ANDY WONG/AP PHOTO
Chinese president Xi Jinping bears some responsibility for the deterioration in the U.S.-China relationship, but so does Washington.
This article appears in the February 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace
By Van Jackson
Yale University Press
In the last half-decade or so, the United States’ political and national-security establishment has re-embraced great-power competition as the organizing principle of American foreign policy at an alarming rate. After 30 years of relative calm between major nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Democrats and Republicans alike have concluded that rivalry with China will be the defining challenge of the next generation of American national security. They justify that conclusion by arguing that rivalry is inevitable and that countering Chinese influence in Asia is crucial to maintaining regional stability.
“China has mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to
the region and provide China a freer hand there,” reads the Trump administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. “China presents its ambitions as mutually beneficial, but Chinese dominance risks diminishing the sovereignty of many states in the Indo-Pacific. States throughout the region are calling for sustained U.S. leadership in a collective response that upholds a regional order respectful of sovereignty and independence.” The NSS, along with the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), codified growing bipartisan concerns about China’s influence, concerns that had percolated in think tanks and the bureaucracy during the Obama years and become politically viable under Trump. The conventional wisdom around this question went something like this: The post–Cold War consensus that welcoming China into the global economy would lead to political liberalization was deeply misguided, and China was now using the advantages created by years of skirting international norms to threaten stable U.S. leadership in Asia and around the world.
In his new book, Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, Van Jackson, a former Defense Department staffer during the Obama administration and current professor at Victoria University of Wellington, disputes both the post–Cold War narrative and the new hawks. Jackson makes the case that while détente with China may not have always served to accomplish American policy goals, Washington’s relationship with Beijing was more often a stabilizing force in the Asia-Pacific than a destabilizing one, and that outside of détente with China, U.S. policy was not as foundational to the Asian peace as American narratives may suggest. “U.S. détente with China—the flawed but long-lasting cooperative relationship between Asia’s two largest powers,” Jackson asserts in the book’s conclusion, “has been a vastly underappreciated source of regional stability since the 1970s.”
Pacific Power Paradox sets out to answer crucial questions about America’s role in the world. These include: “How much has America really mattered, for good or ill?” “To what extent has Washington been not just a source of, but also a threat to, regional security?” and “What might the United States do to shore up an Asian peace that is today under tremendous strain?” Jackson’s account is a deeply researched analysis of the seven presidents (not counting the incumbent) who have overseen a more than 40-year-long stretch in which “no interstate wars have been initiated in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Pacific.” Each chapter of the book focuses on one of these presidents’ terms in office, and each is split into several sections: U.S. forward military presence in Asia, the White House’s handling of alliances in the region, economic interdependence, regionalism, democracy, and good governance. Jackson details American relations with countries throughout the region, notably Japan, North and South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the other countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But for the purposes of this review, the most important theme is the nature of the great-power détente with China.
Trump’s decision to loudly and insultingly embrace rivalry with China will likely have long-term effects for American foreign policy.
Maintaining an increasingly fragile peace in Asia will require reconciling two competing beliefs: one, that U.S. competition, if not outright rivalry, with China is an inescapable fact of American statecraft, and two, that the ability to keep that rivalry within certain limits, and avoid crossing certain lines, has been crucial to achieving peace in Asia in the first place.
Jackson points to several times over the last 40 years in which American presidents faced a fork in the road vis-à-vis the relationship with China, and each time Washington opted against antagonizing Beijing.
Following Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China in the early 1970s, and some hiccups in the relationship during Gerald Ford’s presidency, Jimmy Carter’s administration sought to strengthen ties because a “genuinely cooperative relationship between Washington and Beijing would greatly enhance the stability of the Far East,” as then–National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued.
Internal tensions were often starker during Republican administrations, due to disagreements stemming from the party’s varying levels of commitment to anti-communism, foreign-policy realism, and a corporatist influence from U.S. businesses hungry for Chinese markets. Despite some debate within the administration, Jackson states that in the Reagan years, the United States ultimately fulfilled Assistant Secretary of State John Holdridge’s statement that “our long-term objective is to enhance greatly the stability of the region by strengthening U.S.-China ties.”
In June 1989, shortly after George H.W. Bush ascended to the presidency, he faced a tough choice during the Tiananmen Square massacre “between putting the weight of U.S. influence behind Chinese society or behind the CCP leaders with whom Bush had cultivated close ties over the years,” writes Jackson. “Bush chose the latter.” It was one of many examples of the United States rating economic or political priorities over human rights or democracy in Asia.
Jackson makes an interesting choice to cover Presidents Clinton and Bush II in just one chapter, illustrating some of the continuations in policy between the two men who presided over the so-called unipolar moment. Clinton is often held responsible for accelerating China’s incorporation into the global economy because of his corporatist approach to economics and his push to grant China normal trade relations status and permit them to be a full member of the WTO. Jackson agrees with that assessment. “[E]ngagement and integration not only matched the liberal rhetoric of Clinton’s national security policy,” he writes. “They were far better for the U.S. economy’s growth, which trumped just about every other foreign policy consideration.”
Many might disagree with Jackson’s economic analysis, but his argument that engagement with China was beneficial to the Asian peace is more convincing. Great powers will always compete for international influence. But the United States and China have thus far managed to avoid direct confrontation, which has held Chinese foreign-policy adventures and other potentially combustible regional dynamics in check. For instance, that relationship has been key to ending the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia and keeping a lid on the erratic North Korean regime.
AP PHOTO
Since Nixon, American presidents have faced a fork in the road in the relationship with China; each time, they opted against antagonism.
For several decades starting in the ’70s, détente with China helped protect Taiwan’s independence and channel Chinese ambition in peaceful directions. As Jackson explains, “The détente that followed restrained Chinese military adventurism after 1972 and moderated China’s approach to Taiwan starting in 1979 … Détente also gave rise to foreign policy ideas in China centering on peaceful development. It incidentally accelerated and deepened economic interdependence, both within the region and between the great powers.”
Alas, détente started to crack in the mid-2000s. Initially, Bush made hawkish sounds on China, but spurred by 9/11 and a shift away from Asia and toward the Greater Middle East, he sought to turn China into a “‘responsible stakeholder’ in what policy makers referred to with increasing frequency as the ‘liberal international order.’” But at the same time, there was a sense that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had only served as a mere temporary obstacle in an inevitable rivalry between the United States and China. And simultaneously, Beijing was prepared to take full advantage of an American empire that had been unquestionably weakened by two failed wars.
During the Obama years, think tanks and the bureaucracy began to adopt the rhetoric of great-power competition with China. Jackson contends that the Obama White House strained to hold together détente with China even as conventional wisdom in the nation’s capital pulled in the opposite direction, at one point attempting “to stop the Pentagon from even using the phrase ‘great power competition.’” But such language became common in Washington, and China interpreted such rhetoric as a sign that competition was indeed unstoppable. Obama left office with détente—and peace in Asia—hanging by a thread.
While Jackson argues initially that President Trump displayed a “shocking amount of continuity … in U.S. foreign policy, especially toward East Asia and the Pacific,” he later concludes that his administration displayed a “transgressive rejection of any semblance of détente with China in favor of unabashed rivalry,” which was a real change. His administration’s decision to loudly and insultingly embrace rivalry with China will likely have long-term effects for American foreign policy. After decades of teetering on the edge of open rivalry—and barely maintaining peace in Asia, occasionally despite their best efforts—both of those realities may be over in the near future.
After decades of responding slowly to changes in China, largely ignoring their human rights abuses and increasingly assertive foreign policy, and allowing their mercantilism to have a terrible effect on our national economic well-being, it is understandable that policymakers in the U.S. would come to believe change is warranted. But Jackson offers words of caution for a slugging match with China—for American domestic politics, but also for the future of Asia’s vulnerable peace, including the ethnonationalism and “clash of civilizations” rhetoric that is driving extreme politics around the world. Beyond that, “you risk not only arms races, proxy conflicts, and real wars, but also negative externalities like hate crimes, McCarthyism, circumscribed civil liberties, and militarism generally,” writes Jackson.
None of this is to suggest that competition with China is wholly unmerited. Beijing and Xi Jinping bear their own share of responsibility for the deterioration in relations between the two powers. But Washington embraced great-power competition as a defining lens of national security exceptionally quickly, in part because it appeals to so many people from varying parts of the political spectrum. One only has to look at Vladimir Putin’s Russia to see the risk of a dictatorship that feels it has no reason to maintain its connections to the West. China and America will likely be the two global powers for the rest of this century; it would be wise to learn to live with each other.
