Chas Freeman 美国对华政策 自残案例

美国对华政策：一个自残案例

U.S. China Policy: A Case of Self-Harm

查斯·弗里曼 2023-02-07
https://chasfreeman.net/2505-2/

对美国外交学院的讲话
Chas W. Freeman, Jr. 大使（USFS，退役）
布朗大学沃森国际与公共事务研究所访问学者

2023 年 2 月 7 日通过视频发送至华盛顿特区

234年前，这个国家的人民明智地决定通过新宪法“组建一个更加完善的联邦”。 该宪法的序言仍然是有史以来最雄辩的清单，列出了人们建立政府的目的。 它宣称美利坚合众国的使命应该是：

建立正义，
确保国内安宁，
提供共同防御，
促进普遍福利，以及
确保我们自己和我们的子孙后代获得自由的祝福。
对照这一系列基准来衡量，我们当前的对华政策越来越具有破坏性。 中国能够而且将会照顾好自己。 短期来看，我们可以限制甚至削弱它。 但从长远来看，我们的政策正在对我们产生什么影响，以及将会对我们产生什么影响，我深感担忧。 让我按照我们国家宪章规定的顺序回顾一下这份清单。

我们在最新的“选择之战”中的决定——将中国指定为我们的敌人——非但没有推进正义事业，反而导致了针对华裔美国人的新的不公正现象。 轮到他们了，并蔓延到那些看起来像他们的人，经历了其他少数族裔（如德国人、意大利人和日裔美国人）在过去与美国的战时紧张局势中所遭受的那种来自民众和执法机构的仇外迫害。 他们祖先的土地。

就像麦卡锡时代一样，我们再次让有才华的中国移民科学家和工程师感到这里不受欢迎，并激励他们回国。 朝鲜战争期间，我们将加州理工学院控制论工程之父钱学森带回中国，在那里他成为了中国人民解放军核武器和运载系统之父。 我们现在正在让新一代才华横溢的华裔美国科学家和工程师中的多名成员害怕监视和迫害。 他们的离开是我们经济技术的损失，也是中国的收获。

当然，反亚裔暴力并不新鲜。 现在发生的事情只是几个世纪以来扰乱我们国内安宁的种族主义和宗教偏见的最新证据。 马丁·路德·金充满希望的乐观主义已经让位于乔治·弗洛伊德令人窒息的绝望。 伊斯兰恐惧症根深蒂固，反犹太主义卷土重来，我们将外国人和他们的想法拒之门外。 美国人因我们对信息环境的忠诚、另类事实以及剥削性的企业和社交媒体强加给我们的盲点而分裂。 辩论，就其发生的程度而言，是充满敌意的而不是文明的，而且很少有成果。

如果像卡尔·多伊奇（Karl Deutsch）所宣称的那样，一个国家是“一群因对过去的错误看法和对邻居的仇恨而团结在一起的人”，那么除了我们对官方指定和妖魔化的敌人的强烈敌意之外，我们就不再符合这个标准。 中国、伊朗和俄罗斯等国家。 我们对我们的历史及其意义产生了深刻的分歧。 现在，美国人之间对于是否：

我们的国家是在自由中孕育的，或者说是在非洲奴隶制的基础上诞生的。
我们是一个“白人”或多种族国家。

我们的国家应该独立于宗教，或者服从各种版本的基督教。

我们的祖先通过勇敢地突破边境或使这片大陆的土著居民遭受种族灭绝来建立我们的国家。

选举的合法性在于其公平性，或者在于狂热者是否选择接受选举结果。

我们正在经历的不团结和功能失调不仅仅扰乱了我们家庭的安宁。 它削弱了我们与其他国家的关系。 华盛顿的政治僵局阻碍了经济、种族、意识形态、军事和其他利益之间的权衡，并阻碍了总体国家利益的综合。 这使得我们的外交政策成为国内特殊利益竞争的载体。 就中国而言，单一利益集团因怨恨和恐惧而联合起来，表面上使它们结成对北京的共同敌意。 但每个团体的议程都会削弱其他团体的议程，从而损害所有人的利益。

1991年，苏联不再与我们争夺全球霸权并解体，我们没有了明显的敌人。 中国现在已经成为我们治疗“敌害剥夺综合症”的良药。 在这种情况下，我们放弃了作为国防和对外关系工具的外交。 我们之间的交战理由是台湾与中国其他地区的分离，这是我们军事干预分裂中国内战各方的无意结果。 瓦

我们甚至不再假装遵守我们后来与北京达成的基本协议，以使其能够将台湾问题放在一边以供未来和平解决。 现在，所有的讨论都是如何通过战争来确定台湾的地位。 双方都必须知道，这样的战争对台湾来说将是灾难性的，对美国和中国来说都是灾难性的，对任何加入我们或中国参与战斗的国家都会造成严重损害。 但华盛顿没有人像尼克松政府五十年前所做的那样，试图寻找解决方案或临时的权宜之计来处理中美在台湾问题上的分歧。

美国人不喜欢大政府，除非它穿着制服。 现在，对与中国发生战争的预期是大幅增加对我们的军工国会和情报综合体补贴的主要理由。 军事凯恩斯主义找到了冷战后可靠的动力。

但是，将我们遏制、如果可能的话扭转中国崛起的努力描述为“冷战2.0”是一种逃避。 这意味着我们与苏联的经验在某种程度上为我们在不引发热战的情况下与中国抗衡并击败它做好了准备。 因此，这是一种否认行为，是幻想外交政策的借口，也是对国际事务采取适得其反的完全军事手段的理由。

中国对我们的地区主导地位和全球霸权的挑战虽然真实存在，但与已故的、无人哀叹的苏联所发起的挑战几乎没有任何共同之处。 遵循冷战剧本是无法实现这一目标的。 与自我孤立、自给自足、高度军事化的苏联不同：

中国已完全融入1945年后的政治经济秩序。 它是世界上大多数国家的最大贸易伙伴。 它可以被对抗，但不能被“遏制”。

中美经济相互依存。 不存在我方胜、中国方败的零和博弈。 脱钩会让双方都付出经济增长、就业和技术进步的代价。

中国对美国全球霸主地位的挑战并非源于意识形态侵略或海外帝国建设。 中国寻求将其体系与美国意识形态的弥赛亚主义隔离开来，而不是输出其自身定义不明确、内向且没有吸引力的威权意识形态。 与苏联不同，中华人民共和国既没有试图也没有威胁征服其邻国。 中国的政治经济影响力开始让我们黯然失色。 我们把这个问题伪装成一个军事问题。
中国的财富和实力的回归正在通过逐渐取代我们在二战后的地区和全球政治经济霸权而降低美国的国际地位和影响力。 但北京不会对美国的领土或独立构成威胁。 东亚经济秩序已经以中国为中心。 中国已成为非洲最重要的外部力量。 阿拉伯和拉丁美洲欢迎中国，以此抵消欧洲和美国持续的主导地位。 中美之争是关于美国地区和全球影响力的衰退，而不是关于中国征服邻国的愿望。

美国的军事姿态与我们面临的经济和技术挑战无关。 它无助于恢复我们日益下降的威望，也无助于平衡中国日益增长的经济实力。

1950年，美国派第七舰队介入中国内战 — 与我们 1918-1920 年干预俄罗斯内战不同 — — 成功地阻止了共产党的彻底胜利。 它将中国领土一部分的台湾与其他地区分离。七十多年后，我们继续在军事上争夺中国的边界。 我们越这样做，中国就越觉得有义务挑战我们。

中国与印度、日本、马来西亚、菲律宾和越南存在轻微领土争端，但没有占领或威胁占领邻国。 我们选择在军事上支持其他针对中国的声索国，而不是帮助解决他们与中国的争端。

美国与中国的“竞争”不是效仿中国决心自强不息，而是试图阻碍其发展并将其排除在外国市场之外。 首先寻求“脱钩”的是我们，而不是中国人。 中国对美国的关税进行了报复，并寻求减少对美国进口产品的依赖，但直到最近，中国还以补贴和支持本国企业作为回应，而不是效仿美国的经济战。

从一开始，我们“遏制”苏联的冷战战略就有一个明确的目标——最终让苏联体系因其自身的弱点而崩溃。 我们与中国开始的准战争既没有胜利的定义，也没有终止战争的战略。 很少有人看到中国会崩溃的前景。

与冷战时期不同，其他国家现在认为没有令人信服的理由在我们和我们指定的对手之间做出选择

。 欧盟和日本以及南半球国家希望与中国接触，而不是孤立它。

中国的工业经济规模已经是我们的两倍。 现在，世界上四分之一或更多的科学家、技术人员、工程师和数学家是中国人，而且这一比例还在不断增长。 技术平衡正在向对我们不利的方向转变。 讽刺的是，我们与中国竞争的最有效方式就是引进更多的中国人才。 但我们却反其道而行之。 禁止美国技术向中国出口或在两国交叉投资不会扭转中国的前进方向。 它甚至可以加速它。 中国已开始在越来越多的领域引领国际技术创新。

在与中国就边界和领土主张发生的任何战争中，中国将拥有工业激增能力和承受消耗能力的优势。 它还将拥有更短的通讯线路。 民族主义热情的天平将站在北京一边，而不是华盛顿一边，就像河内努力统一越南一样。 但与北越不同的是，中国是一个拥有核武器的超级大国。

在国际事务中，就像在物理学中一样，每一个行动都会产生大小相等、方向相反的反应。 我们的行动刺激中国反映、满足和匹配我们对它的军事敌意。 我们现在正在与中国进行军备竞赛，而且我们是否能坚持住还远不清楚。 我们明显决心将台湾作为美国在东亚势力范围的一部分，并派出海军和空军在中国边境积极巡逻，这为北京方面提供了快速重组解放军和全面现代化的理由。

中国人民解放军海军（PLAN）目前是世界上最大的海军。 据报道，一些解放军海军舰艇配备了轨道炮，但我们一直无法开发和部署这项技术。 解放军陆基火箭军部署的弹道导弹能够攻击距中国 1000 英里外移动的航空母舰。 中国部署了我们无法防御的高超音速导弹。 解放军空军现在拥有世界上最大的轰炸机部队以及装备射程超过我们的空空导弹的战斗机。 北京正在加强其核能力，以阻止美国再次干预其与蒋介石政治继承人的未结束的内战。蒋介石在大陆与中国共产党的战争中失败，但在美国的支持下，在台北重建了政权。 。

尽管中国的军力建设令人瞩目，但迄今为止，北京的国防开支仍远低于GDP的2%。 与此同时，五角大楼仍然无法控制成本。 国防部从未通过过审计，并且因依赖美国类似以利润为导向的国有企业的成本加成采购而造成浪费、欺诈和管理不善，这些企业是军工企业官僚机构，其收入（和利润） ）完全来自政府。 就我们的支付能力而言，美国国防预算已经失控。

四十年前，美国迫使苏联将更多的经济投入国防而忽视其公民的福祉，从而使苏联破产。 现在，我们美国人正在将越来越多的借来的钱和纳税人的钱转移到我们的军队，尽管我们的人力和物质基础设施正在老化。 在某些方面，就中国而言，我们现在处于冷战时期苏联的地位。 我们的财政轨迹损害了美国人的总体福利。 然而，这与我们的自由一样，是我们武装部队要捍卫的。

美国试图压制中国的国家技术龙头企业、阻碍其电子工业并剥夺其外国市场，表面上的目的是减少我们对全球供应链的依赖，恢复美国的就业和经济领导地位。 但直接影响是：

促使中国做出对等决定，减少对美国进口产品的依赖，并加大力度促进科技自力更生。 中国现已承诺投入 2650 亿美元来减少对进口半导体的依赖。

扰乱供应链，导致零部件短缺，从而降低美国的经济效率，同时引发通货膨胀。

促使外国和企业寻求美国技术和美元融资的替代方案，以避免未来出现长臂制裁和供应链中断的风险，就像我们单方面对中国、伊朗和俄罗斯实施的那样。

引导中国和韩国等技术竞争对手加大对半导体和其他高科技产业的补贴，提供比我们新颁布的产业政策分配的额外资金相形见绌。

导致中国开始效仿我们的军国主义新重商主义对其拥有全球领先地位的技术出口的限制，正如其最近的禁令决定所表明的那样

出口太阳能电池板硅片生产技术。

美国半导体工具和设计公司失去了其主要市场，损害了他们自筹资金研发或进行新投资的能力。

加速世界分裂为不同的技术生态系统，其中一些生态系统由美国技术垄断，一些由美国和中国共享，还有许多由中国主导。

加速中国在南半球工业和技术市场的主导地位。

将美国投资从中国转移到墨西哥、越南和印度等第三国，而不是将工业和就业岗位“回流”到美国。

迫使台积电和其他亚洲企业在美国投资政治上有利但缺乏竞争力的半导体代工厂。他们计划在美国生产的半导体成本将比他们在国内生产的半导体高出至少50%，而且先进程度较低。

减少中国对美国经济的投资，而不是像我们那样创造就业机会并减少对外国供应链的依赖，例如欢迎德国、日本和韩国汽车制造商在这里设立生产。 [1]

成功的外交体现了政治经济诱惑，而不是强奸。 然而，我们目前的经济治国手段完全是强制性的。 如果贸易和投资伙伴不遵守我们的强制性授权，出口管制和制裁就会带来痛苦。 这种方法是疏远而不是入口。 它对美元主权的依赖现在威胁着美元的地位和赋予我们的特权。

更重要的是，我们正在做的事情并没有停止，也不会阻止美国公司通过将生产转移到国外来应对竞争——如果不是转移到中国，那就转移到墨西哥、越南或其他拥有可靠、廉价、勤奋劳动力的地方。 企业对外包的吸引力并不是中国阴谋窃取美国就业机会的结果。 这是我们选择构建公司财务、劳资关系、税收政策、医疗保险制度以及环境和其他国内政策和做法的结果。 中国极具竞争力的经济可能使其成为外包的首选目的地，但其他国家现在也加入了这个游戏。 如果我们目前没有兴趣进行国内政策改革，美国就不可能实现再工业化，也不可能恢复饱受打击的中产阶级。

最后，美国人的显着特征是我们对个人自由的坚持以及我们增强个人自由并将其传递给我们的子孙的愿望。 但长达四个十年的冷战、所谓的“全球反恐战争”、政权更迭的“永远的战争”，以及我们对中国和俄罗斯的偏执妖魔化，催生了一个痴迷于国家安全的监视和战争国家。 严重侵蚀了我们共和国的传统和公民自由。 当然，即使是偏执狂也有敌人。 但我们在国内为我们的以外国为中心的精神病付出了巨大的代价，包括最近我们对中国的民族反感。

战略的目的是将目标与资源联系起来，并以尽可能低的成本规划实现愿景的路径。 我们的对华政策缺乏远见，也缺乏对节俭效率的关注。 这不是一种战略，而是一种旨在通过强制而非鼓舞手段维护美国主导地位的姿态。 它不包括国内改革的愿景或以身作则恢复领导地位的努力。 不起作用。 正如我们目前对中国的态度开始表明的那样，这将不必要地加速我们的衰落。

最后，我感谢一位瑞士外交官最近提请我注意乔治·凯南的一些非常相关的言论。 凯南关于苏联和莫斯科的言论也适用于我们目前对中国的态度。 那么，请耐心听我用“中国”代替“苏联”或“俄罗斯”，用“北京”代替“莫斯科”来回忆凯南的话。

“我相信，今天在我们许多政府和新闻机构中盛行的（中国）观点是如此极端、如此主观，与任何对外部现实的清醒审视所揭示的内容相去甚远，以至于它不仅无效，而且 作为政治行动的指南是危险的。”

凯南继续说道：

“这一系列无休止的扭曲和过度简化； 对另一个伟大国家领导人的系统性非人化； 这种对[北京]军事能力和所谓的[中国]意图不公平的例行夸大； 这种对另一个伟大民族的本性和态度的单调歪曲，……这种在判断[中国人]和[我们自己]的行为时轻率地运用双重标准，最终无法认识到他们的许多问题和我们的许多问题的共性 ，当我们无情地进入现代技术时代时。 这些都是知识分子原始主义的标志

在一个伟大的政府中，愤世嫉俗和怀疑的天真是不可原谅的。”

当我们接近 21 世纪第一个 25 世纪末时，我自豪地回忆起，我们的国家诞生了世界历史上最伟大的政府之一。 我愿意相信，我们美国人还有更多值得期待的事情，而不是沉思和争论。 乐观对于外交官来说就像勇气对于士兵一样。 我相信，如果我们认识到这样做的必要性，我们的共和国就能找到一条民族复兴和增强竞争力的道路。 但如果没有明智的治国方略和外交来创造一个和平的国际环境，使我们能够自由地实现这一目标，我们就无法实现这一目标。 与中国建立更少对抗、更多合作的关系将在某种程度上使我们能够恢复先辈们建立美利坚合众国的宗旨，并用一句话来说就是“让美国再次伟大”。

[1] 最近的一个例子是，扬金州长以所谓的“国家安全”原因，决定阻止中国在弗吉尼亚州进行电动汽车电池生产绿地投资。 这种对当前反华情绪的政治屈服的影响是，使美国目前对中国电池进口的依赖永久化，并使弗吉尼亚州失去了投资本应创造的就业机会。 人们不禁要问，弗吉尼亚制造的电池如何以及为何比中国制造的电池对我们的国家安全构成更大的威胁。

U.S. China Policy: A Case of Self-Harm

Chas Freeman 2023-02-07 

https://chasfreeman.net/2505-2/

 

Remarks to the American Academy of Diplomacy

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

By video to Washington, DC, 7 February 2023

Two hundred thirty-four years ago, the people of this country wisely decided “to form a more perfect Union” by adopting a new constitution. The preamble of that constitution remains the most eloquent list ever written of the purposes for which people establish governments. It declares that the mission of the United States of America should be to:

• establish Justice,
• ensure domestic Tranquility,
• provide for the common defense,
• promote the general Welfare, and
• secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

Measured against this list of benchmarks, our current policies toward China are increasingly ruinous. China can and will take care of itself. In the short term, we can constrain and even weaken it. But I am deeply concerned about what our policies toward it are doing and will do to us in the long run. Let me review the list in the order set forth in our national charter.

Rather than advancing the cause of justice, our decision in our latest “war of choice” – to designate China as our enemy – is leading to renewed injustices against Chinese Americans. It is their turn, with spillover to those who look like them, to experience the sort of xenophobic persecution by both the populace and law enforcement agencies that other minorities (like German, Italian, and Japanese Americans) have suffered during past wartime tensions with the lands of their ancestors.

As in the McCarthy era, we are once again making talented Chinese immigrant scientists and engineers feel unwelcome here and incentivizing them to repatriate themselves. During the Korean War, we drove Qian Xuesen [钱学森;], the brilliant father of cybernetic engineering at Caltech, back to China, where he became the father of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) nuclear weapons and delivery systems. We are now making multiple members of yet another generation of talented Chinese American scientists and engineers fearful of surveillance and persecution. Their departure is our economic and technological loss and China’s gain.

Of course, anti-Asian violence is not new. What is happening now is merely the latest evidence of the racism and religious prejudice that have disturbed our domestic tranquility for centuries. The hopeful optimism of Martin Luther King has yielded to the suffocating despair of George Floyd. Islamophobia is entrenched, antisemitism is back, and we are walling out foreigners and their ideas. Americans are divided by our allegiances to the information environments, alternative facts, and blind spots imposed on us by exploitative corporate and social media. Debate, to the extent it occurs at all, is rancorous rather than civil and seldom productive.

If, as Karl Deutsch declared, a nation is “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors,” we no longer fit the bill except in terms of our passionate animosity toward officially designated and demonized enemy states like China, Iran, and Russia. We have become deeply divided about our history and its significance. There are now profound disagreements among Americans about whether:

• Our nation was conceived in liberty, or in reliance on African slavery.
• We are a “White,” or multiracial country.
• Our state should be independent of religion, or subservient to various versions of Christianity.
• Our forebears built our nation by bravely breaching a frontier, or by subjecting this continent’s indigenous inhabitants to genocide.
• Elections are legitimated by their fairness, or by whether zealots choose to accept their outcomes.

The disunity and dysfunction we are experiencing does more than disturb our domestic tranquility. It weakens us in relation to other countries. Political gridlock in Washington inhibits tradeoffs between economic, ethnic, ideological, military, and other interests and prevents the synthesis of overarching national interests. This makes our foreign policies a vector of competing domestic special interests. In the case of China, single-interest groups have coalesced around resentments and fears that superficially align them in a common hostility to Beijing. But each group’s agenda undercuts the agendas of others to the detriment of all.

In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to contend with us for global hegemony and collapsed, leaving us without an obvious enemy. China has now become our cure for enemy-deprivation syndrome. In its case, we have abandoned diplomacy as an instrument of national defense and foreign relations. The casus belli between us is Taiwan’s separation from the rest of China, which was the unintended result of our military intervention to separate the parties to the Chinese civil war. We no longer even pretend to comply with the basic agreements that we later worked out with Beijing to enable it to set the Taiwan issue aside for future peaceful resolution. Now, all the talk is about how to fight a war to determine Taiwan’s status. Both sides must know that such a war would be catastrophic for Taiwan, disastrous for both the United States and China, and severely damaging to any country that joined either us or the Chinese in the fight. But no one in Washington is attempting to find either solutions or a temporizing modus vivendi for managing Sino-American differences over Taiwan, as the Nixon administration did fifty years ago.

Americans dislike big government except when it is in uniform. Anticipation of war with China is now the major justification for massive increases in subsidies to our military-industrial-congressional and intelligence complex. Military Keynesianism has found a reliable post-Cold War motivator.

But describing our effort to retard and, if possible, reverse the rise of China as “Cold War 2.0” is a cop-out. It implies that our experience with the Soviet Union has somehow prepared us to contend with China and defeat it without triggering a hot war. As such, it is an exercise in denial, an excuse for fantasy foreign policy, and a justification for a counterproductive, entirely military approach to international affairs.

The challenge of China to our regional primacy and global hegemony, real as it is, has almost nothing in common with that mounted by the late, unlamented USSR. It cannot be met by following the Cold War playbook. Unlike the self-isolated, autarkic, and heavily militarized Soviet Union:

• China is fully integrated into the post-1945 political and economic order. It is the largest trading partner of most of the world’s nations. It can be confronted, but it cannot be “contained.”
• The Chinese and American economies are interdependent. There is no zero-sum game in which our side wins while China loses. Decoupling costs both sides economic growth, jobs, and technological progress.
• The Chinese challenge to U.S. global primacy does not arise from either ideological aggression or empire-building abroad. China seeks to fence off its system from American ideological messianism, not to export its own ill-defined, inward-looking, and unattractive authoritarian ideology. Unlike the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China has neither attempted nor threatened to conquer its neighbors. China’s political-economic influence is beginning to eclipse our own. We have dressed this up as a military problem.
• China’s return to wealth and power is reducing U.S. international status and influence through the gradual displacement of our post-World War II regional and global politico-economic supremacy. But Beijing poses no threat to the territory or independence of the United States. The East Asian economic order is already Sinocentric. China has become the preeminent external power in Africa. Arabs and Latin Americans welcome China as an offset to continued European and U.S. dominance. Sino-American contention is about the ebb of U.S. regional and global influence, not about a Chinese aspiration to subjugate its neighbors.
• American military posturing is irrelevant to economic and technological challenges we face. It does nothing to restore our declining prestige or to balance rising Chinese economic power.
• The U.S. intervention in China’s civil war in 1950 with the 7th Fleet – unlike our 1918-1920 intervention in the Russian civil war – succeeded in preventing a complete Communist victory. It detached Taiwan, part of Chinese territory, from the rest. More than seventy years later, we continue militarily to contest the borders of China. The more we do so, the more China feels obliged to challenge us.
• China has minor territorial disputes with India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, but it does not occupy neighboring nations or threaten to do so. We have chosen to back other claimants against China militarily rather than to facilitate the resolution of their disputes with it.
• The U.S. is “competing” with China not by emulating China’s determined focus on self-improvement, but by attempting to hamstring its development and to exclude it from foreign markets. We, not the Chinese, first sought “decoupling.” China has retaliated against U.S. tariffs and sought to reduce its dependence on imports from the United States, but until recently it has responded with subsidies and support for its own companies rather than emulating U.S. economic warfare.
• From the outset, our Cold War strategy of “containment” of the USSR had a clear objective – the eventual collapse of the Soviet system from its own infirmities. The quasi-war we have begun with China includes neither a definition of victory nor a war-termination strategy. Few see any prospect that China will collapse.
• Unlike the Cold War, other countries now see no compelling reason to choose between us and our designated rival. The EU and Japan as well as the countries of the global South want to engage with China, not isolate it.
• China’s industrial economy is already twice the size of ours. One-fourth or more of the world’s scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians are now Chinese, and the proportion is growing. The technological balance is shifting against us. Ironically, the most effective way for us to compete with China would be to import more Chinese talent. But we are doing the opposite. Banning the export of U.S. technology to China or cross-investment in the two countries will not reverse China’s advance. It could even accelerate it. Chinese have begun to lead international technological innovation in an increasing number of arenas.
• In any war with China over its borders and territorial claims, China would have the advantage of industrial surge capacity and the ability to survive attrition. It would also have far shorter lines of communication. The balance of nationalist fervor would be on Beijing’s side rather than Washington’s, as it was with Hanoi in its effort to unite Vietnam. But unlike north Vietnam, China is a nuclear-armed superpower.

In international affairs, as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Our actions have stimulated China to mirror, meet, and match our military hostility to it. We are now in an arms race with China, and it is far from clear that we are holding our own. Our apparent determination to hang onto Taiwan as part of an American sphere of influence in East Asia and our aggressive patrolling of China’s borders with naval and air forces have provided Beijing with the justification for its rapid reconfiguration and comprehensive modernization of the PLA.

The PLA Navy (PLAN) is now the world’s largest. Some PLAN ships are reportedly equipped with railguns, a technology we have been unable to develop and deploy. The land-based PLA Rocket Force fields ballistic missiles capable of striking moving aircraft carriers 1,000 miles from China. China fields hypersonic missiles against which we have no defense. The PLA Air Force now possesses the world’s largest bomber force as well as fighters equipped with air-to-air missiles that outrange ours. Beijing is beefing up its nuclear capabilities to deter renewed U.S. intervention in its unfinished civil war with the political heirs of Chiang Kai-shek, who lost his war with the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland but, with U.S. backing, reestablished his regime in Taipei.

Despite China’s remarkable military buildup, Beijing has so far kept defense spending well below two percent of GDP. Meanwhile, cost control continues to elude the Pentagon.  DoD has never passed an audit and is infamous for the waste, fraud, and mismanagement that result from its reliance on cost-plus procurement from the U.S. equivalent of profit-driven state-owned enterprises – military-industrial corporate bureaucracies whose revenues (and profits) come entirely from the government. The U.S. defense budget is out of control in terms of our ability to pay for it.

Four decades ago, the United States bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing it to devote ever more of its economy to defense while neglecting the welfare of its citizens. Now we Americans are diverting ever more borrowed and taxpayer dollars to our military even as our human and physical infrastructure  decays. In some ways, in relation to China, we are now in the position of the USSR in the Cold War. Our fiscal trajectory is injurious to the general welfare of Americans. That, along with our liberties, is, however, what our armed forces are meant to defend.

The ostensible aims of the U.S. effort to crush China’s national technology champions, hobble its electronic industries, and deny it foreign markets are to reduce our dependence on global supply chains and restore American jobs and economic leadership. But the immediate effects have been to:

• Provoke a reciprocal decision by China to reduce reliance on imports from the U.S. and to step up efforts to boost its scientific and technological self-reliance. China has now committed $265 billion to reducing its dependence on imported semiconductors.
• Disrupt supply chains, causing component shortages that diminish economic efficiency in the U.S. while generating inflation.
• Cause foreign countries and companies to seek alternatives to U.S. technology and dollar financing to avoid the risk of future long-arm sanctions and supply chain disruptions like those we have unilaterally imposed on China, Iran, and Russia.
• Lead technological competitors like China and the Republic of Korea to boost subsidies to their semiconductor and other high-tech industries with additional funding that dwarfs what we have allocated to our newly enacted industrial policies.
• Cause China to begin to emulate our militaristic neomercantilist restrictions on the export of technology in which it has the global lead, as illustrated in its recent decision to ban the export of silicon wafer production technology for solar panels.
• Cost U.S. semiconductor tool and design companies their major market, damaging their ability to self-fund research and development or make new investments.
• Accelerate the division of the world into separate technological ecosystems, a few monopolized by American technology, some shared between the U.S. and China, and many others dominated by China.
• Accelerate Chinese domination of industrial and technology markets in the global South.
• Divert American investment from China to third countries like Mexico, Vietnam, and India rather than “reshoring” industry and jobs to the United States.
• Compel TSMC and other Asian corporations to invest in politically expedient but uncompetitive semiconductor foundries in the U.S. The semiconductors they plan to make here will cost at least 50 percent more and be less advanced than those they make at home.
• Curtail Chinese investment in the American economy rather than creating jobs and reducing dependence on foreign supply chains as we did, for example, by welcoming German, Japanese, and Korean automobile manufacturers to set up production here.[1]

Successful diplomacy exemplifies political-economic seduction, not rape. Yet our current economic statecraft is entirely coercive. Export controls and sanctions promise pain if a trade and investment partner fails to comply with a peremptory mandate from us. This approach alienates rather than entrances. Its reliance on dollar sovereignty now threatens the status of the dollar and the privileges that has conferred on us.

More to the point, what we are doing has not stopped and will not prevent U.S. companies from responding to competition by moving their production abroad – if not to China, then to Mexico, Vietnam, or somewhere else with reliable, cheap, hardworking labor. Corporate attraction to outsourcing is not the result of a Chinese conspiracy to steal American jobs. It is the result of the way we have chosen to structure our corporate finance, labor-management relations, tax policies, health insurance system, and environmental and other domestic policies and practices. China’s amazingly competitive economy may have made it the preferred destination for outsourcing, but others are now entering the game. There will be no reindustrialization of America or restoration of our battered middle class without domestic policy reforms we show no current interest in making.

In the end, the defining characteristic of Americans is our insistence on individual liberties and our desire to enhance them and pass them on to our children and grandchildren. But the four-decade-long Cold War, the so-called “global war on terror,” “forever wars” for regime change, and our paranoid demonization of China and Russia have birthed a national security-obsessed surveillance and warfare state that has severely eroded the traditions and civil liberties of our republic. Of course, even the paranoid have enemies. But we are paying a huge price domestically for our foreign-focused psychoses, including, most recently, our national antipathy to China.

The purpose of strategy is to link objectives to resources and to lay out a path to the realization of a vision at the least possible cost. Our China policy lacks both vision and a concern for frugal efficiency. It is not a strategy, but a posture aimed at the preservation of American primacy by coercive rather than inspirational means. It includes no vision of domestic reform or effort to restore leadership by example. It will not work. As our current approach to China is beginning to demonstrate, it will needlessly hasten our decline.

As I conclude, I am grateful to a Swiss diplomat who recently brought to my attention some very relevant remarks by George Kennan. What Kennan said about the Soviet Union and Moscow applies to our current approach to China. Bear with me, then, as I substitute “China” for the “Soviet Union” or “Russia” and “Beijing” for “Moscow” in recalling what Kennan said.

“I believe that the view of [China] … that prevails today in much of our governmental and journalistic establishment is so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober examination of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action.”

Kennan continued:

“This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leaders of another great country; this routine exaggeration of [Beijing’s] military capabilities and of the alleged unfairness of [Chinese] intentions; this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and attitudes of another great people, … this thoughtless application of double standards in judging the behavior of the [Chinese] and [ourselves], this inability, finally, to recognize the commonality of many of their problems and ours, as we move inexorably into the modern technological age. These are signs of an intellectual primitivism and a naivety of cynicism and suspicion unforgivable in a great government.”

As we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, I recall with pride that our country was born with one of the greatest governments in world history. I would like to believe that we Americans still have more to look forward to than to brood and argue over. Optimism is to diplomats what courage is to soldiers. I am confident that, if we recognize the need to do so, our republic can find a path to national rejuvenation and strengthened competitiveness. But we will achieve neither without intelligent statecraft and diplomacy to create a peaceful international environment that frees us do so. A less confrontational, more cooperative relationship with China would go some way toward enabling us to reinstate the purposes for which forebears established the United States of America and – to coin a phrase – “make America great again.”

[1] A recent example was the decision of Governor Youngkin to block a Chinese greenfield investment to produce batteries for electric vehicles in Virginia for alleged “national security” reasons. The effect of this political kowtow to the current anti-China mood is to perpetuate the current U.S. dependence on battery imports from China and cost Virginia the jobs the investment would have created. One is left to wonder how and why batteries made in Virginia would be more of a threat to our national security than batteries made in China.