The Strategy Sessions is a limited-run podcast hosted by Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Today, Emma talks with Ali Wyne, a senior advisor for U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group. Emma and Ali discuss the psychological challenges posed by a resurgent China, why anxiety is a harmful driving force for foreign policy discussions, and how the rise of China might actually present U.S. policymakers with opportunities. Emma and Ali’s discussion is part of the New Visions for Grand Strategy Project, a collection of essays, videos, and podcasts in which out-of-the-box thinkers discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy. *The Strategy Sessions Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
The Strategy Sessions is a limited-run podcast hosted by Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Today, Emma talks with Ali Wyne, a senior advisor for U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group. Emma and Ali discuss the psychological challenges posed by a resurgent China, why anxiety is a harmful driving force for foreign policy discussions, and how the rise of China might actually present U.S. policymakers with opportunities.
Emma and Ali’s discussion is part of the New Visions for Grand Strategy Project, a collection of essays, videos, and podcasts in which out-of-the-box thinkers discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy.
*The Strategy Sessions Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Emma Ashford: The 2020s are likely to be a pivotal decade in determining the future of America’s role in the world. Global dynamics are changing. The era of unchallenged U.S. global dominance is ending. And China and other states are rising. At home, the United States is also going through a period of transition and change in foreign policy — from bipartisan consensus to debate and division. The only thing certain is that change in U.S. foreign policy is inevitable.
In these discussions, our guests engage with some of the most challenging questions facing U.S. policymakers, bring distinct perspectives to bear on these questions, and offer their own vision for the future of U.S. grand strategy. These are The Strategy Sessions.
Hello. I'm Emma Ashford, a senior fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program here at the Stimson Center. Welcome to The Strategy Sessions, a series of discussions with forward-looking, out-of-the-box thinkers on the future of U.S. foreign policy.
Joining me today is Ali Wyne. Ali is a Senior Advisor for U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group and the author of a great book, America's Great Power Opportunity.
So, thanks for coming in today.
[00:01:23] Ali Wyne: Thanks very much for having me. Glad to be here.
[00:01:25] Emma Ashford: We'll get to China in a minute, which I think, you know, looms very large in these U.S. foreign policy discussions. But if I could start with a few general questions, because I think it's helpful. You know, I am curious to know how all of our authors see the world that is emerging, right? What do you think is coming in the next few decades? How does it look different from the unipolar moment, from the Cold War, from all of these eras that we've known and many of us have lived through? Because I think our diagnosis of where the world is going is a big part of how everybody sees strategy formation. So, I'm curious what your assessment is.
[00:02:03] Ali Wyne: I mean, I'll answer by just saying that, in my case, I think that the personal and the political really, you know, congeal… I mean, I came of age in the early ‘90s, so what's going on in the early ‘90s? It's the end of history, allegedly, the end of history. And the notion of the end of history, I think it's difficult for folks who are coming of age now to appreciate the extent to which that phrase, it wasn't just a geopolitical construct, it was very much part of the national psyche. And again, you know, lest I be seen as sanctimonious, because I've recalibrated since, when I was growing up, I had fully internalized this notion of the end of history. I remember, when I was younger, I was a math guy. I hated reading. I hated writing. And my parents were always exhorting me when I was younger, like, “Ali, please read a book. Ali, please open up a newspaper. Ali, there's a whole world out there.”
And subconsciously, when I look back, if I'm psychoanalyzing myself, I think one of the reasons that I didn't heed the exhortations was, subconsciously I, I think I probably thought to myself, “Why do I need to learn about the rest of the world?” I think, subconsciously, I regarded the fact of American preeminence as akin to oxygen, as akin to a constitutional amendment. I regarded it as immutable.
So, if you had said to me 30 years ago, “Ali, 30 years on, America's principal challenger is going to be a country that is today poor, isolated, allegedly on the wrong side of history,” I would've been incredulous. I give that personal backdrop by way of, sort of, juxtaposition how quickly and how thoroughly today's environment is different.
Now, the United States is not a secondary power. The United States, I think, comprehensively, is still the world's most influential power, whether you look at its military capacity, you look at the role of the dollar, you look at its network of allies and partners. But today's international environment, it is much more contested, it is much more complex, it is much more complicated. America's freedom of maneuver is more constrained than it was 30 years ago. Whether you look at China, you look at Russia, there are a number of other countries that often act in ways that are antithetical to the United States that are increasingly asserting their sway, some more ham-fistedly than others. So, with Russia, you have aggression against Ukraine. With China, you have a more multifaceted challenge.
But even if we… let's expand the aperture. It's not just China and Russia. You have a number of middle powers. These are, kind of, the Indonesia's, the Turkeys, the South Africas of the world that are, maybe, not great powers comprehensively, but that are very significant powers regionally. They, increasingly, are trying to play the United States and China off of one another. They are increasingly trying to exercise their own agency. And of course, then, if we expand the aperture even further and if we look at, sort of, the vast swath of developing countries, I don't like using the term “Global South,” maybe global majority, and there's a vocabulary around that concept, but a very significant number of developing countries that, A, reject the idea that they have to make a choice between the United States and China, and they have very dark memories of the first Cold War, and they don't want to be instrumentalized in a second.
So, all the way of saying that, vis-a-vis, you know, when I was coming of age, even though the United States is still, in the aggregate, the world's most influential power, its relative preeminence is significantly diminished. It has to be more, I think, agile in its diplomacy, more creative in its diplomacy. It has to deal with the reality that its principal competitor is likely going to be an enduring competitor. And it's a very different operating system.
[00:05:20] Emma Ashford: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, kind of, interesting that you talk about how, you know, your own personal experience really shows, I think, in some ways, the mindset of folks here in D.C. And I think, for any of us that have spent a lot of time here in the policy community, you know, you can see generational differences, people that came with age at the end of the Cold War into the ‘90s do tend even now to be a little more, sort of, triumphalist, a little more sure about U.S. power. And then you go through your generation and mine, which is a little, you know, we get the ‘war on terror’apart, we get the global financial crisis. So, you know, things start to look a little different, up in the generation that comes after us, right? They don't even remember the triumphalist part. So. it's, kind of, interesting to think how that might be shaping our policy formation here in D.C.
[00:06:09] Ali Wyne: Oh, absolutely. And what you just said about, you use the word “triumphalism,” and it reminds me of one of my very favorite essays. It's published at the end of 1952. It's called The Illusion of American Omnipotence. And it's one of these essays that I feel that it should be perennially reissued as, sort of, updated for current events.
And I do think that there are a lot of policymakers today, maybe policy old guard, for lack of a better phrase, but certain policymakers and certain commentators, perhaps, belonging to that old guard who, either, do, you know, in their heart of heart, subscribe to or want to subscribe to that illusion of American omnipotence, that, if only America exerts itself more, if only America tries harder, it can essentially bend the rest of the world to its will, or at a minimum, maybe if they don't subscribe to the illusion of American omnipotence that this essay discussed, if they do cling to a certain nostalgia about a world and a balance of power that I think are irretrievable.
And nostalgia is not a good basis for policy. Anxiety is not a good basis for policy. When I think about what America's principal strategic challenge is, you know, for the rest of this decade and, really, for this century, you know, going forward, it's not military, it's not economic, it's not technological, it's not diplomatic. Those are all, and we can talk about those different dimensions of competition.
The principal challenge facing U.S. policymakers is a psychological one. When you have policymakers and commentators who came of age when I did, believing, maybe hoping and or assuming, that American preeminence would carry the day, that it would be immutable, dealing with the crumbling of that worldview or the crumbling of that reality so quickly and so thoroughly, it's difficult. It's difficult. And so, you know, at the risk of sounding reductionist, it seems to me that, as we go forward and think about, sort of, our mindset, really, the choice of the fork in the road is, do we proceed with composure, recognizing that the United States still has a number of enviable and, in some cases, irreparable competitive advantages and the reality that it is still the world's preeminent power and also recognizing that there are far more actors on the international stage, recognizing that its freedom of maneuver is constrained. So, do we accept, internalize that reality with equanimity and proceed and adapt creatively? Or do we succumb to a, kind of, reactive, anxious defensiveness and try to, sort of, claw our way back to a world that really isn't coming back?
[00:08:20] Emma Ashford: Yeah. So, I was going to ask you, you know, given this need to change our mindset, how would you approach general principles for U.S. foreign policy, going forward? It sounds like one of them, maybe, acceptance or, you know, willingness to be proactive instead of reactive, but, you know, what would be your general principles for policymakers?
[00:08:41] Ali Wyne: So, there are a few, and certainly acceptance. And here again, you know, at the outset, I was talking about, kind of, my own coming of age story and, sort of, linking the personal and the political. And I think, in much the same way that I would, sort of, exhort U.S. policymakers to embrace acceptance, and even just in our personal lives, when we come to forks in the road, when we come to difficult forks in the road in our personal lives, in our professional lives, it's, do we pretend that those forks on the road don't exist? Do we pretend that those challenges don't exist? Or do we accept them and say, “Now, how do I adapt?”
So, I think that it's the same advice that I would give, you know, if a friend were to come to me and say, “Hey, Ali, I'm dealing with some personal challenge or some professional challenge. What should I do?” You know, acceptance is, sort of, the first step. At the risk of sounding facetious, but I think, the past couple of decades furnished quite a lot of evidence to justify this principle. The first one would be… it's the Hippocratic Oath applied to foreign policy and applied also to domestic policy. So, first, do no harm. Do no harm abroad, or at least minimize harm abroad. And also, do no harm or at least minimize harm at home.
So, abroad, I think, if you look… and you mentioned, you know, sort of, the generation, sort of, younger than us. They didn't even come of age with, sort of, the triumphalist mindset in their formative memories. What have they been? The global war on terrorism. The global financial crisis. I think that they've really seen misapplications of U.S. power. They've seen applications of U.S. power that really haven't born strategic dividends.
So, first, do no harm. I mean, if you look at our foreign policy in recent decades, if you look at, of course, all the misadventures in the Middle East and the harm that they inflicted abroad, the harm that they did to our interest, the harm that they did in terms of distorting our foreign policy priorities, if you look at our, sort of, increasing application of sanctions, sanctions and other, sort of, punitive financial instruments, again, think about the consequences, the blowback that those measures have caused.
So, abroad, I would say it's, do no harm or at least minimize harm. And I would say, increasingly, it's also, do no harm at home, because our ability to be competitive abroad, it's not just related to our ability to be healthy at home. Our ability to compete and be successful and thoughtful abroad, it's predicated upon our internal cohesion and our internal health. And I am very worried, just in the past six months, about the number of acts of self-harm that we have taken. Whether you look at the gutting of funding for science, whether you look at the measures that we have taken that dissuade international students from wanting to study in the United States, whether you look at the cancellation of talent pipeline, such as the Presidential Management Fellowship program, a number of the steps that we're taking at home and abroad, these are not at the behest of any external competitor. These are actions that we are taking inexplicably of our own volition. So, principle number one would be, do no harm.
I think a second principle would be, don't use external competition as a crutch for internal renewal. And I mentioned just a minute ago the symbiosis of external competitiveness and internal renewal. And it won't surprise you that that's, sort of, my second principle, especially in the China context. I think that the larger the China challenge has come to loom, the more the instinct has been on the part of many policymakers to say the United States must do, A, at home abroad because China, because China, because China.
Now, do I think that some measure of anxiety can be useful? I mean, anxiety can have some propulsive utility. I mean, if you look in recent years, I think one could make the argument that anxiety about China probably played some role in securing passage of chips and science, maybe played some role in securing a passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the big infrastructure bill. But beyond a certain threshold, anxiety goes from being healthy to becoming a crutch and becoming a policy crutch and a political cudgel. The United States should not need to invoke a competitor in order to address really pressing socioeconomic challenges, whether it's rising income inequality, rising wealth inequality, racial discrimination, exorbitant healthcare costs. We shouldn't have to invoke an external competitor in order to make progress on those challenges. And if we do, then I think we need to be asking ourselves really difficult questions about the health of our body politic, the health of our policymaking process. So, that would be the second principle.
And then maybe the third principle, just to close off, would be, and I say this, you know, recognizing that I'm talking to a scholar who has really done so much to expand the Overton window on this topic, so, I hope you'll agree with this third principle. I suspect you'll be sympathetic to it. We really do need to recalibrate the way that we think about alliances and partnerships. And I would break down that principle into two parts.
First, we talk a lot and we pay a lot of lip service to empowering, enabling, encouraging allies and partners to be more self-reliant, to be more self-sufficient. But then, sometimes, I think we get a little bit shocked when allies and partners are moving in that direction. If we believe that America's relative preeminence is declining, if we believe that the international system is becoming more contested, then it behooves us, for selfish reasons, to have more capable allies and partners. So, one is actually encouraging allies and partners to be more capable in defending their own national security. And then related to that is, and then I'll stop here, so, the second part of that third principle is, as much as possible, enlisting allies and partners in affirmative undertakings that don't require an external competitor. So, rather than going to an ally or a partner and saying, “Hi,” you know, let's say Emma, you know, you've been a friend for many years. Let's say that, you know, we're talking and I say, “Emma, it's good to see you. I need you to help me compete against China,” that's not a very compelling pitch. I think, instead, if I say, “Emma, it's great to see you. We haven't caught up in a while. What's on your mind? Tell me what issues are top of mind for you. How can we collaborate? And how can we jointly collaborate to advance progress on climate action or macroeconomic instability or arms proliferation, whatever it might be?” But I think that, allies and partners, no one likes to feel instrumentalized. We want to feel that we are friends in a joint purpose rather than just as instruments for the superpower of selfish prerogatives.
[00:14:16] Emma Ashford: I mean, there are a lot of things there, and I think we're going to try…
[00:14:20] Ali Wyne: That's the caffeine kicking it. Sorry for ramblings.
[00:14:22] Emma Ashford: We're going to try and pull out some of those threads as we go on here.
[00:14:25] Ali Wyne: Sure.
[00:14:25] Emma Ashford: But, you know, I was struck as you were talking about, sort of, anxiety driving our politics, our foreign policy. This is a good place to pivot to China, I think, because something that is, sort of.
[00:14:36] Ali Wyne: We should rebalance. I had to get that info.
[00:14:37] Emma Ashford: Okay. We're going to pivot to China.
[00:14:38] Ali Wyne: That's a very nerdy joke, I know.
[00:14:39] Emma Ashford: Something that I think, sort of, always makes me, kind of, a little crazy, about the China debate is that China is either a giant behemoth poised to conquer Hawaii or they are facing a demographic and economic cliff and they're going to collapse tomorrow. And I don't think we have a good image. We don't have a good image of our own strengths and weaknesses, but we don't really seem to have a very good image of China, either. Where should policymakers, or how should policymakers actually be thinking about China?
[00:15:11] Ali Wyne: Well, it’s between those two extremes that you mentioned, that judgment might sound prosaic, but I think it's very important. It's very important to do a net assessment in real time. And I would say the same if I were having a conversation with a friend of mine in the Chinese think tank community who is trying to do a net assessment of the United States. I would say, “Look, America has, yes, we have challenges, of course, we also have strengths.” And maybe we could do, sort of, an updated version of this. I've actually been rereading a book that came out in 2006 called fittingly and I think, encouragingly, China: the Balance Sheet. It was prepared by, it was written by a team of scholars at CSIS. And the rationale for the book was that we need a healthier, more nuanced discourse on China.
Now, I think that they were very farsighted because, I mean, in 2005, 2006, China was not yet… I mean, this is before the global financial crisis. This is before the Beijing Olympics. I think that most folks in 2005, 2006, I don't think that there were too many U.S. observers who were worried about a potentially 10-foot-tall China. So, I think that these scholars are farsighted in saying, “Look, you know, China might not be anywhere near a peer competitor to the United States right now, but it has a lot of potential. It has a lot of competitive potential.” And they, in their books, say that Americans and the American public and American policymakers need to be prepared for the psychological, they use that word, psychological impact of China's resurgence.
But what they do in the book, they go category by category. I don't remember the precise categories, but it was essentially just the different dimensions of power. And they juxtaposed China's competitive strengths and China's competitive liabilities. And the impression that you get when you read the book is that China is a power that is likely to endure but also has significant constraints. Now, that's not a very glamorous or dramatic assessment.
[00:16:53] Emma Ashford: It’s a pretty good assessment for the United States, but most powers of the world right now.
[00:16:58] Ali Wyne: Absolutely. And I think, you know, if you look at China today now, obviously, you know, China, those scholars published that book roughly 20 years ago, but I think that that broad conclusion that, you know, China is a power that is likely to endure but faces significant constraints, I still think that it holds today. So, if I'm just briefly enumerating, what are some of China's, you know, strengths and weaknesses?
So, in terms of its strengths, economically, it has the second largest economy in the world. It is making significant strides in many categories of critical emerging technology. Militarily, it's undergoing a very rapid modernization, particularly in the naval and nuclear domains. And the PLA has now modernized to a point that, when we read about, sort of, one of these innumerable war gaming exercises that's taking place, today, many of those war games either have China winning or have a really bloody attritive struggle between the United States and China, in which the United States might not necessarily win. 30 years ago, in ‘95, ‘96 when we had the Taiwan Straight crisis, China made some noise potentially about attacking Taiwan. The Clinton administration dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Strait and the PLA backed down. It’s a very different PLA today. Diplomatically, China now has more diplomatic outposts than the United States. It is, I think, particularly expanding its diplomatic footprint across a developing world.
So, you know, economically, militarily, diplomatically, you know, China's a very formidable competitor. At the same time, if you look at its weaknesses, they are mounting in number and severity. So, at home, slowing growth, demographic decline, which you mentioned, difficulty transitioning to a new economic model that relies more on technology and less on infrastructure. Externally, I think that China's environment is quite contested. So, China's surrounded by a combination of volatile states and very, I think, capable, advanced industrial democracies .
So, what does that mean in the aggregate, if you juxtapose China's strengths and its liabilities? I certainly don't think that China's power has reached a peak. I don't think there's any evidence or any reasonable basis for inferring that China is on the precipice of collapse. And I think, actually, there's this, sort of, running, you know, commentary, you know, China's going to collapse this year, China's going to collapse this year. And we've been seeing versions of this prediction for decades. They haven't panned out. But at the same time, do I think that China is going to dominate Asia? No. It's going to encounter a lot of resistance, let alone dominate, the Eurasian landmass.
So, again, why is it important to present China's strengths and liabilities in juxtaposition? It makes U.S. policymakers less likely to succumb to either complacency or consternation. When you say, you know, China is on the brink of collapse, you know, China's economy is not going to be able to keep up with globalization, et cetera, et cetera, there's a risk of underestimation and you don't want to get complacent. I think if anything, I would say, what proved to be a fleeting interregnum between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the global financial crisis, the principle, I think, analytical mistake on the part of U.S. policymakers was one of underestimation, that China on the wrong side of history. But unlike in the realm of physics where, you know, when you drop a pendulum, you know, you know exactly, or when you, sort of, release a pendulum, you know exactly where it's going to arrive.
When we change policy pendula, there's a risk of overcorrection. And I worry now that we are seeing this whiplash between underestimation and having realized that that assessment was mistaken, we now run the risk of undue aggrandizement.
I think, if you look at China as an enduring but constrained competitor, you're not complacent, you don't succumb to consternation, and you try as best as possible to think not about how do you achieve a decisive victory, but how do you instead forge a durable cohabitation? Number one and number two, you think as well, the United States can't control, I mean, it can influence what China does, it can't control what China does. The only decisions that the United States can fully control are the decisions that it makes. And so, it really then places the onus on us. What are we doing to strengthen our principal sources of competitive advantage? And right now, unfortunately, forget about strategic competition with China. We are rapidly and systematically for rather bewildering reasons, undercutting our own sources of competitive advantage. And so, I think if you're China, you, kind of, look on, bewildered, why is the world's incumbent power doing so much self harm?
[00:20:56] Emma Ashford: Yeah. I mean, look, I think, you know, you get at a bunch of things in there. And some of them are just really important questions that I think are often assumed in Washington rather than actually answered, things like, what is the China challenge? Where is it that China is actually challenging U.S. interests? Or, what is strategic competition? It is one thing to say, you know, that we are reentering an era of great power competition, like the 2017 National Security Strategy did, but they never really defined what that meant. They just said, we're going to compete, we're going to compete in all the domains. And so, I think part of this is right-sizing China. But I think part of it is also thinking through, from our side, why is China's rise a challenge to us?
[00:21:39] Ali Wyne: Yeah. I'm really glad that you asked this question because it's something that I've been… I'll actually, again, just to weave in a little bit of a personal anecdote. I have found that some of the most trenchant insights that I into, not just in the U.S. foreign policy, but in the U.S. politics come from outside the beltway. So, I had occasion recently to visit Casper, Wyoming. It's beautiful, if you haven't been. And I was there to give a presentation on U.S.-China relations. And so, it was an evening presentation. But during the day, my host, he's a professor at Casper College, and he said, “Ali, why don't you, before we get ready for your dinner presentation, why don't you come talk with some of my students?”
And so, I addressed some of his undergraduate students. I said, “Here's a little bit about the international crisis group. Here's some of my, kind of, starting points for thinking about the U.S.-China relations.” I just gave my usual, sort of, spiel. And then we took questions from his students. And Emma, I'll never forget, because I'm still actually grappling with this question. I don't have a good answer, but it dovetails with the question that you just put to me. One of his students raised her hand and said, “Ali, why do America and China dislike each other?” And I was just floored. I was floored for a number of reasons. One, I had never been asked that question. I mean, you certainly wouldn't hear that. I mean, I live on Mass Avenue and I live on “Think Tank Row,” as it were. If I were to stand outside of my apartment building with a sign saying, “Why do America and China dislike each other,” I think people would say, you know, “Duh.”
But it's very often, when people say the answer is obvious, the answer is self-evident, what an ignorant question, those are very often the questions where we assume that there's a pervasive understanding, but there isn't actually really a shared understanding or a good answer. So, when his student asked me that question, I said, because I realized it's a really profound question, and I realized in the moment I don't have a good answer, I'm going to need to think more. So, I said to her, “I'm not going to insult you by just, kind of, trying to contrive an answer right now. I don't have a good answer for you. I might be able to think of one, but I'm going to need to think about it on the plane ride back home. I'm going to need to think about it quite a bit. Let me get back to you.” And it, kind of, dovetails through the question, what exactly is a challenge? And actually, what I'm about to say to you, maybe I'll, kind of, do up a version of this and send it back to his student because I still owe her a thoughtful message.
One starting point for an answer, and it’s not the full answer, but I think it’s a starting point is, it's the combination of the power that China is accumulating, alongside the ideology that it promulgates. Would we be as worried about China's ideology were China not as comprehensively powerful as it is? Probably not. Look, I mean, leaving aside China, there are a number of other countries whose ideologies, whose political systems, whose understandings of history we find repellent in many aspects. North Korea, for example. We worry about North Korea, of course, for its nuclear program. And now, of course, we worry about it for sending soldiers to a really grizzly war between Russia and Ukraine. But we don't worry that North Korea could potentially pose a systemic challenge to the United States.
There's a really interesting article, and I've been revisiting it. And it goes to show the importance of ideology or the growing role of ideology. This is, I think it's in 1991. So, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Nick Kristof wrote a column saying, and I'm paraphrasing him, but he says something to the effect of, he says, now that the Soviet Union is gone, he said, the one actor in international affairs that probably most purely distills and encapsulates all that Americans find loathsome is China. This is in 1991. But China in 1991, it's poor, it's isolated, it's backwater that we think is on the wrong side of history.
Fast forward 30 years later, China is more confident in promulgating that ideology. And it's starting to put flesh around the bones. How is it putting flesh around the bones of its ideology? You have the Belt and Road Initiative that debuted in 2013. And now, in more recent years, you had this triplet of initiatives that China has debuted. I think it was first the development initiative, I believe. Then, the security initiative. And more recently, the civilization initiative.
And if you put together the Belt and Road Initiative with that more recent triplet of initiatives, do they spell out a fully articulated conception of an alternative view of international order? No. But you're starting to see some meat on the bone.
So, the first part of the answer is that China articulates in many ways a conception of exceptionalism that is antithetical to our own and now increasingly has power that it can bring to bear in expressing and in implementing, and maybe, in some cases, even diffusing that ideology is component one. And then maybe component two, maybe I'll, sort of, zoom in a little bit on technology, in terms of, you know, where China poses a challenge.
I think that most observers… and here I wouldn't say that this point is even particularly partisan or ideological. I think that most observers in Washington, in Beijing, regardless of their ideological priors, do believe that strategic competition, a big component of it, will be, sort of, access to development of harnessing of critical and emerging technologies. And here again, think about how, and I've had to eat a lot of humble pie in my own assessment of China's technological prowess. When I was coming of age, I thought, China can't innovate. It can build little widgets and it can export some widgets, but it can't do much more. Then, I said, well, China can innovate, but only if it steals other country's intellectual property. And now, we're in a situation in which it is simply untenable now to make the case that China can only innovate on the base of stealing other countries’ intellectual property. It has a very different model for technological development, but it is a model that has propelled China in many categories of critical and emerging technology to be the leading power in the world and just comprehensively to demonstrate that there are other pathways to technological innovation other than the so-called Washington consensus.
So, those are a couple of answers. They certainly don't cover the waterfront, but maybe those are two starting points.
[00:27:04] Emma Ashford: Yeah. No, I mean, I think, tying this back to your points about, sort of, American psychological reorientation, I mean, part of this is accepting that America is, I mean, still number one, let's be honest.
[00:27:17] Ali Wyne: Sure, sure.
[00:27:17] Emma Ashford: But, you know, that there are other competitors out there. And then some of this, I think, is that main shift from seeing China as something weaker, someone we're helping, we're helping this country to rise to something different. And for a very long time, I've been absolutely fascinated by this report that the Center for New American Security put out in 2015. A lot of the people that wrote it were advisors on the Hillary Clinton campaign. And in it, they basically reiterate the consensus about China from the last 10 to 15 years before that, saying things like, “China is still a responsible stakeholder. There have been some incidents, you know, but this is still a viable strategy. We will pursue it.”
And part of what's so fascinating about that is I would say the consensus in D.C. that shifted from that to the idea that China is a big threat and a big competitor happened very much, sort of, almost overnight. And so, D.C., you know, when we had this significant shift where we suddenly saw the challenge from China, even if maybe we didn't agree entirely on what it was or how to deal with it, but part of rethinking our own place in the world was understanding that China is there.
[00:28:27] Ali Wyne: Yeah. Well, here's what's interesting, though, about this notion of a consensus. I think that there’s absolutely a consensus, and I think a consensus that transcends ideological divisions, that you ask Republicans, you ask the Democrats that China is undoubtedly America's most potent strategic challenger, not only today, but arguably, the most potent strategic challenger that the United States has confronted in its history.
There, there's a consensus or something approaching a consensus. Once you get beyond that diagnostic, though, I think that the consensus is much shallower and I think that there are a number of, I think, important sources of division. So, one, you could say… and take a few categories where I think that there's actually a tremendous amount of distances. So, number one, a historical question. Did America get China wrong? And there are some folks who say that we got China wrong in 1949. We then got China wrong that, you know, Nixon then committed the original sin by saying that we should have an opening to China. And now, we continue to get China wrong by enabling the resurgence of our principal competitor. There are other folks who say that there isn't really a self-evident alternative course of foreign policy that the United States could have pursued. They would've been definitely forestalled a competitive challenge from China.
So, a historical question. Did the United States get China wrong? We're still litigating that debate. Here’s the analytical question. Is China a peaking power? Has it already peaked? Or is it still a power that, albeit more slowly, is still rising? And do we have more than the fear from a powerful China that begins a systemic decline or from a powerful China that continues its confident march?
And then three prescriptively, there are a whole host of policy questions on which, in some cases, far from being a consensus, debate is only in its very nascent stages. So, how do we recalibrate our economic relationship with China so that we mitigate the risks of so-called weaponized interdependence that Henry Farrell and Abe Newman talk about? And we saw, because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and now the Coronavirus pandemic, that policymakers rightly are seized with the security risk of being too entangled with China.
I worry about a scenario, though, in which, if we, sort of, throw the kitchen sink of due economic leverage at China, and if China adapts, maybe we slow China down. But what happens if 10, 15, 20 years, hence, we wake up and we say we've expended most of our economic leverage vis-a-vis China, and now China is far more financially self-reliant, far more technologically self-reliant, if it feels that it's built up a, kind of, economic force field around it and feels that, in the case of a conflict with the United States, it could withstand most of whatever we could throw at it economically, does that China become more risk-taking in the security arena? So, what is, kind of, the Goldilocks sweet spot of economic interdependence of China? Nothing approaching a consensus. On Taiwan, of course, you know, do we maintain some manifestation of strategic ambiguity? Do we shift over to strategic clarity? A very vigorous debate there.
And then, kind of, the ultimate question, what is it that we ultimately seek to accomplish vis-a-vis China? And you saw, of course, that debate that took place in the issues of foreign affairs recently versus, should we articulate an end state? Should there be an end state of competition? And if so, what would that end state be? Should we instead manage competition? And if so, manage competition, it feels a bit murky. It feels a bit ambiguous. It's not as satisfying. I think it's more realistic.
But on a whole host of questions, there's actually a tremendous amount of discensus. And then one wrinkle that makes this question about China policy even more interesting is, you mentioned this real, sort of, sea change that takes place in the discourse on China, and in some cases the policy with the arrival of the first Trump administration.
And it's undoubtedly true. If you look at the national security strategy, you look at the national defense strategy in 2017 and then in 2018, they say they portray China in adversarial terms. They say that China wants to, not only dominate the Indo-Pacific, but in time become the dominant power in the world. You know, China is, sort of, enthralled by this Marxist, Lenist ideology, et cetera, et cetera.
What's really striking, when you look at those documents in 2017 and 2018, and even now, sort of, turning to, sort of, the past and former President Donald Trump, if there is a consensus on China, and again, I try to offer some reasons why I think that the notion of a consensus is overstated, but arguably, the most prominent influential dissenter from that consensus is none other than President Donald Trump. If you look at the way that he talks about President Xi, I mean, he says, again and again and again, he says, “Xi was a dear friend of mine during my first term.” And even now, if you look at some of his recent interviews, I like Xi a lot. He's really smart. He's brilliant. I'm looking forward to going to Beijing.”
So, first, he talks about President Xi in very friendly terms. I mean, you would be hard pressed to find anybody else in Washington, Republican or Democrat alike, who would speak about Xi in those ways.
He also takes, I think, a quite narrow view of strategic competition. He's fixated on the size of China's trade surplus. He's aggrieved by China's export of Fentanyl precursors. But he certainly doesn't subscribe to the very expansive zero sum, kind of, mannequin notion of strategic competition that you see in the NSS and the NDS from the first term. And he also, I think, is maybe not unique, but I think he's in pretty rare company in this town in believing that the United States and China actually have a substantial remit for bilateral cooperation.
And you see right now this tension within the Trump administration, where many of his senior advisors, I mean, you look at Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, if you look at the speech that he gave with the Shangrila dialogue, I read the speech, and my instant reaction was, you know, did the president read the speech? Because it clearly does not reflect his view. So, you have a decensus within the Trump administration. I think you also have a reckoning within, whether it's the Democratic party or the progressive community, I don't actually think that the absence of a consensus is necessarily bad. We actually have seen, from pretty recent American history, that when you have poorly specified but confidently proclaimed constructs, they can act that, under the veneer of a consensus, they can actually drive U.S. foreign policy in very misguided directions, you know, case in point, the global war on terrorism, if we go a little bit further back during the Cold War, Kennan had, I think, a very geographically delineated, restricted conception of containment. His colleagues appropriated containment and then had a more expansive version.
So, all a way of saying that I think that there isn't a consensus on China policy, which means that there's more of an opportunity and, really, an imperative for those in the analytical community to come up with fresh ideas.
[00:34:20] Emma Ashford: Well, I think that is unfortunately all we have time for, but I also think that's a great place to end on a great note to end on. And I do think, when it comes to China, there really are more questions than answers right now. And so, I appreciate you taking the time to talk us through at least some of them and hope to continue the conversation in future.
[00:34:39] Ali Wyne: Can't wait. Thanks very much for having me.
[00:34:45] Emma Ashford: That's all for this episode of The Strategy Sessions. You can find the full set of episodes, along with the accompanying essays, at stimson.org or by searching for us on your favorite podcast app. A big thanks to Stimson's communications team for their assistance with the taping and to University FM for providing audio editing services. I'm Emma Ashford. Thanks for listening!