Jacob Stokes and Ali Wyne on Whether America is Manufacturing an Enemy

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

January 8, 2020

ALI WYNE: If our anxieties about China's resurgence are harnessed in the service of national renewal, then by all means. What I worry about is if anxiety exists in a vacuum. If anxiety about China's resurgence isn't tethered to a broader strategic vector, and the United States doesn't have a sense of where it would like to go, then I think anxiety in that vacuum can impede vision.

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MARK HANNAH: This is Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Welcome to None of the Above. Back in October, I spoke with Isaac Stone Fish and Stephen Orlins, two China experts on how Washington should respond to the rise of China as a global power. As China's military, economic, and technological power rises amid growing tensions, many are starting to view our relationship to this rising superpower as something akin to a new Cold War. But is this accurate? Is it useful? Today, we're going to be talking about the concept of great power competition and how we can use the concept to get a better understanding of where history is taking us. Now, to dig into these issues, I'm joined by Jacob Stokes, a senior China analyst from the United States Institute of Peace, and Ali Wyne from the Rand Corporation. Ali is an international security analyst who writes extensively on great power competition and the rise of China. Jake and Ali, welcome.

HANNAH: Jake, let's start with you. You served in the Obama administration. You worked for Vice President Biden, and there was a lot of talk in the beginning about the pivot to Asia. What happened?

JACOB STOKES: Well, first of all, Mark, thank you for having me on the podcast. It's a real honor to be here. The logic behind the pivot to Asia was that the United States, since the post-9/11 era, had become overinvested in nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that ultimately the political, economic, and strategic future of global politics was really going to be decided in East Asia and in the Indo-Pacific region broadly.

Interlude featuring archival audio

STOKES: So it was both a geographic pivot away from the Middle East and a substantive pivot away from a militarized foreign policy toward something that still had strategic elements but was thinking as much about politics and economics and the way the governance structure was going to be going forward.

HANNAH: Over the last two decades, a lot of our resources and attention have been focused on the Middle East. What work has been done to refocus on East Asia that maybe we haven't been paying as much attention to?

STOKES: The first step in the rebalance or pivot was about freeing up American resources. You had to actually do some drawdown from Iraq and Afghanistan in order to free up those resources, both military forces and money and bureaucratic attention. You had a whole generation of people that were focused on Iraq and Afghanistan and counterinsurgency—so that was the first step. Within Asia, it was really about creating a framework not just for U.S.-China relations, but U.S. relations with Asia. That involves some shifting of additional military forces to the region, changing a little bit as the basing structure so that U.S. forces had more access in different places, including things like Australia, and then thinking about an economic leg of U.S. engagement in the region that was done through the Trans-Pacific Partnership—which ultimately failed because it wasn't passed on the Obama Administration, and President Trump, of course, pulled out of the deal.

HANNAH: Ali, can you define what great power competition means?

WYNE: Let me reiterate what an honor it is to be here, and especially speaking alongside Jake, whom I've known for many years and learned from for many years.

HANNAH: You guys are both such diplomats. Very polite.

WYNE: Just being honest. I think if I were able to define the term succinctly, I'd probably be able to retire today. But my sense is that great power competition, at least as I understand it, refers to the notion that—by way of a little bit of historical context, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, I think it's fair to say there was a certain triumphalist sentiment that suffused the U.S. commentariat, the U.S. policy making establishment. There was a sense that maybe history hadn’t ended, but perhaps it had slowed down a bit—that democracy and capitalism were, if not inexorably ascendant, then confidently so. There was a sense the borders had become less salient, that nationalism and populism were on the way and so on and so forth. And I think those assumptions largely obtained—or observers felt that they obtained—for some time, probably through to the global financial crisis. But then I think a big bellwether event was the invasion of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea in early 2014, and Chinese militarization of the South China Sea. It’s this notion that where we once thought or had hoped competitive geopolitics would give way to a more pacific geopolitics, that hypothesis didn't obtain. We see a more revanchist Russia and a more resurgent China. On the surface, it's referring to a more competitive geopolitical space. But the concern I have about the construct is—leaving aside great power and what criteria we use to assign the great power status—when I hear the word competition, I think of a means, of an instrument, of a tool. I'm engaged in competition, presumably to do something. And it seems to me there is a pretty marked gap between the prescriptive policy-making momentum great power competition has achieved and the analytical interrogation it's undergone. So the question is: what world order would the United States like to witness? What world order would the United States like to contribute to? What role would China play in that system?

HANNAH: What essentially are we competing for?

WYNE: What are we competing for, and what are we competing over? Also, as our own internal economic situation deteriorates in critical respects and as our fiscal room for maneuver declines, and we have to think hard about tradeoffs that we're willing to make in the world, great power competition—at least as it's presently conceptualized—would seem to be an invitation to essentially unbounded competition with China and Russia principally, but in every geographical sphere and every functional domain. Even for a country as preponderant as the United States, the United States at a certain point won't be able to elide the necessity for painful strategic choices any longer. So, I'm not rejecting the construct out of hand, and it does capture a very important aspect of contemporary geopolitics. What I would like to see is to tether that analytical abstraction to a more concrete set of policy recommendations saying, “Where would we like to go in the world?” and being selective about where you compete rather than competing everywhere, lest we hemorrhage our financial and strategic assets further.

HANNAH: Ali, you're at the Rand Corporation, right in the heart of D.C. think tank-ery. So from your perspective, in the thick of it, what do you see as the prevailing opinion about the threat China poses to the United States?

WYNE: I think both in the analytical community and in the policymaking community, there's a pretty pronounced gap between an abstract desire to get tougher, a growing persuasion that China's resurgence introduces more competitive elements into the U.S.-China relationship than cooperative ones. But the question is how do we translate that abstract desire to get tougher, to recalibrate our China policy into a durable, coherent strategy? We often hear that, and there have been many commentaries to this effect, even very recently, saying that contemporary tensions between the United States and China either amount to a new Cold War or are akin to a new Cold War. That analytical framework has some purchase and some virtues. But I think the more I scrutinize the analogy, the more it seems to me the differences between those episodes loom large. And the reason I bring up that analogy is I think the frequency with which policymakers and analysts invoke that analogy paradoxically betrays a certain unease about the uncharted waters we're entering into. So to talk a little bit about the analogy, the Soviet Union had pretensions to a universal ideology. It was actively fomenting violent upheaval across the world. It harbored no illusions that it would be able to coexist peacefully over the long term of the United States. When you look at China, one of the reasons it's been difficult for the United States to formulate a coherent strategy, despite this growing unease, is that China is more selectively revisionist than posing a frontal assault on the postwar order. Of course, despite all the talk about decoupling and de-linkages, we do still have very, very significant trade and technological entanglements. And there are areas, again, despite the prevailing atmosphere in both Washington and Beijing, in which the United States and China both can and must cooperate. And so we don't have a good analytical frame. We don't know where along the continuum between ally and adversary to classify China, so we call it a strategic competitor. But again, translating this abstract desire to get tougher, to be more competitive, into a strategy for dealing with China that doesn't isolate the United States, brings our allies on board, and quarantines competitive dynamics from cooperative ones as best as possible, is going to be a lot more difficult, I think.

HANNAH: Are our people, writing right now in the op-ed pages, confusing or inflating the threat because it fits some sort of analogy about a new Cold War or about great power competition as a theory, rather than what actually exists?

STOKES: I tend to think there is actually too much debate about whether it's a Cold War or not.

HANNAH: Then I guess we can't have that debate here.

STOKES: Yes. There's not a lot of clarity about what constitutes a Cold War. Is it exactly like the one we had with the Soviets? Then, of course it's not. There are all kinds of differences. If it is a reference to a political science category about two major powers or great powers, if you want to use that term, engaged in a full-spectrum or at least mostly full-spectrum competition, then yes, by that definition it is a new Cold War. I think some of the use of the term “great power competition” tries to get at that broader category without making undue comparisons to the Soviet experience. But I think what's more important is to get to the specifics of what we're dealing with when it comes to China.

HANNAH: And what do we do about it? Once we’ve named and admired the problem, how do we confront the problem or solve it?

STOKES: The debate is now about how to change Chinese behavior to the extent that you can. And to the extent that you can't, how do you mitigate the behavior that impacts you in a negative way and is in areas that are really important, to the extent possible? The engagement with China in the 1970s was about countering the Soviet Union, and then after the Cold War, we changed the thinking around it to welcoming China's rise, with the idea that if we don't try to contain and stop them, the character of their rise might be more positive and less confrontational. I think what we found over time, though, and certainly towards the end of the Obama administration, is there was a sense that especially under Xi Jinping, in many instances, China interpreted that as U.S. weakness and sort of an open door which, as they pushed on it, opened easily. And they could continue to push out strategically in the region. So you saw that in the South China Sea, and you see that in the East China Sea as well. You see that with military confrontations with India in certain cases, and then also a broader sense. Not that the Belt and Road is primarily an economic initiative, but there are strategic aspects to it. My sense is that Belt and Road is basically the front end of China trying its hand at being a great power and creating a China-led world order, first in Asia and then around the world.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Do you think China has an ambition to be a hegemon? I once heard their foreign minister say, and this obviously can't be taken at face value, “Oh, well, our version of communism disdains hegemony. We don't want to be a hegemon. That's you projecting your own values system on us. We want to make sure we're protecting our borders and have influence on our region, but we're not trying to ultimately take over the Western Hemisphere.”

STOKES: I think it's more about making the world safe for authoritarianism. The logic of that becomes that you want every incremental or every marginal addition to that safety if you have the power to get it. One of the primary drivers for the Chinese Communist Party is to protect their governance and their power, especially in China. And for them, one of the ways to do that is to hold back the tide of democracy at home. But doing it abroad helps them as well. So it's actually, in many cases, not about where the Soviets were going around trying to overthrow governments in many cases. What China's trying to do is help illiberal governments that are already in power stay in power and for that model to still be acceptable around the world because they see that is making the world safer for them.

HANNAH: Ali, I just want to ask, is there anything Jake said that you don't agree with?

WYNE: Just a couple of points I wanted to broach. The first: you were talking about the Chinese foreign ministry statement. And it's interesting to me that especially in an environment of rapidly growing strategic distrust between the United States and China, the irony is that the more strenuously China disclaims pretensions to regional and/or global hegemony, the more likely the signal received in the United States is that they indeed harbor such ambitions.

HANNAH: Saying, “I am not a crook,” gets people thinking, well, this guy might be a crook.

WYNE: And on Jake's point, I think it's important to note that, whether it is with the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or China's investments in Frontier Technologies, I do think those are the crux of the competition between the United States and China. There are of course, military dimensions that are growing and salient, certainly ideological dimensions that are becoming more salient, particularly with revelations about mass internment in Xinjiang and the repression of protesters in Hong Kong. I would still say on balance to the crux of the competition—I think as Jake was alluding to—it’s economic, technological. And that reality, if you accept that conclusion, poses a conundrum for galvanizing the American public and American policymakers. And again, going back to the case of the Soviet Union, the comparison with the Soviet Union in some ways understates the challenge and in some ways overstates it. How does it overstate the challenge? And then I'll get to I think the more important part about understating it. It overstates the challenge because, again, China is not a rampaging militarist intent on fomenting violent upheaval across the world. We're not doing duck and cover drills. We don't live under the specter of a nuclear Damocles. And in that sense, the threat is less existential. The problem is that from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War—and this is a point George Kennan makes. George Kennan gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1994 on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. And the council asked him, “How well do you think your doctrine of containment, your construct of containment, has held up? How relevant is it to contemporary challenges?” And he made a point which has proved to be quite prescient. He said that for the past sixty years—this is dating to the interwar period—the U.S. foreign policy establishments’ energies have been so absorbed with addressing real and/or perceived overriding existential challenges—Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—that once that ballast of an existential challenger disappears, the United States doesn't know how to orient itself strategically and designate strategic priorities.

HANNAH: So you're saying we need a villain, that our adversary gives us shape by opposition, and that we are a little uncomfortable having to define our own national identity without that. Then are we trying to make China an enemy so we can maintain that self-image? Is this essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy?

WYNE: Well, the existence of a pacing competitor, particularly one on China's economic scale—and this is a critical way in which China is different. The Soviet Union at its peak, depending on which estimates you use—I think in the latest estimate I saw, Neil Ferguson had an op-ed the other day in which he cites historical estimates that the Soviet Union at its peak had roughly forty-four percent of America's GDP. China's already well above that level, so it's a far more potent economic competitor. But to your question, the existence of an overarching pacing competitor has been an orienting principle for American foreign policy for the better part of three quarters of a century. The existence of that type of competitor can be strategically useful, but it depends on how the anxieties are harnessed. So if our anxieties—and our very legitimate anxieties about China's resurgence—are harnessed as an instrument or harnessed in the service of national renewal, and they prompt a renewed focus on how the United States can invest in its unique competitive strengths, then by all means. I think having China as an organizing principle could be prudent. What I worry about is if anxiety exists in a vacuum. If anxiety about China's resurgence isn't tethered to a broader strategic vector, and the United States doesn't have a sense of where it would like to go, then I think anxiety in that vacuum can impede vision. And just as a quick footnote—and I'll stop there—I think the individual, or I should say the scholar, who I find myself coming back to more and more on this question is the late Samuel Huntington. Whenever you say Samuel Huntington and China in the same sentence, people think you're talking about the “Clash of Civilizations” essay. But there's actually a far more important essay he wrote in Foreign Affairs as well about five years earlier. It was called “The U.S. – Decline or Renewal?” And at the time, in the late 1980s, there were concerns that America was relatively in decline vis-a-vis Europe and particularly Japan, and Professor Huntington said no, here are the reasons why I don't think we're in decline. But he says at the end that the declinists have played the single most important role in preventing American decline in the postwar era because they sound the alarm and compel the United States to take steps to shore up its innovation base at home, to shore up its alliance network. His closing exhortation to the American public and the American policymaking establishment was, “I think some of our concerns about these various competitors are overwrought, but if those analytically overwrought concerns compel you to invest in yourself, then you be my guest.” I think Huntington's analysis offers a useful frame for thinking about China. We have very legitimate anxieties, but we need to tether those anxieties to where we would like to go, rather than just making China the sole orienting principle for more defensive foreign policy.

STOKES: Can I just add to that? I think one of the most useful ways of thinking about it I've heard is that sometimes our China policy is confrontational towards China without being competitive at home. What we really need is a policy that's basically competitive here and confrontational in a tailored way, in a specific way toward specific ends. But the competitive aspect is the most important thing because it really has to do with getting our house in order, and that's going to be the way we influence public opinion and strategic opinion around the world. If other countries see the United States taking steps to ensure it can be a world leader in a way that's not overly militaristic, not hegemonic, but in a way where we are a powerful country, we should be helping to set the standards for how the world is governed, how the world is run.

HANNAH: What are American vital national interests in East Asia? What exactly are we trying to protect in East Asia by maintaining this dominant presence there?

STOKES: The United States has an interest in not living in a world where democracies can be squashed. And that's what we worry about in Taiwan. Through military, political, and economic force, is China able to absorb and squash Taiwanese democracy? We're worried about that in South Korea as well. There's a real interest in that, because if the region becomes more authoritarian, there's the possibility that over time, if you control all of the resources of East Asia, you become a very powerful power. Historically, U.S. grand strategy has been focused on not allowing a major power to control all of the resources of either East Asia or Europe, because then they have the ability to cross the ocean and threaten us.

HANNAH: A lot of times this great power competition can seem like posturing. The point of the competition gets lost. So we're in this competition, but to what end? What is our objective?

STOKES: I think one of the things that denotes the era of great power competition is the idea, as Ali said, that large states will go back to seizing territory by force. If you look at the long sweep of history, the basic rule was “might makes right.” If you're strong enough, and you can take more territory, go ahead and do it.

HANNAH: One empire would wipe out another empire, and that would occur successively throughout history.

STOKES: What the United States tried to build after World War Two was a world order that said, ultimately, that's very destructive to humanity, and to the extent possible, we're going to use our overwhelming power to enforce a system where that's not allowed. We were not totally successful during the Cold War, and in doing so there were obviously times where we overreached. But that was the basic idea—to try to change the way humanity worked. It's a big idea. After the Cold War ended, the only states that were left who seemed willing to do those were sort of tin pot dictators: Saddam Hussein in Iraq going into Kuwait, Gadhafi. The particular types of problems those rulers can pose to the United States because they are so small—it’s about nuclear proliferation or support for terrorism—are meaningful. I don't mean to make them smaller. But at the end of the day, they're not an existential threat to the United States. What great power competition is about is two big powers, or in this case, multiple big powers, and that if they chose to do so, they could actually pose an existential threat to the other. The things we're competing over—some of it is about a military balance, preventing those changes of territory by force. Some of it is about market access: who's more economically successful, but can they use that economic success to rig the rules of the economic system in their favor? That's some of what the technological game is for China, to set up standards so that if you're going to use the technologies of the future, you're going to use Chinese standards. And hopefully from China's perspective, you're going to use Chinese technology.

HANNAH: Within China, it seems like—or at least the headline is—China is using advanced technology to enable a surveillance state.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: The Trump administration has sounded the alarm about the ways in which that might maliciously spill over into our country, for instance, through the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which has done so much business now in the United States. Is that fear accurate or hyperbolic?

STOKES: I think they are right in raising concern about Huawei and Chinese control over 5G technologies in particular. They didn't come up with this. It's been a concern raised by the intelligence community going back to the early parts of the 2010s. So this is really about responding to a technical challenge. I think with 5G in particular, one of the important things to understand is that a lot of internet communications technology is just about that. It's just about communications. What 5G will have in the future as things in the physical world, including cars and also your appliances at home, get connected to the internet is an ability to turn off or move or change those things. If an adversary had control of, say, all of the cars or all of the nuclear power plants or electric plants, and we were in a conflict situation, and they wanted to even turn them off or make them malfunction, that's a very dangerous prospect. That's really where the concern stems from. The problem with this is that it's very hard to know because these types of technologies get software updates sent to them remotely that can have vulnerabilities in them.

HANNAH: That was my next question. Aren't our technological capabilities such that we can at least detect whether these on-off switches exist within the technology? It sounds like maybe not, if everything is now in the cloud or these updates and upgrades are happening remotely.

STOKES: My best understanding from the technology experts is that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to do that. And given the stakes, what level of confidence do you want to have that you're successful at scanning for that technology, versus just getting the technology from a partner you trust? Really, that's what it comes down to.

HANNAH: Is there any value in the bluster of Donald Trump's foreign policy? He's obviously been very abrasive toward nearly everyone—both to China and our allies. And when he publicly bashes China or for that matter, NATO, or generates controversy on some level, does that not raise attention or generate action in a way that could be useful, or is it simply counterproductive?

WYNE: Here I would distinguish between rhetoric and execution. I think the administration, to its credit, and in particular the President himself, by virtue of his rhetoric and his disposition, has surfaced many important debates. He has interrogated certain shibboleths that undergirded U.S. foreign policy. And we do need fresh looks at these ongoing debates. Where I find myself getting concerned is not with the interrogation of those assumptions, but the way in which the administration is executing its concerns. Take NATO, for example, and the concerns about freeriding, about inequitable burden-sharing, as you said. They date back decades, and they've existed for as long as NATO has existed. But particularly when you talk with friends, if you have substantive disagreements, whether in geopolitics or in our personal lives, you air them quietly and privately. And when the big ball arrives, you walk out hand-in-hand. You put on a smile for the rest of the audience so that you project unanimity. But when you telegraph your disagreements vocally, publicly, and you project and almost seem to embrace disunity and a lack of cohesion, that doesn't suggest to me it's a very prudent thinking-through of how to address these concerns. If you have outsiders, particularly those such as China in this instance, who are looking to see even the slightest daylight between the United States and its long standing friends and allies that they can exploit, when you do so in such a public way and vehement way, lacking nuance, I think you only are advancing the cause of your principal competitor.

HANNAH: Can you imagine a possible future where there are large chunks of countries and different regions that share some cultural attributes, share a few interests, and diverge on a few other interests, but ultimately—let's end on a question about peace—is there a possibility where peace is the goal, not advantage?

WYNE: I don't feel a nostalgia for the Cold War, let me put it that way. I think that for all the challenges East Asia confronts—if you look at the number of battle deaths, interstate war, proxy wars, et cetera—East Asia today is considerably more peaceful than it was twenty years ago, fifty years ago. That trend is something we should all applaud. There are present dangers, and there are dangers on the horizon. But in fact, largely in response to China's military modernization and strategic ambitions, we see a number of deepening regional arrangements in economics and security. So, I think there are efforts underway to promote a more equitable and sustainable security architecture there.

HANNAH: Ali Wyne, Jake Stokes, thank you guys both so much for your time today.

I'm Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation, and this has been another episode of None of the Above. If you like what you heard, please listen to more of our episodes over at noneoftheabovepodcast.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Shoot us an email at info@egfound.org or info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. We'd love to hear from you. Catch you next time.

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