down on repressive activities at home, and engaged in destabilizing activities in the region. In the decades since its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the PRC has consistently broken its promises, which ranged from commitments to allow wholly foreign-owned internal combustion engine vehicle manufacturing licenses in the PRC to pledges to reduce market-distorting agricultural subsidies. It committed to these reforms dozens of times and reneged each time.

At the same time, the CCP has pursued a multidecade campaign of economic aggression, fulfilling General Secretary Xi Jinping’s directive to be the “gravediggers of capitalism.” It has employed extensive mercantilist and coercive policies to hollow out the American economy and displace American workers and has wielded extensive subsidies at unprecedented levels and market access restrictions to strengthen indigenous industries and decrease the PRC’s reliance on foreign partners. At the same time, it has sought access to U.S. technology, expertise, and capital. It has often done so illegally, stealing as much as $600 billion per year of intellectual property (IP) and technology—in what the former director of the National Security Agency called “the greatest transfer of wealth” in history.

This Select Committee Report presents findings from the Committee hearings and it outlines recommendations for a strategy for the economic and technological dimensions of the competition with China. Once again there are three pillars to the described strategy with the intent to “…reset the terms of economic and technological competition and shape a strategic environment that favors the national and economic security of the United States and its allies while upholding our values.” The pillars include:

First, the United States must reset the terms of our economic relationship with the PRC and recognize the serious risks of economically relying on a strategic competitor;
Second, the United States must immediately stem the flow of U.S. technology and capital that is fueling the PRC’s military modernization and human rights abuses.
Third, the United States must invest in technological leadership and build collective economic resilience in concert with its allies.”

Identifying just these three pillars fails to do justice to the rather ‘breathtaking’ list of recommendations – some 150 recommendations – that covers a multitude of issues from AI to rare earth production and manufacturing. As described in the Washington Post:

The report, released Tuesday by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, contains a broad legislative blueprint that — if followed — could ratchet up duties on Chinese goods, significantly curtail certain U.S. investments in China and further restrict or ban U.S. market access for companies including TikTok, as well as drone makers, chip manufacturers and telecommunications groups.”

Though the Select Committee Report describes something less than full throttled decoupling it is hard not to see the rising barriers to US-China trade and investment and the rising protectionism and the costs for the United States and its allies and partners from such a severe strategy as outlined in the Report.

Reading the Select Committee Report one could be forgiven if one presumed that the US-China competition was just a ‘hair’s breadth’ from a dramatic confrontation.

It leaves one unnerved and more than slightly depressed.

This was posted earlier at my Substack Post, Alan’s Newsletter – https://substack.com/@globalsummitryproject

Image Credit: Asia Freedom Institute

The New and Rather Difficult Course of Global Order Relations

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Alan Alexandroff

Current diplomatic activity, especially recent visits by senior U.S. officials to China underline the still difficult relations among the major powers. William Burns, the current CIA head, earlier this month described the more tense relations among the major states in international relations in the annual Ditchley lecture:

The US and its allies have to adapt to a world of permanently contested primacy. The post-Cold War dominance of the US drove the world more broadly towards democracy and free markets. …Those trends have now solidified into current reality with strategic competition with China and Russia’s war in Europe, one representing the challenge from a rising power, and the other showing that a declining power could pose a different type of threat. The post-Cold War era is definitively over and the US is no longer the only big kid on the block.

Here at Global Summitry Project (GSP), we pay ‘large’ attention to the policy and to the process in the Global Order. We are also ‘driven’ to comment on many of our colleagues, particularly those drawn to a ‘Realist’ perspective in international relations. Many colleagues are called on to target and explain their framing of international relations from a great power dynamic. As a result I, and many other colleagues, expend much analytic energy on all these Realist views that continue to focus on the ‘structure’ of major power relations and its consequences. These Realists dedicate much energy in describing the distribution of power among the major and lesser powers. There is a strong commitment to explaining international outcomes by targeting the international structure and assessing whether the Global Order sets up as a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar order. Note, for instance, the recent article inForeign Affairsby IR experts, Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, both of Dartmouth, that tackle in “The Myth of Multipolarity: American Power’s Staying Power”, the decline in power of the United States but the continuance in their view of U.S. unipolarity, of a sort, nonetheless. As they write:

Now, American power seems much diminished. In the intervening two decades, the United States has suffered costly, failed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, a devastating financial crisis, deepening political polarization, and, in Donald Trump, four years of a president with isolationist impulses. All the while, China continued its remarkable economic ascent and grew more assertive than ever. To many, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine sounded the death knell for U.S. primacy, a sign that the United States could no longer hold back the forces of revisionism and enforce the international order it had built. … Yes, the United States has become less dominant over the past 89 years, but it remains at the top of the global power hierarchy—safely above China and far, far above every other country. No longer can one pick any metric to see this reality, but it becomes clear when the right ones are used. And the persistence of unipolarity becomes even more evident when one considers that the world is still largely devoid of a force that shaped great-power politics in times of multipolarity and bipolarity, from the beginning of the modern state system through the Cold War: balancing. Other countries simply cannot match the power of the United States by joining alliances or building up their militaries. … What is at issue is only the nature of unipolarity—not its existence. (78)

But much of this expert focus is – from my perspective – misplaced, or at best, confusing if not conflating. While structure has its place in understanding global order relations – stability, conflict, global governance progress – or any other global order issue, the central concern of global order relations has to be – in my humble opinion, on the process and policy of the major actors – states, substates or non-state actors. It is not, in the end, notwithstanding the Realists, about unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity, the structural configuration of the Global Order. It is rather about unilateral, plurilateral or multilateral policy making. Moreover, it would be very helpful indeed for colleagues to stop confusing all of us by intermixing structural configurations – unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity with policy and process groupings – unilateral, bilateral, plurilateral, or possibly minilateral, and the ‘holy grail’, multilateral.

Now that we have that ‘out of the road’ for the moment at least, let’s focus on the difficult terrain that we see in international relations. It starts with the undermining of the rules, principles and norms that to one degree or another have laid a base for international conduct. The recent Council of Councils gathering by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) focused on this in their most recent gathering:

The lack of global solidarity is worrying. The ordering principle of territorial sovereignty could no longer be respected, and the international ambivalence over the invasion of Ukraine is a warning sign for an inability to act collectively to mitigate global challenges. One participant argued that upholding the sanctity of borders is in everyone’s interest, particularly smaller states. While several participants raised the West’s double standard for only caring about universal principles of sovereignty in Europe, others suggested that the West’s track record in previous conflicts was no excuse to react with ambivalence in this case. Several participants agreed that the only way to respond to the violation of these norms is to give enough support to Ukraine to ensure Russia loses. They argued the world should demonstrate that the invasion of sovereign territory and wars of aggression will not be tolerated.

We will return to the rules-based international order (RBIO), and what it is, or isn’t in the future. But for now let’s target the most difficult current bilateral relationship in the Global Order, the US-China policy efforts. Why such a focus. Well, from a global order point of view, I think my CWD co-chair, Colin Bradford, Senior non-resident Fellow at Brookings has expressed it well to another colleague:

The CWD is not just about China, but centrally about strengthening global governance to address systemic global challenges with China crucially involved and not excluded or diminished. A promising way [we hope is] to strengthen the G20 as a means of strengthening global governance for the future.

But on the US-China side recently there has seemingly been serious diplomatic activity. What has occurred is a series of visits by senior American officials. First there was the visit of Secretary of State Antony Blinken following his cancellation of an earlier trip to China due to ‘balloongate’. This was followed by Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen and most recently three days of intense discussion on climate matters by climate envoy John Kerry with his counterpart in China Xie Zhenhua. In each instance modest advances seem to have occurred. For instance Sha Hua in the WSJ identified John Kerry’s eagerness to move forward on the bilateral climate discussions:

Kerry said he and his Chinese interlocutors were already discussing the next two sets of meetings ahead of the upcoming climate summit in Dubai at the end of the year. Points of further discussion, he said, include new emission goals for 2035 and ways to reduce emissions of methane and other non-carbon dioxide emissions. China’s use of coal, Kerry said, remains a contentious issue.

Secretary Yellen also described forward movement reported in Al Jazeera:

Yellen said on Sunday the objective of her visit was to establish and deepen ties with China’s new economic team, reduce the risk of misunderstanding and pave the way for cooperation in areas such as climate change and debt distress. … No one visit will solve our challenges overnight. But I expect that this trip will help build a resilient and productive channel of communication,” she said, adding that she expected increased and more regular contact at the staff level.

But these forward steps, though modest, it seems, failed to assuage all. There was much discussion back in the U.S. that no agreements had been secured. In particular there was loud concern expressed that Kerry had failed to achieve a new US-China climate agreement and there was much made of the statement by Xi Jinping reported by Sha Hua and others that China would follow its own path to emission reductions:

In remarks to that gathering, Xi reiterated China’s goals to see its climate-warming emissions peak before 2030 and become carbon neutral before 2060. But he underscored that his government would proceed on its own timetable despite pressure from the Biden administration to accelerate the time frame.

Even more pointedly the earlier diplomatic efforts of Secretary of State Blinken came in for strong criticism including from Republican members of Congress. Notably, there was vocal criticism by Rep. MIke Gallagher, Chairman of the new Select Committee on China:

I’m concerned that we’re seeing the revival of diplomatic and economic engagement as the central part of our strategy with China, … The reason this is misguided in my opinion is that we’ve tried this for 20 years and it hasn’t worked.

Gallagher signaled this early in the Biden Administration effort to re-establish communication channels. Gallagher, in an opinion piece on June 14th for the WSJraised the spectre of what he called, ‘zombie engagement’:

This is the trap of zombie engagement. It almost always places the burden of “improving” relations on the U.S. rather than demanding that Beijing adjust its malign behavior. We give up the farm simply to get to the negotiating table. Once we’re there, we’re beholden to an entirely new process of concessions because of the pressure to present “deliverables.” While we build guardrails for ourselves, the Communist Party builds fast lanes to achieve its long-term objectives.

Gallagher, a significant Republican foreign policy figure in Washington, appears to have turned back the clock: current modest diplomatic effort has been harshly criticized as a part of the ‘failed’ engagement strategy of an earlier period.

So where are US-China relations? And how do we understand current global order relations? Tuning in to Washington would leave one highly concerned over the growing U.S.-China tensions. But outside the ‘Washington world’, a modest improvement in diplomatic relations may well best characterize the state of relations.

We will, naturally, continue to follow and report on diplomatic and security actions.

The following is a Substack Post from Alan’s Newsletter uploaded on July 21, 2023. Feel free to subscribe at: https://substack.com/@globalsummitryproject

Image Credit: CNN

A Veteran Chinese Diplomat – Cui Tiankai – speaks to the Media

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Researchers from the China-West Dialogue (CWD)

Cui Tiankai, China’s former ambassador to the U.S. made a public appearance on December 20, 2021, in Beijing. It was his first public comments since leaving his U.S. ambassadorial post and returning to China. Additionally, this image shows Ambassador Cui more recently sitting down with Ian Goodrum for a moderated interview on January 10, 2022 with the ChinaDaily.

During Cui Tiankai’s earlier December speech* he stressed that:

Since the purpose of the struggle [between the U.S. and China] is to protect the interests of the people and the overall strategy, then during the struggle, [we] should reduce the cost and influence to our interests and grand strategy as much as possible. In principle, [we] don’t fight unprepared wars; don’t fight wars that we are not confident with; don’t fight wars due to anger; don’t fight wars of attrition. The people worked very hard for their prosperity; we absolutely cannot have anyone take that away. Also, we absolutely cannot lose it due to our own carelessness, slack, and incompetence.

Moreover, Cui Tiankai claimed that:

The status-quo of U.S.-China relations will continue, the U.S. would not accept the rise of another major power of a different political system, ideology, culture, and even race.

In terms of America’s China policy, there is a strong factor of racism. Some people mention it, but some people don’t. The U.S. will inevitably do whatever it takes and everything it can to suppress, contain, separate, and surround to overwhelm China even without a bottom line. To this effect, we need to have a clear mind and full preparedness to confront a future unstable, difficult, and even roller-coaster-like future of U.S.-China relations.

These views are sobering to say the least.

Cui Tiankai remains a close ally to Xi Jinping, and his experience in the U.S. makes him perhaps the most competent person among China’s senior officials in understanding the U.S. from China’s perspective. Katsuji Nakazawa in an article for the Nikkei Asia explains that Cui Tiankai’s speech aimed to modestly warn Xi Jinping not to engage in unnecessary conflicts with the U.S. and divert China’s current ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” (WWD) and hardline foreign policy towards the U.S. However, Ambassador Cui’s remark could also have served as a wake-up call for top leaders to accept that China may not be in an optimal position to engage in further conflicts.

Continue reading →

Summit for Democracy – Who and Where is the Threat?

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Alan Alexandroff

So, the Summit for Democracy has come and gone. Much commentary preceded, accompanied, and then followed this December 9th and 10th gathering. Truth be told there is a continuing stream of observations still. Various countries openly applauded the Summit though unsurprisingly those uninvited pushed back starkly including in the case of China holding a conference of many of the uninvited.

The lingering question for the global order and its key participants remain: what does this Summit announced early on by then presidential candidate Joesph Biden tell us about current US foreign policy; what is Biden’s strategic policy framework particularly in relationship to China and Russia – the two most evident rivals and authoritarian states; and what is the conclusion drawn by close US allies and partners? What has been gained; what has been hindered and harmed?

The lack of clarity over the purpose of this Summit is fairly evident. This Administration has left seemingly a variety of presumed goals ‘on the table’. It appears in fact as though the Administration identified at least three goals: an anti-corruption initiative; a protection of human right and more broadly a protection of democracy; and an autocracy versus democracy foreign policy approach, presumably part of a US democracy promotion goal.

On the democracy protection front the Administration offered a number of policy initiatives, including funding: As President Biden identified these efforts in his opening remarks:

Working with our Congress, we’re planning to commit as much as $224 million[$424 million] in the next year to shore up transparent and accountable governance, including supporting media freedom, fighting international corruption, standing with democratic reformers, promoting technology that advances democracy, and defining and defending what a fair election is.

This initiative was part of the US effort to encourage all participants to set goals and report back in a follow up on these commitments. As the President expressed it:

… and to make concrete commitments of how — how to strengthen our own democracies and push back on authoritarianism, fight corruption, promote and protect human rights of people everywhere. To act. To act. This summit is a kick-off of a year in action for all of our countries to follow through on our commitments and to report back next year on the progress we’ve made.

Still the clarity surrounding the Summit was never very evident to most. Indeed there appears to be no agreement on the nature of the declared initiatives . Observers have taken the above to be democratic promotion and not protection. This multiplicity of goals and their accompanying confusion have enabled experts, officials and commentators to choose their own goal from the menu of options offered by the Administration. Ben Judah at the New Atlanticist described one view of the Summit: Continue reading →

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