How the US should engage China and Russia -World stability depends on
a strong America that is economically vibrant and technologically superior
Russia, China and America never will be friends; at best they will be
peaceful competitors rather than warlike adversaries. To maintain the former
rather than the latter circumstance is the proper goal of American policy.
It would
be dangerous for America to pursue the Wilsonian (and neo-conservative) vision
of internal transformation of Russia and China, with the goal of turning them
into American-style democracies.
The
second-most dangerous thing America could do would be to abandon the world
stage. World stability depends on a strong America, that is, an America that is
economically vibrant and technologically superior.
It is
whimsical to speak of a Russian-Chinese-American “alliance” in the sense of the
European “Holy Alliance” after the Napoleonic Wars. America, Russia and China
never will be allies. China and Russia can be “equal partners” with America,
provided that America is more equal than China and Russia. By this I mean that
China and Russia are powers that have legitimate interests that deserve
consideration, so long as America retains a decisive edge in military
technology – something that cannot now be taken for granted.
Relatively
speaking, America’s big stick has shrunk noticeably, and there is a temptation
to speak loudly by way of compensation.
Misconceptions
about Russia and China abound and could have tragic consequences. Democracy is
integral to American culture, which (as I have tried to show) flows from our
self-conception as an almost-chosen people. Individualism is stamped indelibly
on our national character, and our national avatar is the lone pilgrim.
Russia
and China are not like us, and Russians and Chinese do not see the world the
way we do. Russia and China are not nation-states but multi-ethnic empires. In
that respect they bear a certain resemblance to the United States, which is a
multi-ethnic republic rather than a nation-state in the usual sense of the
word.
To
construct a state from different ethnicities – a one, out of many -requires a
culture with some universalizing character. The peculiar ways in which Russia
and China were unified is the key to their character.
Like
America, they evince a peculiar balance of resilience and fragility. Of the
three America is by far the most successful. There is no guarantee that this
will continue, to be sure; as in the past, America will require monumental
efforts to remain the most successful among the great powers.
Consider
first the parallels in geography. Russia expanded from a relative small core of
territory in the 16th century to the world’s largest sovereign nation during
the 18th century.
Its
imperial expansion always has been both its strength and weakness. There never
have been enough Russians in Russia: Tatars, Turks, and other Muslims have been
hard to assimilate since the 18th century expansion that brought them into the
Russian empire.
Chinese
culture is 5,000 years old, but the seed-crystal of modern China, the Zhou
Dynasty of 1,000 BCE, occupied only the Wei and Yellow River plains.
The
Chinese empire gradually expanded by assimilating its neighbors, often by
force: the unruly barbarians on the imperial border who did not learn the
Chinese characters, adopt Chinese dress, and become civilized were exterminated
or driven westwards. That may explain the fall of Rome; the Huns and other
tribes were dislodged.
The
similarities to America’s expansion during the 18th and 19th century are
inescapable. Most of the expansion, of course, favored slavery.
“Manifest
Destiny” was a slogan of the slave party, and the Mexican War was supported by
the slavery interest and opposed by anti-slavery Whigs like the young Abraham
Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. In that respect America’s 19th-century expansion
was imperial and unstable until the Civil War eliminated slavery and uprooted
the source of divisiveness.
Russia
and China, like the United States, absorbed a vast territory and ruled it on
the strength of a unifying culture. The US, China and Russia are inherently
fragile but also have surprising resilience.
European
and American elites spoke of a collapse of the American empire after the fall
of Vietnam, and the Western intelligentsia at the end of the 1970s expected
Russia to win the Cold War. Henry Kissinger certainly did; so did then German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
Few
expected the United States to come roaring back under Ronald Reagan, win the
Cold War, and emerge as the world’s only “hyperpower” during the 1990s.
After the
Century of Humiliation bounded by the 1st Opium War of 1848 and the Communist
Revolution of 1947, few expected China to become the world’s largest economy
(which it either is or will be soon).
After
losing more than a fifth of its population in the Second World War, Russia
nearly won the ensuing Cold War, and after the collapse of Communism and
predictions of a Russian “implosion,” Russia has returned as a world power.
Here the
similarity ends.
That
said, there are radical differences among the three cultures. America is
apocalyptic; Russia is messianic; and China is pragmatic. By apocalyptic, I
mean that Americans define themselves with respect to an unattainable point in
the future, the goal of a Christian pilgrimage whose endpoint always hovers
beyond the horizon. In a recent essay for Tablet Magazine I tried to identify
what was unique in American culture:
America’s
journey is the Christian pilgrimage that cannot end with an earthly goal. Thus,
Huckleberry Finn is an exemplar of Christian literature as much as is The
Pilgrim’s Progress. The journey is motivated not by the destination but by the
restlessness of the pilgrim. There is only one possible conclusion to Huck’s
adventure: His journey must resume, as he announces in the book’s last line:
“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because
Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I
been there before.”
America
is apocalyptic in the original sense of the Greek word: resolution lies beyond
the visible horizon. The central trope in American culture is the pilgrimage to
the Promised Land, and its character type is the pilgrim on a journey towards
redemption.
Our
culture is Protestant, individualistic and antinomian. All our protagonists
have problems with authority. We celebrate the cowboy who rides off into the
sunset, the private detective who walks alone, the Western sheriff who won’t
quit his job at high noon – the individual pilgrim on a journey to salvation.
Our
national archetype is the pilgrim. Russia’s national archetype by sharp
contrast is the penitent: the Russian national drama is Pushkin’s Boris Godunov
(the pretender to the throne who murders the true czarevich), and its national
novelist is Dostoevsky.
Western
analysts tend to portray a Russia in crisis. They are correct, but this
characterization conveys no information of importance, for Russia has been in
perpetual crisis since its founding. Russia has always been on the verge of
crisis. It has always relied on tax revenues from its political uncertain west
in order to finance profitable adventures in the east.
As Eugene
Rosenstock-Huessy wrote in Out of Revolution, Russia and America are continents
which have had to be organized during the last 150 years:
But in
Russia the problem was somehow first solved from the “frontier” toward the
Baltic coast. It was as if Texas or Utah and Nevada had tried to annex the
13 colonies. In conquering Finland, in dividing Poland, in vanquishing the
free people of the Caucasus, in getting the Baltic provinces from Sweden, the
Russians inherited an old investment in political and social tradition.
They
found a surplus for taxation more easily in the Teutonic order, the German
harbors and universities, the Polish craftsmen and peasants, and the Jewish
traders. For Russia, the conquest of new western districts spared organizing
the purely Russian regions.
Historic purpose
Rosenstock-Huessey
explains that the Russian moujik “was no stable freeholder of the Western type
but much more a nomad, a pedlar, a craftsman and a soldier. His capacity for
expansion was tremendous.”
In 1581
Asiatic Russia was opened. Russian expansion, extending even in the
18th century as far as the Russian River in Northern California, was by no
means czaristic only. The “moujik”, the Russian peasant, because he is not a
“Bauer” or a “farmer”, or a “laborer”, but a “moujik”, wanders and stays, ready
to migrate again eventually year after year.
Russia
combined a sense of its historic purpose as the successor to the fallen
Byzantium and a messianic sense of a civilizing mission as it flung its
political power across the Eurasian continent. The whole enterprise was
incompetently organized and subject to continuous failures, but it had a
grandiosity that evoked a sense of imperial pride among Russians as well as an
astonishing capacity to absorb pain.
Russia
defeated Napoleon and Hitler. Its scientists beat the United States into space
in the 1950s after reproducing German missile technology on their own. The US won
the space race only because the German team led by Werner von Braun was playing
for us. Again, Russia nearly defeated America in the Cold War.
The
colonization of the Western border territories also provided the Russian Empire
with many of its greatest leaders. Rather than revolt against czarist
expansion, many of the most ambitious men of the Baltic, Polish, and Caucasian
colonies became the most fervent exponents of empire. Dostoevsky himself
wrote:
I suppose
that one of my Lithuanian ancestors, having emigrated to the Ukraine, changed
his religion in order to marry an Orthodox Ukrainian, and became a priest. When
his wife died he probably entered a monastery, and later, rose to be an
archbishop. This would explain how the Archbishop Stepan may have founded our
Orthodox family, in spite of his being a monk. It is somewhat surprising to see
the Dostoevsky, who had been warriors in Lithuania, become priests in Ukraine.
But this is quite in accordance with Lithuanian custom. I may quote the learned
Lithuanian St. Vidunas in this connection: “Formerly many well-to-do
Lithuanians had but one desire: to see one or more of their sons enter upon an
ecclesiastical career.”
To be
Russian is to feel part of a great, holy and collective enterprise, whose
purposes are so compelling that great crimes may be committed in its
furtherance. The Russian Empire was a project as mad as it was grandiose. It
required leaders with ambitions larger than life and utter disregard for human
suffering to manage its lurch from crisis to crisis.
We do not
hear of “Ivan the Reasonable.” The archetype of the Russian leader is the
bloody-handed tyrant who nonetheless is capable of a degree of Christian
repentance, as in Pushkin. On the Russian scale of tyrannical bloodthirstiness,
Vladimir Putin might rate a “2” if Ivan the Terrible and Stalin rate a “10.”
Individualism
is not a Russian character trait. To require that Russians emulate America in
matters of democracy and human rights really is a Protestant attempt to
evangelize the Orthodox. Anglophone Protestantism is individualistic in its
most fundamental premise, that the source of revelation is the communication of
God’s word directly from Scripture to the individual. Orthodoxy has no such
concept; in its embrace the individual fits into the collective as closely as Russia’s
matryoshka dolls.
The
expression “paranoid Russian” is a pleonasm. To be Russian is already to be
paranoid, because the imperial project always is at risk of going to pieces,
and the losers in the distribution of imperial power always are looking to
avenge themselves.
The
Russians are chess players. Chess is the ultimate paranoid’s game, and it is
not surprising that several of history’s greatest chess players (e.g., Alekhine
and Fisher) were paranoids in the clinical sense. Paranoia is the inability to
distinguish the random from the intentional. On the chessboard, though, nothing
is random. Every move has a purpose. Unfortunately, Americans play the
chessboard as if it were Monopoly. We have no overarching strategic objective
and simply seek to accumulate local advantages.
For that
reason it seemed quite reasonable to the George W. Bush administration in
February 2004 to support the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine; after all, don’t
we Americans want to support democracy everywhere? Ukraine’s oligarchs played
musical chairs, and Vladimir Putin concluded that America was out to dismember
Russia.
Chinese
identity is difficult for Westerners to grasp. Until quite recently few Chinese
spoke the Imperial court dialect, or Mandarin. Most spoke one of the nearly 60
dialects still spoken in China. But all wrote with the same
characters. China’s imperial expansion allowed the peoples incorporated
into the empire to retain their own spoken language, but required all to write
with the characters.
Chinese
whose languages are as different as Welsh and Hungarian write the same
characters but cannot understand a word of each others’ speech, although
Mandarin is now understood by most Chinese thanks to a centralized education
system and electronic media.
Literacy
was the foundation of the Chinese empire. At the turn of the Common Era (CE),
China had achieved literacy rates of 30% while Europe’s was close to zero; the
only people in the world with a higher literacy rate were the Jews.
Chinese
children are given a brush and a bottle of ink at age six, and informed that
their childhood is over: They will spend three or four hours a day during the
next five years of their lives simply learning to read and right. With the
exception of the Jews, China has produced the most educationally-intensive
effort at socialization of any people in history.
No
Chinese mother sang a lullaby to her child with the Imperial characters, which
are an abstract representation of thought without sound. For most of Chinese
history, lullabies and love songs were sung in the dozens of dialects that
Chinese speak at home.
Imperial coercion
Since the
Communist Revolution and the growth of electronic media, Mandarin, once merely
the official court dialect, has become intelligible to a majority of Chinese.
But most Chinese still speak a regional variant of Mandarin, and many only
speak dialect, particularly in the South.
Chinese
culture is in some respects an instrument of imperial coercion. Chinese have
two identities, one for public life in the Empire, and one in their families.
The first is conducted in the written ideograms, the second mostly in dialect.
At one
level China is the most unified culture in the world, requiring years of effort
on the part of children to acquire the written culture. At another level China
never was unified. It is the perfect Ciceronian state, held together by common
interest, namely the need for domestic peace and order.
St.
Augustine admonished Cicero that common interest did not suffice: what gives
cohesion to states is a common love. That is what China lacks. Its families,
tribes, clans and peoples tolerate the Emperor who sits in Beijing, but they do
not love him, or each other. He is necessary to prevent chaos (and the Chinese
have a vivid memory of what chaos in the form of warlordism is like), but they
do not love him.
As
Italian sinologist Francesco Sisci observes, China developed no sense of
“rights and obligations” in the sense of Roman and later Western usage. One
does not do one’s duty to the state in the expectation that rights will be
conferred in return. Instead, one obey’s the Emperor’s whim and hopes to be rewarded.
On the
surface, the glue that binds Chinese society together is exceptionally strong,
with a deep and ancient culture that requires enormous effort to acquire during
childhood. But China always remains subject to centrifugal forces. The Emperor
in the Forbidden City must always fear the rebel province that tears the fabric
of the Empire. China fears foreign intervention that might encourage rebel
provinces.
That may
seem paranoid, but China only recently endured the “Century of Humiliation”
(from the First Opium War of 1848 to the revolution of 1947) with repeated and
devastating foreign interventions.
China’s
attitude towards the world is paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies: China
fears Western attempts to promote independence in Tibet, or to radicalize the
Uyghur Muslims in its extreme west, or to build up Taiwan as an alternative
state.
China
will go to war to preempt any attempt to dismember it. Its fixation on the
South China Sea, where its historic claims to sovereignty are dubious, reflects
the old Chinese proverb, “Kill the chicken while the monkey watches.” If we are
willing to go the brink for a few empty reefs, Beijing is saying, think of what
we would do for Taiwan or Tibet.
In so
many words, that is what Xi Jinping told President Obama in December 2014 at
the APEC Beijing Summit. China, Xi explained, is a people and a territory; the
population might rise 10% or fall 10% but there always will be many Chinese.
China as a territory is sacred and inviolable, he added, and that is why
Beijing never will give up the South China Sea.
China’s
borders today are substantially the same as they were under the Tang Dynasty
circa 700 CE. It is hard to think of China as an expansionist power, given that
it has done very little expanding in a millennium and a half.
China
devotes enormous resources to protecting its borders (surface-to-ship missiles,
diesel electric submarines, satellite killer missiles, cyberwar capability) and
relatively little to its land army. China spends barely US$1,500 to equip an
infantryman; the US spends 13 times as much. China is investing heavily in
fourth-generation interceptors and fifth-generation stealth aircraft, but has
no specialized ground-attack aircraft like the American A-10 or Russian SU-25.
Its goal
is to close the technology gap with the United States and one day surpass it.
America’s erstwhile allies in the region have taken note, and the Philippines
has already offered to switch to China’s side.
What
appears in the West to be a courteous gesture to religious freedom (visits by
the Dalai Lama) or hospitality to political refugees (official US funding of
the World Uyghur Congress) are viewed in Beijing as evidence that the West is
keeping open its options to attempt to destabilize and dismember China.
I do not
mean to minimize the risks associated with the weakening of America’s global
strength. Under the best of circumstances Russia and China are dangerous
competitors who require careful management; under the worst of circumstances –
well, we do not want to think about the worst of circumstances. We came closer
to a nuclear exchange with Russia in 1983 than most people involved with the
matter care to admit. But there is no reason that America’s relations with
Russia as well as China cannot remain peacefully competitive, and not entirely
adversarial.
There are
two basic rules for dealing with Russia and China which, if respected, will
avoid tragic mistakes.
The first
is that America must always negotiate from strength – real and overwhelming
strength, not bluster. That means maintaining an insuperable edge in military
technology. During the Reagan administration, Russia and China lagged so far
behind in computation that they had no hope of defeating American arms, and the
promise of the Strategic Defense Initiative frightened them. During the
past 15 years America has spent US$5 trillion on the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars while gutting basic defense R&D. That has to reverse drastically.
The
second is that America should NOT attempt to destabilize Russia or China – for
example, by supporting restive Muslims against the Moscow and Beijing regimes.
That is a view held by some in the US intelligence community.
We do not
have quite the same interest as Russia or China in these matters. Their Muslim
populations are entirely Sunni, and they are happy to ally with bloody-handed
Shi’ites, e.g., Iran and its ally Hezbollah. There is room for cooperation on
counterterrorism with Russia and China, but it will be a fraught negotiation
rather than an easy confluence of interests.
In short:
Russia and China should remain in awe of the technological and economic prowess
of the United States, and the inventiveness that a free society can muster
best.
That has
been America’s advantage from the outset. If we lose our scientific and
technological edge to China (which now graduates twice as many STEM doctorates
as do we), the game is over.
America’s
problem is simple: we wasted US$5 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan and
neglected basic R&D and investment in cutting-edge defense and aerospace
technology. For the first time since World War II our technological supremacy
is at risk.
It is
dangerously wrong-headed to dismiss the Chinese as imitators rather than
innovators. As China strove to catch up with the West it was cheaper to imitate
than innovate, but that is no longer true in many industries. China is full of
innovators. Anyone who doubts Chinese capacity to master the most creative
challenges of Western culture should hear Yuja Wang play Beethoven.
After
their long humiliation, the two other powers want to flex their muscles and
exhibit their power
For
example: Russia’s S-400 (and soon-to-be-deployed S-500) may already be able to
defeat American stealth aircraft. No US Air Force commander will allow the F-22
“Raptor” anywhere near Russian air defenses in Syria; we do not know how good
they are and do not want to find out.
When
politicians demand that someone get tough with Putin, it is unclear just what
they mean. America might not win an air battle with Russia. We certainly don’t
want a ground war in Ukraine. It is not at all clear what the US could do in
the short run if it wanted to get tough.
By 2018,
China will have Russia’s S-400 air defense system with a 400-kilometer range,
enabling China to sweep the skies above Taiwan. The “unsinkable aircraft
carrier,” as American strategists sometimes characterize the island, will fly
aircraft only with the tacit permission of Beijing.
The goal
of American policy should be to persuade the rest of the world that no-one
could hope to win a war against a technologically-superior American military,
while at the same time making clear that the United States will not try to make
our competitors insecure within their existing borders.
The
nature of the Russian and Chinese empires makes them inherently unstable, and
outside intervention in their internal affairs will be viewed as an existential
threat. We had cause to wish to break up the Soviet Union, and we succeeded. We
reduced the Soviet Empire to Russia. Sending a message that we do not want Russia
to exist in its present form is perhaps not the wisest course of action.
We now
have just the opposite state of affairs. China is rapidly closing the
technology gap with the United States, as gauged by the progress of its space
program. Russian air defense systems already may be able to engage US stealth
aircraft. Russia and China now feel that they have the opportunity to show the
United States that it no longer is the dominant superpower. After their long
humiliation, the two other powers want to flex their muscles and exhibit their
power.
American
won the Cold War in large part because Russia could not compete with American
digital technology. What seemed like a devastating Russian advantage in
surface-to-air missiles in 1973 became a decisive American advantage in avionic
countermeasures by 1983, when Israel destroyed almost 90 modern Soviet aircraft
flown by Syria in the Bekaa Valley.
By the
mid-1980s Russian military leaders concluded that American superiority in
computation, avionics and (prospectively) missile defense were overwhelming.
We should
draw the lesson that Russia and China well may find areas of strategic
cooperation with the United States, but that their incentive to seek such
cooperation will rise in direct proportion to America’s technological edge.
No comments:
Post a Comment