Maybe letting go a little, and letting other powers emerge and rise and the global order sort itself out isn’t necessarily such a bad thing

"ross douthat

There’s — I mean, there’s been this sort of bipartisan turn against the relationship that we had with China in the 1990s and 2000s, where we were sort of deeply, economically integrated, and assuming that integration would contribute to liberalization in China, which it obviously has not.

We’ve turned against that. Not just because China hasn’t liberalized, but because of this widespread sense that America has deindustrialized too far, that our trade policies have not worked out for American society as well as confident free traders thought in the 2000s. And this is how you have both the Trump administration and the Biden administration trying to sort of reset the trade arrangements with China, even as we are trying to arm up to defend Taiwan.

Those are sort of overlapping areas, but they’re also distinct. You could imagine a world where we say, look, it’s really important for the US to defend Taiwan and persuade China not to invade. But because of that, we need to have good economic relations with China. We shouldn’t always be in trade wars.

Or you could imagine saying no, we have to have this economic reset, even at the risk of incentivizing China to go to war and try and take over. If you’re having a trade war, it’s helpful to control all of the chip manufacturing infrastructure in Taiwan. So there’s a lot of different ways in which right now, you have multiple incentives in Washington, or multiple theories converging on escalation with China.

carlos lozada

I want to emphasize what Ross said about America’s economic policy toward China in the ‘90s, when the whole argument was, look, engage. Trade. Open things up. And then two things will happen — they’ll have a stake in the global economy, the Chinese will, and that economic openness will create this irresistible impulse toward political openness.

But that didn’t happen. The Chinese economy went gangbusters and the system grew even more authoritarian. And what I find so interesting about that is that it shows that, you know, one country rising , another falling, it’s not just kind of like the ebbs and flows of history. It’s specific things that we do sometimes.

Like, the United States enabled China’s economic rise. It did. It made a bet on how it would turn out. The bet ended up being wrong, right? And that was a huge part of what’s happened, and a huge part of why we’ve been having the conversation about China seeking to supplant America as the great superpower.

lydia polgreen

Well, and I think you could also say that America being the kind of dominant power in the world may not be a recipe for peace and maybe sort of security for all. And maybe part of the problem that as long as any one power is trying to dominate and set the terms of the global order, there are going to be these fissures.

And we should probably be humbled by the history of the last few decades, and think a little bit more carefully about our place in the world. And all of these internal, external, economic, political, security factors, they’re all pulling us in a direction potentially of being a little bit more focused on the home front. And thinking about, how do we secure ourselves, secure our future? And how do we let other countries go forward and do the same?

Our interests are not necessarily aligned. The United States and Europe have different interests in Ukraine and in the relationship with Russia, just given the dependencies. The rest of the world relies on Ukraine for food, for example. So they have a different perspective on it. And I think maybe letting go a little, and letting other powers emerge and rise and the global order sort itself out isn’t necessarily such a bad thing."