------The Case for Putting Vital Interests First
By Graham Allison and Fred Hu（胡祖六）
（Foreign Affairs，2021-02-18）
Fifty years
ago this July, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced what would become his
signature foreign policy achievement: the opening to China. The following
February, in what the press called “the week that shook the world,” he flew to
Beijing to meet Mao Zedong, the leader of communist China. So began a half
century of U.S. engagement with Beijing. At the time, China was the most
important ally of the Soviet Union and the tip of the spear advancing communist
revolutions worldwide. But within the decade, U.S. President Jimmy Carter had
normalized the relationship, recognizing the regime in Beijing as China’s sole
legitimate government and abrogating the U.S. defense treaty with Taiwan. The
rest is history: China helped the United States win the Cold War, and the thaw
in U.S.-Chinese relations allowed Asia to emerge as the most economically
dynamic region in the world.
Prior to the
Trump administration, engagement with China was applauded as a rare bipartisan
success in U.S. foreign policy, with both Democrats and Republicans agreeing
that Washington could work with Beijing to advance American interests and
values. Today, as China’s government has become more repressive at home and
aggressive abroad, leaders in both parties have declared engagement a failure.
As U.S. President Joe Biden’s senior Asia adviser, Kurt Campbell, and the
president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, wrote in Foreign Affairs
in 2019, “The era of engagement with China has come to an unceremonious close.”
Yet it is
worth remembering what engaging China was all about. For most of the past half
century, efforts to improve ties with the country were not about transforming
it. Starting with Nixon, the motives were decidedly unsentimental: to balance
against the Soviet Union, to convince China to stop exporting revolution, and
to help lift millions of people out of poverty. It was only after the Cold War
that a desire to change China became a prominent objective of U.S. policy.
Today, as Biden and his team develop a new
strategy to meet the defining international challenge of this generation, many
are urging them to give up on engagement altogether. That would be a mistake.
Instead, the administration should heed the central lesson of five decades of
U.S. policy toward China: it works best when focusing realistically on
geopolitical objectives essential to protect American interests, and worst when
attempting to engage in political engineering to promote American values.
THE LOGIC OF ENGAGEMENT
The historical
record leaves no grounds for debate about what Nixon and his successors during
the rest of the Cold War—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—had in
mind when they sought to improve ties with China. For each of these four
presidents, the objective was first and foremost geopolitical. Nixon had an
urgent requirement: to create the conditions for the withdrawal of the more
than 100,000 U.S. troops bogged down in Vietnam. For all four presidents,
however, the overarching goal was to tip the balance of power against the
Soviet Union by widening the cracks between it and China. The opening
represented a step in “triangular diplomacy,” in the words of Henry Kissinger,
Nixon’s national security adviser. By widening the fissure between Moscow and
Beijing, each would be more willing to work with Washington.
Nixon, Ford,
Carter, and Reagan had their eye on this geopolitical prize; none of them were
seeking to change the Chinese Communist Party. Had any of these presidents been
offered a deal that promised victory in the Cold War but zero change in China’s
political system, they would have accepted it in a heartbeat. Reagan admitted
as much in 1984. After a six-day trip to China, he sought to reassure those who
questioned engagement with Beijing. “I’m an anti-Communist if you talk about
Communism for the United States,” he said, “. . . but I have never thought that
it was necessary for us to impose our form of government on some other
country.” The United States and China, he insisted, could “live at peace in the
world together.”
These
presidents also sought to bring China inside the tent of an emerging U.S.-led
world order. (As President Lyndon Johnson once said of a different rival,
“Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”) In
a meeting with his staff, Nixon laid out the logic of the opening to the
Chinese. “The reason why it has to be done . . . is that they are one-fourth of
the world’s population,” he said. “They’re not a military power now but 25
years from now they will be decisive. For us not to do now what we can do to end
this isolation would leave things very dangerous.” Or as Kissinger later
summarized, “Nixon . . . urged a relaxation of tensions on the basis of
geopolitical considerations in order to return China to the international
system.”
Carter—along with his national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski—continued the effort to integrate China into this
order. Despite his signal commitment to human rights, Carter explained in 1978,
the world “must accommodate diversity—social, political, and ideological.”
Brzezinski was more explicit in a briefing the next year for a group of
business leaders. “We recognize that [the United States and China] have
different ideologies and economic and political systems,” he said. He added:
“We harbor neither the hope nor the desire that through extensive contacts with
China we can remake that nation into the American image.”
Beyond
security objectives, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan wanted to promote
development in China, which had the greatest number of poor and hungry people
in the world. Like their predecessors, these presidents believed that the
United States had an obligation to help lift others out of poverty. This
conviction was a major factor in Washington’s choices after World War II to
reconstruct Europe, create the World Bank, and establish what became the U.S.
Agency for International Development.
WHAT
WORKED
Judged by its
own standards, U.S. engagement with China succeeded. Its chief aim, widening
the fissure between Moscow and Beijing, bore fruit quickly. In May 1972, Nixon
flew to Moscow for a summit with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, where the two
leaders signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Strategic Arms
Limitation Treaty, heralding a period of restrained competition known as
détente. Perhaps even more valuable to the United States was the way in which
the opening to China undermined communism’s claim to ideological solidarity;
after all, Mao had established a relationship with his country’s archenemy
without consulting its senior partner in the communist bloc.
The opening
also prompted a broader shift in Chinese foreign policy toward greater
geopolitical realism. In an early sign of its waning revolutionary ardor,
Beijing reduced its support for North Vietnamese communists and nudged them
toward the peace deal they signed with the United States in 1973. When the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, China became a vital ally in the Reagan
administration’s covert war to expel Soviet forces, supplying money and arms to
Afghan opposition groups. And as tensions with the Soviet Union intensified in
1980, China even hosted U.S. radar and surveillance systems on its territory.
What about the
second goal of engagement, to bring China into the world order? That, too, was
a success. Today, when it has become fashionable to demonize China, it is hard
to appreciate how far the country has come from the revolutionary firebrand it
once was. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was supporting wars of liberation around
the world, helping Pakistan and North Korea design nuclear weapons, opposing UN
peacekeeping operations, and isolating itself from the global economy. Today,
it has become an active member of all the major international organizations. It
contributes the most troops, and the second-most amount of money, to UN
peacekeeping efforts. In the UN Security Council, it rarely exercises its veto
and usually votes with the United States.
Perhaps the
most telling example of China’s successful integration into the global system
occurred during the 2008 financial crisis, when the United States urgently
sought to rally global support to prevent another Great Depression. Even though
China was the least affected of the major economies, and even though the crisis
had begun in the United States, Beijing swiftly responded to Washington’s call.
China was the first country to introduce an economic stimulus, and at $2
trillion, its package was the largest in the world. In the midst of extreme
market gyrations, when Moscow sought to persuade Beijing to dump its massive
holdings of U.S. Treasury bills, China flatly rejected that advice.
As for the
third goal of engagement, to lift the Chinese out of poverty, the result has
been nothing short of miraculous. After Nixon’s opening, China experienced
decades of economic growth, which resulted in the most dramatic reduction in poverty
of any large nation in history. The country achieved this by abandoning
communist economics and embracing Western free-market principles. In 1978, nine
out of every ten Chinese were living below the World Bank’s “extreme poverty”
line of $2 a day. Today, more than nine out of ten are above that line.
The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which critics of China frequently cite, contains
two sets of rights: one economic and social, the other political. Like the U.S.
Constitution, the declaration affirms the right to freedom of expression and a
representative government. But it also declares, “Everyone has the right to a
standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his
family.” Although China’s record on political rights has been abysmal, when it
comes to expanding citizens’ economic rights, it has succeeded beyond anyone’s
wildest dreams.
CHANGING
CHINA
From the time
of Nixon’s opening to the end of the Cold War, U.S. policy toward China pursued
these specific, practical goals—and largely succeeded. But after the collapse
of the Soviet Union, caught up in the euphoria of victory, many imagined that
the world had reached “the end of history.” U.S. policymakers foresaw a
“unipolar era,” in which liberal democracy and market capitalism would be
triumphant and peace would reign.
These ideas
informed President George H. W. Bush’s and President Bill Clinton’s expectation
that integrating China into the international trade system would lay the
foundations of a new liberal world order. As Clinton explained his rationale
for inviting China to join the World Trade Organization in 2000, “China is not
simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of
democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom.” Clinton was confident of
the link between economic and political liberalization. “The more China
liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its
people—their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise,”
he said. “And when individuals have the power . . . to realize their dreams,
they will demand a greater say.”
President
George W. Bush and President Barack Obama carried this strategic rationale into
the twenty-first century. Like Clinton, they both believed that economic
engagement with China would promote the aspirations of the Chinese people and
eventually force the Chinese leadership to open up the political system. As a
high-ranking Bush administration official told Foreign Policy, “Their policies
will align with ours—not over months, but it’s going to happen.” Confident in
this arc of history, Obama made the same forecast during a 2009 trip to China,
saying, “When you start seeing economic freedom like that, then political
freedom starts . . . gearing up.”
As is now
obvious, these expectations were illusions. China was never going to become a
democracy and follow in the footsteps of Japan and Germany, taking its assigned
place in a U.S.-led international order. What ensured failure was a form of
blindness that accompanied a vision: the United States became mesmerized by an
ideal end without accepting that it was unachievable.
LESSONS
FROM HISTORY
Looking at
this record of dealing with China, the Biden administration should find four
lessons instructive. First, when pursuing geopolitical objectives, engagement
has succeeded more often than failed. Washington was able to create a viable
exit from Vietnam and, more important, tilt the balance of power against the
Soviet Union. By persuading Beijing that it could achieve more of what it
wanted by joining the U.S.-led international order, Washington slowed the spread
of nuclear weapons, countered global terrorism, promoted global economic
growth, and avoided another Great Depression. The secret to success was that
the United States shaped objective conditions to the point where Chinese
leaders could be persuaded that it was in their interest to do what Washington
wanted. Facing a much more powerful China, Biden and his team will have a far
harder time following this playbook. Still, they will discover that only by
creating the right alliances and alignments with other countries can the United
States hope to influence China’s behavior.
Second, those
who advocate regime change in China to promote democracy are as misguided as those
who pushed wars in the Middle East in pursuit of the same objective. When he
was secretary of state, Mike Pompeo proposed making that goal the center of
U.S. policy toward China and tried to enlist other nations in the cause. That
was a sure formula for failure. Americans should never waver in their
conviction, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that all humans have
“unalienable rights”—and that these apply to the 1.4 billion people ruled by
Beijing, including 13.5 million Uyghurs and 6.5 million Tibetans. But
addressing the immediate threats to U.S. survival requires working with the
China that exists, not dreaming of the China one might wish for. Preventing
military crises, combating climate change, containing future pandemics,
preventing nuclear proliferation, fighting terrorism, managing financial
crises—none of this can be done without accepting the reality that the
autocratic regime in Beijing runs China now and will continue to do so for the
foreseeable future.
The third
lesson for Biden is that policies of openness and integration have been engines
of economic growth for the world, and they will remain essential for a
successful future. While U.S. President Donald Trump was busy turning the
United States inward, Chinese President Xi Jinping stepped up to become the
driver of globalization. Most of the world enthusiastically welcomes the United
States’ return. But Washington is coming back wielding a smaller share of
global GDP and facing a challenger whose economy is now, by some metrics, as
large as its own. Thus, the United States will struggle to establish level
playing fields on which global competition can deliver win-win results and
ensure that it gets its share of the winnings. Nonetheless, this is what has to
be done—and no one said statecraft was easy.
Finally, as happens often in history, success
in addressing the grand challenge of one generation creates a new, more
formidable challenge for those who follow. Engagement with China allowed the
United States to prevail in the cardinal struggle of the twentieth century. It
also left Washington in a long-term rivalry with what the Singaporean statesman
Lee Kuan Yew rightly called “the biggest player in the history of the world.”
In the broad sweep of history, this is the United States’ fate: to confront
successively graver challenges, from the Revolutionary War to the Cold War. As
Washington contends with the current contest with Beijing, it is worth
recalling words Kissinger said in a 1976 speech about dealing with the last
great challenge: “We know what we must do. We also know what we can do. It only
remains to do it.”
