Only U.S. is in position to conduct effective global response to China
When I was at National Defense University a dozen years ago, our second-semester seminars included foreign travel and it was striking that the American military officers who were my classmates did not much care about the substance of the seminars as long as they would be able to travel to China.
At the time, I felt that some of the more hard-core officers were only looking for the next "enemy" that would justify continued increases in the Pentagon budget. Some of the more thoughtful officers, however, just seemed curious. Some wondered if the United States, at some point in the future, would be defending Taiwan against a Chinese attack, which one officer derisively referred to as "the million man swim."
Sometime this month, or perhaps next, President Biden will have a virtual summit with China's President Xi. The two know each other well, having met many times. However, that is not going to make the conversation any easier.
The foreign policy community - what former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes called "the blob" - is in ferment. Recent congressional testimony has warned of new Chinese weapons and an expanding nuclear arsenal. The most recent cover of Foreign Affairs features Biden and Xi face-to-face in a confrontational pose and refers to America's new "Cold War."
This was too much for Harvard's Joseph Nye, the person who developed the concept of "soft power." Writing in The New York Times, Nye warned that it is dangerous and intellectually lazy to use the Cold War analogy to describe our relations with China.
He pointed out, correctly, that our two economies are intertwined in ways that the American and Soviet economies never were. China holds about $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds. And, if it is American policy that climate change is an existential threat to the planet, we cannot hope to tackle the problem without cooperation from China, the largest emitter of CO2. So, it was shocking when a senior Chinese official recently suggested that if other countries don't acquiesce to Chinese demands, that it might do nothing to ease global warming - essentially holding a gun to the head of the planet.
President Biden has tried to stress that the United States is in competition with China and is not seeking confrontation. However, when the Cold War analogy is invoked, it creates political pressures that could send America down a costly path. Let us remember that George Kennan, the architect of the containment strategy that became the backbone of our Cold War policy toward the Soviet Union, lamented that he never meant it to be so heavily tilted toward military means.
We always need to keep in mind that China has few allies in the world. It can buy votes on the Taiwan issues in the UN General Assembly from small countries, and there are authoritarian countries eager to buy its surveillance technology, but its authoritarian model and human rights record make it unsavory at best.
Still, nationalism is a powerful force and President Xi enjoys strong domestic support for his narrative that other countries - particularly America - are trying to hold it down.
This is the challenge then, to create a concert of allies to provide steady diplomatic pressure against unacceptable Chinese behavior related to human rights, trade or an increasingly aggressive military posture.
It won't be easy. Economic self-interest will cause some countries to pull their punches. We've seen that in Europe. However, America and its allies are collectively bigger and stronger than China and have a greater chance to get China to behave more responsible if they act together. Only the U.S. is capable of conducting that concert and it will be a fundamental test of American leadership in the years to come.
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.